Getting into the festive spirit?!

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It’s been almost 2 months now since we arrived in Sydney so we thought that we should do a blog update and upload the pictures that we have taken so far!

So it’s been quite an eventful few weeks since our last blog update! The job hunt was in full swing, however it was soon to be partly ended when Emma got an interview for a company called ‘Make it Cheaper’, and was then was offered a role in the operations team starting on 3^rd December, which gave us a couple more weeks to enjoy Sydney whilst the main attractions were less busy in the week (we would still have weekends of course) before starting work. We visited Madame Tussauds and took the obligatory photos posing next to the waxworks. We went to the cinema a couple of times, watching ‘Breaking Dawn: Part 2’ and ‘Skyfall’ – both of which were pretty awesome films that we really enjoyed! We visited the aquarium and the wildlife centre again on a weekday, which were much less busy than when we previously visited on a Saturday, so we could take a bit more time to look around rather than being herded around along with hundreds of other tourists! We also spent a couple of sunny days lying on the grass at the Botanic gardens and by Coogee beach, not missing the British winter one bit!

We spent some time walking around various shops and shopping centres, with gradually more Christmas trees sprouting up and tinsel appearing in shop windows – all the while still not really feeling very much like Christmas, especially when we had a heatwave at one point and it went up to almost 40 degrees! To try to get into the festive spirit we bought our own little Christmas tree to put up in our apartment, and spent an hour or so decorating it with lights, baubles and tinsel, and also putting random bits of tinsel around the place, such as on picture frames, around door handles and wrapped around the blind cords!

During a couple of Saturday nights, we went down to Darling Harbour to watch some fireworks, which were on every week in November. The first one that we went to was the penultimate event of the month, with very impressive fireworks lighting up the skies over the water However, on the final Saturday of November was an event called ‘Santa Fest’. We went down to the harbour again to be greeted by a huge crowd of people and lots of various different forms of Santa’s! Singing Santa’s, dancing Santa’s, water-skiing Santa’s, Santa’s on stilts, jetpack Santa’s (yes, really!), streetlights with Santa faces etc etc! It was pretty fun and we were treated to various Christmas songs by a local choir as the Santa’s danced by, before the big fireworks ended the event.

On the 3^rd of December, Emma started her job at Make It Cheaper, which is basically a company which is sort of an in-between for electricity/gas retailers and residents/businesses in Australia, offering discounts for customers to either connect or switch to the different retailers. Emma’s job is basically to batch all of the sales for each day and send them to the different retailers with all of the new customers’ details. It’s fairly easy work, her colleagues are all lovely and the wages are brilliant! Craig continued his job hunt but wasn’t having much luck, and after Emma heard that her place were always looking for new sales people, she referred Craig for an interview (with the promise that if he stays there for 3 months, she will receive a $250 voucher for referring him!), which he got a couple of weeks later. As soon as he had walked out of the lift to exit the building after his interview, they phoned to tell him that he had got the job, and will be starting on the 21^st January! So the job front is looking great, and we hopefully won’t need to worry about money for the rest of our trip!

Last weekend, we decided – after a lot of recommendations from people that we have met over here – to take a day trip to visit the Blue Mountains. A two hour train ride took us to the small town of Katoomba in the heart of the mountains, where we then paid for a ticket which would allow us to ride the hop-on hop-off trolley bus that looped around the various attractions and lookouts around the mountains. Our first stop was a place called ‘Scenic World’, where we first took a partly open-topped (there was a sort of net roof but no sides, if you get what we mean!) railway down the cliff to the bottom of the canopy below. Now this was a railway like no other we had been on before! The incline down was 52 degrees, which pretty much felt vertical when you were descending down with no safety bar, just a slight backwards tilt to the seats to keep you upright and to stop you from sliding off! It was pretty fun though, especially when accompanied by the Indiana Jones theme tune as we hurtled down the cliff!

At the bottom, there were a few different routes to take on the walkway that lead around the bush, so we just took the longest route and took an hour or so to stroll around the massive trees, tangled vines and various types of wildlife that reside there. At one point we were pretty sure we heard a snake hissing, although we never actually saw it so we can’t be sure, but there are hundreds of them living there, so chances are, it was there! After our walk, we took the cable car back up the cliff, being treated to amazing views on the way up of the famous ‘Three Sisters’ – three rocks that sit next to each other on the edge of a cliff that are probably the most photographed objects in the Blue Mountains. We could also see some waterfalls flowing down the side of the mountains, although there wasn’t much water left to fall after not having much rain recently! As we got to the top of the cliff, we soon realised how high up we must have been when the tops of the trees below (which really were HUGE by the way) seemed like tiny bushes below, and we could literally see for miles around us – we later were told it was around 70 miles that we could see from up there – crazy!

The last ‘ride’ offered at Scenic world was the Skyway – which was another cable car with a glass bottom which travels between the tops of two cliffs that face each other, and above the canopy and the floor which lay almost 300m below! After taking in the views on our way over, we departed on the other side and decided to take a walk along the cliff to Echo Point – the main lookout point for the Three Sisters and incidentally where the trolley bus would pick us up! There were various lookout points along our walk, all with amazing views of the mountains – seriously the photos do not do it justice!

At Echo point, we took a few more pictures then got onto the next trolley that came along, which we rode back into Katoomba. After a look around and a bite to eat, we got back onto a trolley to see what else the mountains had to offer. Our driver was an old guy that sounded like he had been doing his job for many years, and knew a lot about the area, and at a couple of points on our journey pointed out to us the houses that were up for sale for a couple of million each!

We got off the bus at Gordon Falls, and again took in the views from this vantage point, although the falls were a bit more of a trickle due to the water shortages! We walked along to ‘Olympian Rock’ – a huge rock which overhangs the cliff edge, giving yet another great view of the canopy and cliffs surrounding it. Unfortunately, there had been a recent bush fire in that area, and so there were quite a lot of dead trees around, although this did give us some interesting photos with the contrast of the lush green behind the dead trees.

The trolley picked us up around an hour later and after a short stop at ‘Honeymoon Lookout’, we made our way back to Katoomba to catch the train back into Sydney. Altogether, our trip to the Blue Mountains was an amazing day and was a nice change to the usual city sights that we see daily now! One mention has to go to the guy that Emma the other day, who was dressed in formal business wear whilst riding a push scooter back from work - brilliant!

We hope you enjoy looking at the pictures – we’re not too sure how many we’ll be taking now that we are working, so there may not be another update for a couple of months now, unless we do something random at the weekends, who knows?! We hope you all have a great Christmas and new year – we’re still not ENTIRELY sure what we’re doing for either yet, as Emma has to work New Year’s Eve which has kind of ruined our original plans of getting to the harbour early ready for the fireworks, but we’ll work something out!

See you in 2013!

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