Greetings from Downunder! We have had a great 3 weeks with Dave's sister, Emma, to visit. We did some travelling with Emma including a long weekend in Sydney, where we got our first bit of sun! We saw all the sights and also met up with Fi's university friends Fi and Ally (and a band of other medics) and Dave's school friend Rob and his girlfriend Kaisa. We ended up at a random Australian house party on the Saturday night, where we drank strong alcoholic slush puppies (ingenious!) Dave was later caught on camera in our hostel looking rather worse for wear!
We also did a day trip from Melbourne to 'Phillip Island' which is famous for the 'Penguin Parade' where approximately 1000 penguins migrate home every evening. We upgraded to the 'penguin plus' experience which meant we were really close to the little penguins waddling past-it was really quite incredible! That same day we also went to the wildlife park which looked pretty run down and tragic on the outside, but turned out to be possibly the best thing we've done in Oz so far..We hand fed hundreds of kangaroos and wallabies in large areas of remote land. We had the whole park to ourselves and we were amazed at how gentle and tame the 'roos were!
We (embarrasingly to some!) went to the 'Neighbours Night' where we met some of the stars from Neighbours, including the characters 'Dr Karl Kennedy' 'Lucas' and Irish 'Connor'. It was awesome! We also paid a wee visit to 'Ramsay Street', site of where Neighbours is filmed. No filming sadly!
This weekend we sadly waved goodbye to Emma and then had a slow weekend of fine dining, coffees, a run in the park and some exploring to Yarra Bend Park and more of the Dandenongs with Gail and Jon. We found more wildlife and hand fed cockatoos and parrots (much to Jon's horror, he hates birds so watched from afar and took some pics for us!)
Dave has found an admin job with 'Fosters'. It's stress free, with nice people and has a free bar after work on Thursdays and Fridays! To note this event we went to our local steakhouse, enjoying a couple of medium-rare bits of cow, washed down with a bottle of Australia's finest red.
