Mooching

So, we've been mooching off of Kane's friends for the past 4 days now. We're staying at their house (in their room, no less), eating their food, and pretty much bothering them all their waking hours (at least when they're home). They are extremely gracious to have us here, and it's been really great. Fortunately for them, there is a light at the end of the tunnel as we have booked our next move.

Kane and I are both eager to get jobs and a place to live; vagrancy hasn't been as welcome in our lives as we might have imagined. We both seem to long for something to work for, which would in fact be just that - work. So, we're moseying on down to Melbourne where we anticipate that we will settle. We have booked a temporary apartment for the next two weeks, which we hope to use as a home base to find permanent housing and jobs. People are going on "holiday" for the holidays and are renting their places out to travelers like us. We were really lucky to find the place we did at the time we did and I hope it all works out ok. We fly down on Friday and move in Saturday.

We explored Sydney downtown a bit yesterday, it rained today. We went to Darling Harbor and walked around. It's relatively comparable to Pier 39 in San Francisco except less tacky, and I would actually readily compare Sydney in general to San Francisco. Except there are not the hordes of homeless people waiting to accost you. Plus, I don't know if they have the crappy areas that SF does; we were more in the area like the financial district - downtown Market Street. It was fun. The weather is supposed to be nice tomorrow and we plan to hit up the other half of downtown with the opera house, etc.

One comment that Kane would like me to mention is the lunch we had while we were downtown, specifically, the lunch he had. We were wary of having lunch downtown; all restaurants appear to be very expensive here. So, it would be fitting that the tourist area on the harbor would be the most expensive. There were a plethora of nice restaurants, packed with savvy white collar folks who work downtown. Typical lunches were over $20 a person. We weren't into that, so we went a block away from the harbor are and found a nice cafe with cheaper sandwiches. I got a veggie burger and Kane got a chicken sandwich costing $9.50 combined. My veggie burger was very mediocre, but Kane's chicken sandwich was quite interesting. To his surprise, in addition to chicken, tomato, and lettuce, this sandwich also included beets, a fried egg, ham, and a slice of pineapple. It looked nasty to me but he seemed to like it, even commenting how he could go for another one today. Weird Australians...