Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our family + friends back home in America! 

Yesterday we hosted a small thanksgiving celebration at our flat

[ Proof that I cooked :) ]

 [ Yummy Australian sweets from Tara ]

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving!

We missed all of you!

xo

Sydney : Part 3

We woke up early Monday morning to take the ferry back into downtown Sydney. 

[ Taking the ferry is officially the best mode of public transportation ]

Unfortunately we only had a few hours to walk around before we had to head back to Canberra.

Sydney is one of the most Beautiful, cultured, clean and amazing cities I've ever been to. 

Here are a few pictures from our day

Beautiful purple trees all over Sydney

Fish & Chips on the water

Sydney : Part 2

After dinner we took the ferry into downtown Sydney with Daniel and a few of his friends to See a hip hop concert at the Sydney opera house! 

It was a very surreal moment taking the ferry into the city, at sunset to go to the famous Sydney opera house! While on the ferry We drove right past the Sydney opera house and the harbor bridge. 

It was absolutely breathtaking. 

It is hard to believe that people take this ferry into the city for work everyday!
After the concert we all went outside and had a drink at the opera house bar which is right on the water overlooking the harbor bridge

 It was an unreal view of the opera house/ water/ harbor bridge.

Sydney : Part 1

Jeremy had another off day on sunday so we decided to go to Sydney! 

We have very special friends who live in Sydney and we are so lucky that we were able to see them and spend the night at their house! The Finks met my parents when they moved to Philadelphia in in 1986. 

 As Tamar told the story: She and her husband had just moved to Philadelphia with their 3 year old son Daniel. They knew no one and enrolled Daniel in pre school at the JCC- where I also happened to be attending pre school. On the first day of school my mom came over and introduced herself and invited them over for the Jewish holidays when she found out they had no family in Philadelphia ( my mom is the sweetest person in the world)
Daniel and I became good friends went to school together until they moved back to Australia 3 years later.

As soon as we arrived in Sydney Tamar took us on a " Randee tour" of Bondi beach, which is the town they live in.  If you don't know my mom a " Randee tour" is when you see lots of sights in a city in a short amount of time and do lots... of ... walking!! 

LOTS!  

Yes, that is a swimming pool ON the ocean. Tamar took swimming lessons there as a child.

10/31

A  few years ago my sister EJ studied abroad in Spain for the summer. Before she left I bought her a bunch of different greeting cards, wrote inside each one, and then wrote a date on each envelope. I told her she couldn’t open up the card until the date written on the outside of the envelope. I spread out the dates so she would have a card to open once a week or every other week while she was away in case she ever got homesick or needed something to cheer her up! 

A few years after Spain EJ moved to Costa Rica for a year, so I sent her with another stack of cards with dates on the envelopes!

As Jeremy and I were leaving for the Airport to go to Australia my mom handed us a stack of cards for each of us with dates on the envelopes. We opened our first cards on the plane but had to wait to open the rest.  

We were all sitting around on October 31 discussing how strange it is that they don’t celebrate Halloween in Australia when I remembered we had cards we were allowed to open on 10/31!   

It definitely brightened my day to get to open a card from my mom! 

Looking forward to opening the rest over the next few months….

Thanks mama, I love you!

Pebbly Beach

We finally had our first Australia adventure! 

We all had the day off on Sunday and decided we needed to leave Canberra and go on an adventure! 7 of us decided to drive to Pebbly Beach and go camping for the night. Pebbly Beach is about 2 hours away from Canberra – However it took us closer to 4 ½ to get there, since we got lost [about 3 separate times]

Getting lost has become a part of our daily life.  It is basically guaranteed that we will get lost every. single. time we leave the house. None of us have smart phones or a GPS so we have to rely on these things called paper maps- remember those?!

Once we arrived at our camp site the long car ride seemed worth it! We stayed on a beautiful site that had a tropical pool, bar, cabins and was right on the most gorgeous beach.  As I was unpacking the car when Jeremy came running over and told me they found a bunch of kangaroos just laying around a few feet away. We all ran over and were able to sit around with the Kangaroos and take pictures! Little did we know we would spend the rest of the day with these roos! 

After our exciting encounter with the Roos we all put on sneakers and went rock climbing down the beach. It is hard to even describe the beach. The camp site is basically in the woods and then all of the sudden it just opens up to this amazing teal blue ocean water. The beach was surrounded by beautiful and intense rocks that we went climbing on. The pictures don’t even do it justice but I hope you can get an idea of what we saw.

 

to be continued.. 

Red Hill