We're in Australia!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For Mom

2008-11-18T15:53:00.003+11:00

Sorry mom, this is what we saw the weekend after you left while bushwalking near the Blue Mountains. Oh, and I finally got your postcard yesterday.

This last one is just a kookaburra, I don't know if you ever saw one. Kangaroos have really big claw looking paws, the picture of the one hopping is one I took. Sunny walked up to it and it started jumping straight at me, I didn't know if it was gonna run me over or what, it was a pretty big one too. But it just ran right past me.

The Great Aussie Walkabout Part Three

2008-11-05T20:53:00.004+11:00

Alice Springs and Uluru

P.S. OBAMA WON!

When we got back from our Kakadu tour, I had a voicemail from our tour operator in Alice Springs telling me to call them. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I did, and to the vindication of my stomach was told that our tour was cancelled due to vehicular problems. They booked us with another tour company, and this tour pretty much totally blew as it involved touring around in a minibus with all the other tourists. There were more people in our group so it wasn’t as fun, it felt more touristy and impersonal and I definitely wouldn’t do it again, but there were some fun moments.

To describe Alice Springs as a sleepy little town would be overhyping it. The place was practically a ghost town. I think most people use it as a place to store luggage while they’re on tour. The Sunday market was cool though, there were stalls selling the usual cheesy souvenirs but also many aboriginal people selling their original artwork, which I LOVE. We ended up buying a painting from a gallery, you get pictures of the artist painting the work, a biography of the artist, and a description of the painting. We got a “Possum Dreaming” painting, depicting the activities of a possum gathering food back and forth between a waterhole and a secret cave somewhere. I just think it’s pretty.

The first day of our tour involved a lot of driving through hot, dry, dusty, red desert. Our tour guide noticed another tour group stopped at the side of the road, so we stopped to see what the problem was, and apparently, they had discovered a dead body on the side of the road. I guess we really were in the Outback. During the course of the drive we saw several horse, camel, and other animal carcasses as well. FYI, there are wild camels in Australia. We stopped at a camel farm where you could ride one, but we contented ourselves with a photo of a cameltoe.

So we drove for a while, finally got out to walk around some big red rocks, drove to Uluru, another big red rock, and had champagne at sunset in front of the rock, just an intimate moment with hundreds of other tourists. If you can’t tell, this wasn’t my favorite tour. But after dinner at camp, we did some stargazing. Man, the stars were awesome, I’ve never seen so many stars. We decided to take our swags up to a lookout point and sleep up there, and unfortunately half the group decided to follow us. But sleeping under all those stars was cool. FYI, a swag is something you sleep outside in, it’s like a canvas covered mattress that can zip up to completely cover you. I slept in my swag outside both nights, but I didn’t zip myself all the way in as it was pretty hot.

The next morning we got up at 4am to catch sunrise at Uluru, again with hundreds of other tourists. Then we walked all the way around the base of Uluru and that has officially filled my quota for big red rocks for the rest of my life. Got to our second campsite, had dinner, sat around the campfire and went to bed. My husband left me to sleep all alone outside in front of the fire with the dingos while he pussied out and slept in the hut. I kept waking up to check for dingos. Not that I’m particularly scared of dingos, but there were signs all over the place warning you to be careful of them.

Sunny digging for witchety grubs

The next morning we drove to Kings Canyon, did the hike through the canyon which was way more interesting than Uluru, then drove back to Alice Springs and the next day flew home. Now I am back at work and that sucks. But at least I don’t have to blog anymore.

The Great Aussie Walkabout Part Two

2008-10-31T00:58:00.004+11:00

Part 2: Darwin and Kakadu (aka Crocodile Dundee land)

So from Cairns, we flew into Darwin on the Top End of the continent, and holy shit, it was HOT….and HUMID. Like 95+ at 100% humidity. Dad collapsed into a puddle of sweat immediately upon stepping outside. Seriously, he sweats a lot. We stayed at a YWCA-affiliated hostel which touted itself as a “safe environment for women and children” which I later found out meant at least one woman felt safe enough to pass out in the upstairs lounge and urinate all over the floor right next to an innocent bystander using the internet (me). And I didn’t notice she pissed herself until I stepped in it.

The city of Darwin is relatively boring. Mostly backpackers and bars. The real adventure came with our 4WD tour through Kakadu National Park, which was awesome. The first day we stopped at Corroboree Billabong for a crocodile cruise. Disappointingly, no giant crocs attacked our boat and everyone made it with limbs intact.

On the way, we saw a whole bunch of wallabies hoppity hopping across the road. Then we stopped at a site with a bunch of aboriginal rock art which was also cool. We camped at a campground where a few years earlier, a girl on a tour was eaten by a croc near the water. The next morning we got to try some traditional aboriginal activities such as spear throwing and didjeridoo blowing. I suck at both. Mom, however, regaled us all with a superb rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee”.

Then we all jumped into the back of the truck and did some bumpy but exciting 4 wheel driving to some beautiful gorges and waterholes for some swimming in possibly croc infested waters. Again, sadly, no tourists were eaten.

Back to the campsite for a campfire dinner and various campsite hijinks. The last morning was the best. We hiked to Barramundi gorge, and played in the chain of swimming holes on the top of the waterfall. There were these underwater tunnels to swim through and waterfalls to climb over. One of the tunnels led to an enclosed rockpool with no way out other than the tunnel, it was pretty deep too. That was such a great day.

Dad having fun on the tour.

On the way back to Darwin, we stopped at some gigantic termite mounds. We went to a market in Darwin, check out my melons. And that concludes the second installment.

The Great Aussie Walkabout

2008-10-29T11:47:00.010+11:00

Part One: Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef

Okay Emily, these postings are for you and you better appreciate them because I totally hate making blog posts. Especially uploading pictures, ugh. Just go to Sunny’s facebook page to look at a lot of the pictures. Ok, here we go (deep breath)….

The first leg of our Australian tour started in Cairns (pronounced Canes if your name is Steve Christopherson, but pronounced Cans for everyone else) the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef or GBR for those in the know. This is where Sunny and I became Scuba-certified! Yay for us! I LOVED diving, it was so awesome, I can’t wait to do it again. We had 2 days of pool and classroom instruction and 2 days of diving out on a boat in the GBR. Our instructor was a Kiwi named Westy who was very enthusiastic and constantly referred to himself in the third person which annoyed me at first, but eventually became kind of endearing.

Diving is so fun, the amount of fish and coral we saw was amazing. We saw a whole bunch of sea turtles, I got to scratch one on the shell which they apparently like. I almost sat on a lionfish which would not have been pleasant. We saw some reef sharks and played with sea cucumbers. We got to go on a night dive with flashlights. One of the reefs had a bunch of tunnels you could go through which was cool. Diving isn’t scary at all, except for one incident I had where we had to take our masks off underwater and put them back on. When I took mine off, all this water flooded into my nose whenever I breathed through the regulator because I can’t really breathe just through my mouth. I’ve always had a problem with water in my nose, I always have to plug my nose when I go underwater. Anyway, I felt like I was drowning because I was breathing in all this water through my nose and I started to freak out and really wanted to shoot up to the surface which would not have been good due to the fact that I probably would have gotten decompression sickness and we were like 30 feet below the surface anyway. But I just put my mask back on as fast as I could and then I was fine. But it was pretty scary for a bit. In hindsight, I should have just plugged my nose but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. Sunny didn’t get too seasick so that was good. Mom and dad snorkeled and I think they enjoyed it. I didn’t wanna leave, it was really fun. You can volunteer to work on the boat and you don’t get paid but you get free accommodation, meals, and dives so I’m thinking about doing that before we leave. If we have time.

In Cairns, we stayed at a hostel and hung out in our hammocks or on the esplanade by the lagoon pool. They have these public barbecues we used one night to make hot dogs (no, we didn’t throw any shrimp on the barbies). And that’s pretty much it for the first installment.

Here's a video of Sunny and I doing our flip entry from the boat. Sunny goes first, notice how much better my execution is than his ;) FYI, my flippers are child size flippers as the size 5s were too big. Those flippers sucked, they were way small and too tight and I felt like a tool wearing them.

Tim Tam-erific

2008-05-17T11:17:00.008+10:00

I finally broke down and allowed Sunny to realize his dream of becoming the typical Asian tourist by purchasing a digital SLR camera. He now carries this thing around with him wherever he goes and may even surpass my mom in being the most annoying person with a camera ever.

It does take pretty decent pictures, I guess, I don't really know. He was signed up for a photography class so he could actually learn how to use the thing, but it got cancelled. Here are some sample pictures of the thousands he's taken so far.

Sunny got to go to the Barossa Valley in South Australia last month for a work event. They got to tour some wineries while they were there.

I won a night at a hotel through my work, so we spent a weekend out at Manly Beach taking pictures, strolling along the esplanade, and getting drunk on champagne from our ocean front balcony.

One of the girls I work with is teaching me all about Australian junk food, we have kind of a cultural junk food exchange program going on. The best thing to come out of Australia, in my opinion, are these chocolate biscuits called Tim Tams.

They are amazing, I love them so much I can't buy them anymore because I'll eat the whole packet in one sitting. They're chocolate wafers with cream or caramel in the middle(there are different varieties) covered in chocolate. You can eat them plain, or freeze them, but the Australian equivalent of dunking Oreos in milk is to bite the ends off a Tim Tam and use it like a straw to suck up hot chocolate or coffee, and then the Tim Tam gets all soaked with the liquid and you eat it. It's called a Tim Tam Slam. Man, that is good stuff. I am seriously going to have to smuggle out a case of these things when I leave here.

March Highlights

2008-04-03T20:55:00.004+11:00

The cool thing about Sydney is that every single weekend there's some kind of festival going on, usually involving at least one parade, fireworks, food, and booze. The first weekend of March was the Gay Mardi Gras festival, the highlight being the Mardi Gras parade. I didn't bring my camera, but it was pretty cool although a bit tamer than I expected. It wasn't as flamboyant as the San Francisco Gay Pride parade, and much less nudity, but fun.
The next weekend was St Patrick's Day, complete with parade and a festival in the park. There were so many drunk Irish people in the streets you could literally smell the alcohol. Sunny dressed up to show his pride in his Irish heritage. We went to see a fiddler performance at the Opera House that night, I am so learning how to play the fiddle.

The next weekend we went to a rugby match, which was pretty fun. I don't really get all the rules. It's kind of like football only you can't do any forward passes, and sometimes a guy randomly kicks the ball to the middle of nowhere and then everybody gathers together in a huddle for some reason. But man, these guys are huge. It's like football mixed with wrestling.

We also went to the horse races, where we discovered we are terrible at picking winners. I think the horses we picked always came in last, even when they were favored to win. It probably didn't help that we based who we thought would win on how much we liked the horse's name. People were all dressed up for the races, and the girls all had floppy hats or feathery headpieces. Except us, we always look like bums.

Last weekend we went to the Sydney Royal Easter Show, which is roughly equivalent to a state fair. There are carnival rides, exhibitions, livestock, and of course fireworks. We saw a woodchopping competition, a dog show (the ugly poodle won), a game called polocrosse which is lacrosse on horses, bullriding, and a motorcross show.

Sunny gets to go to Adelaide this weekend for work for some event and to tour some wineries in the Barossa Valley. I think I may go to the Red Bull Flugtag, which is a flying machine competition. And that's all I can remember to relate. Over and out.

Our Life in Pictures

2008-02-29T23:15:00.005+11:00

So maintaining a blog is more of a pain in the ass than I had first thought. So I am just going to post a bunch of random pictures of what we've been doing and comment on them in no apparent order as I don't really have a cohesive theme on which to create a running commentary. Huh? I don't know, I'm tired, so back off.

Hey look, it's me on a cannon.

We had dinner at a french bistro one night, and this was my first course--sweetbreads with escargot and mushrooms. Or, in plain english, brains with snails and fungi. I wonder if people would eat cow shit if you called it Puree of Merde de vache.

This is the front of our apartment building.

We went fishing one day with a couple of Sunny's coworkers. Cute story. We drove to the river in one of the guys' jeep and got sidetracked by a go-kart course off the highway. So we exit and go down this road towards the raceway when all of a sudden, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he has a jeep, the driver decided to do some impromptu four wheeling in a construction lot along the road. Sunny and I were in the back (where there were no seatbelts) and were being tossed around like ragdolls, albeit ragdolls who were somewhat enjoying the tossing when we approached a 10-15 foot drop off. The driver hesitates. I object profusely saying "Absolutely not, no, let me out if you're going down that thing, I can't go to the hospital here if I get hurt." (The financial concern being foremost in my mind). Of course Sunny eggs him on and down we go. The way down wasn't so bad except for the fact that there was a dip and a jump at the bottom, where my skull attempted to force its way through the roof of the car.
The blow to the head jarred my entire spinal cord and when I next try to take a breath, all that comes out is a disturbing moan reminiscent of a mule's bray. I haven't had the wind knocked outta me since grade school, and let me tell you, it doesn't feel any better now than it did then. Anyway I spent the rest of the day worrying about having a permanent spinal cord injury and imagining creative ways to torture the driver to death.

We found another cool cemetary.

Tetsuya's kitchen

We hang out with a lot of Japanese people. We actually went to a karaoke bar that night--I am so thankful I don't live in Japan and have to listen to their music on a daily basis.

Sunny celebrating his heritage at the Chinese New Year parade.

Sunny forcing other people to celebrate his heritage at a Korean restaurant.

We're coming up on Mardi Gras, which for some reason is only a holiday for gay people here. This was a festival in the park celebrating all things homosexual. We watched a dog show emceed by a trannie. Interesting fact: most gay men have small dogs while gay women have big dogs. The Gay Mardi Gras parade is tomorrow night, I am so going. Remember when we went to the gay pride parade in San Francisco, Emily? Well this one is supposed to be a million times gayer. I didn't think you could get any gayer than San Francisco. Well, other than France.

Things I find weird about Australia or to put it bluntly, WTF?

2008-02-08T20:50:00.000+11:00

1. Hungry Jacks

Okay, so they have all of the same major chains here that they do in the US, like McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Etc. And they’re all called the same thing, pretty much the same menus. Except for Burger King. They have Burger Kings here, the menus are the same but they’re called Hungry Jack’s. Why? I have no idea.

2. Cheddar cheese

Okay, besides the obvious poor choice of name, cheddar cheese here is graded as to how tasty it is. Mmmm, that’s some extra tasty cheese.

3. Double 00 Double 77

They really love to use the word double here, whenever there are two numbers or letters that are the same in consecutive order. My name would be spelled J-O-L-double E-N and Sunny’s would be S-U-double N-Y and my phone number is 043141 double 3 7 9. It’s kind of hard to get used to actually, especially with the accents.

4. Dryer Sheets

More specifically the lack thereof. There are no dryer sheets in the entire country of Australia. I don’t even know if they know what they are. They only use liquid fabric softener.

5. Cricket

Here’s some actually commentary from today’s test

83.4 Lee to Pathan, 2 runs, fuller one now, swinging in, Pathan pushes wide of mid-on and wants two 83.3 Lee to Pathan, no run, jaffa! A cracking bouncer has him sniffing leather, but he just does well to rear his head out of the way - what a delivery at the end of the day

83.2 Lee to Pathan, no run, short of a length outside off stump, he gets back and shoulders arms

83.1 Lee to Pathan, 2 runs, ah thats tough! Lee bangs in a snorter, Pathan tries to get out of the way but bat hangs out in the air and the thick edge flies just over third slip Just about time to wind-up. Last over of the day. Its Lee to Pathan, around the stumps.

Huh? I’ve watched the damn game and I still have no idea what’s going on. It involves wickets, runs, and stumps, and that’s all I’ve managed to figure out.

6. Purchasing bottled beverages

The bigger the bottle, the cheaper the price. A 600ml bottle of coke costs $3 while a 2 litre bottle is like $1.89.

7. How’re you going?

In the US we either say How are you or How’s it going, but here the preferred salutation combines the two into How are you going? It just sounds weird to me. Example: “Hey mate, how’re you going?”

“Not too bad, mate, but I’ve got heaps of kookaburras in my gumtree and my boomerang is stuck in my billabong.” Ok so I made that last part up, but you get the idea.

8. Netball

They recently had the National Netball Championships or something, which was actually kind of a big deal and Sunny liked watching (unsurprisingly). Netball is like a really lame form of basketball where you can’t move when you have the ball and the girls wear skirts.

No Title

2008-02-01T19:55:00.000+11:00

I really should try and update this more often, as I’ve totally forgotten what we’ve done since the last post, but now that we finally have internet at our apartment, that should be a little easier.

So I started work a couple of weeks ago, and am enjoying it so far. Everyone I work with is really nice and it’s a fun environment. I've been entertaining people with my American accent. It's weird, but I always have the urge to overemphasize my american-ness for some reason. I think its partly because being an American in America is essentially meaningless, but when you're an American in Australia it becomes a large part of who you are, whether you want it to or not.

I’m already getting to do some pretty cool stuff and I’m not even done training yet. The first week I started we got a free dinner at one of the 5 star hotels that’s a part of our hotel group here in Sydney. It was yummy. We also got to do some inspections of a couple of other hotels near the harbor. Next week, one other girl and I get to fly down to Melbourne to do a hotel inspection there and I guess we’ll be handling all their calls from then on. I don’t know yet if we get to spend the night there or just fly down for the day, I guess it’s only like an hour flight. Hopefully I get to go to some other places as well.

Last weekend it was Australia Day, which is kind of equivalent to our Fourth of July. We did some shopping and hung out in the park where they had food and beer and bands and loads of drunk Aussies. We were planning on going to the Australian Garden Gnome convention, but they were doing trackwork that day on the rail lines so we couldn’t get out there. We went down south to a town called Cronulla where Sunny attempted to do some coastal fishing, with no luck.

The next day we took a train to the Hawkesbury River where we rented a boat and Sunny tried some river fishing. He caught a couple of little fish that were apparently something like our catfish, only they had tails like eels, but no keepers.

Oh, a couple of weekends ago we went to a performance at the Opera House. We were pretty psyched because it was supposed to be this show similar to Cirque du Soleil, but ended up being disappointing. I was actually really pissed that I paid for tickets, it was pretty cheesy. The finale was pretty hilarious though because they did this thing called the “Wheel of Death” which was a miniature version of the wheel thing from Circus of the Stars from whence came the immortal Christopherson family quote “Get out of the way of the wheel!” I tried to explain to Sunny why that was funny, but he didn’t get it.Here's a picture of a random person's yard, with wild parrots hanging out in their tree. We thought that was pretty cool.

The Australian Open was going on in Melbourne recently. They set up these huge TV screens in a couple of places around Sydney. Sunny thoroughly approved.

This weekend it’s supposed to rain again. It has pretty much been raining every day off I have except for last weekend, which is really beginning to irritate me. There’s not much to do in the rain. I was hoping to do some more bushwalking, but we’ll see.

Happy New Year!!! (better late than never)

2008-01-16T19:28:00.000+11:00

We had a super awesome New Year’s Eve, even though it did not involve the Christopherson tradition of fondue and jumping off furniture. (Seriously, how does everyone not do that?) It did, however, involve copious amounts of fireworks and booze. The afternoon of the 31^st, we spent a delightfully sunny afternoon picnicking in the Royal Botanical Gardens, watching the crowds pour into the harbor foreshore for the evening celebration. It was estimated that 1.5 million people lined the shores of Sydney Harbour to watch the fireworks, some even camping overnight to get a good spot. People in their private boats were jockeying for position in the water (Sting being one of them—for real, Sting had a yacht out on the harbor for the fireworks).

But we didn’t have to worry about any of that, so we had our nice picnic, then headed on home in the afternoon to get dressed and ready for our New Year’s Eve cruise! We got tickets on a boat that left the wharf at 7:30pm and included dinner and drinks and dancing on deck. They have family fireworks at 9pm for the kiddies, and then the real ones commence at midnight obviously. In the meantime, we cruised around the harbor, checking out all the boats decorated with lights and looking for Sting. (Alas, he was nowhere to be found). The main fireworks are lit from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a giant bridge that spans the harbor, appropriately enough. The bridge had a giant hourglass that was counting down the time to midnight. But there were also barges all over the harbor that also lit fireworks, as well as fireworks from the Opera House and from the rooftops of skyscrapers in the city. It was pretty amazing, apparently the best fireworks display in the world. Certainly the best ones I’ve ever seen, although the ones we light at the cabin come in a pretty close second. Sunny was trying to film it all from our crappy camera, he had to do it in like 7 different shots and the quality is pretty poor, but we had a view from the bow of the boat and saw it all up close and personal. I just put the beginning, a bit in the middle and the end videos. Ok, never mind, this computer is taking forever to load my videos, so just look it up on Youtube if you wanna see it. I'll try to upload them later maybe.

There were a whole bunch of Scottish people on the boat, and Sunny now believes me that Scottish people are the awesomest people in the world. When we returned to the wharf at about 2am, we slowly made our way through the drunk crowds with our new companions from Brisbane and ended up at a bar near our apartment. I drank a little too much and ended up being sick for the rest of the night (well, morning really, we didn’t get home until 5 or 6 in the morning) but it was fun nonetheless. New Year’s Day was spent recovering and watching High School Musical the Sequel and Nancy Drew (both Sunny’s picks, so not kidding).

In other news, I started work last week. I worked for a week at a telemarketing company, selling American Express cards. It actually was not quite as bad as I was expecting, and I was surprisingly good at it, but it still sucked. The fact that the guy sitting next to me had wicked B.O. did not help. Anyway I only had to do it for a week and this week I started my “real” job. I work in the central reservations department for Mirvac hotels and resorts, an Australian hotel group. It seems pretty easy and fun so far and the schedule is good as I’ll have a lot of Sundays and Mondays off with Sunny, so I’m happy. Plus I'll get discounts on hotels after the 3 month probationary period, so yee-haw for me.

What else have we been doing? Mostly sitting on the beach and stuffing ourselves with delicious food. I'm getting fat, but I just joined a gym today so I feel better already.

So who’s gonna be the first to come visit us?

A Midsummer's Christmas Eve

2008-01-03T16:44:00.000+11:00

Firstly, we’d like to thank everyone for sending us Christmas cards. Sorry we didn’t send any out, we kind of skipped celebrating Christmas this year. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas in the middle of summer. But Sunny got a couple of extra days off from work so that was nice. The Tetsuya’s Christmas party was on the 23rd at an Italian restaurant right on the beach. It was a beautiful setting, the dining room had a full view of the ocean and it was a sunny day. There were these fortune-tellers there and Sunny and I both had our fortunes told. The lady totally sucked, she didn’t even set up the tarot cards right. Anyway, apparently we’re going to move to Asia sometime in 2009 where Sunny is going to take up yoga and I will be a professional athlete. (I told you she sucked).

On Christmas Eve we took a 2 hour train ride to the Blue Mountains. We did a lot of bushwalking (which is what they call hiking here) and stayed at the youth hostel in Katoomba.

We had a Christmas Eve dinner at a little French restaurant that overlooked the mountains. Sunny had lamb kidneys and ox cheek. I tried the lamb kidneys and it totally tasted like how a farm smells (manure and hay). Apparently that’s how it’s supposed to taste, but how anyone can find that appetizing I cannot fathom. He liked it. Christmas day we did some more bushwalking, although the weather was drizzly and grey. We knew most places would be closed on Christmas, so the night before we bought groceries as the youth hostel had a full service kitchen. We bought stuff for sandwiches for lunch, and it was my responsibility that morning to make the sandwiches. We had bought some mustard called hot English mustard and I noticed when I opened the jar that it was pretty strong smelling (it actually kind of made my eyes water) but didn’t really think much about it. Sunny likes a lot of mustard on his sandwiches, so I slathered both sides of the bun pretty liberally and put a normal amount on my sandwich. When we sat down to eat lunch at the waterfall, we each took a bite of our sandwiches and OMG, that mustard fried the hair clear out of our nostrils. It was like eating pure horseradish, the sandwiches were completely inedible. Especially Sunny’s. So I told him the next time he puts me in charge of food, to remember that I can screw up even sandwiches. But we had a nice dinner (Sunny cooked it this time). And we went back home on Boxing Day.

I went hiking the other day at a national park close to Sydney, and got totally lost. There were trails all over the place and no signs and I kept seeing spiders and thinking “Crap, is that a funnel web or redback spider? Are there taipans in this area?” I can’t tell the difference between spiders. They all look the same to me-icky. Anyway I made it out alive.

There are these really pretty gardens in the middle of Sydney called the Royal Botanical Gardens. There’s a huge colony of bats that literally hang out there during the day. The bats are so big they’re called flying foxes, I swear they’re like 3 feet across and there are thousands of them hanging from the trees. I tried to take some video of them, they start waking up at dusk and flying around and they eventually commute out to the suburbs to do whatever it is they do—eat bugs, suck the blood of young virgins, whatever. Mom you better not look at the pictures, they'll give you nightmares for weeks. I think they’re totally adorable, I want one as a pet. It can eat the cockroaches in our apartment.

The moon is upside down here, it looks weird.
This is just a picture of me in Hyde Park that Sunny made me pose for.

Coming soon.....New Year's Eve posting!!!

So dad knows we're still alive

2007-12-22T14:05:00.000+11:00

Ok, so after much hassle and an endless amount of walking, we finally were accepted for an apartment. Finding an apartment in Sydney totally sucks. You have to go through this whole process that starts with finding an ad online for an apartment you’re interested in. Then you have to call the real estate company that manages the apartment, leave your number and wait for them to call you back with the “inspection time” which is a 15 minute window of one day where everyone who is interested comes to the apartment and files through like cattle. Usually they end up being dumps, but if you happen to still be interested after the inspection, you fill out an application. Along with this application you have to submit copies of passports, visas, previous rental receipts, bank statements, pay stubs, credit cards, (yes you have to give them an actual copy of your credit card which is not a little scary), and agree to submit to an anal probe. Ok, so not that last one, but it feels just as invasive. Anyway, the owner then picks which application he/she deems approvable (and what criteria they use to determine this presumably involves either eeny- meeny- miney- mo or some other equally random process) and they call you to let you know you’ve either been accepted or rejected. To make this even more annoying, apartments here don’t come with appliances. When people move apartments, they take their fridges, washing machines, etc. with them. So we signed a lease for an apartment, it actually came with a washing machine surprisingly, but we had to buy a fridge. It was totally unfurnished, so everything you see in the pictures is stuff we bought (thank you IKEA). Anyway, we felt pretty lucky getting the apartment until the first night we spent in it when all the cockroaches started crawling out of the walls and cupboards. I spent that night feverishly whacking away at any real or imagined movements with Sunny’s shoe. The next day I bought this spray which seemed to lessen the activity and the property managers sent over a pest control guy, but we still see several a night. At least they’re not really big ones, but the roach guy said the smaller, or german, cockroaches are harder to get rid of. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation re: cockroaches:
Him: “Germans hate that they’re called german cockroaches, but that’s what they’re called everywhere, except in Germany.”
Me: “What do they call them in Germany?”
Him: “French cockroaches.”
So we have unwanted roommates and have to keep all our food in airtight containers and I swear I feel them crawling all over me all the time, but at least it forces me to keep the apartment clean. We moved from a predominantly Korean populated area to the most flamboyantly gay area in all of Australia.

I also finally got a job, but it’s as a customer service rep for Amex so I’m going to continue looking. I don’t start til January 7. I think maybe I’ll just change jobs every so often just to mix it up.
So here’s some pictures of a little of what we’ve been doing.

We took the ferry over to the zoo, where Sunny made a fuzzy friend.

Us at the Sydney fishmarket.

I did this coastal beach walk thing while Sunny was slaving away at work.

Every Saturday night we go out after Sunny gets done with work and it’s funny cuz the music that’s popular here is music that was popular in America like 5-10 years ago. Their music kind of sucks.
But the restaurants here are amazing. Just the sheer variety of ethnicities to choose from is bewildering. Except Mexican. There aren’t many Mexican restaurants here, and the ones that are here aren’t really Mexican. So I’m going to go into carnitas taco withdrawal soon, but I’ll try to console myself with tom yum or sushi or yum cha (which is what they call dim sum here).

I still don’t have internet, which is frigging annoying. I was supposed to get it connected yesterday, and had to stay home all day in case the technician needed access to the apartment. Then I got an email today that they didn’t do it and it’s now scheduled for January 2nd. Which means it’ll be almost a month from the time I ordered it until I finally get to use it. Sunday we have the Tetsuya’s Christmas party. Monday we’ll be taking the train into the Blue Mountains and staying there over Christmas. I’m looking forward to that, it should be fun. Ummm, yeah, so that’s about all I got right now, are you satisfied Dad?

Quick Update (cuz I know you're all dying to hear about our lives)

2007-11-30T18:05:00.000+11:00

First Week (still no kangaroos)

So we arrived in Sydney safely, sailed through customs (apparently they just let anybody in), and were met by Tetsuya’s 50 year old gay errand boy, “Granny”. He rules. He took us to Tetsuya’s where we briefly met the head chef and were then taken to our lush accommodations.

Now don’t be too jealous, we only get to live here temporarily. We immediately got started looking for an apartment, and I will not go into that process here as it’s agonizingly frustrating and suffice it to say we still have not found an apartment. We got to eat at Tetsuya’s on my birthday (yes, I am now a 30 year old woman who still wears sparkly unicorn t-shirts—wanna fight about it?) The meal was very yummy, and we both got a little buzzed off the wine.

Of course we had to visit the iconic opera house.

Sunny started work a couple days later, and I haven’t seen much of him since. He works Tuesday-Friday from about 11:30am to 12:30am and Saturdays about 9am to 12:30am and has Sunday and Monday off. He actually gets half an hour before service to eat sitting down. He works with a lot of Japanese guys, and that’s about all I know. I have been looking for jobs and apartments with little success so far.

Some random observations on Sydney:
Holy Koreans, Batman. There are soooo many Koreans here, it’s not even funny. Especially the area where we live, there’s more Koreans than anybody else by far. Coincidentally, I haven’t seen many dogs….
Everything is so expensive here, a 6-pack of beer costs $20-so not kidding. I’d say a good 15% of the population has pretty rank B.O. Vegemite-I have to say, I don’t hate it. Sunny really likes it. Haven’t had much trouble with the accent here, except for the occasional misunderstanding like the commercial advertising something involving free pubic hair?? (turns out he was really saying free puma gear) They have really random celebrations—in the time we’ve been here we’ve already seen fireworks twice and 2 parades and have no idea what they were for. Oh and sorry Brian, but I did see a North Face store and it’s still called North Face here. The light switches are down for on and up for off and the toilets have two different flushing options—more water for #2 and less water for #1. We bought kangaroo meat at the store and I don’t really like it, it’s pretty gamey. Yeah, I have to go look for apartments some more.

G'Day Mates!

2007-11-20T16:12:00.000+11:00

Ok, so we’ve finally made it to Australia (although we have yet to see either a kangaroo or Crocodile Dundee) but don’t have a lot of time, so this is going to be pretty brief. I don’t know who all is going to be looking at this, but depending on who you are you may find parts of this blog either extremely interesting or extremely boring. Anyhow, as you may or may not know, we flew first to Honolulu on our way to Sydney and spent a few days there. It was pretty awesome, please enjoy a sampling of photos from the trip:

This is basically a view of what we did most of the time in Hawaii:

We spent a lot of time on the beach. Poor us.

We did get off the beach a little bit. We drove around the island, went snorkeling, a little hiking, a lot of eating.

While in Honolulu, we were so lucky as to eat at Alan Wong’s. They gave us menus with our names on them, which was pretty cool. It was very yummy. We also ate at Roy’s, which was much less impressive. Nothing much else to say about Hawaii, other than it's beautiful and everyone talks like Johnny Mizukami.