Blogs from Neutral Bay, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Oceania

Steadily panning east from west, changing cultures coupled with growing distances have taken us further from home. But, at our furthest point away (so far), Sydney feels closer to the western world of our past. The buzzing culture capital of Australia is home to my brother Justin and his wife Freya, and with distances dividing Christmas' it felt good to be connected with family on the other side of the world. We happily greeted each other as they welcomed us into their Neutral Bay home. It had been two years since I had seen them and they had some exciting news...Ricky Ponting had just been bowled LBW. No, Freya was three months pregnant! It was great to be there to congratulate them and not only was Freya pregnant but her sister Lucy was expecting a baby ... read more

Hello to all! Once again, apologies for taking so long to update the blog. Will try and keep it as short as possible and basically just summarise all the main things we've been up to but there's been quite a lot so apologies in advance! After Brisbane we set off to start our Christmas celebrations with a few of the lads we've been traveling along with. It was to be a Christmas like no other! Because of our complete lack of preparation there was no hostels free so we took the bold step of getting tents and basically sleeping rough for 4 nights. As you can imagine, this was far from luxurious but we had some amazing banter. We started our Xmas day with a game of footy in the field we were camping in, picked ... read more

Hi friends and family It's been a month since I posted some photos so I thought I should do something about that. As usual, the pics are mostly of Olivia :-) It's Mike's 39th birthday today and he's having a party tomorrow, so I'll include some social shots from that gathering some time next week. So what have we been up to since my last post in August? Well ... Gymbaroo (baby gym) continued for Olivia, and last Tuesday Mike came along to the last session of the term and took some great photos, so I have included these. We went away for the weekend to Bowral with friends Jaques and Bianca and their little girl Alicia. It was a lovely weekend of wine tasting and walking. My South African born friend Penny (from mothers' group) ... read more

Hi guys Hope you all had a good June. Can't believe it is the middle of the year already and winter (well 18 degrees celsius here - ha ha ha to those of you in the UK!) in Australia. As usual, life has revolved around Olivia, not that we're complaining, so our travel blog for June is naturally full of photos of her. She's now 4.5 months and a happy little girl. Life is starting to return to normal for her parents :-) and we're getting out and about more. Looking forward to seeing friends and family in the UK in November (will let you know my plans closer to the time) and in South Africa in January. PS: Congratulations to my sister in law, Caroline and her husband Anthony on the birth of little Nicholas ... read more

So after three months in Sydney we finally got around to having a house warming party. It took us a while, but waiting 3 months was critical in making sure that we not only had furniture for the apartment, but that we also had some friends. Since mexican food is pretty non-existant here, we decided to have a Cinco de Mayo housewarming party. We soon realised that most people don't even know what Cinco de Mayo is, which turned out to be a a good thing, since our party was on May 15th and not the 5th. It was a great time, and involved sangria, margaritas, way too much tequila, and a massive quanity of tacos. We also bashed in two pinantas, and had a special guest appearance from the "didgeridoo guy"(who was a friend of ... read more