Swinter!

This has apparently been the wettest and coldest winter here in 30 years. That's great since it's also our second one in a row. We had autumn in LA, winter in LA, autumn here, winter here to be more accurate.
The winter here is normally supposed to be something like the winter in LA, which tiffany and I call "swinter", because it's somewhere between spring and a real winter, with some cloudy kinda cooler days interspersed with sunny warm days.

Today was beautiful, warm and sunny -- it got up to 21 Celsuis (yes this is system that world uses for temperature measurement, with one stubborn exception :) which is equivalent around 70 F. To celebrate I went on a new 5km jog (the link works in Google Earth. If you don't have it you should download it -- it's really cool).

PS I promise more photos soon, since I realise they're a lot more exciting than my weather observations to everyone except possibly my father :)

Water Bar

We went to check out the Water Bar on Saturday night. It's in a converted wharf warehouse and is part of the Blue hotel. Further down in the same warehouse is the Sydney home of Russel Crowe.
We were definitely hoping for a better experience. It was cold in the bar and the drinks just weren't very good. Oh well trying new things :)

At the grocery

It just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

AND WHERE THE ARE THE BLACK BEANS!!
There's like half an isle dedicated to Vegemite (still don't like that stuff), but no black beans at any grocery. *sigh* They have a mexican section that consists of a bunch of "Old El Paso" stuff, which is more "Taco Bell" and less real mexican.
They just don't get mexican food here really. There's a good mexican restaurant near us that is run by a guy from Long Beach, he said you can't really get black beans around here, he has to go to a big distributor. At least that restaurant is there or we'd probably be flying back to California once a month to get our mexican food fix.

Footy

We went to a footy (Australian rules football) match yesterday. It probably would have been a lot more fun if it hadn't been raining heavily and freezing cold. We aren't big spectators usually, but it's fun to go out and watch a live game.

Utes

This is a "Ute":



It's like the El Camino never died here. Australians love them. I've seen lowered ones, ones with big rims on them, even one with a fin on the back.

I'm still waiting to get a photo of 2 of them together (2 Utes haha).
I don't get it personally, but I suppose even one with a fin is a lot less obnoxious than something like this:


Honestly though most people here just drive little sensible cars. I suppose with petrol the equivalent of over $4 USD a gallon you kind of have to. (although the US is catching up to that price as of late).
There are SUVs here but they are little ones, not the horrible gigantic ones that ruled the streets of LA.
I'm happy to not have a car at all here to be honest. It's a nice change to be able to walk around the city and use subways, etc. We live very close to CBD (central business district, or "downtown"), so it's really easy to get around.

Accents and Language

We've been told many times here that we have "beautiful accents". It's so weird thinking of myself as having an accent. It's always seemed quite plain to me. I suppose it's in part that we sound like people on TV and movies to Aussies, and it's not a common accent to hear around here.

For some reason a lot of people mistake our accents for being Irish. I don't see the similarity at all, but it's happened a few times. It might be the use of the word "like", which is greatly overused by both Californians (like, yeah "whatever" :) and Irish too.

Also, we expected everyone to say "G'Day" all the time. I think I've heard it like maybe 5 times since we've been here. People here just say "how are you going?". I think that G'Day is more of a provincial thing.
Oh, and the general term for a woman is "Shiela" (like "Lass" in the UK). Tiff hates being called that. For guys it's still "lad" or "bloke".