 |
 |
 |
Getting ready to move to Australia was, to put it bluntly, sheer *@#&$^#$ hell. Who knew that we'd store around seventy boxes in Mark & Tamar's basement (thanks, you two!) -- or that we'd be shuttling them over there at 5 am on the day of our flight, in the middle of a snowstorm? Or that the 500 pounds of stuff State Street paid to ship, which sounded like plenty, really wasn't all that much -- and almost 200 pounds of that was clothing? Or that we'd end up actually leaving some things behind in our old apartment -- like our bed, couch, guitar, and miscellaneous furniture?
|
|
|
After leaving Boston, we stopped on the Left Coast to visit some friends and relatives in Washington, Oregon, and California. Christina and Jude very graciously picked us up from the airport in San Francisco and took us for a lovely drive to Pebble Beach and on down the coast.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
We stayed overnight with Christina, then went to the Australian consulate in SF to pick up our visas, which weren't finished when we left Boston (aaaaaaaugh!), and took a nice drive around the city and environs. After a yummy Indian dinner, Christina, Jude, and her sweetie, Mark, saw us off at the international flight gate. Much tearful hugging and goodbye-waving ensued. The airline employees at the security gate kept looking at us very strangely. :-)
The flight was long and not very comfortable, since we were in coach. We did get to see Secrets and Lies, though. When we finally arrived in Sydney, we were picked up and taken to Broughton House, a serviced apartment building, where we lived for our first month here. State Street picked up the tab. Good thing, because it was AU$900 per week!
For the first six months we lived in Darlinghurst, right by Kings Cross, which is the red-light district of town. But it's the cleanest, safest red-light district we've ever seen. It was a very convenient place to live, just a few minutes' walk from the nearest CityRail station, grocery store, and lots of nifty cafes and restaurants.
 |
 |
You can take a tour of our first apartment! It's on Royston St., a small, leafy cul-de-sac. Check out the view from the kitchen window. (Well, okay, you have to lean over and look out to the right to see this. But you could still see it from the window!) The building's name was Myrna -- really! This flat had two bedrooms, a teeny kitchen, and nifty patterned ceilings.
 Main hallway |
 Teeny kitchen |
 Dining room |
When we moved in, we were unpleasantly surprised by the presence of cockroaches. Lots of them. They ranged in size from baby to Kafkaesque. In the first week or two we killed about five roaches the size of Gregor Samsa! That sure inspired us to keep a clean kitchen! We also had to get the carpets cleaned, because the previous tenants were smokers, and to scrub lots of mold from the bathroom tiling and wallboards, because said tenants didn't clean much, either, and the combined smell was overwhelming. Funny how we didn't notice the mold smell when we visited the place before the guys moved... the smell of smoke probably covered it.
Unfortunately, we also had a couple of wankers for upstairs neighbors. They didn't seem to do much except they stomp around and make our chandeliers shake, especially after midnight. Because they couldn't be bothered to remove hair from their shower drain, they caused a leak that caused water to drip from our bathroom ceiling over the first weekend of June. That drip became a stream, and in a matter of days part of our ceiling collapsed, leaving a nice, big hole which wasn't repaired for a month, due to the fact that our realtors (Hayek Property Group, Bayswater Road, Kings Cross) were also wankers. However, this incident did lead to the offending neighbors leaving their flat at the end of the month, replaced by a couple of (much quieter) women.
In September 1997, we moved to a small-but-sweet one-bedroom flat (in a building named "Klondyke") in Bondi Junction, a couple of kilometres from Bondi Beach. At that time we became the noisy upstairs neighbors in a building of old folks. Pictures to come!
