Milner Rd

Milner Rd

This is the second Milner Rd that I've found in Australia. This one is in Alice Springs. We found it on the way to the caravan park.

We've been in Sydney for a week now. I've had two days of temping, both days at a bank's office. The same bank, but different office towers downtown. The first day I was putting color coded balloons on desks to help the IBM consultants to know what type of computers to deliver on what desk. They will be moving almost 200 people into the office over the weekend. The second job was to make nameplate and name tags for the banks federal budget announcement dinner. This one took the whole day and will probably take most of Monday as well.

The 'E' on my keyboard broke off. It's a bit of a pain in the butt. There are two clip on the bottom of the key that attach it to the keyboard and one is broken, so I can put it back on, but if I type in a certain way it comes back off pretty easily. I looked up keyboard prices online and a new one seems to be $60. It's something that I could probably do myself as I have actually removed and reinstalled laptop keyboards in the past. It's probably one of the easiest fixes to do because you have to take the keyboard out to fix anything else in there anyway.

Sydney is nice. We stayed in a hostel for a couple of days and now we are in an apartment. We almost took one downtown that has a killer view of the opera house and harbour bridge, but they wanted $450/week. As it is, we are paying $300/week for the flat where we are and we have two roomates.

The enterance to our flat is on the 12th floor, but our bedroom, the livingroom and the kitchen are on the 13th. Our roomates are on the 12th floor. One of the room mates works for company that rents the apartments out. He says that to buy a place like this would probably cost $500,000. I was reading in the paper today that since the end of 2003 property values have dropped almost 10% which means that if you bought a property at the end of 2003 and put 10% down, and you sell it today, you'll end up owing the bank money after the property is gone.

Sydney comes in 6th in the list of the 100 most expensive places to live in the entire world based on affordablitiy of homes. Sydneysiders should be prepared to rent for the rest of their lives unless they already own property.

We went to Bondi Beach today and to tell the truth, I don't see what the big deal about that beach is. I guess it's famous for being famous more than anything. It's pretty small, and almost always crowded. There were lots of people there today even though I wouldn't have called it a really warm day. In fact autumn is upon us, some of the leaves are turning yellow around town.

More from Sydney later.

-Gary Milner