I was planning to make the 45 minutes trip to work blog post. It would complement my Singapore and Auckland work trips nicely (Sydney is just SO different from those 2 places!), but I never got around to taking pictures all the way through the trip, so here's just a beginning, this is our Wollstonecraft train station. The platform is of an interesting curved shape (our house is actually surrounded by the train line!), so you can't see the other end of the train on that platform! Never thought that I'd appreciate public transport so much as I do here in Sydney. Trains are pretty old, tired and slow and they don't go too often after the rush hour, but I just love them for being there at all! Lots of Sydneysiders whinge how bad the service is, but I guess, everything is a matter of perspective... And ANYTHING is better that Auckland trains... :) These are electric, for one...

We still go surfing almost every weekend and the weather has been mostly pretty great (just read in the paper that we had "the driest May in 150 years"! The "est" again, but I'm not complaining this time, its been lovely!) All hopes for a year round beach season! It is quite unbelievable that you get conditions like this in the built up and very populated city beaches of the Eastern suburbs here. Last Friday humpback whales traveling up North decided to pop by and visit the Sydney Harbour. People could see them from Manly wharf on their way to work! Seriously, is there another city in the world where you could find this kind of amazing nature, beautiful beaches, whales and dolphins circling around while still having exciting city life, exhibitions, film festivals, etc?!?!

Palm Beach has become our favorite beach now, it has a very nice mellow wave and now that the summer is over (and the circus of tourist pilgrimage to Home and Away site has almost stopped), it has a very nice quaint feel to it.

We have discovered Bikram Yoga as our possible winter time hobby. It is yoga that you do in a room heated up to +40C degrees. During the first 10 minutes you find sweat pouring down your body and soaking the yoga mat, who would have ever thought that so much water could be lost in 1 1/2 hours without serious (fatal?) consequences?! Right now it is about the only place around here that is truly warm (except the bed with electric blanket cranked up to max!)

Ok, it looks like Sydney autumn is not too terrible. We still enjoy sun and temperatures above 20C during the day, although nights and mornings are pretty crisp. Some trees changed colour and dropped the leaves, while others look as green as ever... We're counting days till winter solstice (about a month and a half to go!). Darkness comes too early and evenings are too long and too dark... :(

My work is going great, I just finished one major project last Friday and it all went quite well. I got a few pats on the back and it looks like I'm finally settling in at work, as well as at our substandard home. I can't bring myself to cook in our house though! Sydney is so full of restaurants, heaps of places even deliver food to your doorstep... Too easy to make eating out a habit!

We still go surfing every weekend. Last weekend I managed to mess up my wrist when pulling back the surfboard leash. My arm is of an interesting deformed shape now , but it didn't prevent me from getting back into water today though!!! (that is a bit of a bummer otherwise, I was hoping to start my aikido training next week...). We saw a school of big(gish) fish swimming around in the waves followed by dolphins (!!) while we were sitting on our boards. It was incredible to see those huge creatures jumping out of the water just a hundred of meters (or so) away from us! It generated a bit uncomfortable chain of thought in my head: fish -> food -> dolphins found it -> what else might be interested in it? Yeah, you're right, whenever there's fish around, sharks may be interested in dropping by closer to the beach too. Most of shark attacks occur in this way: they come after fish and get tempted by something juicier. There was a story of yet another shark attack in South Australia today - a guy swimming with fish and dolphins, got nibbled by a 5m white pointer shark... argh... its best not to think of these things while you're out there....

In any case, sore wrist didn't prevent me from starting singing last week and I'm contemplating the idea of joining a mass volunteer choir (450+ people) that Sydney Philharmonia Choir recruits every year to sing Handel's Messiah at Christmas. It is a pretty cool idea and in general these choirs are quite inclusive, there are heaps of pathways for you to go and join all kinds of singing (I'm still pondering on the idea of singing Carmina Burana in June). Their website also answers questions such as "What should I wear to concert?", "When should I clap?", "What about other noises - coughing, cell phones, pagers?", it aligns nicely with the Australian ways - not snobbish or elitist at all (= lack of culture and sophistication?)!!! Love it!

I was telling Kaj that after a long(ish) time I don't feel stuck. Opportunities abound!

After 2 long weeks of endless rain we finally got some respite! 2 full days of sunny balmy weather!!! I can't describe how much I missed the sun, we went surfing both of the days and I was soaking the sun in while lying on the board... It felt fantastic! They blame El Niño (or La Niña) for the rain, apparently we had a very "unusual" summer this year... I wish we'd have more "usual" weather in places where we live: apparently the first winter we were in NZ was the longest and coldest in 35 years, now we're having the coldest and rainiest summer in Australia in 10 years, and so it goes... Ummm... Normal weather would be fine thank you very much...

Things are really settling, it feels like we've been here forever (and its just over a month since we moved to our current place!!!) So the novelty of work-home routine (that I dreamed about while going through cockroach infested madness of apartment hunting) started wearing off by now. I'm thinking of starting aikido again and singing, possibly. Sydney is fantastic in that way, I can choose from tens, if not hundreds of dojos (aikido clubs) around the city and at any given time there might be a couple of movie festivals, tens of theatre plays, exhibitions, festivals and all sorts of other interesting things going on. And things are easy to do and reach. Going from place to place in Auckland was difficult. You wouldn't want to go to the city at night, because there would be no buses (or if there would be, they would be scary) and you wouldn't want to drive, because you'd struggle to find a parking place. So obviously it would be much easier to stay at home and watch Desperate Housewives... While here you can just hop on the train and it would instantly take you most places you want to go. Fast (kinda) and safe (almost).

When I take the train over the Harbour Bridge in the morning, I can't quite believe that I actually live here.. My first encounter with an idea of what life might be in Australia was the Paradise Beach TV soap (that was even before Home and Away). It was full of those incredibly good looking kids having the time of their lives. Like, seriously. It didn't quite fit in my head then (and I guess for a reason, the show was incredibly bad, no one could really act there!), but I guess I still expect that life is somewhat like that (for other people that are, like, mostly models). Kimberly Joseph in Paradise Beach summed up the Australian woman for me then, she was, like, totally cool. From what I've seen so far, the Australian reality bears only slight resemblance to that soap though... :)

This is our house from the outside. It is pretty incredible to see these 2 week old pictures. I don't remember when was the last time I saw blue sky, we have had horrible autumny weather for about 2 weeks now. As dark and as cold as European end of October. I feel we've been cheated once again!!! Sydney is not a summery paradise after all!!! Today i wore my warmest coat to work (I really hope that it won't get much colder than this...) and I was terrified to see girls in spaghetti tops dolled up for the night out hitting the streets as the night fell! Jeez, how do they do that? I need woolen socks and a hot bottle to stay somewhat comfortable... Am I just getting old?!

We've been steadily acquiring stuff. Some planned, some not so. Like those 92 bottles of wine that Kaj successfully bid for in online auction... At least we're set up nicely for the winter and we don't need to worry that wine will ever run out in this house... I hope our livers won't be pickled by the end of it! Have you ever owned 92 bottles of wine?!? Believe me, its quite a lot when you see it all piled up in a corner of your home!

We also acquired a car since last couple of weeks. This time was an incredibly painless process (I remember it took us some 3 months to find our previous lemon in NZ!), we checked only one car and we bought it! So far its looking/behaving good. It looks ridiculously small when we plunk our 8ft surfboards on top though! But who cares as long as it takes us places and is able to carry those surfboards. We've been putting this car in good use last couple of weekends, I finally caught my first Australian wave and that was mighty exciting!! it is always disheartening to see all those 10 year old kids snatch the waves in front of your nose, but I just have to persevere... I'll start getting waves again, I'm sure!

And one of the latest additions at the home front is the Tongan tapa (remember, the one that Nicoletta and Owen gave us?! And since you, Nicoletta, are reading this blog now, I'm not doing this because I know that you're reading, its because I think it is so gorgeous!!!) When we unfolded it, it covered the whole floor of our lounge!

I still have wee hopes that Indian summer will come eventually... Otherwise there's a bl**dy long misery ahead of us!!! It is just April and so horrible alreadyyyyyy!

Almost all the photos in this entry are courtesy by Sean who stopped by for a few days on his way to NZ (but really, Sean, couldn't you visit NZ when we were there?!?!)

This is the ultimate proof that photography is about the skill and not about the gear. Sean has exactly the same camera as ours (the one that doesn't take good pictures as you might have heard me complain). But look at these photos. I was blown away!!!

He managed to find those angles and subjects that I plainly failed to notice myself!!! So yeah, I guess it is not really about the camera, huh?

We rented a car and went on a road trip to the South, all the way past Wollogong. The scenery was stunning, the coast was lined with beautiful white sand beaches, we saw dramatic cliffs everywhere, but somehow the landscape didn't really touch our hearts the way NZ did. I'm not quite sure why, but the bush here is quite dry, not really lush and mossy at all (as it was in NZ). The landscape around Sydney has somewhat horizontal character, the hills aren't quite as green and they don't roll they way they did in NZ. Give me NZ landscape anytime (but, I guess, I'm not that keen on the rain that keeps those hills green...)!!!

We talked with Kaj, that people are really lucky to be born here. Life is generally quite good here, imagine if you would have spent your childhood by the beach, swimming all year round, running around barefoot, instead of being wrapped in a big coat, wearing heavy shoes and staying indoors half of the year... People do appear to be confident and happy here, and why wouldn't you, if it is almost certain that tomorrow the sun will shine, it will be Tshirt weather again, and you won't have to fight against the elements to secure your existence. You'd start to expect that good things will happen to you in the future too, wouldn't you? So yes, from what we can see so far, it looks like Australia is " a lucky country" indeed.

NZ seemed to be quite different. I think people were much more self-conscious, humble and humane. Australia does appear somewhat brash and loud compared to its poor cousin. It is not unlike Finland and Sweden rivalry: for some reason Sweden always wins Eurovision (except in 2006, of course!) and ice-hockey. However, my aussie colleagues commented that because of that cultural/art-life is not all that lively in Sydney. It is pretty hard to compete with the surf culture, apparently. To which I commented that "surf culture is also a culture"... :)

This reminded me about OZ/NZ art exhibition that I saw in Vilnius in summer 2006: 70% of art pieces were about surfing. Two pieces stuck in my mind, one of them was a video of a guy cutting surfboards with a chainsaw (I struggled to interpret it...) and the other lovely piece was about surfers changing clothes at their cars (I was really fascinated by the range of different strategies that people employed to wrap themselves in a towel, take off the pants and get into a wetsuit!) So yes, surfing can inspire art too!

It was great to have Sean here and we're hoping that Sydney will be more of a crossroad rather than a destination (as NZ was) and that it will bring more visitors!

Sean obviously enjoyed some aspects of the surf culture!..

Since having a rental car we realised how much easier it would be to get to places (and do the shopping!) if we'd have one. And would you believe that we already managed to get a car last week! Pics on that later! We both never really owned a car before going to NZ, so it is incredible to see how it completely changed our perception. We wouldn't really need a car in Sydney, public transport is great, but dragging milk and juice bottles from the shops is daunting! We also have been very city-focused for the last few months, just because we couldn't get out of here. Hopefully we'll be making heaps more of road trips very soon!

Autumn is slowly coming along (we'll be switching to winter time this weekend) and the mornings are already quite chilly, but we're counting on that long Indian Summer that everyone promises us! There are more sunny afternoons to be had this year!

Ok, so if you were wondering what's up with us, we've been busy moving and setting up our new home (and Sean came by and I'll write more about it next time!). This picture could well be an ad for IKEA scandinavian design catalogue. We were overjoyed to find IKEA in Sydney and went a bit crazy over the weekend. Well, the thing is, love it or hate it, if you're trying to settle down and you need a massive amount of stuff, nothing can really beat IKEA. It all is just so useful and cheap! We also stocked up huge amounts of dry cracker rye bread (nakkileipa), pickled herring and kallen mattitahna (not sure how to explain that, it is some sort of roe paste that goes incredibly well with nakkileippa).

This time moving went pretty smoothly, they delivery guys arrived when they were supposed to and only forgot the surfboards (that were dropped off a few days later).

Unpacking and finding places for stuff always takes a while, we still have things all over the place and everything still looks like storage. Hopefully it will start looking like home soon.

The surprise this time was elsewhere - we checked the house only once at a night time and it was raining. By that time we've seen tens of substandard apartments, and were extremely happy to find something that was really quiet, leafy and spacious.

Somehow we completely overlooked the unrenovated kitchen and bathroom. We knew that they were in "original" condition, but we didn't pay too much attention to that. Well, let me tell you that things have really improved since 50s (it is also very possible that our kitchen and bathroom goes back all the way to 30s when they house was built!). Our kitchen doesn't have much storage space and we hardly have a work benchtop. The sink is at one corner, the stove at the other, fridges all over the place. When you try to cook and start dragging leaking messy stuff back and forward all over the kitchen, you kind of start appreciating characterless laminate functional kitchens with drawers that open. I guess we had too good of a life in Coogee with all modern appliances and really nicely renovated apartment. This one has a bit too much of "character", what with shower system where you can have only one temperature shower (and can't regulate it) or a sink where you have to bend under cupboards to wash a cup or a hot water system that leaks 61 cubic meters of water in a year... Will it ever become our home?!?

Well, its not all bad, there are heaps of great things about our place: we have enough space, we don't have carpets (makes a huge difference!!!), it is super quiet (can't hear anything apart birds and frogs), with parks and beautiful leafy streets around, 2 minutes to the train station that takes me to work in 40 minutes (that's great, considering that I travel across the whole city), 7 minutes to shops and heaps and heaps and heaps of restaurants and cafes. I'm sure we'll be fine!

But if you plan to come for a visit, do not expect your usual creature comforts. Brace yourself for 40s style luxury where everything is a bit off and in a slightly different place than you expect it to be!

Last Friday we finally signed the lease for the Wollstonecraft apartment. So it is 100% certain that we'll be moving there on the 17th of March. A relief of sorts, but I'm secretly happy that we still have a couple of weeks left living at Coogee.

I fell in love with the ocean, you see.

There's something so incredibly magnificent about the raging water and rocky shoreline, waves crashing onto the cliffs, water foaming and soaring upwards, and on a sunny day, staring at the impossibly turquoise water can hurt your eye!... I use any excuse to go down to the waterfront, at any weather. I started running along the shore, rain or shine. Last Friday I even volunteered to pick up pizza takeaways, because it gave me a chance to walk by the ocean for 20 minutes while pizza was baking in the oven!

But we haven't been surfing yet... We still haven't got our boards and wetsuits from NZ (Kaj got his birthday board though!) and this weekend the surf was way too big for us. I'm reaching the state where I want to paddle out so much, that I'm not being completely rational, i.e. I was thinking just couple of hours ago that maybe those waves in Bronte beach were not all that big and maybe the wind is not that cold, so maybe I don't need a wetsuit...

But I do, really. And I must be mad to even contemplate going out when the ocean is like this. The whole Bronte bay was whitewater yesterday. There was so much water pushed in, I don't think I would have gotten much further than some 10 meters from the shore and made a "laughing stock" of myself...

If only I could get out somehow so that I can lie on my board and watch the waves rising, curling and pealing, water spraying back straight into my eyes (well its onshore now, so not sure how much of spray there is). I don't even mind not catching waves, I just want to look. As there is really nothing more beautiful. Trust me...

Our current apartment is really nice and feels like home. Given that the ocean is 15 minutes away, it kind of makes sense that I kind of look forward, but not really, to move to North Sydney.

You see, North Sydney is also nice, but in a very different way. It is tidy, safe and cute. It has parks and the streets are quiet and leafy. There are heaps of cool restaurants and cafes. But it doesn't have even a hint of harshness and elemental beauty that the Eastern shoreline has. It is also a car drive away from the Northern beaches... So... I guess, I have to take full advantage of being here now. I better head off to the beach NOW!

Last weekend we got an invitation to join a boat chase. Queen Victoria cruise ship (I think it is one of the biggest in the world!) was leaving Sydney Harbour after stopping here for a few days.

Hundreds of small boats set out to farewell the big ship.

We were on a "chinese junk" boat and our captain/steerer/boat owner superskillfully took us right to the front row of hundreds (or thousands?) of boats at Sydney Harbour.

The exciting part, of course, was the chase after the ship went past. The whole harbour turned into a whitewater turbulance and all the boats tried to keep up with the departing Queen Victoria.

I'm not sure on what that ship runs, but we didn't have much of a chance to continue the race, so we just saw the boat leave. Whoever would want to travel on one of those ships that are of a size of a suburb?!!?

Last week we also moved to yet another temporary apartment (we still have more than 2 weeks before we can move in to our new home at Wollstonecraft). But this time we can't really complain. We stay not far from Coogee beach (and go running along the shore) and the apartment is lovely, spacious and completely renovated. The kitchen is full of fancy gear, we even have iPod speakers, etc. Why would anyone rent a place so nice to strangers?!?!

We are immensely happy to be out of the Kings Cross cockroach hole. Last Monday we moved to a place on Coogee beach and it is such a relief!

Instead of a needle exchange station next door (we didn't really have a needle exchange station nowhere near our place in Kings Cross, but let me use this as a metaphor...:) we have Coogee beach. We go running along the shore and Kaj has been going for an evening dip every night.

Being so close to the beach will simplify our weekends too! We've been making trips to the beach basically every Saturday and Sunday. This weekend we can just walk down the stairs in a bikini and towel, not worrying about leaving wallets and cameras on the shore!

We still have a few more weeks of summer ahead, but on the 1st of March we will switch back to the winter time... I can't believe that we wasted the whole summer relocating and settling down... When we get our surfboards, our only option most likely will be to go for night surf (a scary thought that one of my colleagues enthusiastically advocates!) We have full moon now, so actually now could be a great time to try it (if you can't see sharks, at least you can see waves?!?! Maybe?!?!)

Yesterday I witnessed history in the making. For the first time in history of Australia, the prime minister asked indigenous Australians (Aborigines) for forgiveness for the terrible injustice that they were put through by previous generations of white European Australians. He apologized the "stolen generation" - aboriginal kids that were taken away from their families to be raised "properly" by "civilized" European families or orphanages.

It was a simple speech, but the whole event (I was watching the speech with hundreds of others in the lecture theatre at the University) was very emotional. I don't belong to this culture and I know very little of the background for this. I do know though that Howard, the previous conservative PM, flatly refused to make this apology for years. It seems to be a simple and small thing to do, but it carries huge symbolic meaning and signifies changing times for Australia. Coming from outside of the country it is plain clear that Aboriginals were mistreated, yet it was such a major issue for people here and a huge step to have officials to actually acknowledge that. There were people with families, lots of people crying and standing ovation after the speech. I'm happy to be here while these great changes are taking place. Go Rudd government, go!

Meanwhile our luck turned to worse, we moved to our temporary accommodation and realised almost immediately that the place is crawling with cockroaches. We spent the whole day on Tuesday spraying, cleaning and killing cockroaches, but as the night fell, there were more and more of them coming out from all sorts of gaps. We complained and the owner was forthcoming, we can actually leave this place without loosing money. So we'll be moving yet again next Monday (to a place in Coogee) and once more after a week. Until we finally move into our long term accommodation on the 17 March... Argh... This settling in Australia takes forever!!!

Kaj had his birthday yesterday and this time my present to him was a link that I sent to his email. It is so 21st century!!!

It will materialise into a Big Boy 6'6'' surfboard eventually.

It will be delivered to his work and then, I guess, he'll take a train home. In Sydney you see people taking buses or trains with surfboards in tow and don't even blink.

Otherwise, it has been raining (again!) and we still don't have a home. The light at the end of the tunel is the possibility to move into an apartment owned by friends of our friends of friends that is supposed to become available on the 17 March. Fingers crossed for this to materialise! And you better do your finger crossing for us this time!

Happy New Year! Unfortunately we still don't have a home. Yep, we didn't get the only place we really wanted. We're set to live the another next 5 weeks out of our luggage and we'll be shifting from our posh room with the views at Mcmahons Point into something much dingier next Tuesday...

Did you do your share of positive thinking for us?!?!

Apartment hunt in Sydney is not easy. Places are shown for some 10 minutes (mostly on Saturdays) and then there are tens of people usually "inspecting" them. So on Saturday you carefully draw a list of flats that you want to check and try to rush from one to another. If something goes wrong (the agent is late, the bus doesn't arrive and you miss a connection), your carefully drafted plan collapses and everything melts into panic, terrible rush and great profit for taxi drivers.

The ads you see on Internet are usually photoshopped, so our Saturdays have been full of disappointment after disappointment. But yesterday we saw a place that we loved... For a change...

However... The catch is that once you see a place that you like, you have to compete with the other 20 people interested and submit an "application". The landlord or the agent looks at the applications and assesses the likelihood that you'll trash the place and either offers you to rent the place or not.

We submitted a couple of applications just to test how it goes and we would have gotten every single one (except that we didn't want them)... But currently we're hanging in this dreadful state of "the unknown" terrified by the prospect that we may not get the only place that we liked!

I couldn't sleep properly for last 3 nights, anticipating the Saturday apartment viewing, dreading the idea of someone else getting the place we liked and the whole huge "UNCERTAINTY" hanging above us... Arrrghhhh... Please please please, can we get the place we like and this whole mess would be over!!! Not much we can do right now except to dread the worst and hope for the best... All positive thoughts from everyone are appreciated!

This is Palm Beach North of Sydney and it is the beach where they shot Home and Away!!!

I remember watching Home and Away during breakfast before school on our tiny black and white TV in the kitchen and even in my wildest dreams I wouldn't have imagined that I'd be standing on the very same beach one day! It looked so amazing then, the scenes shot from helicopter flying over beautiful white sand spit with the ocean on both sides...

Little did I know that this beach is located an hours drive from Sydney and is actually quite built up, not some untouched paradise in the middle of nowhere at all!...

Kaj rented a surfboard and we both paddled out for a while. It was nice to be in the water without a wetsuit! We have to start surfing again, because I'm loosing my skills! I was breathless in 5 minutes and couldn't even really go past the whitewater, then got wiped out and that was the end of it...

Other than this, we still haven't found a permanent rental place to stay. Our hopes are really high for the next week, so please please keep fingers crossed! I hope our place will be in North Sydney... I don't mind views like that on my way to work...

Meanwhile Kaj has befriended a couple cheeky rainbow lorikeets that come for their share of toasted sandwich every morning! Birds are really weird and cool here. The sounds you hear from the trees can almost make your heart stop, if you walk through a park late at night...

We just had a long weekend because of Australia Day. It is kind of a national day, I think, with heaps of events (and people) in the city. I still can't get over this.. Isn't Sydney a truly stunning city?!?!

And by the way, the commenting works again, so you can leave a note for me! it will not show automatically, I'll have to approve it, but it will be there eventually, so be patient!

It is 8 days since we arrived in Sydney and it is our 2nd week at work. So far we like almost everything about Sydney: beautiful harbour, heaps of white sand beaches, lively neighbourhoods full of restaurants and cafes. Although we go to work every day, it feels almost like holiday otherwise. We stay at beautiful apartments right on the Lavender Bay, I take a ferry and a bus to work, Kaj just walks up the hill. Unfortunately we have this accommodations for 30 days only, so meanwhile we're also going through an intense apartment hunt.

We had lots of space at our house in Auckland, so we're finding local apartments quite crammed and urban. Almost all the 2 bedroom apartments (even if they have a separate lounge and dining room that would equal to 4 room apartment by Helsinki standards) that we saw wouldn't be able to accommodate our surfboards and bicycles. We also have an opportunity to rent an apartment without ANY carpets this time, so we're discarding all places that have carpets... Add a quiet location and good public transport connections as the absolute must and our apartment hunting quest becomes nearly Mission Impossible?... I hope not... We still believe we might be lucky and find all of that in one place!

Oh yes, and what's the story with draught in Australia?!? Since we arrived, we had 2 sunny days out of 8... That makes it... 25% sunny? If this is "a draught", I don't want to see how "good rain" looks like! I guess Sydney is spared from the worst of it though... I just expected it to be constantly sunny and now it looks like Auckland weather has followed us!