Well toss a shrimp on the barbie and crack me open a fosters we are in AUSTRALIA!!! When we landed in sydney i was pretty emotional... not because we had reached the most beautiful city ever but because i'd just finished watching 'p.s i love you' on the flight and feel free it was tugging on my little heart strings - not such an ice queen after all dunkers! :)

We were lucky enough to be met by the lovely moya at the airport and herself, george and jan were so utterly generous that james had tears in his eyes when we said goodbye after the week (do NOT believe his denial of this fact, there was some serious eye leakage on the go when we got on the train that night!).

Staying with jan was so relaxing, we finally got the chance to take some seriously overdue hot showers after which we realised that our 'tans' really were just a serious build up of 4months of dirt. And so it didnt take long to realise that we were more than mildly out of place in full blown winter wearing clothes that could only be described as rags. My combats were torn into shorts and james had taken pride in wearing the same tshirt for a whole month, day AND night.... the simple fact of the matter was that we looked like hobos.

Luckily moya and jan were clearly born with the 'generous gene' and we immediately hit the shops. Unfortunately it didnt take long for my 12 year old boy ways and my complete inability to last more than 10minutes shopping kicked in pretty swiftly. Both jan and moya were insanely patient with us and soon tried the tactic of leaving us on our lonesome hoping we'd man up and buy some suitable winter wear... unfortunately we lack that sort of shopping spirit and felt it necessary to taste the local beer before our shopping spree began and managed to conveniently forget about updating the old wardrobes until it was too late. darn it!

This plan totally backfired on our asses as we went to the beautiful shangri-la for some cocktails and felt more than a little out of place but luckily for us, MOST of the classy customers were more interested in admiring the stunning views overlooking the sydney opera house and harbour bridge than disapproving of the two stinkers in the corner :)

Although we could have quite happily settled into Epping with jan's clan we felt it was perhaps a little unfair to overstay our welcome so we went about searching for a new ranch. Once again we approached this activity with maturity and sensible reasoning - i replied to the ad's by 'rod' and 'brad' purely for the reason that their names made me giggle. yup, i am easily pleased. We took a bit of a spontanous decision to move to bondi and live with rod (who we soon found out lives in the shed), teddy (his 17year old 'famous' flea ridden dog) and 3 other new flatmates... it all seemed like such a good idea at the time!