Mee and I were in Melbourne just this morning and now, I am typing on the bed of a hotel in Sydney. The weather here is quite warm compared to Melbourne. We reached Sydney’s airport at about 2010 and 30 minutes later, we were in our hotel room. We then went out for a walk and the city was still full of people. I guess it’s because of the long weekend break. A lot of my friends said to me that they felt like they were in another country when they arrived in London. Well, I felt the same when I walked around Sydney just now.

This morning, our friend brought us to the Werribee open range zoo as agreed. The weather was cool and sunny occasionally. With the entrance fee, we got a free bus tour. To be honest, the bus tour was the only exciting thing offered by the zoo. At least on the bus, we got to see some animals. After the bus tour, there were nothing much to see. The variety of animals was just too limited. We still very much prefer the Perth’s wildlife zoo. After that, we went back Point Cook town near our friend’s home for lunch. We settled for Nando’s. While on our way back, we saw some discount window on display. Our friend was quite interested with the offer but she couldn’t do much about it as she will be moving to Sydney in a week’s time because of her work. Her house will be rented out after she left and she wonders when she will be back to Melbourne.

Today is not as sunny as yesterday. In fact, it is cloudy at the moment. I am watching tv at the moment and every channel I switch to, it is almost always advertisement. Like UK, the advertisement in the afternoon is always about sales, loans, discounts and of course, easter sales as it is good friday this week and easter Monday next week. Some advertisement that we don’t normally see UK is about whispbar roof racks at cracksandracks.com. I think it’s because of the weather here where the materials used to built the houses here are different from UK. In fact, it’s very similar to Malaysia except that the houses here are a lot bigger.

The weather in Melbourne is kind of temperamental. It can be hot in a moment and chilly next. Like now, it’s quite windy. It’s quite hard to decide what to wear for the day. In addition, they rely on the national weather forecast for the day’s weather. As we have missed the opportunity of visiting the Werribee open range zoo today, we have decided to go there tomorrow instead. Should be an exciting day tomorrow before leaving for Sydney!

A question that always come to our mind before travelling is how much foreign currency should we buy. Mee and I both think that we won’t be coming back to Australia in the near future. Hence, it’s best if we could spend it all and we decided to not buy too much Australian dollars. We were a bit wrong as we spent almost half of our money during our time in Perth. The living expenses in Australia is quite high though Australians seem to earn a lot compared to other countries.

Take for example, Mee and I bought a SIM card just for the sake of convenience. The hotels that we booked in Sydney and Gold Coast do not provide free WiFi and we kind of need the internet while we are there. Anyway, the SIM card costs from AUD2 to AUD5 and a minimum recharge from AUD19 depending on the service providers. And every recharge has an expiry date. I thought expiry date was history. My friend in Perth told me that it costs them AUD60 for internet connection only with a 50GB allowance per month. Every meal costs at least AUD10 and the cheapest meal you can get is fast food like McDonald.

I guess Mee and I will have to eat a lot of cup noodles while we are in Sydney and Gold Coast.

Haha… My previous blog post wasn’t really relevant to its title. Well, at the time of typing that blog post, Mee and I were actually at Perth’s airport, waiting to fly to Melbourne. Nevertheless, we are in Melbourne now. Unfortunately, I am not feeling too well since yesterday. I am at Mee’s friend’s home now while both of them went to Melbourne city. I am actually a lot better now and I do hope that I will be fully recovered today. We were supposed to go to Werribee open range zoo today but I was too tired. I guess the tireness was also because we went on a Great Ocean Road tour yesterday. It was a full day tour from 0800 to 1930. There were a lot of stops and we had to get on and off the bus very frequently. Also, the weather was really hot but we felt cold when the wind blew. Hot and cold don’t work well for me I suppose.

Mee’s friend suggested that I go and see a doctor this morning but then again, we will probably be send to buy medicine from pharmacy instead which Mee and I had already done yesterday. If I don’t get better, I might have to visit the hospital! The idea of seeing the wards and hospital carts doesn’t sound very good at all!

By the way, Mee and I paid about AUD87.50 per person online for the Great Ocean Road tour. However, when I looked at the company brochure, it will cost AUD160 per person to book at the visitor centre. That’s almost 50 percent more than what we paid.

It’s been a great few days in Perth. Yesterday, our friend dropped us off in Perth’s Chinatown after picking up her daughter. We then went around Chinatown on our own before heading towards Perth city. In Chinatown, we ate lunch twice; once at a Hong Kong BBQ restaurant and once at Penang House Restaurant. Mee was quite disappointed when she found out that the Penang House Restaurant no longer sell assam laksa. After lunch, we walked to Perth city with is just south of Chinatown. In fact, Perth’s Chinatown is not on the map, it’s just happened to have a lot of chinese shops around the area.

At Perth city, we took the advantage of the free CAT buses to take us around. There are three CAT buses lines which covered most of the tourist areas, if not all. Honestly, Perth city is quite small. On a good day, it should take just half a day to cover all the tourist areas. We were a bit unlucky as it rained intermittently throughout the day.

Our final stop was the Perth mint. It’s a place where they process golds and silvers into gold bars,
personalized coins and the likes. We didn’t join the tour as we thought it would be quite similar to the one that we went to in Amsterdam.

Eight more days and Mee and I will be doing our first out of nine flights. We haven’t started packing and I haven’t finished planning the trip stuffs. It all sounds a bit hectic and the worst part is that I feel unusually tired since last night. My muscles are still aching since Sunday’s gym session. I guess I won’t be doing any gym-related things tonight and just take Mee to the gym for her AquaFit session.

By the way, I wonder if I will be needing an umbrella in Australia as all my umbrellas are broken. Might have to make do with just Mee’s umbrella. Mine had broken for quite some time already but I haven’t got the chance to look for a new one mainly because it hasn’t been raining. It’s just one of those things where you don’t think about it until you really need it. Anyway, if only consumer’s umbrellas can be as strong as like the market umbrellas at PatioUmbrellas.com. Those types of umbrella could easily withstand strong winds and bad weather. Mee’s umbrella is quite strong too considering that I have two broken ones and her umbrella is still perfectly fine.

Anyway, I just can’t wait to have a relaxing three weeks holiday.