Seven days in: cars, golf and...sunshine!

Well we have arrived! Actually we arrived a week ago, but jet lag has severely claimed both of us despite getting bumped up to Business Class for both legs and managing to sleep for a massive nine hours in total! This is huge as I normally only get about four or five hours sleep on the journey to Oz. Business Class was something else; I'm not sure I'd pay for it (a whopping £5000 each) but to get it for free (well, the cost of two premium economy seats) was amazing. The best thing is having a double bed when both seats are lying flat and having the privacy from screens so it almost feels like you're in your own private room. We stopped off at Singapore for an hour (photos below) and arrived in Sydney at 5am last Thursday.

Steamy in Singapore.

Not looking TOO bad after 13 hours on the plane.

So here we are. We haven't done too much in the last week - waking up at 5am and falling asleep at 3pm and again at 8pm has put a stop to most things. But the weather has been fantastic. I don't think I've ever seen the Mountains so sunny the last few times I've stayed here. By Mountains I mean the Blue Mountains, which are about 100km west of Sydney. It is absolutely freezing (we are about 950m above sea level), but the sun has now been shining for seven days straight. Coming from the UK after such a washout of a summer, this has been a welcome change.

We have managed to get one thing done though - buy a car. This was a bit of an adventure yesterday as we set off for the ominous-sounding 'Car City'. Our brief was a medium-sized car (it's a struggle to find a small car round here!) that would last us about 12 months without breaking down, with a budget of $7000. Sounds simple? Not at all. Car City has hundreds of cars but we only found about three that we actually liked and that we could afford. Cars here are not cheap, and having been brought up on European cars (particularly German ones) I was finding it difficult to consider Holdens, Fords and Hondas. In an ideal world I wanted a 4x4, but those in our budget were pretty scruffy and needed a bit of work. We will hopefully get a newer one next year when we have both been working for a few months. The other half finally convinced me to look at a Holden Commodore which was at a good price and was in surprisingly good condition for its nine years on the road. I took it for a test drive and it drove just like our Audi A4 which was nice and familiar. So we are now the proud owners of a good old Aussie Commodore.

Apart from that, I had my first experience of a golf course this week as I drove around on a cart with my father-in-law while my husband played 18 holes. It was fun to start with, but three hours of watching Steve line up a golf ball, look at it for ages, sigh and then move it again, got pretty tedious. I think it will remain as something he can go off and do on his own or with his Dad/cousin/uncle, while I amuse myself with something I am interested in!

So that's about all our news from our first week down under. We're off to Sydney tomorrow which I'm really looking forward to, as we'll be catching up with other members of Steve's family and some friends too. And it's a lot warmer down there! I also have my first AFL (Aussie Rules football) experience on Sunday so I'll be blogging about that next week.