Heather's great danes

On Sunday we took a walk along the boardwalk, following the river from our apartment to the famous Regatta which is a hotel, café, bar and restaurant. We had the most amazing burgers we’ve ever had. Finding that we could barely walk we took a quick ride on the SeaCat (the city catamarans) back to our side of town, to prepare our part of the nights BBQ.

We where invited to my friends place, Heathers, in the suburb Bulimba which is on the other side of the river from where we live. The storm, coming down with heavy rains and lightning made us have to sit inside for our first real Aussie Barbie.

Heather’s passion is her Great Dane Dogs. She mentioned that we had to wear dog safe clothes, and that the dogs where big. But never had I imagined that they where this big!!! Besides the other couple also invited to the Barbie had two more of the same kind, leaving us with 4 great danes around us while enjoying a very good dinner. This kind of dog is very sensitive and sulks days in a row if you tell them off.

Heather served excellent cooked prawns & Cajun spiced fish, with cheese cake dessert. After this weekend we seriously need to do some good exercising otherwise we’re going to look like balloons soon!

Royal Queensland Yacht Club visit

This Saturday we went for a drive out to the coast. Manly is Queeslands largest marina, which was really busy with all kinds of activities and we enjoyed a lunch at the Royal Queensland’s Yacht Club. Patrik found out that they had races on every Wednesday 12AM – 5PM so this Wednesday he will be signing up as crew on one of the boats, wearing SPF30, hat & long sleeves.

Our drive was filled with Aussie experiences! We went up on Mt. Cotton to see a winery and among the vineyards there’s lots of wild kangaroos enjoying the shade in the afternoon.

Death Metal?

On Wednesday we where invited to a band playing by Erik & Rebecca. Lucky we got to socialize a bit before the band started playing because it turned out to be what my ears thought was death metal? Maybe not really but it was loud rock n’ roll anyways.

Australian visa

On Monday we got our visas pasted into our passports! So now were allowed to stay in the country for some time & come back into the country as many times as we want. Quite handy when you live here!

Having a pool in your backyard is quite nice, we have tried to do some laps in the lap pool in the mornings but so far it’s only happened once. But chances are good that we can improve on the statistics.

Crikey!

You have probably heard of “The Crocodile hunter”-Steve Irwin. The man who loves animals like no other. He does documentaries with his wife and is concerned of protecting the environment. He is also the manager of The Australia Zoo where he projects his extraordinary feelings for the nature to the visitors.
Yesterday we went there to see what it was all about. After about an hour drive from Brisbane we where welcomed too the zoo by a camel (An animal you don’t get too pet in everyday-life).
After saying hello to Harriet (The oldest living animal in the world) an 175year old Giant Galapagos Land Tortoise, found by Sir Charles Darwin in 1835. We found our way through the park to a big arena that’s called “The Crocoseum”. There we got too see the daily show with snakes, birds, tigers and crocodiles. It was really amazing to see all the animals in action. The tigers playing, the birds with marvelous colorings and the feeding of the crocks. When the show was over we got out walking in the park where we saw elephants, birds and lizards along with a lot of crocks. We also got to come up close and pet kangaroos and koalas.
It was interesting to see all the animals but it was also interesting too be inspired by the “Crikey” feeling that Steve Irwin is all about. If you don’t have the opportunity to go there you should at least have a look at http://www.crocodilehunter.com/ at read about how too trap a crocodile.

Gold Coast and Byron Bay

On Saturday we drove down to surfer’s paradise to have a look at the “Florida alike” Australian beach. The skyscrapers practically where leaning over the beach. This weekend was “schoolies” weekend in Surfers. All Australian teenagers’ finishes school for summer vacation and the beach and streets becomes overly crowded with happy/drunk teenagers staying the weekend to party. We only made a short stop at the famous beach and continued down the coast to Byron Bay, the best beach we’ve seen so far.

We thought of our friend Neven, as the Bay was crowded with Kite surfers, (they use a shorter board, than the surfboarders, and use a “parachute” looking thing, tied to their waist to surf the Bay. Then a part of the Bay was used for a wedding, and on leaving the bay to look at the lighthouse we where offered to share a New Zealander’s lunch on the BBQ. Prawns & Garlic on the BBQ is excellent!
The lighthouse offered a great view of sandy long beaches and we then headed back to Brisbane city.

Patrik is working out

During my day at work Patrik has been moving all our things from one apartment to another. And so you see, I am quite lucky to have a fiancé sorting out the moving of our things! (Kristin’s note)

This weekend we will be heading for the Gold coast, hoping to get that golden tan!

Swedish meatballs

On Thursday all stores outside the city have longer opening hours (most close at 9PM) and so we set out to get some stuff for our new apartment at IKEA in the evening. IKEA is 15 minutes down the highway towards the Gold coast. It turned out to be the smallest IKEA we ever visited, but we did get our dinner, Swedish Meatballs lingonberry, brown sauce with Chips. Weird combination! With Mandelkaka (the one you buy at Aschebergsgatan in Gothenburg).

Most of the things we wanted were out of stock unfortunately though so we had to go to Target, to buy what we needed. Next time we go there it will be for the Swedish Christmas food and not for the furniture.

Entertainment in Brisbane

Kristin’s very nice colleague at work, Alan, offered her two tickets to a concert at the Brisbane entertainment center on the day of the concert!

So, we gave up our plans of going to the Pub, watching Australia meet Uruguay in Soccer, which by the way was the final qualifying game for the world cup for Australia, to go to the Kelly Clarkson concert. She is a Texas girl on an Aussie tour.

Mind you, Kristin had a more difficult time letting go of the soccer plans, than Patrik, who mainly longed for the cold beer I think! We left from home a bit late, considering that we didn’t even know on which side of town the BEC was, Kristin had to take out her old Scout Map reading skills and Patrik his now excellent left-side driving skills… waiving the window wipers quite nicely in the first couple of turns, instead of the indicators…

However, we did manage to meet up with Alan and his family on the main steps to BEC, and now we know it is 30 minutes north of Brisbane. The crowd was mainly “younger” girls screaming like I’ve never heard people scream before! Sound level wise, the U2 concert was not even in the same league as Kelly’s crowd. But Kelly turned out to be a great singer with a great voice. So we’re happy we went.

And I am happy to say, Australia won the game over Uruguay with 2-0, and so Australia will be in the World Cup!

Finally a decision

During Monday we had a look at some more apartments, which made the decision even harder to make. A few of them where really good, but they where either at the wrong location (next to a powerplant or reconstruction site) or too far from the center. After looking at numerous apartments, we have decided to go with a very central flat that we saw Friday last week.

The apartment has gym, pool, and BBQ area (which most apartments have of some sort at different quality though), a balcony overlooking the river which makes the apartment rather quiet even though its very centrally located. For Kristin to get to work by car won’t take more than 10 minutes.

After taking the decision we signed the contract which really felt good to. We have been without a real apartment for quite some time (they came and fetched our furniture in Sweden a month ago now) and so having a real home will feel very good. We’re moving in this Friday and we’re looking forward to having a housewarming party already!

Sunshine (& heavy rain) in Hinterland

We started off the Sunday with a beautiful view for our breakfast at the floating boat house restaurant on the Noosaville river. We then went on a drive through the inland of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. Maleny, Montville and Mapleton towns, visiting the Gingerbread factory, (who does gingerbread completely different to Swedes).

One of the real highlights of the day where the trail (2,5 km) in the Kondalilla falls area (National Park) which had a waterfall & a cool rock pool where you could swim. That would have been nice! But we didn’t know we where to bring our swimmers, so we watched the others jumping in the waterfall.
We saw the Glasshouse Mountains from a great lookout, although the highest of them only stretches 500 m above the ocean, it’s a view since there’s not much heights around the area. The heaviest rain we’ve ever experienced came down on us, so we left the lookout worried that the roads would be over flooded. Which the of course weren’t. It was just a light Australian rainfall !?

We hit a bad traffic at the Bruce Highway coming back to Brisbane, and so we paid Redcliffe a visit. This was much more of a city sea side town, which has turned in to a suburb to Brisbane as the city grew. After our stroll on the pier, we headed home to Mary Street in Brisbane.

Sunny side up

On Saturday we got in the car and headed north for the coast on Bruce Highway. After about one hour we reached a few surfer resorts. We drove along the coastline enjoying the views. We parked the car and went down a bushy trail to the Marcus beach. The nearly empty beach stretched out in both directions as far as we could see with white sand.
We then drove further up north to Noosa Heads and relaxed in the shade with real Italian Ice-cream. Noosaville had a wonderful esplanade and it was in Noosaville that we stayed for the night.

Finding a home

Today we have been out looking for a place to live in Brisbane, which is really different from looking for the same in Gothenburg. Here there is a lot of empty apartments in Gothenburg there’s none.
Together with Anne Coffey (from Volvo) we drove around in the areas that we found interesting, and just looked for “For rent” signs. It’s interesting that even though there are available apartments, the prices are quite high. At least compared to what we are use to. And the rent is set per week, not per month.
Having quite a few options, we couldn’t really decide, so we’re seeing a few next week too…
Tonight we’ll enjoy late night shopping (all shops in the city are open to 9 pm), and hopefully get some Aussie things and high factor sunscreen. Because tomorrow, we’re heading towards the Sunshine coast! (this is actually it’s real name!)

It's a small world after all

With the new self-confidence of being an architect, Patrik tried to get in contact with the Australian architect market. From Volvo he'd got a telephone number to a Swedish architect living here in Brisbane, so he called the number and introduced himself. It all went really well and they decided to meet over a pint of beer. Then suddenly in the middle of the conversation they realized that they already knew each other. The architect that he had phoned was Erik Björnhage, who also has studied at Chalmers. It's nice to know that the world isn't bigger than that. And Yes, they're still going out for a beer.

First days at work

Working at VCVA Volvo Commercial Vehicles Australia I am sure will be hugely challanging, no doubt. But, that was what I came for, so this was expected....
I guess this office (full of gentleman and our female assistant) could use some of my female influence and alternative thinking and I am sure that that will be as much of a challange to them as to me.
As my manager insists on all of my work being hugely surrounded by confidentiality I can't say much but than that the piles of reading are large enough to remain bedtime reading until christmas, at least.
Learning about all the small towns and villages where we have distributions points thoughout the country is hugely interesting! Did you know that there is such places as Wagga wagga, Dandenong, Goondiwindi, Kununurra and Kalgoorilie?

The scenic route

We've now been in Brisbane for 4 days and we felt it was time to explore the neighbourhood. So we took a drive around town starting of heading to the "Mount Coot-tha". Since the landscape here is kind of flat, every little hill that rises up is seen as a mountain. Mount Coot-tha is about a 20-minutes ride from downtown and at the top there’s a lookout that overviews all of Brisbane.
A try to describe the topography of the town would be that there is a small city-core with really tall buildings. This is surrounded of a lot of suburbs with low housing that reaches out in infinity.
After visiting the lookout we got in the car again and decided to explore some of the suburbs that we had heard should be good to live in (Spring-hill, Fortitude Valley, and New Farm). On Friday we are going to look at some apartments and we thought it would be good to have a look at the surroundings before we decide where to live.
With one of us driving and the other as a map-reader we then tried to find our way. The result was not too bad. Even though we were driving on the left side and tried to keep up with the Aussie-traffic, we got around finding what we were looking for. We eventually ended up in "New-farm" an area right by the Brisbane River with many new built houses and they've also renovated old "wool-houses" and made apartments in them. It felt as a good place to live with lot of theatres, restaurants and cafes. Though we have not found an apartment yet, we will probably look for one in New Farm.

The small things…

It's interesting that there are so many things that are different from what we are used to, at the same time as it is almost the same. Last night we went shopping in a big supermarket. Kristin had found out were to go for the weekly grocery shopping.
Things like this are not so very different to Sweden, people go by car to a big supermarket. But it is the small things that are so different that an easy task as shopping for groceries suddenly gets to be a challenge. One thing is that stuff as brands or names are different, but then there are many things that are not at all the same. In all this when all the small things add up, it's suddenly hard to think of what to make for dinner. After being confused for a while we decided to go safe. Spaghetti Bolognese can't go wrong. It went pretty well, the hardest was maybe to find vegetable stock (buljong).
How do you do that when they don't have "knorr"?

Left side!

Yesterday was Kristin’s first day at the new job. After a long day of a lot of "introducing" she got home with our car, a shanghai-red Commodore Acclaim by Holden. We later took it out for a drive around Brisbane.
Driving on the left side is weird. It is like doing something that you know how to do, but at the same time newer done before. It went pretty well. We didn’t cause any accidents, but there was times where the co-driver had to shout out which side of the road the vehicle should be.
After driving around we stopped at the South-bank. It is a part of Brisbane that is rather recently built for the Expo-88. They have gathered cinemas, theatres, convention-centres and sports arenas in one place. (Similar to "Evenemang-stråket")
There is also an artificial bay where people can swim and sunbath. It is a big pool with a sandy beach, maybe it sounds crazy, but it works.
After this exploring we went home to sleep.
The jet-lag still gets to us.

Brisbane at last

Yes, we arrived well. After all the travelling it was nice to finally hit Brisbane’s airport. At the airport a driver sent by Volvo picked us up and drove us in to the city. On the way we got the first glance of the city and the river.
There was a lot of impressions like riding on the left side of the road, and see how they do in the roundabouts, we also saw a lot of trees with purple flowers, the driver told us it was Jacaranda (you know, the dark hard wood).

In the city we got to our apartment-hotel. We now live in a two-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms, two balcony’s and we got one walk-in closet each.
After we unpacked our bags we got out on a walk around the city. We also took a ride with the City-cat, a small ferryboat that goes along the river (typ Alvsnabben).

Singapore 22,5C degrees

We are on our way..after packing all our stuff, having numerous goodbyes with friends & family.
A legstretcher at the Singapore airport was useful after the 18 hours of travelling, and so we took the chance to update our Blog.
It'll be exicting to arrive in Brisbane, & to see if we have all necessary stuff to get by, before our ship travelling boxes arrive. Not that shopping new stuff would make us too sad..