The First Two Weeks

And so begins what is certain to be another long blog post in which an attempt is made to summarize our experiences during our first two weeks Down Under. At some point, we will get caught up to present day, and the length of our posts will decrease significantly. Until then, a comfortable seat is recommended.

Arrival
We arrived in Sydney at roughly 8am on a Thursday. Keep in mind; we left on our journey at 2:25 pm on a Tuesday. So yes, the rumors are true, it is a very long flight to Australia. The total travel time was somewhere around 24 hours, but it honestly did not seem that bad. The flight from LA to Sydney was just over 14 hours. Crossing the date line was interesting as Wednesday February 24th did not exist for us. On the other hand, we will have two of the same day when we return. Our first day was a battle to stay awake and fight the jet lag. We had been awake for nearly 30 hours, and it was 8 in the morning. Sleep deprivation has an odd effect on the mind, and we generally felt uneasy and slightly dizzy. We managed to stay awake all day before falling into a 14 hour coma that night.

House Hunting
The next morning we felt as good as one can after such a long journey, and began a week of relentlessly searching for a place to live. For all you landlords out there, the remainder of this paragraph may cause extreme forms of envy. The rental market in Sydney is not like it is in the States, in fact, it's quite the opposite. Rather than jump at the opportunity to show a potential tenant a property (as I have done countless times), the landlord (or usually their agent) simply schedule a 15 to 20 minute time on a Saturday to view the property. During this narrow window, somewhere between 15 and 20 people show up to view the property, and the landlord generally receives three or four rental applications. I know that sounds hard to believe; I was a complete skeptic myself, but it's true. We showed up to view the first property on our list before the agent arrived, and it looked more like the building was having a fire drill as opposed to a property inspection. There were at least 20 people there to look at a small overpriced 1 bedroom apartment for $450/week. That's right, $450/week. They quote rental prices here by the week not the month. I can't blame them; $450 sounds much better than the monthly rate of $1,950. Anyway, we looked at several places that Saturday, and near the end we found one that we loved. Although it was our favorite place we had seen all day, it was also the cheapest. As there were 15 other people at the inspection, we did not hesitate to grab rental applications and get things rolling. On Monday, we showed up at the property manager's office bright and early to submit our applications. Knowing we would have competition, we did not have high hopes for getting our first choice. Late that afternoon, we heard back from the agent. The place was ours.

Financially Unprepared
Like in the states, we were required to pay our first months rent and deposit before finalizing a lease agreement. We planned to meet on a Wednesday to do this, giving us two days to transfer US dollars into Australian ones. What ensued was a stressful, headache producing process that entailed numerous phone calls to our bank as well as an exchange company. I will spare you the details, but if you ever move to Australia or any country for that matter, exchange money before you go. After delaying our move-in date by a day, we finally got word that the money should be in our account early Thursday morning. The news was reassuring, but I was less than confident we would have Aussie Dollars the following day. We checked out of our short-term housing Thursday morning, and made a nerve-racking walk to our new bank. If the money was there, we were off to the property manager's office to sign the
lease, pay our money, and move into our place. If the money was not there, we were off to find another hotel and spend the day worrying the property manager would lose patience with us and lease the property to someone else. Finding a rental property here is no easy task, and the thought of starting over was not a good one. Luckily when we got to the bank, we were welcomed by an account filled with Australian Dollars. The transfer had arrived, and within hours, we were in our new place.

Starting from Scratch
The next week few days was spent acquiring all the things we would need for our new home. It was not a short list and included furniture, dishware, electronics, small appliances, washing machine, refrigerator(typically not provided by the landlord), etc... As expected, this was at times a stressful process. Especially during the
assembly our IKEA furniture, which generally consisted of me misplacing my tools and exhausting my vocabulary of four-letter words. Overall, we were able to acquire everything we needed in a few days, and after nearly two weeks in Australia we were very close to being settled in.

As you can probably tell, our first couple weeks were high-stress. However, with all that had to be done, things went really well for us. We were very fortunate to end up in such a great apartment, and in such a short period of time. Not to mention how much fun we had exploring our new city during our first few days here.