From Sydney to Hong Kong

1. (top left) Steven and I spent our last day in Sydney being the best tourists we could be: walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, shopping for souvenirs, and having our last Australian Starbucks!

2. I think Starbucks cards make pretty good souvenirs! They are printed with all those touristy things like the Sydney Bridge or kangaroos and stuff like that. They are also technically useable back home even though it would make no sense to use an Australian card to spend Canadian dollars in Canada...

3. Steven and I ordered a pizza from Crust for our last meal as we were busy packing and had no energy to go out and eat. I think I will miss this pizza: loaded with veggies and topped with a delicious pesto aioli. 

4. Skip ahead about 12 hours and BOOM we are waking up in Hong Kong! The flight was hard on my poor motion-sick stomach, but Steven seemed to have a great time watching all the movies and chowing down. I'm always so jealous of people that can so thoroughly enjoy themselves on flights. Don't they know I can barely move my eyeballs without wanting to throw up?!

5. (bottom left) This is Steven's new favourite Hong Kong thing: iced milk tea but with the ice on the outside so as not to dilute the precious tea on the inside. He had two in one sitting today, and I think he will have more later. If it were his choice, he probably would hook himself up to one of those beer helmets, but instead of beer, pipe HK milk tea straight into his mouth.

Arriving in Perth, Australia

It's been a long week, Blogger World. I finally made it through my last week of work, training my replacements (yes, my job is so important I've trained 2 people to do it), packing, and moving all our 7 months of Sydney living into 3 big luggages and 2 backpacks.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that Steven and I have wrapped up our working lives in Sydney and will be spending the next few months traveling and exploring Australia and Asia. This last week at work has been an emotional doozy. I guess I was pretty well-regarded and appreciated in my job, as I got a farewell dinner, a beautiful card, and the well wishes from all my co-workers and my employer. Farewells and "last time to do ---"s always make me emotional.

Like this: One of my last morning commutes over the Sydney Harbour Bridge with the opera house down below: (sigh)

My boss even took me out for one last lunch at Aboutlife, which is a popular health food shop in Bondi Junction. Like a true adult, I had this "healthy" tiramisu for my lunch. Made of nuts, cacao and all sorts of other healthy stuff, I was STUFFED by the time I scraped the bottom of the cup. Nuts and seeds are filling, guys, but not a true tiramisu do they make. Nothing can replace the soft, fluffy cream and cake of a true tiramisu.

On my last day, I left work a few hours early, confident that my replacement could handle everything, and went home to pack.

It is a LOT of work sorting through the items that would come with me for my 3 week trek through Australia, and the items that would stay in the luggage in Sydney, awaiting our onward journey to Asia. Especially since I had worked all the way up until the day before we would leave, there were a lot of things to be thrown away, donated, or wrapped up.

I finally filtered all the stuff that I didn't need from stuff that was really necessary and got this:

This is the backpack that I would be carrying for the next 3 weeks in Australia... I hope it's enough!

This morning, Steven and I got up at 3:30 AM to get to the airport for 6 AM. After an extremely smooth check-in, we boarded the plane. I took a Travelcalm (for motion sickness) "non-drowsy" and fell asleep immediately. The motion sickness drugs always make me feel like I'm weak and jello-y, and I never really knew why. The pharmacist this time explained it to me in a face-palm, obvious kind of way: Motion sickness drugs are muscle relaxants. Like DUH. No wonder I would feel jello-y, HELLO Bachelors in Science, I'm an idiot.

Before we knew it, we had arrived in Perth.

Let the Western Australia adventure begin!