And so it begins...

Day 1

G’day mates!!  Arrived in Sydney safe and sound last night around 10:30pm.  After going to bed at about 1am we both woke at 5:30am (6:30pm GMT) and have been up ever since – not sure what kind of jet lag or time zone this is?

We are staying in ‘the bush’ (South Windsor) at the moment.  Today we went for a wander around the local area and found a YMCA swimming pool and sports centre which seems appealing.  We then walked to find the South Windsor shops (looks like an 1800s wild west town ‘strip’) and bought limited (expensive) supplies for the store cupboard.  After taking them home and a drink of juice we decided to try and get some of our ‘essential’ things done.  We’re sure we probably broke a few laws during this hour trip as the pavement kept appearing and disappearing and so we had to walk on the road most of the way.

The kind shop assistant in the supermarket told us that Windsor was “10 minutes down the road, just after the bridge”, which we couldn’t see and therefore assumed was further away than we were told (as seemed to be a recurring theme of Australian directions).  After returning the shopping home and having a drink of juice, we decided to try and get some of our ‘essential’ things like phones, bank accounts and internet sorted, and would therefore need to find this mysterious bridge.

It turned out that Windsor wasn’t actually that hard to find (although the 10 minute walk actually took around twenty minutes).  Windsor looks like a slightly larger version of South Windsor, but has a few banks, a few poor excuse for phone shops and a Target!  First stop, the bank.  The lady was lovely and even waived our $5 a month account fee for us.  Although she spelt Ewen’s name wrong and will therefore have to get that fixed once our debit cards arrive.  After that, we spent the rest of the day trying to get phones sorted.  The few phone shops in Windsor wanted $90 to unlock our UK phones, or $50 for the lowest spec phone.  Finally in an electronics store we found a guy who seemed to know what he was talking about and directed us to the next big town – Richmond – which was where we headed.

Got our first Australian train (not as expensive as expected, unlike most things) to Richmond and headed towards the main shop area in search of the phone network stores.  Unfortunately, there only seemed to be countless tacky clothes stores, tailors and kebab shops.  The highlight of may day was our trip to the supermarket (to ask the check-out girl where the phone shop was) in which we found…vanilla coke!  And only $1!!!  It turns out that the phone shop was in the other mall next to McDonalds…which we also don’t know the location of.  Vanilla coke and tomato crisps in hand we set of to find Maccers.  It turns out it was directly next to the train station, just in the opposite direction from which we walked…

By now it was mid afternoon and we hadn’t eaten since our breakfast at 8am so we treated ourselves to a cheeseburger and an ice cream.  Once finished, we continued our quest for a phone shop.  After leaving McDonalds and seeing no mall or phone shop, only houses, we discovered that the mall was, in fact, behind the houses.  How odd.  We traipsed around the 3 phone shops several times trying to take in their deals (bearing in mind we are jet-lagged and have no idea what time or date it is and have already been to many phone shops) before giving up on the internet and settling for two $19 samsung phones, pre-loaded with $10 credit.  We also topped them up with $30 credit, which gave us 100 bonus texts and 50 bonus minutes.  After texting my dad with my Aussie number I realised that it didn't cost an absolute fortune to text home, it actually came off my 100 free messages - score! In the evening Steve took us to the local for a skooner before cooking dinner.  Ewen and I fell asleep almost immediately after eating at about 7:30!



Day 2

We woke up at a more resonable time of 7am (after almost 12 hours sleep).  Ewen watched the champions league (said it is very strange watching it with breakfast and not a beer, although we are on holiday and so can combine the two if he so wishes...) and we had a leisurely breakfast while taking our time getting ready.

 
We decided to head out Californee way and get ourselves some internets.  After yesterdays incredible frustration in many, many outlets we tried to make this as painless as possible.  We returned to the first shop we went to yesterday and got served by the same guy. He told us again that he requires Australian photo ID (which we don't have) and debit card (which we'll have next week) to sell us some pre-pay internet.  Although we think this is nonsense, we had to walk away and settled for a deal we had seen in Target...so we have 6GB of internet to use within the next 30 days!

 
So now that we are finally set up, I have realised that its about 4am back at home and therefore no one is on skype :( will just have to catch up with you all later!


Having a lovely time so far.  We have decided that when we're going to get jobs (will probably start looking next week) that we're going to try and get them around this area (Windsor or Richmond) to avoid a lengthy commute into Sydney.  The weather forecast for the next week looks like we can expect lots of sunshine and temperatures in the early/mid 20s so we will hopefully get a chance to hit the beach too!  Missing everyone lots, but all of the locals have been very friendly and helpful (I think we're somewhat of a novelty as they don't get a lot of foreigners out here in the 'bush').

 
That's all for now.  I'll leave the final word with Ewen: "you put me under a lot of pressure......physiotherapy"

Lots of love, Alison & Ewen x 




P.S. As some of you may know, my sister is in Ghana at the moment teaching maths and science...her blog can be found here