X-mas in Sydney

Officially Australians only celebrate 1 day of Christmas (the 25th of December, Christmas Day). The 26th (Boxing Day) is a public holiday but not a real day of celebration like in Europe.

On Christmas day we had a long lunch at out friend Mark's place with some other guys. We had planned to do a picnic in the park, but the weather made us divert inside.

On Boxing day, Sale started in downtown Sydney so we took a stroll towards Myer and DJ's but it was just too crowed. Later that afternoon our friends from Holland Aukje, Arthur and their 3 girls came over for dinner. They migrated to Australia in August, are still travelling around and happened to be in the Sydney area. We had a great BBQ dinner with them. We had chicken skewers, giant king prawns and baby octopus on the barbie. Ofcourse Aukje also wrote about it on her Blog.

 

   
Hans cooking

 
Arjan arranging the crackers

Bregje and the Sticky Date pudding

 
Yummy, Sticky Date pudding

Merry Christmas

Today was our last day at work for this year. We are now off till January 2nd so plenty of time to relax and explore our new hometown some more.

 

We'd like to wish all visitors to our Blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

 

Sydney Town Hall

Goods arrived in Sydney

After a long long wait, our stuff has finally arrived at our apartment. Most of the boxes where opened by Quarantine officials, but because we packed carefully and according to their instructions, the shipment was cleared without impediments.

We were happy to be able to sleep in our own bed, and finally have a TV. The best thing was to have our Nespresso coffee machine again.

Here are the details of the shipment:

• Pick-up in Amsterdam: 4th September
• Departure from the port of Rotterdam: 29th September
• Arrival in Sydney; 11th November
• Customs Clearance: 19th November
• Quarantine Clearance: 6th December
• Delivery in Sydney: 10th December

So it took 98 days to travel 16.000km, that's less then 7km/hr.

Northern Beaches

Today we made a trip to the Northern Beaches. We booked a car through a community car sharing plan called Charterdrive, much like Greenwheels in the Netherlands. It was a Smart forfour.

Our car

The ride took us all along the coast via Whale Beach towards Palm Beach. Along the way we made various stops to admire the view, take pictures and have coffee and lunch.

 
Whale Beach

Palm Beach is town with a beautiful beach where a lot of surfing goes on. It was not very busy today. Probably everyone went Christmas shopping.

A customs station was on the beach established in 1843 as the Headland marked the entrance to Broken Bay and the Pittwater which were considered to be the backdoor of Sydney for smugglers

The far end of the Beach, Barrenjoey Head is part of the Kuringgai National Park. On the head you can find a lighthouse, Barrenjoey lighthouse, constructed in 1881, constructed to either guide ships into the safe Broken Bay during bad weather, or alongside on their way to Sydney.

We took the steep walk up the hill to visit the lighthouse. A volunteer gave us a tour of the grounds and the lighthouse itself. The lighthouse is still in service, but instead of running on kerosene, it now has a 75.000 candlepower halogen lamp.

On our way back it started to rain. So we decided to take an alternate route back via Ikea to buy a few things we needed.

Tomorrow the removals company will bring the stuff we shipped.