I'd been thinking about buying a laptop for a while, certainly ever since Hannah left for India... I have been missing the convenience of having her laptop around, and the ability to use Skype to call her Indian mobile (without having to hang around the office at odd hours and weekends) was enough to encourage me to splash some of the cash I'd received from selling the van. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable to have over $2000 in cash sitting around anyway (I don't have an Aussie bank account) so it was an easy decision!
Given that I still plan to travel in India myself after my stint down under, I was keen to buy something very small. A MacBook Air would be nice... but I think I would have been paranoid about breaking it. Instead something called the "eee pc" caught my eye, and I had been waiting until the weekend for the new model to hit the shops. It doesn't have a CD drive, or even a hard disk (instead it uses flash memory) and it really is tiny - just a 9" screen. But it does everything a normal laptop does and weighs almost nothing. And cost less than $600 - sweeet.
Anyway although I had an invite out to a "supporters day" for an Aussie (well actually kiwi) friend's football team (i.e. drinking beer all afternoon while watching the team play) on Saturday, I didn't end up going due to the stinking headache I had that morning, which I put down to all the authentic Aussie beer I had drunk on Friday. This was probably the worst hangover I've had since leaving the UK - when travelling we didn't really go in for drinking to get drunk - but it's amazing how easy it is to slip back into the normal rhythm of the working week! Probably doesn't help that there is free beer in the office every Friday from 5pm... and neither did the invite out for a colleague's birthday drinks, after the free beer ran out. But at least I had a decent excuse for a lie-in.
Instead on Saturday afternoon I went for a wander around Balmain, which is very close to the CBD yet separated from it by the harbour (so requiring a long bus ride or a short scenic ferry ride). It was great to wander around away from the city centre (the perils of living about three doors away from your workplace) and it showed that Sydney really is a city of villages and so infinitely wanderable, in a similar way to London... just with a better climate, waterfront location, blah blah...
A big thing that happened this weekend was the start of the annual northwards migration of whales (of the humpback AND southern right varieties) along the coast near Sydney. It being early in the season, I noticed some 'deals' going on whale watching trips out into the ocean just beyond the harbour... but by the time I had thought about going on one they were all sold out. Bah. So I did the next best thing and got the ferry to Manly, then a bus up to the old Quarantine station, then walked the mile or so to North Head (at the northern side of the entrance to the harbour) to look out onto the ocean. To my amazement there was a small group of people with binoculars, looking towards a group of three tourist boats. Then I saw some tell-tale splashing around... there the whales were! I couldn't actually see them against the dull colour of the stormy autumn sky reflected in the ocean, but it made the Sunday afternoon wander worthwhile. The season 'hots up' as it were over the next few weeks so perhaps I'll get out on a boat at some point. A picture of the 'whales' here would be rubbish so instead here's a picture of the grey sky hanging heavily over the city, as seen from North Head (South Head is in the foreground)...
Next weekend is a long weekend (Monday being a public holiday for the Queen's birthday, bizarrely) making up for the May bank holidays we didn't get over here. So I've grabbed the opportunity to go visit Mal down in Melbourne. Flights were not cheap but what the hey. Off to the Yarra valley hopefully... and Mal's driving!
Robin
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