Day 4

We found a place! Well we found a temporary place to live, the housing market in Sydney is very different than that in the states, For one it is a seller’s market there are more buyers than properties which making finding prime real estate a hard thing to do it also drives up cost, so here is how it works here, there really is no such thing as an “apartment complex” where you walk into a leasing office they show you the floor plans and you decide on one of the many available units, pretty much every property here is rented through a real estate agency, and you can only see the property during inspection times, which are normally on Saturday in 15 minute increments, so if you were to like a property in two different areas chances are you will not get to see that property. If you wait until the next week to see the one you missed you will more than likely miss out on both. So you pretty much have to narrow down the place you want in the area you want and be there for the inspection so that you can be ready to put in an application.

Speaking of which everything is sooo expensive in this city for example our price range or rather the most we are willing to pay is 800 a week (yes I said week) for rent, that should get us a nice place, mind you not penthouse overlooking the ocean or, terrace overlooking the harbor, just a nice place. So most places charge a Bond or what we refer to as a deposit, this bond is normally 4 weeks rent so in our example if I went to go see a house and wanted to get it that day. I would have to bring 1st month’s rent plus a Bond, which in this case would be 6,400 to move in. which to me is crazy, but when in rome!

So since our last day at the hotel is tomorrow and we had not had time to look at all the areas we decide to go into a two month short term lease with a landlord that was advertising his place on Gumtree (their craigslist equivalent)…It’s a very nice studio apartment in the potts point area, not the end game, but it will do for now. Lets see what else has happened, um Stephanie is still, STILL on US time she falls asleep every day around 5-6pm which is like she stayed up to 4am US time. She has not been able to sleep thru the night yet it is 1am on Monday morning as I am typing this and I am sure she will wake up in able an hour, with nothing to do.

Still no iphone, we were told that we could not get a plan until we had an address, so now that we have one we are going to go to the bank tomorrow, change our address, try to find a vodaphone location that has the iphone4 and hopefully get hooked up.
Now that all of the business is taken care of, next week you should see some Pictures and videos of our travels, as I will finally have the time to take some!