Friday!!!

Photos: There’s a pic of Julie and I at Darling Harbour Friday night. There’s also a pic of a sailing ship off our balcony. Everyone in the US is familiar with the television commercials where the Aussie dude says something like, “now that’s a knife” — Fosters Beer commercial or Mick Dundee maybe? Anyway, picture above might be captioned… “now that’s a pontoon boat”. Finally pictured is a cruise ship cruising past our building on Friday morning, We love watching the comings and goings on the harbour from our apartment balcony.

Friday, Julie and I headed out after work for no place in particular. We thought we found a good place to go but when we got there it was pretty lame so we regrouped and headed to Darling Harbour — always a safe bet. It’s off season in Oz so the harbour isn’t jammed with people. In other words, you can get a table with relative ease at the restaurant of your choice. Before we get into that, we were able to knock out a Saturday task en route.

In the US we call it the DMV — here it is called Maritime Services. We were walking right past the place, and they were open until 7, so we popped in to get our Australian drivers licenses. We talked to the manager upon entry and learned that we could not get a license until we had been in the country for 6 months. We can simply use our US licenses for driving until that time and then after 6 months, we stop in and they swap out our US licenses for an Aussie license. However, that doesn’t solve the issue of having something (other than our passports) to prove our identity. It’s particularly important because you need a license or an ID to get a Tax ID Number so you can get paid at your actual tax rate instead of the onerous highest level rate. That meant we’d have to get a simple photo ID and wait until the 6 months has elapsed for our license. Here’s the good part — we filled out a quick form and were out the door in about 5 minutes! Yes, 5 minutes! WOW!

We wandered down to Darling Harbour (about 4 blocks) and emerged onto the Harbour right where we catch our ferry home — bonus. We checked out a few places and settled on a Tapas restaurant. I think the owners confused the meaning of the word “Tapas” to mean “Deep fried Spanish” because it was not at all what we expected. Some of the food we shared was tasty enough (the shrimp and scallop ceviche) but the larger plate we got was mostly deep fried stuff that sat heavy and lacked punch. The notable exception being the chorizo sausage. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was bad, but it won’t be on our list of place to re-visit. Still, we enjoyed the time together and the proximity of our ferry meant we were on the ferry and home in about 15 minutes. Commuting by ferry with a free harbour cruise both ways is really fun for us — we love it.

Earlier, while I was waiting for Julie to get off from work I visited a place called Paddy’s Market. Paddy’s is essentially a gigantic flea market with hundreds of booths jammed together selling touristy stuff. I was shocked by the number of places selling wigs? I bought a couple of cool bracelets (for me) and walked the aisles checking out the rest of the stuff. There was booth after booth of wigs, iPhone cases, t-shirts, footwear (Ugg boots [ made in China ] ), and jewellery (check out how that word is spelled). I enjoyed the experience even though I am not much for flea markets.

Upstairs was a regular mall where I happened across a store named “Connor” — took a pic of that and put it on Facebook for my youngest to enjoy. I know it really isn’t a paragraph with just one sentence so I added this sentence to keep from irritating my blog stalking grammarians (Lesley?)

Today is Saturday. We’ll hang around the house today in the morning and depending on the weather either go for a ferry cruise (to Manly Beach or Coogee Beach) or we’ll head out for some clothes shopping. One thing is for sure about Sydney — there are a ton of store selling clothing. Loving it in Sydney! As they say... "Weather is here — wish you were beautiful."