We haven’t really done anything worth blogging about for the past couple of days, but I won’t let that stop me… ๐
Yesterday we just chilled and read the Sunday papers whilst waiting for our new furniture to arrive. We bought copies of the two major Melbourne newspapers — The Age and The Herald Sun — both of which come with at least a dozen supplements on a Sunday, so there was plenty to read. Disappointingly, despite there being about 50 pages of sports news, there wasn’t a single mention of English Premiership football in either newspaper, so I had to make do with reading the RedIssue website via poxy dial-up. ~X(
Our new settees eventually arrived late in the afternoon, so we spent the evening rearranging furniture and hopping from one seat to another smiling. I’m still suffering from jetlag so I turned in at about 8pm only to be up at 5am again this morning. Now that we’ve got comfy furniture I’m determined to stay up later and beat it, ‘cos it’s no good at all being off work and still getting up early every morning. ๐
Today we’ve traipsed around the big shopping centre at Knox, picking up a few bits and bobs that we didn’t buy last week. Nothing exciting, just mundane things like an ironing board and some extra towels. We browsed around virtually every shop on the ground floor but didn’t go upstairs today; we’ll save that treat for another outing later in the week. /:)
We received our first proper correspondence in our little mailbox at the end of the driveway today (previously we had only received flyers for fast food, money-off coupons for groceries and freebie newspapers). Our WestPac bank card has arrived, so we can now withdraw cash from ATMs without having to use our U.K. debit cards. We also received our signed copy of the lease agreement for our house.
Key Moves e-mailed us from tge U.K. to say that three viewings of our old house were scheduled for Sunday afternoon, so hopefully we’ll have a tenant soon. I also received an e-mail from Wild confirming that our ADSL will be activated within the next 5 days. :d
I forgot to say that we bought a pre-paid telephone calling card the other day. A $10 (รยฃ4.15) “Happy Calling” card buys 1800 anytime minutes to the U.K., so Sara will no doubt be speaking to everyone at length over the next few days. I don’t even want to think about how much the calls cost during the first few days we were here. #-o
We have nothing much planned for the rest of the week, so I’ll probably update the website less frequently unless something interesting happens or if I find something else that’s different or peculiar over here. :-<
Weather-wise it's certainly not the year-round sunshine that some of you probably thought we'd be going to: It's the middle of winter over here now and temperatures are about 13-15รยฐC and rainy. That said, the sky is usually more blue than grey and there are occasional patches of warm sunshine most days. It was really nice when we went to Nunawading last week; it felt like a lovely May/June day in England, even though it's the equivalent of January/February at the moment over here.
Everyone we speak to says "at least we're getting some rain" or "enjoy it while it's cool, you'll be wishing for weather like this in a few weeks". We're looking forward to it. Our house lies at the foot of Mount Dandenong (not to be confused with Dandenong city) and there's usually a halo of fog around the mountain, which looks quite spooky, a bit like smoke from a volcano. I'll upload some pictures as soon as I can, it's really not what you think of when someone mentions Australia. b-)