Three Years!

Yesterday we marked the three year anniversary of our arrival in Australia.  The time here has absolutely flown past!  We are spoiled by the weather and the travel opportunities, and still can't believe how lucky we are to be here.

This winter has seemed to drag on a bit, although it might just be the acclimating to a new style of winter.  We were in Melbourne last weekend and have been to Adelaide and Sydney in the winter months and can tell you, with no hesitation, that Queensland is the place to be in Australia during the winter. 

 

Melbourne City from our hotel on South Wharf

 

Friday Night Game at the MCG

Melbourne was really fun.  We went to the Monet Exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria and then to a football match at the celebrated Melbourne Cricket Grounds, or MCG.  The MCG is legendary as the place to see a footy match and we didn't just see any footy match, we saw a Friday night match between Collingwood and Hawthorn, two of the big Victoria teams.  It was a great game and there was a massive wind storm that uprooted trees going on while we were in the stadium, so it was a pretty exciting time.

 

Wacky Arm Flailing Inflatable Tube Man at the Milton School Winter Festival

 

 

Last Days of Winter in Milton

 

Here in Brisbane the winter has been pretty mild and we are happy to be in the time of year when we can walk to work in the morning.  There are lots of winter festivals going on, because Aussies seem to the think that 20C is so miserable and cold that the only way people will venture out in the winter is if they are bribed with a festivity of some sort.   Three years in and we still laugh at the people who call 20C cold, although JB suffers when it gets below 25C, so one of us is an almost Aussie.  We can't help but think back to when we got here and the end of winter here was warmer than the summer we just left!  We are just about out of winter though, so the sun is rising at a fairly reasonable time of 6:00am, rather than the 4:15am that we get in summer...for the record, North American birds chirping away have nothing on the squawking beasts that we have here!