Why Adelaide?

This is the main reason!

We're here! We arrived in a very relaxed manner tuesday night and booked into the same hotel that we stayed in last time. We both felt much better and it was a pleasant change actually knowing where we staying, what was around and what to expect when we arrived. Almost like, for once, we were coming home. Sad really when you consider it was just a hotel room! Never mind!

Adelaide is lovely and although it does get "freezing" (10 degrees) cold in winter we're more than happy to stay and live here for the rest of 2007. There were several clues that we were too dumb to spot whilst we were here the first time which should have told us that we were to live her right from the start.

1. Adelaide's "mall" - high street to you and me - is full of peices of sculpture.. Including these pigs...
Each one of them has an individual name.:)


2. There are beautiful beaches here which stretch for miles and miles. All white sand and turquoise sea...mmm

3. The central market with all it's sights and smells is just brilliant when you can't decide what you want for lunch. (I've done a little video for you but we'll have to wait a little again..)

All in all we're much happier that this is the place where we can live comfortably for a little while. Which is all good as a certain young lofian would say! :)

It has been a very stressful last few days however. It is really hard to find a furnished rental in Australia. First of all when you rent a place unfurnished here it literaly means you get nothing, not even the white goods. If you rent a place fully furnished it means you get everything... all the furniture, white goods, cups, saucers, pots, pans, sheets, towel, books, everything you could ever need..
There is no inbetween and it costs a lot to rent fully furnished.

Oringially LOF and I were hoping to rent a little 3 bed house with a pool with some furniture in it. We thought we'd have to stock the kitchen, linen and towel departments but that for 375 dollars a week we'd find somewhere lovely. In reality for 37h dollars a week we can rent a completely empty 4 bedroom house by the sea (with no pool) or a 2 bedroom "unit" (flat) which very much resembled Penn Grove - the house I rented in the 2nd year of UNi. Now don't get me wrong I have very fond memories of Penn Grove, Bogus' chair washing up, dunk wandering around in a skirt, Farty Mart appearing at the window and scaring the life out of me - but I didn't fly half way around the world to live in a flat that was last furninshed in 1983! Mmm.. It was interesting to say the least and the poor sales guy was trying really hard to tell us that this was the best deal ever in the world.

To be fair to him it was right by the beach had the right number of bedrooms and space for an office and we could have had broadband in there so it kind of was what we were after. Perhaps the backpackers clothes that we wear most of the time give the impression that we would like to live like students as well as dress like them! Who knows.

We were a littel concerned there for a few days though as the second apartment we saw was even worse! It was in a nicer location thoguh and faced the beach which was great.

The only good thing about going to see this place was that it itroduced us to West Beach and I had changed my mind about only putting house in the search criteria box on realestate.com.au. We were gettng really worried that the only way we were going to live in a nice house was to fork out for furniture or rent it (which turned out to be about the same price as another house's rent!) lol. Not good times. We just had to keep checking the paper and the web until something came up...

and it did...

(I don't know how long the link will work but click on the words it did.)