Sorry for the Group Email

After five months, 10 countries and more than 18,000 miles, most of them overland, we arrived in Sydney.

Its first impression couldn’t have been better. Where were the touts? Where were the open sewers? Where was the low-hanging, choking fug of blue pollution threatening the snuff out the life of anything with lungs made of anything less the titanium? The drawback is the price, of course, and for the first week we paid a princely AU$65 a night for the priviledge of a small room, overlooked by offices, past which there was a constant stream of drunk students, whose opening hours began at midnight and ended with noisy abandon at five in the morning. One day we came out of our room to find a man wearing skintight, black-and-white-striped tights, vomiting into a bin.

We’re staying somewhere else now.

Sydney is not entirely unlike Singapore. Its streets are meticulously clean and wide, its people cheery and seemingly not disposed to bouts of government overthrow and rioting, as they were in Jakarta two days before we got there. Its prices are fixed and there’s no haggling: good news for an inveterate wimp like me.

Accommodation proved complicated. We found a beautiful studio on the Gumtree, which we visited and loved. Its occupant, Kayla* was going away for five weeks, and would let us have the place, with its expansive windows and basement gym and sauna, for a song. Bills were included. It was great.

Five days before we were due to move in Mendy had a phone call. It was Kayla.

“Hi, Dave. You know how I said bills were included? Well, I had an offer from my friend, who said she would pay all her bills if I let her move in. Could you pay bills, d’ya think?”

“Um, no. You said bills were included when we saw you last weekend. We shook on it, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Ok then.”

There was a short silence.

“Can we still move in?”

“Yeah, yeah, no worries! I like you better than my friend anyway. You seem more reliable.”

“Because we can find somewhere else if you’d rather let the flat to someone else.”

“No, no. You guys can definitely move in.”

Five days later, and 18 hours before we were set to move in, I phoned Kayla to find out what time we should arrive. Her phone rang through to voicemail, and five minutes later we received a text message to the effect that she had decided not to sublet her flat after all, and gosh, was she ever sorry for the inconvenience.

By this time, of course, we were wandering around Sydney with AU$1,500 in cash in our pockets. We were not best pleased.

Still, Sydney is one of the most photogenic cities we could care to be in. Its skies are blue and its buildings sparkle. Harbour bridge dominates the skyline and its parks are crowd-free. There is, inevitably, a burgeoning collection of photos over on Flickr.

So here’s what’s going to happen now

I have a job. Just after we arrived in Sydney the editor of lovely computer magazine PC Authority, Australia’s best (honest) technology magazine, left. Among his discarded belongings and two years’ worth of empty coffee mugs he left my email address and a reference, so I’ll be working there. With a bit of luck, work will finish on a Friday and Mendy and I will spend our weekends roaming the wine country, hanging out at the Opera house (although I’m thinking opera may be the kind of acquired taste that neither of us has the stamina for), and wearing those hats with the corks suspended on bits of string around the brim.

You know in magazines how there’s a lovely chunky features section full of things to settle down and read when you have a quiet 15 minutes? And then there’s a nice bitty section at the beginning with things you can read while you make the toast? Think of SFTGE in those terms for a few months. The main section (what you’re reading now) is where you’ll find suggestions of things to do in Australia - climbing Harbour bridge and skydiving are just two of the things Mendy will be doing while I have nervous breakdowns nearby. For the every day minutiae of what it’s like to actually live and work in Sydney, you should really have a look at the new blog, SFTGE: Sydney. SFTGE: S will work like any other blog. It’ll be better, of course, so if you’ve got the unsettling urge to hear me rally against crap PR, read my stream-of-consciousness thoughts on nearly anything, and repeatedly read the phrase “worst idea in the world, ever“, that’s where you should go. Usefully, both the SFTGE main section and SFTGE: S have RSS readers in their sidebars, so it should be easy to see when one’s been updated.

Oh, and thanks for reading. The comments left by the small but loyal band of nutters that read SFTGE made writing it worthwhile. Indeed, writing it at all made some of our more terrible bus journeys worth the pain. The fact that some of you are editors even made me spellcheck it once in a while.

Now go and do some work. If I have to, so do you.

Dave kind of misses the touts, actually.

*name has been changed to protect the moronic.