We've been here for almost 2 weeks now and it feels like much longer. Today is mattress, appliances and phone guy day. We'll make a quick stop at the reject shop for some essentials like sticky hooks, a thingy to put our knives in, cleaning products and some baskets or other storage thing to put socks and underwear in. (TMI?! You wanted details, so here you go!). Most of our clothing is here and as soon as Gil gets his hands on the vacuum ( a Miele, because it's European AND German, which makes it indestructibly cool by Oz standards) we'll see some real cleaning magic. There's about 39,000 dead bugs in the house, which the 50 spiders seem to have missed. Our two greatest fly catchers will not arrive for a few more weeks, so we'll buy one of those giant swatters this week.
The pics of the house can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1j72ENi. As we get more furniture, we'll update the album or makes some new
We checked again and yes, we are indeed in an Internet blackout zone. The scary sensation of looking for a wifi connection and finding none, not even locked out. We'll be blacked out and on our mobiles for a day or two before the connection is made with the right Internet partner. Until that time we'll just Dongle along apparently. Phone guy has come and gone and now we have telephone line, yeeeeeh, oh wait, we didn't want one to begin with, but it's the only way to get Internet up and running. Helloooooo 2003!
Radio is great. We listen to Mix 106, which is sort of poppy and has some rock classics. And a lot of Midnight oil, Fine Young Cannibals, Savage Garden and INXS. For some reason there's also a lot of Eurythmics in there, not sure why though. All great bands, but it must be like listening to Frans Bauer and Jan Smit for the Aussies. Should be alright, nice and easy as they say here. They have the greatest radio and tv commercials, quite a few beyond the levels of acceptable akwardness but really really funny. We do hate the ' that's amore' Micky D. commercial. Gil especially hates it when people providing a service all of a sudden burst out in song and dance. When do we ever see that happening in real life huh?! Right! So stop it, now!
The Olympics from an Aussie perspective are great as well. 3 medals and they celebrate like they lead the list and every man and his dog and their sister's neighbour are interviewed about what they think mr(s) X's chances are of winning another medal, lovely TV. TV in general is very much like what we had back in Poortugaal, cooking shows, people building stuff, dieting competitions, lots of drama and fishing, lots of fishing......
Food wise we're doing a pretty decent job if we do say so ourselves. We've cooked every single day and although it is not the height of Haute cuisine, it's not pizza either. In our quest to control the budget we've been cooking pasta, curry, rice and sauce, noodles, burgers (veggie). No worries, mums, we eat veggies with every single meal. We've found that bread is best eaten toasted and that it doesn't matter if you buy a loaf of 7 dollars or just under 2, toasted, it all tastes the same. Cheese is a bit of a challenge, but it is available and digestible, just not that tasty, despite the name (Tasty cheese, the boys in Marketing must have had a field day with that one) Gil is giving cottage cheese a try, but good Lord, why did they ever make this to begin with? Must have been some sort of mistake. Gives great structure to cheap pasta sauce though. Yogurt is another thing. Low fat must be referring to the person that was operating the machine, because in NL, low fat means about 30kcal/100ml, here it's 115 kcal/100ml, and stop calling it Greek Yogurt. Gil's been around Greece and they would be sad and disappointed over this yogurt, possibly some would cry. Gil's now found some 60kcal/100gr that will have to do, it's still Greek though (produced in Oz, haha).
We've browsed so many shops and warehouses in the last two weeks that we feel that we could apply for a position in any of them an get hired on the spot. Big W, K-mart, Woolworths, Coles, Supabarn, Magnet Mart, Bunnings, about 30 furniture stores, 15 BBQ shops, 20 garden centres and 7 shopping malls. The size of the shopping malls is nothing short of spectacular, especially the one in Canb city centre. That's like Rotterdam centre, but with a roof over it. Each has it's own food court and about 1,000 shops (well, at least 300). All airco'd, because hey, Australians laugh at global warming (I mean 44 or 46 degrees, who cares).
Coming Weekend is the Canberra Show (http://canberrashow.org.au/), including farm animals, so we'll go real early on Friday and see if we can spot some racing pigs and other assorted weirdness. All in all we're having a great time and see things slowing down a bit by the end of the week. We haven't wiped the windscreen wipers for 3 days if we wanted to use the blinkers and are getting a handle on the left handed driving. Rotunda's still freak us out though, but so far so good.
The pics of the house can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1j72ENi. As we get more furniture, we'll update the album or makes some new
We checked again and yes, we are indeed in an Internet blackout zone. The scary sensation of looking for a wifi connection and finding none, not even locked out. We'll be blacked out and on our mobiles for a day or two before the connection is made with the right Internet partner. Until that time we'll just Dongle along apparently. Phone guy has come and gone and now we have telephone line, yeeeeeh, oh wait, we didn't want one to begin with, but it's the only way to get Internet up and running. Helloooooo 2003!
Radio is great. We listen to Mix 106, which is sort of poppy and has some rock classics. And a lot of Midnight oil, Fine Young Cannibals, Savage Garden and INXS. For some reason there's also a lot of Eurythmics in there, not sure why though. All great bands, but it must be like listening to Frans Bauer and Jan Smit for the Aussies. Should be alright, nice and easy as they say here. They have the greatest radio and tv commercials, quite a few beyond the levels of acceptable akwardness but really really funny. We do hate the ' that's amore' Micky D. commercial. Gil especially hates it when people providing a service all of a sudden burst out in song and dance. When do we ever see that happening in real life huh?! Right! So stop it, now!
The Olympics from an Aussie perspective are great as well. 3 medals and they celebrate like they lead the list and every man and his dog and their sister's neighbour are interviewed about what they think mr(s) X's chances are of winning another medal, lovely TV. TV in general is very much like what we had back in Poortugaal, cooking shows, people building stuff, dieting competitions, lots of drama and fishing, lots of fishing......
Food wise we're doing a pretty decent job if we do say so ourselves. We've cooked every single day and although it is not the height of Haute cuisine, it's not pizza either. In our quest to control the budget we've been cooking pasta, curry, rice and sauce, noodles, burgers (veggie). No worries, mums, we eat veggies with every single meal. We've found that bread is best eaten toasted and that it doesn't matter if you buy a loaf of 7 dollars or just under 2, toasted, it all tastes the same. Cheese is a bit of a challenge, but it is available and digestible, just not that tasty, despite the name (Tasty cheese, the boys in Marketing must have had a field day with that one) Gil is giving cottage cheese a try, but good Lord, why did they ever make this to begin with? Must have been some sort of mistake. Gives great structure to cheap pasta sauce though. Yogurt is another thing. Low fat must be referring to the person that was operating the machine, because in NL, low fat means about 30kcal/100ml, here it's 115 kcal/100ml, and stop calling it Greek Yogurt. Gil's been around Greece and they would be sad and disappointed over this yogurt, possibly some would cry. Gil's now found some 60kcal/100gr that will have to do, it's still Greek though (produced in Oz, haha).
We've browsed so many shops and warehouses in the last two weeks that we feel that we could apply for a position in any of them an get hired on the spot. Big W, K-mart, Woolworths, Coles, Supabarn, Magnet Mart, Bunnings, about 30 furniture stores, 15 BBQ shops, 20 garden centres and 7 shopping malls. The size of the shopping malls is nothing short of spectacular, especially the one in Canb city centre. That's like Rotterdam centre, but with a roof over it. Each has it's own food court and about 1,000 shops (well, at least 300). All airco'd, because hey, Australians laugh at global warming (I mean 44 or 46 degrees, who cares).
Coming Weekend is the Canberra Show (http://canberrashow.org.au/), including farm animals, so we'll go real early on Friday and see if we can spot some racing pigs and other assorted weirdness. All in all we're having a great time and see things slowing down a bit by the end of the week. We haven't wiped the windscreen wipers for 3 days if we wanted to use the blinkers and are getting a handle on the left handed driving. Rotunda's still freak us out though, but so far so good.
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