New Year, New Country

It is scorchio at the moment with the temperature at around 36 degrees today (10 Jan). I am off to have a barbie shortly but before that I'll update.

2nd Jan everything opened again and we blitzed all stuff we had to do. The easiest was to re-connect our phone with Telstra, who were most helpful, and even suggested we take a cheaper package for our needs. This is in total contrast to the tremendous hassles that Leesa has had with the incompetent and useless BT. Sarah had phoned twice and written once before we left UK to tell them the situation and they said it would be no problem for Leesa to reconnect when we left. Needless to say that she could not do this and with my parents help she still had huge problems. I had to ring BT on my mobile to tell them that she could reonnect and that cost a bomb to call. Then still she had to wait a few more days. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why everyone in UK gets tense and everyone on Oz is laid back, if BT is anything to go by. Anyway rant over, we called other utility companies and it was generally ok, except for water, which will have to remain in Leesa's name. In the arvo (!!) we looked at a few cars and then bought one from a friend of Jenni's (a Mazda 626 with a new engine and clutch - which I will need if Sarah is going to drive it!). We will pick motor up tomorrow hopefully. We sorted out insurance for it, which was amazingly cheap in contrast to UK. Incidentally petrol works out at about 50p a litre here. A very productive day!

The next day we went to Bendigo, a town (sorry, city) about an hour drive away. Bendigo is famous for its gold mine, which we went down after a bit of shopping. We then went gold digging and found some. It was ironic beause we know a few gold diggers in the UK! Anyway here we are below the surface. Mine is the incorrect way up as I did not know how to rotate it, although I did it with Sarah's photo afterwards. To be updated in the near future with an interesting time in Sydney to come next.