Quick Jump: The House | Our Room | The Housemates | The Housecats
So, here it is, the first actual place where we actually lived as
official (though temporary) residents of Oz. We lived here from the first
week of February until the first week of June, when we moved to a
one-bedroom place with more privacy.
The house was a terrace-style, two-story building wedged up against more
terraces on the left and a little cafe shop to the right.
It had a stone-paved BBQ patio out the back door with high solid fences on
both sides (and, for many weeks, a beautiful huge spider web, shown left).
Off the patio there was a small laundry room, too, so that was a bonus--
although the drying technique of choice here in Sydney seems to be
line-drying. In addition to all this, the house included a lounge room with
cable TV, a DVD player, and a VCR, and the selling point for us: free
wireless internet.
The kitchen, as you can see, was
modern on the surface, though its outfittings were perhaps not up to Chad's
standards. As you can also see, he managed to make do...
The best part was the location: ten minute walk from Darling Harbour,
fifteen minute walk from Paddy's Markets and Chinatown, fifteen minute walk
from the Broadway Shopping Centre (a city mall with grocery stores, three
banks, a movie theatre, and a K-Mart), twenty minute walk from the
University of Sydney, and ten minutes from Central Station, where all the
city trains, intercity trains, and city busses originate. From our street
you could see the city skyline (though not the Harbour Bridge or the Opera
House), while half a block away was quiet green space in a city park. Out
our front door was the campus of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS),
so the neighborhood was pretty quiet at night, and the suburb (which more or
less means "neighborhood" rather than "suburb" in the American sense) of
Glebe was adjacent to Ultimo, where there were plenty of good crunchy cafes
there for breakfast and lunches.
...although when the nights started
to get chilly, we added a down comforter (purchased at the grocery store for
only $25!) with brighter colors.
For all its comforts and conveniences, though, the toughest part of
living in the share house was the fact that our room had only had space for
one desk as a workspace. So, only one of us could work comfortably in our
own space, while the other had to lie on the bed, or sit at the busy kitchen
table near the open back door, or leave the house altogether to work.
Since it was a share house, we inevitably had to share the house with
other people. Initially, we had chosen a share house because we wanted to
get to know people, especially Australians, rather than spend all of our
time alone. Three of the five bedrooms in the house were actually doubles,
so most of the time we lived there, we had eight people living in the house,
which was rather crowded. Eight people using one bathroom, one shower
(which fortunately never ran out of hot water), one kitchen, one television.
About the time we made arrangements to move to a new place, it was
starting to get cool (being fall in May) and we learned that our housemates,
Australian and otherwise, had never heard of a chili cook-off. (Some of
them weren't even sure what chili was.) So, we decided to remedy this by
inviting them all together for a good ol-fashioned chili dinner.
Less than two weeks after we moved in, Leslie asked if we would mind if
she adopted a cat. She took Sarah to the shelter with her and they
(unsurprisingly) came home with two cats-- Barry, a six-month old tabby and
white kitten with spunk, and Slinky, a tiny six-week old tabby cat with
attitude issues. For four months we got to live with kitties again... which
was both entertaining (because they were cute and funny) as well as
frustrating (because we disagreed with some of the choices made by their
owner).
Barry, sometimes known as Barry-mundi or Barry-cuda, was the more
affectionate of the two and had a particular liking for the desk chair in
our room, where he kindly left his fleas. He also seemed to like Chad's
iced tea glass, which fit his head rather well.
Slinky, who started out extremely sick and rather skittish, gradually
grew to be a respectable size and sometimes slightly friendly with people.
Our television never got very good antenna reception-- can you adjust those
rabbit ears?
Ah, kitties were nice... but in the end, they were not a replacement for
our own dorks back at home.
Our Room
The share house had five bedrooms: three
upstairs, ours (pictured left and below right) just inside the front door, and then one more
out behind the house. The rooms all came "fully furnished," which meant
that both furniture and linens were supplied... although, unsurprisingly, D
was dissatisfied with the linens provided. The sheets were replaced almost
immediately and the green blanket added to the bed...
We also decorated the walls a bit to make
it feel not quite so bare. Most of our wall decorations functioned either
to 1) help us get oriented to where we were going, or 2) help us remember
the comforts of where we came from. Hence, the large map of Australia, and
the postcard-style scenes of some of the most picturesque places around the
country... which came from a dismantled small calendar.
Then, too, there were all the cards and postcards from back home to remind
us that we had not been forgotten.
The Housemates
Brooke (left)
Leslie & Frank (right)
Sunil (left)
Sarah & Kieran (right)
above left: Our housemates around the dinner table (clockwise from bottom
left) - Frank, Leslie, Neil (Leslie's brother), Cam, Brooke, & Chad
The Housecats
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