It’s somewhat difficult to calculate exactly how long I went without more than 2 hours of sleep. We left Michigan around 5PM local time on August 31st and arrived in Sydney around 6:30 AM local time on September 2nd. Sydney is 14 hours ahead of Detroit, so I was mostly awake for 48 hours. When I finally did get in bed, I was asleep before my head hit the pillow, then slept for about 10 hours. I have been pretty much on the correct time zone since! I can’t say if it was the lack of sleep, or the huge shift in time zones that made it so easy to get on the correct schedule, but I can’t complain.
We’ve been running errands around town for the last couple of days. We went to a mall yesterday to deal with getting our phones activated and look into various other small things. In the States I’ve never looked into a non-contract plan, but the one we ended up getting here is remarkably cheap. It doesn’t give us a lot of data, but if we need more, they allow you to add data to your current month at a decent rate. Data is a must have on your phone because free Wi-Fi is much less widely available here [since writing this, we’ve found quite a few places with free Wi-Fi. It seems that availability varies widely suburb to suburb. I haven’t tested any of the other free Wi-Fi we’ve found for speed or reliability yet.] The only place we found wireless was at a McDonald’s, and it was pretty much unresponsive. I was hoping to be able to get out and around town frequently to do work, so this was a bit disappointing to me. I might pick up a USB modem so that I don’t go crazy working at home all the time [and since this writing I have].
We took a walk with Viive’s (pronounced “Viva”, she’s the one letting us stay with her for now) dogs today. It’s fun seeing all of the new plants and wildlife around. Australia has some incredibly beautiful birds and we see them all over the place. They are colored in bright green and red and blue and many of them have loud and obnoxious calls. Even what I’ve been calling Australia’s version of a crow [Australian Magpie] is pretty. We heard a lot of “everything is out to kill you there” when we would tell people we were coming to Australia, but we have yet to see anything truly dangerous. We’ve seen some funnel webs, and Adrienne managed to lure one out today, but we’re fairly sure that the ones we found are mostly harmless and quite skittish.
You can see the legs of the spider Adrienne found as it lies in wait down in its funnel home.
