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!

Are you OK?

I was sitting on my deck out back reading a good book this morning and look what I saw...Are they asking me? Haven't seen skywriting since I was a little kid, I think. I thought when it started that it was going to be a marriage proposal or something, but then it was just a simple question. I wonder who it was meant for?

Anyway, we have had a very nice Saturday. We went to the Orange Grove Farmer's market this morning. Here in Australia most neighborhoods have small markets on the weekend in the school parking lots. We are lucky enough to live 2 blocks from an organice one and we really enjoyed it today. We bought some great natural lotion, lemon pepper goat cheese, some mandarin oranges, flowers picked today, lime hummus, feta/rocket/rosemary chicken sausages (yes, you can get rocket in everything here), and some great looking asian salad mix. We are definitely not ordering produce from Woolie's anymore. There is so much great stuff at this market! This will definitely become a Saturday ritual for us. We walked to the local coffee shop, Divi, and then went to the market. Definitely a good thing to eat before you go there! So many yummy treats. Can't wait to go back next week!

And, other good news, Dan bought a completely overpriced, but said to be amazing, grill today. So, our deck is all set up with umbrella, chairs, and BBQ now. He even got the overpriced accessories to match : ) He'll have fun cooking those sausages for our friend, E and T tonight - our first visitors, by the way. Looking forward to playing some games with them tonight, like Uno and stuff like that. Dan made some amazing margaritas last night, so we may have to repeat that tonight! I just made a salad with our salad mix, goat cheese, some tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions - can't wait to eat it.

Here are the pretty fresh flowers we got. Dan made the vase out of a water bottle that he cut! No, our crate has not yet arrived. Forecasted to be here Oct 4. And, that's our new little dining set it is sitting on.

This is our new outdoor set minus grill, since Dan bought it later.

Here are some of the plants we were lucky enough to get that the owners left for us - fresh herbs, basil, mint, thyme, sage, cilantro.

The dogs are in quarantine now. Dan will go see them on Tuesday. Apparently they are doing well. The dog walker starts looking after them on Monday, so we'll have a link to post of them for you to see. We're definitely settling in. We are OK. Thanks to whoever asked.

New Stuff

This is sort of a short, random list of stuff...Good news - dogs are finally on their way! Then, they'll have 30 days of quarantine, so they should be home with us by about October 9. I had my first domestic business trip in Australia, traveled to Melbourne. Can you imagine leaving your house at 6:15 am for a 7:30 flight and being able to catch an earlier flight?? This is my new travel life and I am loving it. Domestic air travel is a delight here. And, I have no status on Qantas, yet could fit my bag on...And, they gave me breakfast for a 1.5 hour flight...It is quite lavish this Australian travel, so I'm a big fan already.

We are in the new house, have a real phone, no internet or TV yet...long story, but we should have it soon. Even though we are on a Rent a Centre bed and sofa, it is still better than our hotel room. I was invited by several co-workers for lunch, coffee, drinks, etc. I must have passed the secret 4 week test...not sure. So, on all fronts all things going fairly well. Will post some pics of the house when it looks a little nicer. We have 2 guest rooms for you friends and family!  Will post when dogs get here safely. We have someone we've paid to look in on them every day, so that is really nice.

Chinatown and Sydney Fish Market

Last weekend we had a very fun tourist day. We started by lunch in Chinatown where we got to see a wonderful display of the Chinese dragon. The "dragon" basically went from door to door doing a very frenetic dance. We tried to take a picture, but it was hard since there was so much movement.

Next, we went to the Fish Market and bought some ingredients for a yummy dinner. On the way, we saw a pretty large bird in the parking lot. We don't know these people who were walking up to it.

The fish market was amazing. So many good fresh fish. We took it home and had a great dinner. On the way home we saw an opportunity to take a shot of the city.

We'll post some pictures of our rental soon. Miss you all!

Pasta!

Another of our favorite things is food. We had a wonderful day at our friend M's house yesterday making pierogis. Now, I know she has a very detailed blog coming out that has some great detailed pictures and instructions, so I won't steal any of her thunder, but wanted to share a little bit of our experience from my perspective.

First, a pierogi is a Polish pasta (at least that's what I'll call it) that is kind of like a ravioli. Ours was stuffed with potato, cheese, garlic, and carmelized onions (YUM!). So, the brialliant idea behind M's party was to have some friends over, most of us who are also ex pats, and teach us the original Pierogi making process. So, thanks to her for such a brilliant idea! The other outcome was to make sure each of us had quite a few of these delish treats to take home. And finally, at the end of our hard work day, we all got to sit down together and eat these treats with brown butter and carmelized onions over them and baked with real Polish kielbasa (YUM YUM!). Yes, the husbands participated in the eating part. They seemed to enjoy that part very much!

This was such a fun day. We started at about 11 am and were there until after 10 pm. Much of it was spent (by the women, at least) putting together these tasty delights. I learned that I really enjoyed using the hand pasta machine. I see one in my near future! I was really not good at getting the filling in the dough. We kind of worked an assembly-line type process for the final two batches and got pretty efficient.

It was a very fun day, and we have truly made some great friendships with these folks in a very short time. For the women, it felt very old fashioned to be working together so closely on a mutual task, while still chatting it up and learning more about each other. It felt as if we could have been a group of sisters making a big holiday meal or something together all day. So, we have already committed to a similar engagement for Christmas cookies, although do we really want to do that in December, ladies? I guess I can volunteer since we will have air conditioning. We look forward to having you all over and reciprocating such a generous gesture.

And, for those of you out of town, we will have 2 guest rooms (and a study) starting next Saturday! You may want to wait until later September for when we get our crate, though, so you will also have a bed to go with the room! Doggies fly over next Wednesday. And, we're going to sign the papers for the car today. We are getting settled in.