Six months in Sydney!

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So it’s been a good few months since I even looked at this blog, the last update appears to have been back in December just before Christmas so I’ve got about 6 months of living and working in Sydney to cover here so bear with me! We’ve both been busy working over the last few months but now that we have finished our ‘work’ part of the trip we will try to keep this more up to date with what we’ve been up to!

The last blog was just before Christmas, which turned out to be a pretty uneventful day! The original plan was to maybe go down to the beach and have a BBQ (somewhat of a tradition over here), however the weather had other plans. It absolutely HAMMERED it down all day, which left us stuck in the apartment with not much to do! Christmas dinner consisted of a stir-fry with noodles and we continued to festive spirit by watching ‘Saving Private Ryan’ on TV. To be fair, we DID watch Home Alone later on that night, which kind of counts right?! Emma did get a full on Skype tour of the Christmas dinner that her Mom had cooked back at home, which didn’t really help ha ha!

New Year’s Eve turned out to be much better! As we said in the last blog, Emma did have to work on this day, however Craig stepped up and volunteered to go down to the Botanic Gardens in the morning to get us a spot for the fireworks that evening. It was a very hot day that day so by the time Emma got down to Craig at about 3.30pm (she managed to get out of work early which was a big bonus!), Craig was pretty much dying down there, but at least we had a good spot! We spent most of the evening defending the spot that Craig had worked so hard to get and we ended up with a great view of the 9pm fireworks, the harbour light show and of course the midnight fireworks, which were pretty epic!

Once we were into January we knew that we should start looking for somewhere else to live, as the sublet on our apartment ended on around the 20^th January. We spent the next few weeks trawling various websites (but mainly Gumtree) looking for a new apartment to live in. We viewed a few apartments, including a shoebox in Taylor Square and a dingy little apartment above a dodgy looking shop in King’s Cross, with some strange men smoking something a little funny-smelling on a bench outside the door! Needless to say, neither of these were for us so we swiftly declined and were determined to find something a little nicer. We arranged another viewing for a place in Woolloomooloo, which was right around the corner from work (ideal, we thought), however as we approached the area that the apartment was in, it became clear that this was NOT a nice area, as various homeless people sat around shouting at each other, and the place was RIGHT next to the train track. We quickly text the person and told them that we were not able to view the apartment and made a swift exit!

Emma’s birthday was on 12^th January, and we celebrated by visiting the lovely Tarongo Zoo – the main zoo in Sydney which is located just across the harbour. We really enjoyed our day there and found it to be one of the best zoo’s that we have visited so far – the lay out was brilliant and there were some great views of the city from its elevated position on the water.

The weather continued to be lovely and hot, although we did experience two days (not consecutive either, these were just random days!) where the weather shot up to the 40’s – the second of which was actually the hottest day recorded in Sydney, reaching 46 degrees! The wind felt like it was burning your eyeballs when you stepped outside! Luckily for Emma she was at work in an air conditioned building, but poor Craig just had to endure this at the apartment, where we had no air con unfortunately!

The 20th January soon came around and we still hadn’t found an apartment! This meant that we had to fork out for a hotel until we secured somewhere more permanent, so we first got a hotel in Pott’s Point for a week, followed by another one in the CBD for a week (it was a bank holiday so the other one had sold out so we couldn’t stay there). This coincided with Craig starting work at Make It Cheaper, which was actually pretty good as both hotels were less than a 15 minute walk to work! During our second week at the hotel we went to view an apartment in Bronte (not far from our last one but closer to the beach), which was much bigger than the others that we had seen and had a lovely ocean view from the balcony, complete with a little barbecue! The location was perfect, there was a bus stop right outside to get to the city via Bondi Junction (which we could actually walk to in about 15 minutes), so we decided to take it and paid two weeks rent to secure the apartment which would later serve as our bond.

26^th January was Australia Day, and as our second hotel was right by Hyde Park we decided to have a walk around the vintage car show and the animal farm that was set up, then we later went down to Darling Harbour to watch the fantastic firework show that evening – they sure know how to put on a good display over here!

We moved into our new apartment on the 3rd February and soon settled in to the work routine. Craig was getting on great and making lots of sales and Emma was still enjoying her job on the Operations team. We tried to make an effort to do something most weekends, although the weather took a turn for the worst pretty much as soon as we moved into our new apartments, and it seemed to be lovely and sunny when we were at work but then rained at the weekend! We had a bit of a craving for playing some retro games, and went on the search at a cash converters for a Nintendo 64, but eventually settled on a PS2 and a load of games, which kept us entertained for those rainy days when we were stuck inside – it helped having the huge 50 inch TV at the bottom of the bed, which came with the apartment!

When the weather picked up occasionally, we would go down to Bronte Beach armed with a picnic blanket and enjoy an afternoon snoozing in the sun. We also made a few visits over the months to the various attractions on our Merlin Pass, including returning to the Aquarium, the Wildlife World park, Madame Tussauds, the Sydney Tower Eye and Manly Sea Life Sanctuary. Other days were spent walking around the shops in the city and at Bondi Junction (including regular trips to the pet shop when we did our weekly shop to look at the puppies and wish we could take one with us! We also watched the St Patrick’s Day parade in March down in the city, which was pretty cool!

The next few months went by in a bit of a blur as we continued working at Make It Cheaper, and we went out a few times with our friends from work, usually to the pub opposite work (somewhat of a tradition on a Friday night!) and also to Karaoke, which is always fun! Emma had a few ‘Ops nights’ with her work friends, where the Operations team would do something fun together for the evening! As Operations don’t get incentives like the sales agents do, this was kind of our monthly incentive, so we didn’t have to pay anything! Our evenings over the months included unlimited bowling and laser tag, a trip to the cinema and a harbour cruise during ‘Vivid’ (an annual light festival held in Sydney), all usually accompanied by food and drinks!

Craig was actually able to come with us on the harbour cruise as someone dropped out last minute so we had a spare ticket, and so Emma’s manager suggested that he could come being as we were leaving that week, which was nice of him! We enjoyed a lovely two course meal (first time we’d ever tried caviar – we felt rather posh!) and an amazing view of the city all lit up for Vivid, all with the great company of our friends from work!

The last day of work soon came around and although we were both very sad to leave our friends (who we will be keeping in touch with for sure!), we were excited to begin our journey up the East coast of Sydney! Our last evening was spent at a Karaoke bar in the city with a large group of our friends, and we all said our final goodbyes (with pretty sore voices after 4 hours of singing!) at the end of a great evening!

So that brings us to the end of our stay in Sydney! We’ve had an AMAZING time here over the last 7 months and we’re sure that we will return again one day – we’ll miss it way too much to never come back! We’ve taken so many pictures so I’ve just uploaded the highlights, however I will be doing another blog covering the various road trips that we made outside of Sydney over the last few months once we got our car back in April so stay tuned!

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