G'Day Blokes and Sheilas

G'Day all you Blokes and Sheila's,
We thought we would tell you about our new house and town. Our house is very nice. It is only 3 years old (but will probably look 10 years old by the time we leave:) It has 3 bedrooms, a kitchen and a family room. Mariah and Jakob share a room because they will be on the same school schedule. The first picture we sent is the outside of our house. We are one of four villa's that all share a driveway. It is a very quiet neighborhood except for these new loud Americans! The next picture is of Jakob sitting in the kitchen with the dining table in the back ground and the front entrance. Then there are three pictures of the outside. One is of Kyle in the very small backyard. We do have a field next door to us. The next one is of the laundry line as we have no clothes dryer or dishwasher. Our favorite photo is of the wild parrot in our backyard. It is in a tree called a Christmas tree because it blooms red and green at Christmas time. The birds are lovely (as they say in Aussie land) and plentiful. You feel like you are in a tropical forest.
Our town is very neat and clean. It won the "Tidy Town" award. We have one main street with all of the shops. There are about 5 cafe's, 3 grocery stores, a post office, pharmacy and a couple other stores. If you follow the main street about 1/4 mile, you end up at the beach. You can see we live on a beautiful beach. The flags represent the area which is patrolled every day during school holidays (which we are on) and weekends. Kyle, Mariah and Jakob enjoy their boogie boards and skim board while Mike and I enjoy sitting and reading our books.
Our daily routine takes twice as long because it is like we are doing everything for the first time. For example, to cook we have to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. Grocery shopping is a big deal. We walk up and down the aisles trying to figure out what everything is. We can't figure out why they like vegemite. It's very salty. They eat it like we eat peanut butter. Groceries and gas are pretty "dear" (expensive) compared to home. Gas is about $5.00/gallon. We enjoy listening to new words like "sunnies" for sun glasses.
During our first week here, there was a shark bite on a surf board about an hour away and a snake bite that killed a 16 year old boy three hours away.
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As you are all making snow angels we are are making sand angels and we thinking about our family and friends.
M,K,K,M,J Steen

P.S. If you click on any of the pictures, they will enlarge