Laptop problems

This blog is not really about enjoying Sydney. So far, I wrote mainly about our house. I confess I went to town only three times so far. The first time was on Australia Day. The second and third time, I went for two useless visits to the Apple store. I thought my MacBook had some serious problems so I decided to go to the Apple store. The first day there was no one to assist me because I did not have an appointment. Uhhhh. On day two I waited for half an hour before it was my turn. I explained the Apple technician what was wrong. After no more than five seconds, he said 'ah", changed something very simple in the settings, and voila, fixed! In total I spent almost four hours on 'solving' this very complicated technical problem. I guess I could have made better use of my time.

Anyway, this weekend, I won't spend anytime at home. Today, we will leave for a four wheel drive course south of Sydney. Everything is packed and we will be back on Sunday.

The mess of moving

With our lifestyle moving to another country every few years, it would be wise if we would stick to a minimum amount of stuff. But we don't. With the stuff we have we better promis each other never to move again. We have enough books to fill a 20 foot container. The house we rent in Sydney is not small but it's impossible to fit everything in. This morning, five weeks after we moved in, I again had to spent time on emptying more boxes and deciding what to do with all the things we don't really use but we may use one day in the future. Any suggestions?

This is what our hallway looked like a few weeks ago. I'm happy this mess is gone but other areas in our house like the garage, still need a lot of attention.

Ferns

Thanks to all the rain our garden is extremly green. Everything is growing abundantly including the ferns in our garden. Today I made this picture of an unfurling fern. In New Zealand it's also know as the Koru.

Heat in the city

It's difficult to escape from the heat in Sydney. I just heard on the news that we had the warmest night in the city in 13(!) years. We seem to be going from one extreme (rain) to the other (heat).

Yesterday, after school, I took the kids to the Northbridge Baths to cool down a bit. I bet this is the only pool in the world where kids can go on a stingray hunt. I did not see the stingray myself but my six year old did. The wind changed to the south so today it's less hot but I guess it's still about 30 degrees outside.

Our high speed Internet is finally working!!! To get our 'naked ADSL' installed took a bit longer than expected. People from Telco company Telstra had to come and warned me that they may had to remove all the bricks from our driveway to find the right cable. Luckily it was less complicated and they managed to find the cable behind one of our bookcases. Tip when you move: check where all the outlets are before the movers come because they may hide the outlets.

With the high speed radio I can now listen to the Dutch radio. While I type this I listen to the faboulous item ' wake up your friend to test your friendship' at radio 3FM. It's 2.30 in the morning in Holland. Great fun!!! I'll try that too one day.

The city of Sydney

We live in North Sydney, about 10 kilometers north of CBD (Central Business District) famous for the opera and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Before moving here, Sydney always felt like a big city. Very busy and lively. I now know this does not apply to large parts of the city. I realize that the City of Sydney (mainly the CBD) is relatively small and that Sydney mainly consists of quiet residential suburbs. I believe Sydney alone has about 200 suburbs where you find hardly any high rise appartment buildings.

Anyway, this is the case in North Sydney where we live. It may be completely different on the other side of the Sydney Harbour bridge which divides the city in two. I’ve heard people say that if you live in the north you hardly ever travel to the other side because you have no business there. This is not the case for us, of course. Thanks to my ‘I can’t sit still’ husband, we’ve already been all over the place. I’m sure that in a few months from now we will know the city better than most Sydney people.

The suburbs all have a shopping centre with a Woolworth (or Woollies) or a Coles supermarket, a few shops, restaurants and of course lot’s of coffee places. Sydney has an amazingly strong coffee culture. While we live in a suburb in a quiet residential area we have a coffee place at about 300 meters from our house, next to the bus stop. I guess they must get enough customers to make it worthwhile. The people also use funny terms to order coffee. This morning I heard someone say: 'May I have a flat white? Can you make it very flat, please? ' Not sure what that means, 'very flat'??? Anyone?

We live relatively close to CBD. By scooter, it takes Marcel about 15 minutes to get to work depending on the traffic. By bus it takes about 30 minutes. It’s not a difficult route. From our house you just turn left, follow the road till the end, then turn left again, turn right after 200 meters, follow the road, over the Sydney Harbor Bridge, right into town.

Some people prefer to live further up north because you get a bigger house and more space for less money. There is a train line to get to CBD relatively fast. The scenery in this northern part of Sydney is definitely not what you would expect in a city. It’s a great place for nature lovers with lot’s of green.

Spiders in the garden (1)

This friendly creature, a St Andrew Cross spider, can be found in our garden. I love the cross he makes on the web.

I'm sure there must be more spiders in our garden. I will take pictures of the others too.

Rain

Nobody told me it could rain this heavily in Sydney. I heard stories about water shortage here. Ha, ha. I no longer believe this. During my first week in Sydney I felt bad about watering the plants. Well that's no longer the case! The plants don't need any more water anyway. It's just so wet outside! And it seems to go on forever. Slowly our garden is turning into this green jungle where people can get lost. I guess we need to start cutting some plants and trees soon.

Not sure about the impact of the rains on spiders. Do spiders like the rain or not and will they multiply more quickly now? I don't know. I hope not. The worms in our compost bin seem to be very happy because of the moisture. There are now hundreds of them and when you look inside the bin you see them moving around. Mmmmm. It makes me feel hungry.

School starting age

I’m confused. Every country you go to the age children start school is different. In Australia parents ‘ hold children back’. This means that they wait as long as possible before sending their children to school. Mmmm. Parents often send children to pre school but that’s only a few days a week. It appears that Australian education experts believe it’s better for kids to wait as long as possible before starting school. Living in different countries you soon discover it’s nowhere the same. Dutch kids are supposed to go to school the week they turn four. When they are four, it's not yet mandatory to send the children to school every day. That starts as of the age of five. I believe, similar to Australia, children in the US, also start school relatively late.

Because of the ‘holding back’ policy, my four-year old Julia, who will turn five mid July (she just made the cut off date of 31 July), has children in her class who are almost six. We’ll see what happens. Julia is very confident (this was confirmed last week by her teacher) and she goes happily to school everyday. No tantrums at school so far in Australia (knock on wood).

I really like the school timings: every weekday from 9.30 till 3.30 p.m. No Wednesday and Friday afternoon off as in Holland. Crisp and clear. In Holland, I had to get the kids from school at noon, take them home, let them eat and play, convince them to stop playing, clean them up and get them back to class at 1.15. Because there was so little time everything had to be done in a hurry. I’m not sure what the experts say about this but I personally think lunch breaks at home are not good thing. Everyone gets stressed out including the parents, usually the mums of course. The worst thing was that my four year old refused to go back to school in the afternoon. She just didn’t understand why she had to go to school again. She often threw a tantrum and I felt extremely embarrassed leaving her like that in the class room. Bad, bad mum.

We’ll see how Julia will be doing this year. As long as she is happy, I don’t have to worry about not ‘holding her back’. Children happy, mum happy.

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A typical bed time conversation in Sydney:
Marcel (trying to find something under the bed): 'Aaaaaaah!!!!!'
Me (scared): 'What is it, what happened?'
Marcel: 'A spider!!!!!'
Me (jumping on the bed): 'Aaaaaaaah, what kind of spider?'
Marcel: 'Don't know. It has a body and legs'
Me: 'Where is it?'
Marcel: 'Don't know. Get the vacuum cleaner, quick!'
Me (jumping off the bed to get our beast killer): 'OK. Aaahhhh!!!!!'
Marcel starts making a lot of noise under the bed with the vacuum cleaner.
Me: 'Did you catch it?'
Marcel: 'Not sure'
Me: 'Do you know what type of spider it was?'
Marcel: 'Not sure'
Me: 'Oh'
Marcel: 'Sleep well, have nice dreams...'
Me: 'You too'

Sports

After three months I finally started playing tennis again. I had an idea that the quality of the tennis coaching would be better in Australia than in India and this is indeed the case. While I loved my two coaches in Mumbai, Deepakh and Deepakh (no joke), I believe I can make more progress here. The tennis school is very conveniently located between the school of my kids and home. As a real tennis mum I can drop off the kids at school wearing my very cool tennis outfit and then play tennis at 9.30.

Today, I participated in a ladies tennis clinic. There are more tennis mums like me. I counted 10 other courts with small groups playing. After 20 minutes our coach Craig said we had 10 more minutes left. So I guessed the clinic would last for 30 minutes. A bit short. After some confusion on my side, I realized the clinic would last for two hours switching to another court and coach every half hour. Ouch.

I can only conclude that Australia is an extremely sports minded country. The kids don't have two or three hours sports per week. No, one entire day (Friday) is dedicated to sports. Children who play tennis after school are picked up by a bus and brought to the tennis club. Just to make it easy for them and their parents.

Swimming is also very popular with lots of possibilities for swimming lessons. My six year old started lessons last week in the swimming school next to his school. They teach the children in small groups of four kids max. During Sebastiaan's class there were about 10 instructors in the water with other kids. BTW, in Australia, kids are first taught freestyle swimming instead of the breast stroke as they do in Holland. It takes them longer to learn freestyle swimming but once you can do freestyle the breast stroke is a lot easier.

As part of our integration program we try to be more sporty. Last Sunday, Marcel won his first medal participating in the Cole Classic (www.coleclassic.com), a swimming race in the sea. Marcel entered the 1 kilometer race and managed to finish within a reasonable time. Being Dutch he was one of the very few using the breast stroke but as proven by Marcel also with the breast stroke you stay afloat.

I learned something interesting by the way with respect to the spiders (see my previous post). When you get bitten by a spider, you have to dial 000 and then they will come immediately to provide you with an antidote. This information falls into the 'Nice to know' category.

Warning: do not read this when you have a spider phobia

When we lived in India, people used to think we had a lot of scary insects at home. This was not the case. On the contrary, except for some cockroaches so now and then and a few small lizards on the wall, we were not bothered by any insects.

In Sydney it's different as I discovered last night. Just before going to bed, I entered the bathroom and could not stop myself from screaming. Next to the window there was this enormous ugly spider. Luckily Marcel was at home and he killed the beast. We first did a quick Google search to check if the spider was dangerous which was not the case. Our spider is probably a 'Huntsman' spider and they are low risk and non aggressive. What a relief.

Marcel decided to use the vacuum cleaner to get rid of our new Australian friend. To make sure that the spider would die instantly and not creep out of the hose, Marcel put anti-insect spray in the vacuum hose and he secured the exit of the hose with some toilet paper. The vacuum cleaner is now in the bathroom and no way I'm going to empty it..

The experience of last night further increased my spider phobia which is not helpful when you live in Sydney. There are less friendly spiders here. Read for example about the famous Sydney funnel web spiders. I also read somewhere that the population of Redback spiders in the northern part of Sydney - where we live - is growing.

Who says life in the suburbs is boring?

Desperate housewife

Yesterday I watched a new episode of ´Desperate Housewives´. It is always a good show to watch.

I came to the conclusion that the show is no longer like looking at a completely different world. The thing is that I notice a lot of similarities with my life here in Sydney. In Mumbai, it was a lot harder to compare myself to bored housewives in a suburb of an American town. It´s different here in Sydney which is a bit scary.

I don´t want to become a ´desperate housewife´ and this is why I officially started my job hunt today. I want a job but also would like to have flexible working hours, a commute to the office of maximum ten minutes and I want to be there 100% for the kids. In other words, I want the impossible.

Soon we can watch a new show ´desperate working mums´.