Greenpeace

We heard the Greenpeace ship was going to be in the harbour this weekend so we had to go. Unfortunately, we didn't figure out exactly where we needed to go before we left so we ended up in the wrong place. Where it should have taken us about 20 minutes to get there, it took us over an hour. Sheesh, we're so bad at this city living. :-) It was really neat touring the ship, talking to the workers and hearing stories of their efforts to stop the Japanese whaling.

Happy Birthday, Marra!

We have celebrated 3 birthday's since we have been here. Marra did not want to turn 3 (interestingly, Hanna is the only other one of our children that cried when she turned another year older). So I was surprised on Sunday to hear Marra talking excitedly about turning 3. She insisted on wearing her pink princess dress. We took her shopping (Tessa had to take a picture of her favorite building on the way to the store) and much to her sisters' dismay, she picked out a cake with sprinkles and m&m's on top and some ice cream/popsicles. She asked for her birthday bag (Hanna got her presents in a gift bag) but promptly forgot about it after eating her cake and ice cream. I forgot about her presents too until we got home Sunday night and she had already fallen asleep. I'm going to wait and give them to her on the airplane so she has something new and exciting to do.

Blue Mountains

Wow, I wish we had more time to spend there. It was absolutely stunning. I have always loved the mountains and these were even better than driving up Mount Washington in New Hampshire ;-). The only down side was that it was very touristy. It was the first place I have seen that so obviously catered to tourists that I wish we would have just rented a van and driven around on our own to see the parts of Australia that are off the beaten path. We have been saying that we are very poor tourists because we don't spend a whole lot of money (although the Australian economy has boomed since we have been here). We had to pay over $100 to ride one of those tourist double deckers just to get to the 3 Sisters which was less than 5 miles away from the train station where we got off. The girls had a wonderful time riding the cable car across the mountains and we walked around the rainforest floor before heading up to the 3 sisters where we had stunning views for miles around. A definite highlight of our trip.

Apple and Queen Victoria Building

It's really nice to live in an area where you don't feel like the odd man out. Ray has been an Apple fan for years and we always seem to be in the minority and can never convince others that Apple is THE superior product. Apple is the in thing here, even on television. Apple just opened a store in Sydney last week so we had to go! Very cool store! The girls were having fun and had a hard time leaving. We have been trying to pack as much as we can into the last few days which really doesn't work well with 4 kids. I had been feeling like I hadn't done enough since we have been here but I think in hindsight, it worked very well. It would have been too stressful to be running all the time and I now feel really good about all that we have seen and done. Anyway, we "planned a lot more for that day but only made it to the Apple store and then attempted to do some shopping with a very tired toddler but just had to give up. We went to the famous Queen Victoria Building because I had heard so much about the great shopping. Every once in awhile we will tell people where we are staying and they will say how lucky we are to be so close to great shopping (David Jones??). It's really too bad that it's wasted on me. I'm not really into shopping unless it's gift shops, thrift stores or shops like Australian Geographic.

Around the apartment

I was asked to send pictures of the apartment and for some reason I never got around to it. I should have done it the first day we moved in because it was all new and exciting then. It's a two bedroom apartment so we had to create another bedroom. Emma has the bedroom with the green couch and Hanna gets the great outdoor porch with the amazing views. Tessa sleeps on a couch that is in our bedroom. I would love the kitchen if it was a bit bigger. I like having the laundry room right off the kitchen and it has a lot of cupboard and drawer space for such a small area. In some ways it has been great living in such a small space because it doesn't take us that long to clean it (my idea of cleaning anyway)!