Well, we’ve been here for just over two weeks and it has been a whirlwind of getting settled. Adrienne has been putting up great with my desire to get settled in somewhere quickly. In the last two weeks we’ve gotten our bank set up, started renting a great (granny) flat, got our phones hooked up, got my computer set up with a (stand-up!) desk and chair, found a great deal on a new extremely comfortable bed, bought a great sofa for super cheap, bought all the small things that are needed to live somewhere (rice cooker, kitchen utensils, groceries, Costco membership, etc.), and gotten the apartment very livable! Oh, and we bought a fridge, because apparently it is somewhat abnormal to get a fridge with your apartment here. We still have some work to do to get settled in, our living room is still a bit of a mess, but we’ve made awesome progress. It only took us a week to figure out how to get the shower to a reasonable temperature! The hot water heater here is an on-demand electric heater. It gets the water super warm, but it was hard figuring out how to demand the correct amount of hot water. Without further ado, here are the pictures of our place (Adrienne will be posting her own in the coming days, I was just excited to get anything to show):

This is the view of our place from the front door. The door you can see in the back on the right is the bedroom door, and the bathroom is straight back.

The opposite side of the kitchen. The bedroom door is barely visible as the first one on the left, and the living room is the second on the left.

The bedroom, with Adrienne packing for a trip to the Blue Mountains (teaser).

And finally the living room. We’re currently using an inflatable mattress and an extra pad as our sofa. The new one will be arriving on Friday.

Yesterday afternoon we went to see the couch we ended up buying. It was at a place on the other side of town, the easiest way to get there was to take a ferry out of downtown. Before catching the ferry, we gave ourselves enough time that we could explore a little bit. We first went to the Opera house. It is much more beautiful up close than any of the pictures I ever saw conveyed. The roof is covered in differently textured tiles that give it a really awesome look. From a bit of a distance, I actually thought it was a mesh material, and as we got closer the tiles became more apparent. I also didn’t know that the opera house has three distinct buildings on its campus (for lack of a better word), and at least four auditoriums.

We found this really incredible restaurant down an alley that hung bird cages above its outdoor seating. Most were empty.

After the opera house, we continued exploring some of the downtown area. The mix of architecture here is pretty amazing. There is a really cool mixture of steel skyscrapers, five to six story beautifully mason-ed stone buildings, and two to three floor brick or wood house like buildings. I suppose most big cities are like this, there was just something a little more striking about the way it all sits together in Sydney than in other big cities I’ve been in. It seems that there is more contrast in Sydney, the big buildings and small buildings are interspersed throughout and right up next to each other. I’ve really enjoyed the small amount of exploration we’ve done and am looking forward to more.

Here are a couple of pictures of Luna Park from the other side of the harbor.

And during the day!

On the ferry ride we went past this beautiful point jutting out into the Harbor.

We took the ferry out of downtown, which is on the south side of the harbor, to one of the bays on the north side. It was a very pleasant ride with some spectacular views. The harbor coast is amazing, and has a lot of variety. There are the big houses and apartment buildings you would expect to see along a harbor and there are sandstone cliffs. One section reminded me strongly of the idyllic houses in San Francisco: tall, skinny, and squished all together. The harbor itself is also incredibly busy, with boats going all over the place all the time. I am surprised there aren’t more collisions.

Last Saturday (the 8th) was our last day staying with Viive and Ian before moving into our own place. To celebrate, they took us out to dinner and to see some of their favorite spots around Sydney. We went to dinner at a really great Indian restaurant and shared four dishes between us. I hadn’t completely realized how awesome the food here was going to be, but it makes sense. My theory is that the quality of food is inversely proportional to the distance from its origin, that is: the closer you are to where the food originated the better it is. Australia has amazing Thai and Indian, and I’m sure the Indonesian, Japanese, and Chinese is going to be just as good. We’ve just been so excited about the Thai, that we haven’t gotten around to trying much more.

After dinner, they took us to a beautiful park called Balls Head. It is on the north side of the Sydney harbor with a lot of wonderful trails through the bush. The trails are maintained, but not overly so making the park feel wild even though its in the heart of a large city. There are cliffs and caves and tide pools all carved out of the sandstone that the park sits atop. It makes for wonderful walks with excellent views. Enough talk! More Pictures!

Apparently there are all sorts of little caves throughout the park.

A view of the same overhang from the other side. The pillar is man-made, probably to keep it from collapsing.

And during certain times of year, you can have make fires in the park!

After the park, we went to a Coney Island-like midway/amusement park called Luna Park. I’ve never been to one, so it was pretty fun to see. Apparently it used to have two roller coasters, but then more residential buildings were built in the area and the residents complained too much. Ahh, the perks of being rich. Currently it has one roller coaster, a ferris wheel, a games midway, bumper cars, a big building labeled “Coney Island”, and some other attractions I can’t remember. Pretty cool place, and it’s along a really beautiful section of the harbor (seems to be a theme…) We didn’t take time to ride anything, but it was fun walking through and seeing it. The park has big brightly lit entrances, so you can’t really miss it, and is across the harbor from the Opera House. Since I was there, I couldn’t help but take a picture.

 I apologize for the layout of the pictures in the post. It’s really hard to get WordPress to do it the way I want it to.