Radelaide

heehee Hugh is not pleased with me for posting that picture of him :-D

So, now I am in Adelaide, and have been for a little over a week. Where to begin? At the beginning, I suppose.

Winter in Adelaide was almost more noticeable than in Sydney, but that was sort of just luck of the draw. We happened to arrive in Adelaide during heavy rain. But in addition to that, the suburbs of Adelaide have more trees than we saw in Sydney, and many of these had lost their leaves. It was already dark, so I didn't get much of an impression of Adelaide from that drive, but what I saw looked vaguely like the parts of Orange County that "The O.C." wasn't set in.

Hugh had been living at his parents' house since returning from Edinburgh. The plan had been to look for a place for the two of us once I arrived, but he had managed to find a two-bedroom "cottage" before I arrived. His twin sister, Em, needed to move as well, so the timing worked out really well. I arrived in town on Friday evening, and on Saturday morning, we started moving in! Hugh and I didn't have a bed yet, so we continued staying at his parents until that was all set up, but we moved lots of other stuff in, including my dishes. Yay!

I saw my first Australian bug as we were moving in! It was a cockroach, so not really uniquely Australian, but it was a sort of pretty reddish-purple color. I was okay with it for two reasons: 1) It was outside on the sidewalk, and 2) it was dead. I will certainly not be so blase the first time I find one in the house!

We drove back and forth several times between Hugh's parents' house and the new place. They're about 20min drive apart, so a fairly significant distance to cover several times in a day.

For comparison sake, the City of Seattle packs roughly 600,000 inhabitants into an area of 84 sq mi (not including water) for a population density of 7,360 people per sq mi. Looking at the whole of King County, the population density is still 908 inhabitants per sq mi. Adelaide and its suburbs, on the other hand, cover an area of 705 sq miles with a population of 1.2 million, for a density of 163 people per sq mi.  So it's pretty spread out here, and even in the downtown area, there is a distinct feeling that you're in a big country town, and not the fifth largest city in the nation. But then you have to remind yourself exactly which nation we're talking about here. A country with an area only slightly smaller than the U.S., with 1/14th of the population of the U.S.