24 April 2010 It’s ANZAC weekend, the second of two holiday weekends in April in Australia, and we are on our way via train to the Blue Mountains. These are not mountains like back home, craggy snow-capped peaks dotted with alpine lakes and meadows. These are mountains that you are already on top of, looking …
Admittedly, neither one of us knows a thing about music. Not “real” music anyway, the kind you hear in concert halls or opera houses. The kind with instruments that your parents wanted you to play in high school marching band, as opposed to that garage band your classmates struck up that played the kind of …
17 April 2010 We are in training for an 8 km breast cancer research fun run on Mother’s Day. Neighbor Cynthia convinced us to sign up, and further convinced us to join her on a 7 km (4 mi) training run around Iron Cove today. For those from the Seattle area, picture Greenlake only with …
There is a(nother) three day holiday weekend coming up here in Australia. On April 25, the country will be observing ANZAC day, a national holiday similar to Memorial Day in the States. Gina and I decided the other night that we need to get out of the city for the holiday weekend, explore some territory …
Sydney is a much hillier place than we had anticipated. We mean this both literally and figuratively. Some days the topographical ups and downs of the neighborhoods we’re walking both invigorate and exhaust, other days the emotional ups and downs of having moved to a new country do the same. There’s a definite difference between …
10 April 2010 Our third weekend in Sydney and we think we may have blown out our feet, like we did in Berlin last year. We have walked everywhere. From supermarket to supermarket, hauling heavy bags of groceries home every other day. From front door to office door and back again, daily. And from the …
06 April 2010 Today was the first day at my new Sydney job. Having not started a new job in seven years, there was the admitted dread of being the newbie – mostly the part where you get introduced to 3 dozen people whose names you can’t recall two minutes later. Luckily for me, by …
05 April 2010 Today could be characterized as the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. The good was the Manly Scenic Walkaway (MSW), the 3 to 4 hour bushwalk we tackled along the Middle and North Harbours (card #s 48 and 49 for those of you keeping track). We started the walk from a …
01 April 2010 After giving a shout-out to Cousin Cynthia in our last blog entry, I now am starting to wonder what she got us into with those City Walk cards. Gina is obsessed while my soles are wearing thin. Agreeably, they are the best way for us to get out and experience the multitude …
In Australia, what we would call “hiking” is referred to as “bushwalking.” Gina and I have developed a new yet similar activity, called “hoodwalking.” This is an activity performed by expatriates – in our case, Americans – who are in search of the perfect neighborhood for settling down in for a few years on their …