Sydney Botanical Garden

Last Sunday was an amazingly, beautiful day. We went with our friends E. and T. and spent a lazy afternoon walking through some of it. We saw lots of interesting wildife (flying foxes/bats, eels, cockatoos, and more). Here are some of our pictures.


These are just some pretty flowers and Dan wanted to take my picture. I think it was about 80 degrees that day and of course, we were walking so I do have a little glow about me...

 These are the flying foxes. They are very scary and are awake in the day (see) and they are HUGE! They fly around and above your heads like birds and their wing span is several feet. There are TONS of them in the garden. E, T, and Dan thought their faces are cute, so zoom in, but I just think they are creepy.

 The botanical garden has a great view of the Opera House (where I will see Kathy Griffin next month!) and the Harbour Bridge.

 Also, there are cockatoos everywhere in the trees. Very beautiful! Some people were feeding them and they'd land on their heads or shoulders. While they were doing that, one almost landed on my head! Not a fan...

 Some beautiful poppies in the garden, reminded us of Athens, Greece.

 We spent some time in the succulent gardens because T used to collect them. I like the pretty ones with flowes and he likes the prickly dangerous ones. Hmmm, what does that say about our personalities : )

 This is Dan and I at Macquarie's Chair. Apparently, Mrs. Macquarie really liked to walk through the gardens and her husband had a big rock carved into a chair for her. There is probably more of a story to it, but that's what T told us.

On Tuesday, we joined a group of friends at the Night Noodle Market that was part of the Sydney International Food Festival. They set up lanterns and booths with various Asian food in Hyde park each week day evening for 2 weeks. You go booth to booth and by dumplings, noodle bowls, kebabs, etc. Really fun!

We'll post some pictures of the party later this weekend.

Settled in

As promised, here are some pictures of our house as we get more settled in. It is definitely starting to feel like home.

Our kichen, including the little white bar stools we bought here.

 Our home office. We bought this book shelf at a neat little store in Newtown called Newtown Furniture Haven, very good wood stuff. We got our desk there too.

 Our living room and the art we purchased in Croatia.

 This is our eating area. We decided to buy this little small table and chairs since we typically use our living room more and we have dining outside.

The view from our bedroom. I don't think we've shared that before.

Our bedroom

Please come visit us! We have a nice room for you.

Our third bedroom, also known as my shoe closet : )

This is probably incredibly boring for anyone except our family, so apologies for that, but they have all been asking to see this. I'm really missing all of you right now and am especially jealous that Angie, Aunt Jill, and Grammy are all in Virginia. Have fun tonight!

Almost home!

We are very excited that our goods will finally arrive from customs this week. It will be great to get rid of our rent a centre funiture and to have a better bed to sleep on, as well as to get all of our dishes and cookware. And, the doggies will be here next Sunday, so we should be able to get the house all set up prior to them coming home. So, hopefully it will feel like home to them.

Here is the link to the dog walker who has provided them visits while in quarantine. They have been amazing and you'll see the dogs seem to be having a lot of fun!

Dan is calling home to his folks right now and we begin our ritual of morning phone calls home. We miss home, but have been getting a dose of it on the cable we now have installed. I'm watching the View right now and watched the US today show yesterday. It's a fun reminder of home. However, we are enjoying a few Australian shows and some of the British shows, as well. In general, there is not as much choice in cable as we have back home.

We'll post some pics after we get our house in order next week!