G'day chaps. Apologies for the lack of updates on here, work's been requiring me to do actual work and time away from the desk has seen us fighting round Sydney trying to secure somewhere to live. But! We've finally settled on a shabby, bright pink dump in the middle of nowhere! I jest... it's a nice little detached house in Randwick, five minutes from Bronte Beach, five minutes from Coogee, and about ten to Bondi. Work is half an hour on the bus in the morning, which ain't half as nice as getting the ten minute ferry across the harbour, but then living on the north shore brought with it the promise of regular visits from the mother in law so that was ruled out at a very early stage. Whittling down our options from the 300+ Sydney suburbs wasn't easy, and at first I was all about getting a sexy flat on the harbour and being able to walk to work, but we got this gaff in the end because: Sexy flats on the harbour are small, you can get a lot more for your money if you head towards the beaches a bit, and because there's a housing shortage here, it's a bunfight for every one of them. We saw this tiny terrace in Paddington, which is probably one of the best areas to live, but it was tiny, expensive, and had an outside toilet. No joke, the crapper was in a shed in the back yard. It had a bathroom, with a bath and a sink, but if it's three in the morning and you've had a skinful, you were either peeing in the sink or unbolting the back door and walking face first through a load of fresh spider's webs to get to the dunny. This didn't put many people off. There's so few gaffs to rent here they do it like buying a gaff - they have a fifteen minute 'open inspection' time on a Saturday, when someimtes (again, no joke) there would be thirty couples outside a gaff waiting to get in, and as soon as they were in would start offering up huge budles of cash and start to get into bidding wars with others about how much over the rental price they were willing to pay. You know me, I thrive on that stuff, offering to pay a hundred dollars over the asking price per week for a gaff with an outside shitter is right up my Straße.
Another factor after living below the Thai mail-order bride and her mad family for the last year in Islington was neighbours, so when we saw that we could get a detached house that was near the beaches and centennial park, we were all over it. It's a bit quiet and residential, I dunno where the nearest decent boozer is, but I reckon it'll be a sound. The gmail map is here
