It's a "Koala" not a "Koala-Bear."

Healesville Excursion: 

Melbourne has been a whirlwind of eating cheaply, house-hunting, job-hunting, and walking around the many unique suburbs of the city.

Last weekend we spent a blissful Friday night chowing down on veggie food at a place called Veggie Bar on Brunswick St.  The street itself is packed full of cafes, bars, restaurants, and funky boutiques that cater to the nearby Melbourne Uni students and travelers.  Noticing the array of accents in the restaurant, we decided to come back and interview there on Tuesday night, one of the two interview sessions they conduct a week (yeah, not promising...).

On Saturday we were treated to a lovely excursion to Healesville with Susi and Rony.  Healesville is a small town in the middle of the Yarra Valley (read: wine country). We headed first to Giant Steps, a winery restaurant, where we sampled wines before picking our favorite to accompany our delicious pizza that was smothered with garlic and fresh veggies (or in Nolan's case, spicy salami that made me sweat through the rest of my lunch).  Feeling happily satiated, we headed to Healesville Sanctuary where we saw every typical Australian animal you could dream of...next to the walkway, Koala's snored away while daintily perched in the fork of tree branches (it's a wonder they don't fall off).  Underneath the sleeping Koala's, echnidas, ant-eaters that look like porcupines and adorn the Australian dollar coin, scurried about seaching for god knows what!  We saw Kangaroos lazing about (no they didn't respond to our commands of "jump!"), and we got to pet dingos that roamed the path with their trainers - they look uncannily like my dog Toby.  A lot of the animals we saw were sleeping, but we did get some action from the Emu's - giant birds with tiny heads - which were grunting and clearly protecting their territories.  At the end of our visit, we went into the flying arena, where we saw a lyrebird, a beautiful bird with magnificent feathers for a tail.  Upon hearing us approach, the lyrebird went straight up to Nolan and had a stare-off with him while he snapped photos.  

All in all it was a beautiful day.  Full as a bull from our extravagant lunch, Nolan, Susi and I had some cheeses, dips, and meats from the market and then packed it in for an early night.  

CLICK HERE TO SEE PICS

Week in Melbourne:

This week in Melbourne has been a bit of stressful time as our plans (get jobs asap and start raking in the cash) hasn't exactly gone according to plan.  We spent most of the week passing our resumes to restaurants and stores, but everywhere told us that they had just done a big hiring (in sync with the start of the uni term), and were no longer looking for new people.  The climbing gym, despite woes of being understaffed, still have not called us, which would have been the perfect job.  Nolan scored two yoga classes at a gym, but isn't CPR/First Aid qualified here and the pay wouldn't exactly help us if I'm not working either.

On a positive note, karma or coincidence helped us find a place to stay.  While discussing our options rent a hostel room for a lot of money or a dumpy share-house room with a bunch of uni students for a slightly lower price, a woman overehead us and said she had a spare room that we could rent for $170/w.  So now we're about two blocks from Susi's place with our own bedroom/bathroom and free range to cook!

In terms of work, we've reassessed our situation and decided that it might be best to move on.  Tomorrow we head out to Mt. Arapiles to climb for a week, and then we're heading up the east coast via the Greyhound bus to Sydney where we'll look for more work.  We're excited to explore the beautiful nature and beaches along the east coast!

In other news, we've got our walking legs back as we've traversed nearly the entire city by foot, including the beautiful waterfront beach area which was reminiscent of L.A., and our running regime is still going.  

More next week when we return from climbing!