Weekends in the water

Between moving and going to parades, we’ve been taking advantage of the lovely summer weather to get some beach time in! It’s supposed to be cooling down, but the last three weeks in Sydney have been consistently hot - around 90 every day - so we found time to make a couple trips to the ocean. 

Most recently we went to Shark Beach. Not only is the word "shark" in the name of the beach, but it also has a shark net. So it was a little hard to psych ourselves up for getting in outside the net! But we wanted to check out the sealife, so we went for it! (And of course, there are rarely dangerous sharks in the harbor, so we figured the odds were in our favor!)

Luckily, we made it through the day without getting chomped on by a shark! =D

The beach has a really lovely little kiosk on it. The fabulous people of the eastern suburbs were brunching there. Maybe next time we’ll wear some appropriate clothes and we can join them. 

A few weeks before, we went out to Little Bay beach. It was a gorgeous beach, sort of framed on both sides by cliffs. You can hang out on the sand, or hang out on the rocks along the cliffside. 

We took the GoPro on both of our trips and got a few good minutes of footage of our underwater friends! 

A little stripey hanging out

A small school of garfish

Hopefully we get a few more warm weekends before the summer is completely over, but either way, I can't complain!

Happy Mardi Gras in Sydney!

Mardi Gras is a BIG deal in Sydney. From mid-February to mid-March, there are Mardi Gras-themed things happening all around. It’s mostly geared as a festival for the LGTQI community, but almost all the activities are geared toward families & the general public, so it’s a lot of fun!

This year we went to see the famous Mardi Gras parade. The past few years it has rained on parade day, so I got complacent and skipped it. But this year, some friends from work invited us to their apartment with a view of the parade route. So even if it poured, we were going to have a ton of fun. Luckily, the weather was perfect parade weather: clear, sunny, and a bit of breeze. 

The parade leaves a little bit outside the CBD and down Oxford St. We had a lovely view of Oxford Street from the apartment, but there was also plenty to see on our way! The streets around the parade route shut down before the parade starts, so lots of people were walking in.

People of all persuasions take the opportunity to dress up & look festive!

This was a dress made of comic book fabric

A very Sydney thing to do is to take milk crates down to the street and stake out a spot on the route. It's a holdover from when the parade was much smaller and people would just sit on milk crates and watch the much smaller parade on a much smaller street. These days, you can buy fancy seating in VIP areas - or you can still just bring your own.  This family was one step up from milk crates...

While we weren’t quite close enough to fully enjoy all the glamour of the day, we got a great view of the parade! 

All the apartment buildings down the street were decked out. 

Our vantage point was great for watching all the floats & parade entries. Interestingly, they don't throw beads like the Mardi Gras we are used to. It's almost more of a show than a parade. There was lots of music and dance routines...

Except for the military - no routines for them!

It was very fun, and I’m glad we got to see this famous celebration. =)

A new place!

After our real estate adventures of the past few weekends, we've gotten lucky with a new apartment that we are really loving!

We moved to the neighborhood of Potts Point, which is on the other side of the bridge than we were on before (we're now on the same side as the CBD). Which means no more commutes across the lovely Harbour Bridge and glimpses of the Opera House.

But, it's not all bad news! Our new neighborhood is a bit bigger, so there are lots of cafes and shops to explore! It's also very green, with lots of giant trees and beautiful parks around. 

There are also great Saturday markets!

The community is a bit more "happening" than Milsons Point. On our first weekend living here, we went to the Kings Cross festival. There was a long communal dining table set up, and lots of local restaurants to buy food from. We met up with a couple people I knew from work, and had a lot of fun!

Our new apartment is really fun too!

It's definitely bigger than our old one. We even have room for a table to eat at! This, by far, has been my favorite thing. 

Our kitchen is maybe a little bigger too. The washing machine is in the kitchen, which is a new experience for us but a pretty common design here. There's no dryer, so we hang our clothes outside. With the Sydney summer weather, I think it's actually almost as fast. We'll see what happens in wintertime! =)

Again we got an apartment with a built-in TV, which was lucky! There's plenty of space for our couch and just for hanging out, which has been so nice! 

But the best thing about our location is the grounds around the apartment complex. We live at the bottom of the hill, and to get to our spot, we walk down lots of stone steps through a beautiful garden. Lots of gorgeous trees and flowers! And a possum now or then. 

We love our new spot and I'm super excited to explore all the fun things there are to discover in our new neighborhood!

Housing in Sydney

I realized that it's been a while since I wrote a post about life here in Sydney generally. And this past weekend reminded me that I haven't blogged much about actual "living"' in Sydney - the parts about finding and getting a place. But that side of life here is really pretty interesting. And stressful. And overwhelming!  To begin with, housing here is VERY expensive. To live on the train line and within a reasonable commute to the city, you would expect to pay at least $450-500 a week. That will get you a studio apartment, but things like air conditioning, laundry, or anything bigger than a dorm-sized fridge aren't guaranteed at that price. Designated, covered parking spots are also rented by the week, with $80 a week or so being the cheapest around our area. So needless to say, our ideas of the things we wanted in an apartment shifted radically when we got here! Even though apartments are so expensive, there is still tons of demand for places near the city. This results in some weird quirks in the process of getting an apartment. For example, agents can basically set a time that's convenient for them and then expect renters to drop everything to inspect an apartment. And that's what happens. Apartments are open in 15 minute intervals for inspections, and you better be in and out during that window if you want to see it. These inspection times are often during the middle of a workday, say 3:20 on a Wednesday, which makes it even more complicated. And the inspections aren't just for you: you walk through the apartment with every other person that's interested. Sometimes that can be a lot!

A recent inspection with 50 or so people lined up to see the place

 

A sure sign that an inspection is about to happen

  Another really odd thing that can happen is that current tenants sometimes just stay in the apartment while you're walking through. T and I find this incredibly uncomfortable, and I don't think we'll ever get used to it! 

Some tenants simulataneously watching anime and playing a game while we look around

Fairly often, the agent is late. In those situations, you have to decide whether to keep waiting outside for him/her, call them on the phone and ask if they're still coming, or ring the bell and see if the current tenant is still around and will let you in anyway. Every inspection is an adventure!

Sometimes it can be confusing getting out the way you came in

  We're not earnestly looking for a new apartment right now, but we are checking out some other neighborhoods, just for fun. We've had a few funny experiences during our inspections. Like the time when we thought someone was in the shower, but it turned out to be such a bad leak that it sounded like the shower was on. Or when the agent was taking us up in the lift and kept pressing the alarm button instead of 4. Or the not-so-rare apartments that come with an outhouse in the back garden - a holdover from not that long ago we've been told. (I've ruled these out, because there is no way I'm cleaning an outhouse with Australia-sized spiders around!) Pretty often the agents seem to have never seen the place before, so we spend a lot of time meandering buildings, looking for a certain door number. In older buildings that have shared laundry, the laundry facilities are on the roof, which is just as weird as it sounds.  Without a doubt, housing is quite the adventure here! We're very lucky that we havent ever been in a housing bind, where we had to find a place immediately. For now, we just get to enjoy the quirkiness and strangeness that is the housing market in Sydney!