At night rave near the guard's compartment naked with a blue light

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Sydney, Australia

*creak*…*bang*…*lights on*… and the last of our four room mates arrives home… excellent… it’s 3am, again… and we have interviews first thing tomorrow… mentally I decide it is time to ditch the dorms, at least while we’re job hunting. Yes, that’s right, we have decided to give this job hunting malarky a second chance, but in Sydney, Australia, so we’re dropping the rubber gloves and donning the suit. It was a very odd sensation after relaxing for the last nine months in combats and flip flops to watch Matt re-learn how to do up a tie, under his freshly shaven chin! Obviously the nerves kicked in. Here we were in a new country applying for ‘proper jobs’ and neither of us could remember what we used to do, let alone who to put as a reference! It was time to use what little of our brains remained…

After a few agency interviews we got into the swing of it but quickly grew despondent when the mobile fell silent, day after day. It wasn’t going to be quite as easy as we thought it would, and every extra day we hunted our bank balance depleted, increasing the pressure. A string of interesting agency interviews at least caused some amusement. I faltered on four words to describe myself in a telephone interview; I don’t think they were looking for an ‘organised, busy, excitable, fun’ person that day. But I was cheered that I received 100% on an online filing test… yes one agency really felt the need to test a degree educated person to ensure I knew where to place the ‘Mr Smith’ file in the filing cabinet… on screen…

We had been met at the airport by Cat and Jules, our Sydney friends who recently relocated here from London and were also on the job hunt. Cat’s very sweet sister kindly offered us her spare room to allow us to sleep in peace! Here we kept the local internet shop in business, and the owner even privately offered me the local jobs paper after seeing me despair day after day!

A week or so later Jules and Cat moved into their own flat (they had been at Cat’s parents), so, opting for a change of scenery we moved into their spare room. This allowed for us to share the job hunting pain. Cat was the first to get lucky (or unlucky) and left the nest to catch the busy commuter train to her new weekday home. Matt followed two days later. Leaving Jules and I as the house masters, cleaning and cooking to make up for our lack of jobs! By the end of the week we were both closer so the following week saw all four of us all battling for the shower in the morning with a look of weariness as we climbed back into normality for a few months.

We did our best to out stay our welcome with Jules and Cat, but we were having so much fun we were sad to leave! Our nights were filled with good food, too much beer and laughter over the war stories of new work places. We are eternally grateful for their help in easing us into Sydney life!

I think this was the easiest move we’ve ever made, five minutes down the road, in one trip from car to flat. Although it did make us realise we have already accumulated more than we can carry on our backs, so some prudent culling before we leave here will have to be undertaken! Our new abode for the next few months is a beautiful three bed flat with a huge living room and veranda, shared with two lovely Aussie girls. As they’ve been here a while we have moved into the luxury of a fully furnished flat, so we can relax away our evenings watching their DVDs!

So it is back to the grindstone again, but in a new city. It didn’t take long for things to feel much the same as at home, just minus the friends, the usual Sunday night blues still occurring. It is all a little different though too, I catch the ferry to work, a pleasant, if rather long commute. Matt catches the bus, which regularly misses his stop leaving him to pick his way back along the dual carriageway, which, as usual has no path for pedestrians in this car-focused community. I worked for a publisher for a month, which really did feel like being in London. Now, bizarrely, I find myself working at Parliament House. Matt is the bread-winner, gaining new skills and experiences in the world of IT as a Business Analyst for Fujitsu.

Sydney is a fantastic place to live; it has glistening beaches just a short distance from the very clean central business district. As everybody in this country drives, they have a very empty public transport system, and of course the sun - although that has been hiding a fair bit since we arrived. We even got caught in torrential rain last weekend… it felt just like home! But despite all this, the beer is shit, so we could never live here permanently! And the flies! Who daily make me look like a lunatic as I’m frantically waving in a bid to stop them landing on my face on the way to work/pub/home/anywhere.

Anyway, the beer, Victoria Bitter (Tooheys, Carlton, or any other Aussie brewed 'lager') is a rank, syrupy sweet concoction somewhere between lager and ale. Nasty. And they serve it in stupidly small ‘schooner’ glasses, which in a way is actually a god-send! Luckily they have a pretty good live music scene, which we’d be going stir crazy without. So every Tuesday we scour the free music mag Drum Media for something for the weekend. This isn’t an exact science so of late we’ve been stuck with a folk singer, a pre-pubescent gaggle of teens and a hip-hop-rock ensemble! The best one so far was a wicked London-esque punk band who unfortunately had to perform to a mere 10 people, but we appreciated it! We have also nominated a Dublin Castle-type pub as our local, The Hopetoun Hotel, which by Australian standards is local, just an hour away from the flat! In no particular order we have managed to see the following few bands so far… The Laurels, Merle Morris, I Heart Space, Telecom, The Gingers, N’FA, Butterfingers, Kids from Russia, Pharaohs, Dead Frenchman, Pink Fits, Witch Hats, Eddie Current Suppression Ring, The Statics, The Saturns, The Shake Up, Dave Tucquet, Tucker B’s, Gersey and Mark Seymour… amongst others.

Australia really is a nation obsessed with meat (and driving, but I’ll get to that) not only does the BBQ feature heavily in any decent party; they also have meat raffles, throughout the week. Each village has a club, where you can join the aged for cheap beer and the chance of winning a tray of meat. Matt is in heaven. The clubs are an institution in themselves, our local is a Bowling Club but we have yet to partake in the Bowls, yet. Also, we have yet to win our own meat tray. We will persist. I think a blue rinse may improve my chances.

Oh yes, driving. Australia is huge, so it is nothing to go away for a weekend and rack up a good 900 k’s on the speedo. And the only thing to do that in is a huge 4x4. I have never seen as many of the things in my life, not to mention the ‘utes. Out here there is definitely some sort of kudos to be had by owning an SUV, and never taking it off road. Well why would they? There are enough roads to go round. But whoever was designing this country forgot that some people do walk (only foreigners like us I’m sure), so we don’t even have a path running to our flat. But we do have a parking space. To give you some idea of the ridiculousness of the driving here, a group of cyclists held a demonstration the other day (because there are NO cycle lanes anywhere in the city), and actually managed to slow the smoking heap of 2mph driving, single occupant 4x4s on their way home by a few minutes. What was the outcome of this peaceful and enlightening demonstration? The Telegraph printed the organiser’s mobile phone number and encouraged the hard working, hard-done-by 4x4 and ute driving Aussies to call him and let him know what they thought of his useless and infuriating demonstration - priceless. At a cursory glance, for a country in the midst of a decade long drought, and even more obviously facing the problems of global warming than other places on earth, the waste here is pretty painful to see.

Down our street we have replaced our slightly dull English Robins and Sparrows with brightly coloured Rainbow Lorikeets who flicker past in a blur of green, red and blue, huge white Cockatoos, big-headed Kookaburras and the insane Ibis. We were stupefied by this huge beast foraging shoulder deep in the bins in town, thinking we’d stumbled upon an exotic new bird, but the Ibis seem to be just pests mingling with the common pigeon. A quick trip into town and the Botanical Gardens revealed a whole colony of huge furry fruit bats hanging in the trees. These cuties spend their day in the park and their night hovering round the Harbour Bridge.

We were extremely disappointed when we landed that the streets weren’t full of free roaming kangaroos. It wasn’t actually until we took a road trip to Dubbo, central New South Wales, after spending a full five hours with our eyes glued to the plains did we see our first bouncing marsupials in a field! At last! The rest of the weekend was spent camping out at a zoo where much laughter was expended seeing the Aussie wildlife like the cuddly Koalas, spiky Echidnas and docile Suzie Wombat! And feeding a giraffe! We are such children.

The rest of the weekends are filled with shows at the Opera House, local festivals, beach visits, watching beach volley ball, Irish bars and waiting for this infamous ‘hot’ Aussie weather which we are starting to believe is an urban myth. It has actually been great fun here, despite our little rant, the people are great, friendly and the service always really smiley and helpful. I’m sure when this work nonsense is over in a few weeks we’ll fall in love with Sydney even more!

We are looking forward to our first Southern Hemisphere Christmas, New Year in Sydney watching the fireworks a full 11 hours before you lot in England, Big Day Out - a true Aussie rock festival and getting back on the road in February to see some other parts of Australia. Until then, have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. Love us xx

p.s. In case you were wondering 'At night rave near the guard's compartment naked with a blue light' is an inspired vandal’s edit of a piece of advice given on the trains.

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Photos

Darling Harbour
Katie's office in the middle and the useless monorail

Bondi waves
Sydney's equivalent of Putney, here it's full of Brits (think we know who got the best deal)

Beach Volley Ball
Ladies' final at Manly

A true Aussie BBQ cooked by a true Aussie Brit
Jules with his new and much coveted toy

Feeding time at the zoo
Matt makes a new friend (and Katie gets tongue envy)