It's a hard Aussie life...

So - back at work today, though there's not much work to be getting on with. It was a nice weekend though. Saturday spent mooching about, and at the market and in cool wee shops.

On Sunday morning we caught the ferry over to Manly on the north side of the harbour. It was lovely to be out in the harbour and you get a great view of the opera house and the harbour bridge from there. Plus, like Auckland, there were hundreds of sailing boats out taking advantage of the strong breeze.

It's always a spectacular sight - hundreds of sails billowing over the water in front of a city skyline. And when you add a few sea planes coming into land, a few ferries and such iconic landmarks in the background, it's not bad at all. Of course, half of the amusement on the ferry trip is watching out for near-misses between the boats.

Manly is a lovely little 'suburb'. The town centre is on a penninsular and you can walk from from the ferry on one side to the gorgeous sand beach on the other in about 3 minutes. Despite there being shark nets on the wee beach by the ferry and there being none on the main beach there were dozens of surfers catching the waves. There were big groups out together and a few individuals dotted around and we were speculating that these were people taking their turn at being shark bait.

Other than that I have been managing to keep myself out of trouble by going to the gym and catching up on all the films I have missed out on whilst on the road. So we managed to watch 'Syriana' (quite good, but you need to concentrate really hard) and 'Stranger Than Fiction' (a very good film) over the weekend. The DVD shop is just across the road so we have been hiring lots of boxsets of TV programmes and some old classics too. Alec got the 50s sci-fi 'They Came from Mars' out the other night. It was so funny. The martian costumes were just about falling apart.

Anyhow - we're spoilt for choice as we also have the cinema across the road from us too so we're off to see 'Blades of Glory' tomorrow night.

Other than that I have been trying to think about how to give you a taste of day to day life in Oz. The big things (like having Christmas in the summer) are pretty obvious, but the small things make a difference. Like the massive range of 'tropical' fruit you can buy over here really cheap. Pineapples for $2 (less than a pound) and 10 passionfruit for $3 (about 1 pound twenty). This is the middle of winter don't forget!

Some of you may be interested in the other things we can buy in the supermarket here. Namely kangeroo steaks... Hmm. They taste a bit too much like offal for me. Or the things you can't buy there - by which I mean alcohol. You have to go to a bottle shop, which is just weird if you ask me.

Also - Burger King is called Hungry Jacks for some reason. (It was still burger King in NZ). And they have some very strange birds flying round the park. Forget pigeons trying to steal your lunch - there are some big white ones here with scary-looking beaks.

And everyone here is wearing hats and gloves and moaning about how cold it is aty the moment - about 14 degrees on average. Hmm - I am starting to think I am not going to handle the summer heat very well!