Friday, November 13, 2009

Whew, my feet are really killing me tonight! We went for a VERY long walk today!! Mike needed a haircut and so, after asking our 'landlords' for recommendations, we headed off downtown. When we got back home, Mike went on our gps program to figure out how far we had walked and it was 4km there and 4km back. And, not to mention, but there were a number of hills mixed in there as well. Somehow, on the way down, I didn't notice the downhills, so I was surprised when we came home and had to walk up a number of hills. :-)

When we got to the barber, we found him sitting in a chair and he didn't even get up when we came in. After telling him that Mike wanted a haircut, he got up and walked into the area where he actually cut the hair. He was an older gentleman (about 70) and once he got Mike in the chair, he started up a good chat - turns out he has been here 30 years and quite likes it here. I thought he did an okay job on Mike's hair - it's not what we're used to back in Canada, but for $12. here, you can't complain too much as the average men's haircut is $20. Just as an aside, the taxes are included in everything you buy here and there is no tipping.

After that, we walked over to Coles (one of the two big supermarkets here) to grab a few things we were running out of) and then to Big W (like Walmart) to get a few things that we needed around here (pegs, tea towels, dish cloths, hangars, toothpaste). Our last stop before walking home was a stop at Hungry Jack's (Burger King) to get an ice-cream 'for the road'. :-) It only costs 50c and so that's a cheap treat.

I bought the pegs because I now have to hang all my clothes on the line once they are washed. Very few people dry their clothes in a dryer over here as the weather is so warm all the time and the cost of electricity is quite expensive. I am a bit of a slow hanger upper when it comes to this, but I am sure that I will be able to do it faster the more experience I get. Mike actually hung our stuff up yesterday as the clothes line that is up outside our granny flat is really high and I can't reach it. Our clothes were dry really fast - it was amazing to me how quickly they did.

After we arrived home, Julianne came by with a tv and dvd player - she had called me in the morning before our walk to tell me that she had two tvs and asked us would we like one plus a dvd player to use while we are here. We jumped at the chance simply because sometimes we are so tired in the evening and just want to veg in front of the tv. She also told us that Blockbuster has a $1 per video special on Tuesday nights, so we are going to have 'Video Nights' every Tuesday - I am sure we can find something to rent for that price.

One thing that I have to get used to here is having to turn off all the switches on the plugs after we finish using them. The voltage is 220 volts here and so all the outlets have an on/off switch on them. This is because of the high voltage, but also to conserve power. So, for instance, when we are not watching tv, we turn the switch off and that stops the small power draw for the instant on feature.

After dinner, we did watch a little tv - when we were at Ruth's in Sydney, she had some dvds of a program called 'Midsommer Murders' - it's a british detective show - and we quite like them - tonight they had an episode of that on tv. There are five stations here that you can get 'free to air' as they call it. SBS is a multicultural station (like Omni TV in Toronto), ABC1 is a public broadcasting station (like TVO in Toronto) and Channels 7, 9, and 10 would be your regular tv stations (like ABC, CBS, and NBC). It would be easy to watch tv all the time if we wanted, but we decided tonight to only watch tv when we really liked a program - not to have it running all the time.