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Sunday, 31.08.2008 The weather was really bad today, rainy and grey skies. We
drove down to Shellharbour and then drove along the coast via Wollongong up to
almost Sydney and then back home (near Campbelltown) on the motorway. Below are
some pictures from the city beach in Wollongong. Sarah enjoyed watching the
surfers and she loved the playground they had there. On the picture she is
steering a boat. We also uploaded a video of Sarah on the swing.
Saturday, 30.08.2008 I finally heard from Science yesterday. I had
submitted a manuscript more than 2 months ago and I was already very, very
lucky, that they actually accepted it for review. Less than 1 in 4 manuscripts
get reviewed. Unfortunately I had one reviewer who didn't seem to like the whole
idea of my research, while the second reviewer found the manuscript worthwhile
to be published in Science. So Science rejected it in the end. It
would have been just too good to be true, if they had accepted it. After all it
is one of the best journals in the world. Now I will have to rewrite it and try
somewhere else.
Friday, 29.08.2008 Sarah has been really good at crèche this week. Since Tuesday
she even doesn't cry anymore when I leave her in the morning. As long as she is
busy with her building blocks, she will even happily wave good-bye! But she
hasn't been sleeping to well. She kept us up for about two hours last night and
in the end we moved her into our 'bedroom' with her camping bed. Our 'bedroom'
that is of course still the living room. Our landlords are going to remove the
smelly carpet from the main bedroom tomorrow and will hopefully have it replaced
soon with a brand new carpet, so we can move into the bedroom (which has aircon/heating!!).
Monday, 25.08.2008 Apparently our airfreight finally arrived in Sydney today. We thought it had been flown over more than 2 weeks ago!! Now it still has to go through quarantine, which might take another two weeks! So we have to wait even longer for our warm clothes, Sarah's bed and highchair, my work stuff, Sarah's toys and books, sport shoes, CDs, Sarah's back carrier and bike seat and lots of other things that would make life a bit easier... We had a lovely warm and sunny day today (although I have to admit that it is sunny virtually every day) and Sarah was finally able to play outside at the crèche. I am still finding it strange that the sun moves in the 'wrong' direction down here, i.e. it rises in the east and goes west via north rather than south. And it sets already at 6pm in the evenings at the moment. Also driving on the left side still just doesn't feel right. When I want to drive backwards I still turn around looking over my right shoulder and then realize that all I see there is of course my headrest...
Sunday, 24.08.2008 We went to Mt. Annan Botanical Garden this morning. It is Australia's biggest botanical garden. It is so big, that you drive with the car around it. They only grow native plants there, so lots of eucalyptus trees and all sorts of draught resistant plants. The terraced garden below on the pictures seemed to be the only part that actually looks like a garden. We enjoyed it a lot and are definitely going to go back - and if it is only to climb Mt. Annan and to go to the playground... In the afternoon I bought a new mountain bike for only 100 AUD (60 EUR). It's only got to last for the few months we are here. I hope that Sarah's bike seat will fit on it so I can cycle her to crèche. But we will only know once our air freight finally arrives.
Friday, 22.08.2008 Sarah is coping better with the crèche now, although she still cries a lot when I leave her and she seems to use the dummy all day and hold on to her Olli elephant. She is saying also some new words: "hoppla" (uh-oh), "fertig" (finished) and "book". She has lost already the few Dutch words she used to say. Her English vocabulary is now: daddy, uh-oh, up, out, book, fish, baby, bye-bye, hello. Her German vocabulary: Mama, alle alle, mehr, Auto, fertig, nein/nee, Fisch, auf, zu, Schuhe, hoppla, ja, Baby, Püppi, Ball. She also says mekka, which I think means lecker (yummy). And I'm sure I forgot some words.
Thursday, 21.08.2008 Tuesday it seemed that Sarah was finally settling in a bit at crèche. On Wednesday she had her day off and we went to the shops to pick up my broadband modem - so we are finally again "properly" online!!! I also found the first spider in the house (hiding under Sarah's changing mat) and killed it. It wasn't the one on the picture below, in fact it was tiny compared to that one, but perfect for practicing... Last night Sarah woke up very often and we all didn't get much sleep. We think that it might be another tooth pushing through. She was so clingy and upset in the morning that we decided to leave her at home so she could catch up with sleep.
Picture of a huntsman spider on a toilet roll. We haven't seen one, yet, but they are apparently very common here. They do bite, but are not very poisonous, luckily...
Monday, 18.08.2008 Sarah didn't like the idea of going back to crèche today... It's a shame that the weather is considered as too cold and windy by the teachers, so the kids are staying indoors all day. I think Sarah would enjoy it much more if they could play outside. The same weather in Holland would be considered as perfect outdoor playing weather ;-).
Sunday, 17.08.2008 We went for a little walk today and took Sarah to a playground. She enjoyed the slide and the swing as you can see below. Otherwise we spent most of the day cleaning the house, enjoying the nice weather and investigating our BBQ, which is part of the rental furniture. Apparently you can cook anything with these BBQs, from meat to lasagna and even soup! Still have to get a gas bottle for it, though.
16.08.2008 Weekend! We went to a garage sale this morning and bought
Sarah a toy - a thing with wheels to sit on and move around with. Don't know
what it is called - I'll post a picture tomorrow. Otherwise I spent two hours
doing the shopping for food for the whole coming week. It's great to have all
this choice in these huge supermarkets, but it also takes you a lot of time to
find all the stuff you're looking for...
15.08.2008 We decided to leave Sarah at home in the morning to give her
a chance to catch up with sleep, so she only spent the afternoon at crèche. Nick
met a big spider at work today, which one of his colleagues caught in a pot to
put it on his desk for decoration... I met my first cockroach (Kakerlake) today,
in our kitchen bin! Talking of creepy crawlies - the other day Nick was sitting
on the loo when something fell out of the vent on his head - he was quite
relieved to find that it was only an earwig!
14.08.2008 Today was a veeery busy day at crèche. 15 kids, 6 months to 2 years old, in one room - that was just too much for Sarah. I had to stay with her for the first hour after which they split up the group in babies and toddlers. When Sarah was sitting on the table with 6 other toddlers, eating arrowroots (biscuits), she was comfortable enough for me to leave. So I had almost a normal day of work. However, Sarah only slept very little at crèche and was quite upset in the afternoon, so I had to pick her up a bit earlier. We watched the "Jungle Book" until dinner time.
13.08.2008 We have settled in quite well here I think. Of course we are
missing lots of things that we are used to from Holland like our favourite type
of toothpaste, Pampers, Gouda cheese, drinking yogurt, yogurt and quark, Belgium
beer, proper mozzarella... With the nappies we are currently trying out all
brands but none seems to be as good as Pampers (which they don't sell here). The
most expensive one here is Huggies - almost twice as expensive as Pampers in
Holland, but they already leaked two times with Sarah... Yogurt and quark (fromage
fraiche) is full of stabiliseres and gelatine here and has no original flavour -
disgusting! But then there are soooo many other different things to discover in
the supermarkets, so I don't want to complain.
12.08.2008 Sarah's second day at crèche went much better. She stayed the whole day! But when she got home she was first very cuddly and then very "wild". It was a difficult job for the two of us to get her bathed and dressed for bed. It also took her a little while to settle and get to sleep. It must have been an exciting and strange day for her at the new crèche.
11.08.2008 Today was Sarah's first day at the local crèche. When we had
a look around the crèches last week, she had really enjoyed herself in all of
the crèches, exploring and playing with all those different toys. But today she
was really not in a good mood for it and cried just about anything. I couldn't
leave the room for a minute. In the end I took her back home and we went back to
the crèche again after Sarah's midday nap. She was in a much better mood then
and started playing and interacting more, but I could still not leave the room
without her bursting into tears. We will try again tomorrow. She will of course
need some time to get used to the kids and the teachers.
10.08.2008 Our first day out in Sydney was almost a wash-out.. after our usual morning where I run to the air-conditioning unit across the siberian waste-land that is our bedroom, hit all the buttons to no effect, rant and rave whilst hopping from foot to foot, and finally rip the front off the thing to get to its "forced over-ride". After a further ten minutes standing under this giant hair-drier, I make the coffee and tea, and get our delightful daughter up. For someone who sleeps in a refrigerator all night she is continuously chirpy, it must be the clean air and fantastic food we've been eating. This reminds me of some food brands we've come across.. all countries have their idiosyncrasies, and we can report two so far:- 'Extra Tasty Coon' which is a very untasty plastic cheese (probably the hot variety of this is responsible for our smelly bedroom) and 'Golden Gaytime' which of course I will be working on the rear-end of for the next five months, and is a very tasty ice cream from Unilever! Anyhow, I digress. The morning was cold, we slowly defrosted to a bright sunny morning and decided to go into 'Syders' for the day. Jumped in the car, and set off. 1 hour and several dollars later we finally found a garage in downtown Sydney. Unfortunately, we only had two hours parking before the parking jumped from AUS$10, to 12 per half hour. So we set off for the botanic gardens at a fair clip (which warmed us all up), and set about exploring the place, finding plenty of bats and no spiders. However, it got colder and colder and started raining. We had left our coats in the car so resorted to lurking about the gift shop and buying expensive fridge magnets to keep the shop assistant from kicking us out. To stop little Sarah's teeth from chattering too loudly we also bought a very chic kangaroo fleece, with hood and ears, in blue. Fantastic! After the rain stopped, we trotted off to the Opera house, Circular bay and then back to the car.... The rest of the day we toured the local 'bush' by car; dodging rainbows and buying herb plants for the garden. NJ
09.08.2008 We spent most of today shopping. We happily discovered an ALDI in the town where we are living. I haven't been shopping at ALDI for ages, but here it is really my saviour: proper bread, chocolates and sweets (Haribo)! But I can't really complain about the local supermarkets. They have a huge choice (we've seen guys walking into walk-in beer chillers and walking out with three boxes of stubbies on each shoulder). Especially for fresh vegetables and fruit (almost all grown in Australia), and also meat (of course) and frozen stuff. But we haven't found one vegetarian frozen pizza, yet. It's definitely a BBQ-nation...
08.08.2008 We are online again! It's only a dial-up connection for now,
but broadband will be connected in about 2-3 weeks. So, we moved into our new
home! Spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday cleaning it and unpacking our stuff.
It's a really nice bungalow: a big front room with wooden floor, a master
bedroom at the front with en-suite shower/toilet, an open kitchen-dining-living
area, three smaller bedrooms, toilet, bathroom, covered patio with a HUGE BBQ
and a double garage. Unfortunately the master bedroom smells very cheesy, so we
moved the bed out into the front room - now it's the largest bedroom I've ever
slept in! And we moved the sofa and TV into the kitchen-dining area. This way at
least this area looks homely and not as empty. All the furniture is rental
furniture. We are still missing lots of little things, mainly kitchen stuff.
Sarah has been very busy finding all sockets, cupboards and drawers within her
reach... She enjoys the fact that everything is on the same floor and she can go
everywhere.
06.08.2008 Sarah ended up sleeping in our bedroom again, but at least this time we all got to sleep before midnight and slept trough until 7am. We are moving to our rental house today and we are going to have a look at 3 crèches in the area. We might not have an internet connection for up to 3 weeks, so don't expect these regular updates for the next couple of days... 05.08.2008 We took Sarah to bed at 7pm yesterday and it took her (and therefore us) until way past midnight to fall asleep. First we tried with changing her nappy as she had made a number 2. then we though she might be hungry and gave her a bottle of milk. Then we tried Dentinox against teething pain because her molars are (very slowly) pushing trough her gums. In the end we moved her bed into our bedroom. At least she didn't cry anymore then and was just bouncing around in her bed, singing... In the end we did get a couple of hours of sleep. It was Nick's first day at work. Sarah and I stayed at the motel, playing Duplo, going for little walks around the motel (they've got 2 little indoor fish ponds, which Sarah likes and she actually started saying "fish" now), watching the builders on the building site next door and searching the internet for good broadband deals and crèches.
04.08.2008 Sarah only had a bottle of milk this morning and even didn't want her fruit! She has a continuously runny nose, too. When she went to bed for a sleep, she threw up the milk from the morning. We hope that it is not something like a gastrointestinal infection again. Luckily the motel has a guest laundry! After her sleep Sarah seemed to recover very well so we went for a little walk on the motel's parking place - that is as far as you can safely walk here. The rest of the day we spent in our motel room, writing emails and updating this diary! We hope that we get over our jetlag soon and get some more sleep tonight. 03.08.2008 Nick's colleague picked us up and showed us around the area. It is quite "American" here in terms of how the place looks, the big automatic cars, you can't go anywhere without a car (no paths for pedestrians), people are bigger than in Europe, shopping malls, fast food etc. But the people are very friendly and helpful. The weather has so far been fine, about 17C and sunny during the day but quite chilly at night. The air-condition is our only heating which is not very effective. It is a bit hilly and fairly green here in the area. Many eucalyptus trees and funnily creaking birds. Most houses are bungalows, no terraced housing. Woolworths and ALDI are the two supermarkets in the town where we will move next week (Mt. Annan, New South Wales). We went shopping for a few more things in the afternoon - including a box of DUPLO for Sarah. We couldn't take many toys for her, so she really enjoys playing with her new DUPLO. She has also got a cold. She refused to eat in the evening and went to bed at her normal bed time. Nick and I went down to the restaurant for a very nice meal. Sarah only woke us briefly up at 2am this time and slept otherwise through until 10.30am! However, Nick and I were not able to get back to sleep until 7am and therefore had another short night sleep!
02.08.2008 We woke up just before 9am and had to run down to the breakfast as they were about to clear it up. Then we went to pick up our rental car. It took the Europcar guy a long time to sort it out and in the end we got a much bigger car for the first week(s), as they didn't have our "compact" car available. Then we went shopping for food and some other essentials. We also heard that we will have a house from Tuesday already! In the night Sarah woke up again at 2am and stayed up until 5am, so Nick and hardly got any sleep at all. The bed is much smaller than ours at home anyway and Sarah developed this habit to sleep with her head on my pillow and with her feet on Nick's... It's hard enough to cope with your own jetlag, but having Sarah's additionally is quite exhausting.
31.07. & 01.08.2008 We are going to Australia for Nick's short term assignment! We were flying Malaysia Airlines via Kuala Lumpur. When we were trying to check in in Schiphol, we found out that something was wrong with my (Katja's) visa. Maybe because they included also my maiden name in the visa. It took us a long time to get somebody in Canberra to fix the problem so we were allowed to check in. When we went through the security checks before boarding, the staff was questioning my visa again, but luckily we could convince them that the problem had just been solved in Canberra and they allowed us to board. We had made sure to get bulk head seats, as Sarah was traveling in her car seat which is rather bulky. Sarah fell asleep in her car seat before we even took off - so no problems there! She only slept for an hour, though, and stayed awake for the following 9 hours. But she was quite happy sitting in her seat, running around the aisles from time to time and watching all the Walt Disney movies they had on board. She only slept again for the last 2 hours before landing in Kuala Lumpur. So we didn't get any sleep at all, but for our inner clock it was anyway only midnight then. In Kuala Lumpur we had 3 hours stopover which we used for a refreshing shower in the transit hotel. When we wanted to board for the next flight to Sydney, the security staff told us again that there was a problem with my visa. It took ages to sort it out. Everybody had already boarded and the take-off time had already passed when we were finally allowed on board. Apparently the airline computer system has to match exactly the visa records to get OK for boarding. In my case there were apparently 3 (!) mismatches, one of which was solved from Amsterdam and the remaining ones from Kuala Lumpur. And this although a professional immigration agency organized the visas for us! Anyway - we had a good flight from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney. Sarah slept quite a bit of the 7 hours so we could also get a little bit of sleep. When we arrived in Sydney we had to wait for a long time for Sarah's buggy and when it finally turned up, it was broken. So we had to queue up to complain. They will fix it or replace it, but might insist on us coming all the way back to Sydney to pick it up... We had a taxi picking us up and the extremely friendly driver arranged his daughter's spare buggy for us to use for the next couple of days. The taxi driver spent most of the 40 minutes drive explaining about all the dangerous animals they have here. Why on earth are people living here?!? Or even more strange - why are we here?!?!?! The ten most poisonous snakes, deadly spiders, jellyfish, sea snakes, sharks, crocodiles.... And it's not like they are all far away somewhere in the bush where we would never go! When we got to our motel we ate and went straight to bed as it was bedtime here anyway. Sarah woke us up at 2am because she couldn't sleep anymore. So we took her into our bed where she kept us awake until 5am when she finally dropped off to sleep again.
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© Katja & Nick, last updated January 2012 |
Lunch at the botanical garden in Sydney
SaRoo
At the opera
The local countryside
Our temporary hire car - not very fuel efficient...
Waiting for the visa problems to be solved in Amsterdam
On the way to Kuala Lumpur
Stopover in Kuala Lumpur, at the transit hotel