So here’s the deal... It’s too cool that we have a place to stay while we’re getting settled, but it’s REALLY far away from the Uni. It takes us about 1.5 hours of riding public transport to get from here to there, and that puts a damper on our apartment search.
So yesterday we went to the Arriving and Surviving class (which was mildly useful) and then hung around the neighborhood waiting for the nearby hostels to open so we could see if they had any vacancies. We figured that we could stay nearby for a week or so to make our housing search a bit easier on us.
Since the class ended around noon and the hostels didn’t open until 5, we decided to waste away the day at Coogee Beach. It’s a 30 minute walk (mostly downhill) from the Uni, so it’ll be our home beach while we live here, and that’s fine by me because it’s a nice beach! A lot of the beaches here are very large, and this one was no exception. We mostly basked in the sun and read our books, but occasionally we’d cool down in the surf by getting tossed around by the strong waves.
At 5pm, we stopped by a few hostels, but the cheapest place we could find was AUD $75/night (weekly rate). So we walked back to the Uni bus stop and rode buses and a ferry back to Paddy’s place.
Today we called the cheapest hotel that we found yesterday and booked a room for a week. It’s a bit spendy on our budget, but we’re anxious to get into a place and we’re hoping that being nearby will help us find a place quick. We did a bunch of other administration things: ordered health insurance cards, cancelled our car insurance for the Jeep, cancelled our US cellphones, wired money from our US bank to our Aussie bank, etc, etc.
Around 3pm, we had enough of this serious stuff, so we headed out to the Manly area for some snorkeling. Owen dropped us off at Manly Beach, and we walked over to Shelly Beach where we saw a bunch of snorkelers on Sunday. Along the way, we saw a bunch of lizards so we took a few pics. At Shelly, we saw a bunch of new-to-us fish, and there were quite a lot of underwater plants as well. After some exploring, we headed back to shore to warm up on the beach for a while. Then we walked over to the swimming area right next to the Manly Wharf to do some more snorkeling.
I had read that there are seahorses and cuttlefish to be seen at the Manly shark net, so we put our snorkel gear back on and swam out to it (on the people side, not the shark side!) I didn’t see any seahorses, but I think I might have seen a cuttlefish through the net… Unfortunately I didn’t stay out there long because I kept seeing little jellyfish floating in the water and I didn’t know how dangerous they were. I definitely want to go back there some time, the net was pretty cool looking underwater, and there were lots of fish and stuff hanging around eating the algae that grows on the net.
Tonight we had our first Sydney thunderstorm! More lighting and thunder than I think I’ve ever seen before, very cool!
Tomorrow we make the trek back to Randwick (the suburb near the Uni) to check into our hotel room. Fingers crossed on finding a place soon!!!
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