One Week Down

Hello everybody. I find it hard to believe that we've been here for nearly a full week already. It has been a weird, productive, overall fun week. We've been taking pictures to post along with these writings, but our shipped packages just arrived about an hour ago, and the cord connecting our camera to the computer was packed away. So we'll try to get some pictures posted over the weekend. Otherwise, here's what we've been up to all week:
-Lots of walking around. We've visited a variety of restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, liquor shops (they only sell alcoholic beverages of any kind at specific beer, wine, and spirits shops), Monash University campus, the Immigration office, a large mall (which even had a Target!), our bank, the cell phone place, and even a KMART.
*My most amazing discovery related to restaurants here so far is that some of them are BYOB! I tried to order a glass of wine with dinner at this little Italian place on Sunday night, and the waitress very kindly informed me that they were a BYO restaurant. Lucky for me, there was a liquor shop right next door and my loving husband, seeing the desperation in my eyes for a glass of red wine, jumped into action and went and bought us a bottle. And sure enough, the next people to walk into the restaurant were each carrying their very own bottles of wine and beer. Shocking!
-I've been taking the bus a lot, and am proud to say that I have pretty much mastered Route 703 that runs directly in front of our apartment. I've also spent a tremendous amount of time in the Monash Uni. library computer lab (kinda illegally- I have to use Andy's staff log-in to use the computers. Hopefully I won't get busted).
-Andy started work on Monday at the lovely (aka: nearly sleep-in late!) hour of 9:30am. His office is just 2 buildings down the street from our temporary apartment, so he currently only has about a 5 minute walk commute.
-I've been searching out possible furnished apartment rentals for us and saw my first one yesterday. Not exactly what we're looking for, but not a bad start for a brand new city. We're hoping to see a few more this weekend. We're definitely feeling somewhat unsettled and wrinkled still living directly out of our luggage, and are looking forward to getting our own place with a land-line for making and receiving phone calls, and some home internet access. As always, my hope for a pool wherever we reside lives on :)
-We've been catching up on some good evening couch time and watching a variety of Australian TV.

I guess that is about it for now. We are well, happy, and headed to go purchase some bikes, followed by our first Friday night trip to the local pub (hopefully- if we can find it :) Oh, which reminds me- we shouldn't have any trouble at all finding it b/c Andy is the proud, relunctant owner of his very first cell phone! And his came loaded with a bunch of Navigational maps. Our cell phone numbers are: Andy 0430510801 Christy 0430510802

Happy Labor Day weekend there in the states! Cheers! xoxoxoxo

Christy