Happy Sydney-versary!

Unrelated to this post: we've been having lovely, beautiful springtime weather!

On Thursday we marked our one year anniversary of arriving in Australia.

In most ways it's so hard to believe it's already been a year! I still don't really know how to use our oven, I'm still awful at using the bus system, there are places in Sydney I don't really know, I still get confused at Central Station, and I don't understand rugby. And most exciting for me, there are still TONS of things on my "to do/see" list (much to Toby's terror).

In other ways, it feels like we've been here a while. Things that were super overwhelming a year ago are just the norm for us now: figuring out the public transport system, working with customer service people to get what we need, using coins for $1 and $2, remembering a PIN for credit cards, going to stores before they close at 6 PM, driving on the left side of the road, the list goes on and on. Best of all, our apartment and Sydney feel like home now.

Anyway, we celebrated our milestone on Thursday. We decided to go back to where it all started: McMahons Point. So after work on Thursday, we walked over to the neighborhood where we stayed for our first couple weeks. We also decided to have dinner at a pizza place where we got pizza on our first night in Sydney. That first pizza was an important one: we were feeling pretty sad and homesick about being so far away and in a city where we knew no one. We ate it in our room in the corporate apartment and watched a movie on the computer and tried not to think about our friends and family we'd left on the other side of the world.

This night was different! We'd talked about our days, what we'd talked about with our friends at work, what fun things we had planned for the weekend. We knew where we were going and we knew how to get back home. And it no longer pains me to pay $20 for what Americans would consider a medium-sized pizza!
We got our takeaway pizza and bottle of wine and headed down to the park for a picnic celebration. Unfortunately it was super cold, which I had not taken into account when I planned this. But we stuck it out as long as I could and enjoyed our dinner with a view of our city.

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