Saturdays

Gus has digital art classes on Saturdays in a suburb called Chippendale. While Gus is busy creating, Vic and I roam the neighborhood If I couldn't live by the beach, I would live in one of the inner-West Suburbs (which includes Chippendale). It's gritty, funky, full of terraces (both old and rundown and completely renovated) and has a great cafe culture.

Here's some pics from today's walk around Chippendale.

The coffee shop we tried out today, called the shortlist.

Behold! The bacon and egg roll. A mainstay of breakfast and brunch menus in Sydney. Oh how I will miss you bacon and egg roll.

Street art.


Bougainvillea, in full bloom.



I love this sign and the whole concept of neighbours planting veg and fruit for anyone to take.

As per the sign above, paw-paws (papaya) and tomatoes, free for the taking.


A local resident.

Big ole gum trees, everywhere. A paper gum and a white gum.

They're dirty here

Vic wakes up earrr-ly to go to work. Sometimes, if I'm feeling restless and I can't sleep, I'll wake up with him and we watch the Today show (Australian-version) together before he heads off to work and before I wake Gus up for school. Like any other morning show, the Today show is mostly entertainment and a little bit of news, but we love it - because the hosts always make us laugh.

A couple of weeks ago they were especially funny, so I thought I'd go find the segment on youtube and post it...only to find that the segment was featured in a post on the Huffington Post. It's gone viral! Here's the youtube video, in case you haven't seen it yet. It's pretty silly and a little dirty, but guaranteed to make you giggle.

I spent the day at school today. I had some paid work I had to do requiring minimal brain power so I thought I could make it through an O-week day. It was crazy! The music was so loud that at one point I had to yell to my office-mate to make myself heard. I felt like I was in a nightclub, only with a computer in front of me instead of a jagermeister. Don't the kids today know that universities are a place of higher learning?!

Granma

This week was one I've been dreading for the past few months - O-week. For the past few months, us postgrads have had the campus to ourselves while the undergrads have largely been away on summer holidays. It's been quiet, peaceful and no lineups at my favourite coffee cart.

Well, the young folk are back this week. The first week of the school term is called O-week (orientation week? I'm sure I could quickly google it, but I'm feeling lazy so I'll let you do the googling). This is the week where booths are set up on the walkway right outside my desk window, hoards of first years walk up and down the walkway to check out the booths and really loud music is played all day long - with plenty of bass, again - right outside my desk window. At the beginning of each O-week, I buy myself ear plugs...it's the only way to get through the loud, obnoxious, hormone-heavy week.

The only upside to O-week are the free samples that are given out by sponsors and to entice the students to the various student organizations' booths. During O-week, us postgrad students like to do at least one go around of all the booths, scoping out the free stuff (we figure they owe us for having disrupted our concentration). Today I found some chupa-chups and a piggy bank for Gus (handed out by one of the big banks), a schick razor for Vic and a diet Coke and some free samples of contact lens solution for me. Score big!

File under "Things I won't miss about Sydney"

When we moved here, we brought very little - only what we could fit into the checked baggage we were allowed on the plane. But for some reason, we ended up bringing this souvenir Sens hockey stick. This hockey stick is now termed the "cockey stick", because we (we meaning Vic) use it to kill the massive cockroaches that we sometimes find in our kitchen. Yuck.

Chuffed

Holy Hell! They did it, and we couldn't be more chuffed. Love it!

Pengu

When we were in Tasmania, we visited a penguin rookery. We went out at dusk with a group to watch the penguins waddle in to their nests, after a day spent catching fish at sea. It was ridiculously cute. We weren't allowed to take pictures because the flash would disturb the penguins, but the company we toured with sent us some pictures to enjoy.

Here are a couple of the penguin pictures, courtesy of Bicheno Penguin Tours.

Back at it

Tasmania, we loved it. We rented a car when we got there and spent our time driving to a few of Tassie's more famous sights. Bay of Fires, Wineglass Bay, MONA....The island was beautiful, uncrowded and - as the dairy capital of Australia (or so it would seem from the many, many fields of grazing cows) - it had a ton of delish local ice cream.

We got back on Sunday, just in time for the new school year to start. And with a sigh of relief, I walked Gus to school on Monday for his first day of the new school year . Whew - now I can get back to my thesis in a more full-time way, which is a big relief given the fact that I've got to wrap up this beast by the end of July.

Eureka Farm, for all things fruity, where we stopped for raspberries and ice cream.

Fun with raspberries.


A hike to Wineglass Bay, voted one of the top ten beaches in the world by Outdoor magazine (only they forgot to mention that it's only accessible via a 1.5 hour hike up and over a mountain).

We made it! The water was i-cy (another Sydneysider told me he got in the water and started looking around for icebergs), but after a hike up and over a mountain, it was perfectly refreshing.

Making new friends at the beach.

Resting on the hike back.

When we got back to Sydney, we asked Gus what his favourite part of the trip was. He told us it was the jumping pad at the caravan park that we stayed at during the first two nights of our trip. Ah well.