Bless us, Father, for we have procrastinated. It’s been three months since our last blog entry. Since then we have got ourselves a Sydney apartment, jobs, possible sponsorship and a couch. At the same time there’s been plenty of ale-fuelled culinary debauchery. We haven’t said any Hail Marys but one guy did ask Marie if she’d ever heard of his friend Jesus, which was funny. The reason we haven’t updated the travel blog is because we haven’t done a lot of travelling, and settling blog doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Australia seems strange when you first arrive from Europe. The seasons are reversed and the stars are upside-down. In the winter the trees keep their leaves but shed their bark. The days are hot and bright but very short – with no twilight. At night the temperature can drop by 20°C. Kangaroos- no matter how much footage you’ve seen of them- never fail to impress and seem slightly unreal when you see them bouncing swiftly and perfectly balanced along the road for the first time. The spiders are venomous and the jellyfish are lethal. The birds are colourful, screeching things that cluster in the trees in their hundreds at night and cause a ruckus. How strange is must have been for the convicts on the first fleet. Could we call this place home?

As a bit of a reminder – we spent six weeks in Melbourne and, though we really liked the city, failed to find work. So after a fantastic trip home- where we emailed our polished CVs to recruitment agencies- we landed in Sydney with one night’s accommodation, an old Ford Falcon, two backpacks and not much else. I got a call for a job interview as soon as we landed. Sydney was looking good already.

Immediately we looked up some affordable apartments on the internet, called some people, and got our hopes up only to discover on arrival that every single one of the “apartments” was either mobile, above a brothel or located on a street that we thought felt “a bit stabby”.  We quickly realised that the definition of “affordable” would need to change and we’d need to save up some funds before looking for a permanent address.

We knew we didn’t want to live in the Eastern suburbs – where most beach-seeking white-as-snow Irish backpackers live, get drunk, get seriously sunburned, get into fights and then overstay their visas. Quite by accident, and thanks to Google Maps, we found a clean and friendly hostel/B&B in an urbanised area called Newtown and quickly booked a week. This would turn out to be the best decision ever.

Newtown transformed our experience of Sydney. Melbourne and Dublin are both cities with relatively small, lively centres where you can easily walk from one place to the next – and are hopping at the weekend. Sydney city centre, on the other hand, dies at the weekend. Aside from the fantastically impressive harbour area, Sydney CBD is dominated by suits and skyscrapers, and feels a bit too corporate to really have fun in. On top of that, the prices are daunting. Thus most of the backpackers we met on our travels didn’t like Sydney. In fact, everyone we met who wasn’t from Sydney didn’t like Sydney.  We were hoping we wouldn’t end up feeling the same.

What we didn’t know then was that Sydney is all about the suburbs. The reason the city centre empties at the weekend is because everybody moves out to the much more diverse and affordable suburbs to eat, drink and watch rugby league. Newtown is as much at the heart of this as it can be. If you’d rather be walking the streets than lolling around the beach, this is the place to be. Newtown’s main artery is King Street, which feels endless with well over 2km of restaurants, pubs, bakeries, seedy bookshops and fancy paper stores. Every type of food you could want is available- if you know where to look, and all at fantastically tempting prices. A few minutes walk from the busy, slightly grungy main street lie quiet well-established leafy suburbs where every single house is unique. A few minutes walk beyond that is the train station with its long hulking double-decker trains which are so big it’s impressive they get them to move at all. We’d found where we wanted to live.

Things moved quickly. Within two weeks we were both working full time, and within eight weeks we’d both found permanent roles. Marie was offered sponsorship immediately. Next step – find somewhere to live.

The competition for apartments in Sydney is fierce – people don’t tend to come to Australia for short holidays. You need enthusiasm, savings and ten types of identification to rent a property. It took us a while to get all that together, but eventually we found a place that we liked so much that we filled in the long-and-complicated online application before we even went to the viewing. “That’s very impressive, that you did that”, said the estate agent, “but you’ll need to fill out this paper application now as the girls in the office don’t read those online ones.”

There was one other couple at the viewing who looked very interested, and more established. We rushed home- filled out the paper applications- photocopied the required passports, bank statements, credit cards, rent receipts, visa numbers, character references, biometric scans and scrabble scores – and hurried straight down to the estate agent’s office to drop in the application. The other couple were there too. We eyed each other up suspiciously while pretending that we didn’t recognise each other.

On Monday morning we got the call to say the apartment was ours. Finally! – some space in which to move. No more Germans (and it’s always Germans*) hogging the kitchen, no more walking outside at night to go to the bathroom, no more food thievery, no more arriving down to breakfast at 10am on a Saturday and finding a whole death metal band sitting at your table drinking beer…

The annoying thing about rental properties in Sydney is that they come with nothing- literally nothing. So we had to rent a fridge, buy cutlery, pick up a second hand mattress and go on several trips to IKEA before our apartment was in any way liveable. It seems that if everybody in Sydney could just agree to leave their stuff where it is when they move, it’d save everybody a lot of hassle. On second thoughts – maybe this is why the Australian economy is so strong.

And here we are. It took a lot of work to get this far. The next aim is to get fully sponsored so we can stay with no restrictions. Marie’s job looks like it’ll provide some interesting opportunities – she’s off on a business trip to Cambodia soon, and I’m going along as her partner. Included in the trip, while the business people do their business stuff, is a half-day “spa and pampering session” with the other partners. I think I may go the bar and write the next travel blog entry instead.

*Nothing against Germans by the way, we’ve met some fantastic Germans, but they do tend to hog the kitchen.