Anytime we told Sydney-siders that we were moving to Melbourne, there was much laughter about how we would be used to the cold and how we should take plenty of jumpers  . . . it's 43 degrees today!!

Victoria is having a nice little heatwave that started on Wednesday (thankfully we had moved all our furniture by then) with it hitting 43 degrees by about 5pm and not cooling down - it was 30 degrees at 7.30 this morning!!

This weekend it is meant to be cooler - ony 35 degrees.

When we were house hunting we didn't have air-con as one of our essential items but we are VERY glad that we have it in our lounge - we may all be forced to sleep in there tonight!

 

After our first week in Melbourne, Colin and the kids decided to meet me at my office (after a little bit of a challenge, geographically) so we could all enjoy a Melbourne Friday night in the city.

We went for pizza and were going to enjoy some of the Open in Tennis Square but after we realised how close we were to Melbourne Park we decided to go soak up the atmosphere with some ground passes (we didn't think the bambinis would sit still long enough to justify buying seats at Rod Laver).

We ended up at Margaret Court Arena with great seats - under some shade, close enough so that we could see the action but also far enough away if Emily started acting up, it would not be a disaster.



Before the match started (Warinka v Berdych) we were entertained by Berdych's very loyal and very tuneful fans - they had about 15 different songs that all incorporated their love of Berdych!!



Adam and Emily were were very impartial in their support - every point warranted the unfurling of their banners

(our first day was spent house hunting - laser focused effort  - looked at 4 liked 3 but only two enough to actually want to live there)

Day two in Melbourne was spent  . . . . at the ZOOOOOOOO (have you noticed a recurring theme in our activities?!)

Not much to tell apart from lots of animals - a few more "traditional" cages for the animals but I think they are replacing them with more open enclosures. They do have a fab monkey exhibition with loads of different types of monkeys - half of which I had never heard of.  They also had a butterfly walkthough which was so much fun

After much too-ing and fro-ing, we have a house in Melbourne.

It wasn't our first choice but the landlords of our first choice (in Brighton) were messing about with how long they wanted the lease to be - we wanted 15 months, they wanted 12 and then said no, they only wanted a six month lease, which is totally annoying as if we had known that, we would never have looked at the place.

Our new house is pretty perfect - about 500 metres from a train station - it is a little bit out of the city so is about 40 minutes on the train (I will be reading a book a week!) but is 10 minutes to the beach, 10 minutes to Brighton (nice "cafe culture" suburb) and 10 minutes to the largest shopping centre in Melbourne. It has a good sized garden for Adam to play football and a garage for us to hide all our "stuff".

We are hoping to move on Friday but we need the removal company to confirm that they can do it - our containers are being loaded onto a train tonight to go overnight to Melbourne - as it is a holiday Monday next week (Australia Day) we would really like to get in for then.

Now that we know where we are living we can arrange school, kindegarten (really confusingly, in Melbourne kindy refers to pre-school, and prep is what we called kindy in Sydney!!!), dentist, doctor, football club, athletics, swimming, etc, etc.