Proof positive that London's the most expensive city in the world, as if I really needed any. Interesting to see Sydney is as low as 11th as well. However these sort of infographic's can't be that meaningful if they doesn't even take in to account the average local salary - I think that would skew things even worse for London (and probably better for Sydney too) via Sydney Morning Herald

I went in to see the sun set behind the Opera house one more time, and see that bats wake up and fly out with the city skyline behind them. Some final things I noticed: There are actually quite a lot of car-wash cafes around; I'd never really noticed seeing as I'd never had a car much. Other things I noticed: There are more than 9 Japanese restaurants, 5 Thai restaurants and 6 Indian restaurants in my neighbourhood.

Last day in work yesterday. Surprisingly, I've lasted longer in this job than in any previous ones. So to me it felt like a bigger goodbye. But part of that was undoubtedly that I'm just not going to "see you around" or have a chance to catch up to see how peoples career's are going; I'll probably never see any of these people again. So that feels a little strange. Also in the back of my mind is a constant reminder that I'm freely giving up a good job in a country with a good economic situation to move somewhere where there's neither. We've been lucky to get somewhere to stay for the two weeks since moving out of our old place. Moving out was threatening to be a disaster as the vacuum cleaner keeled over and died literally the night we were cleaning up and left us with no other choice than to clean the carpet with our hands. We've shipped as much crap as possible, thrown out tonnes of perfectly good clothes and towels and kitchen utensils just because we can't fit them into the one suitcase each the the airlines so generously allow us. But spending the last couple of weeks back in our old haunt was worth the short move. It's so much nicer here, the weather has turned all summery, as if the place is trying to get us to reconsider leaving. We have actually being trying to change our travel plans as we'd booked a few days in Bangkok on the way out but that's now impossible with all the flooding. This is the first time that I've used a travel agent to go anywhere and the first time to get full travel insurance so that's got to count for something. Anyway now that I'm finished work I've got a few more days to take those last photos of places I'm unlikely to visit again. It's not like I'm can casually drop by anytime soon.

I must have drunk more coffee in the last four years than I did in all previous years combined. Coffee is a big thing here, much more so than back home. As I'm sure I mentioned before, in our previous neighbourhood I could count more than 30 cafes off the top of my head within 500m of our apartment, and only one of them was a chain. Two of them stayed open until 10pm every night. The very fact that Australians know their coffee and cafes was one of the main reasons Starbucks had such a hard time here, having had to close most of their outlets. I used to wonder how, with so many cafes competing with each other, they could all stay in business. But walking around in the Saturday morning sunshine you can easily find all of them bustling; plates of breakfast and coffee served to tables on wide terraces, people reading newspapers or with families and friends. Lingering as long as I wanted over a perfect flat white, under a big parasol on a warm afternoon is something I doubt I'll have much chance to enjoy again and is something I will sorely miss from Sydney.

Now that we're committed to leaving Sydney and Australia, and it's beginning to sink in, thoughts start to come around to what I'll miss about living here. So in same vein as other blogs I'm going to compile a list of some of the things I'll miss and won't miss about living in Sydney. Some things will no doubt be common to living in such a warm climate, but seeing as I'm heading back to northern Europe the points still stand. So to start things off, the first thing I'm going to miss is Sydney Harbour and Circular Quay. Just recently I had the good fortune to enjoy a Sunday afternoon beer in near perfect Sunshine at the Opera Bar just metres from the Opera House. Backing on to the water and with the Sydney skyline and Harbour Bridge as a backdrop. It's been mentioned in plenty of guidebooks that Sydney has the best harbour in the world and while I'm not sure I'd go that far (how many harbours have I been too?), it certainly is something I'll miss. I've take countless photos from Circular Quay, sat out on plenty of warm summer evenings at harbourside cafes and not felt a chill at 10 o'clock at night. I won't be able to do that any more.

Armidale was freezing. Not quite freezing but very cold. It'd been pushing 22C degrees in Sydney in the days up to our trip and to be faced with 5C instead was a bit unwelcome. Despite being so much further north than Sydney it's 1000m above sea level and, as the Armidale tourist website likes to point out, is the highest city in Australia. View Larger Map I acclimatised by drinking a coffee the size of my head for breakfast. Seeing as we'd left a really long drive to the end, we didn't have much time to see anything in Armidale itself, except for a few kangaroos who didn't seem to mind the cold. And just like the emus and horses together before I was surprised to come across camels at one stage. The drive back promised to be nice enough, away from the main highway and through more farming countryside, down a scenic drive excitingly called Thunderbolts Way. We stopped at the best lookout point along the way but instead of a grand view we got.. It's hard not to feel a little cheated as one look on flickr and you can find plenty of evidence that on a nice day the view is great.

This years attempt at exercise was to enter the 41st annual Sydney City2Surf race. 14kms from Sydney CBD to Bondi Beach. I'd actually intended to do it last year with some people from work, but to organise something of this magnitude a mere 3 months in advance proved impossible, so I entered the Harbour Bridge run instead. This year though I entered with K and instead of trying to work up towards running the 14kms made do with a mixture of jogging, walking and shuffling to get to the end. Not that there was really much opportunity to do anything else. They weren't exaggerating when they said its the biggest run in the world this year, with more than 75,000 participants. As we slowly made our way towards the start line it kept threatening to rain and it eventually did half way through the course. This was not the sparkling sunshine filled day that shined on 39 of the previous 40 races. This was more like a summer day in the west of Ireland. Clothes were discarded along the way; sweaters that had been keeping people warm at the beginning were dumped in wet puddles all along the route (and apparently later donated to charity). Not to mention all the plastic cups.. There were plenty of people in costumes - lego people and pacman with ghosts, elmo, the beetles and drunk smurfs:

I meant to post this a while ago but the worlds first Space Beer (or perhaps the galaxy's) is going to be a local Sydney brew. Specially designed for space and intended for tourists when the Virgin Galactic trips start to get going, it's the first beer designed for zero gravity ..apparently. The design process was not without issues. Another issue is the lack of gravity to separate air and liquid in the stomach, which Mitchell explained could cause "wet burps" in space.. When you're on Earth, the gravity actually separates the air and the liquid such that if you burp, you burp the air, whereas when you're just floating around in space you can do what's called wet burps, which are little suspended balls of liquid just hovering around," he said. Yuk. Read more

I was wrong. The worst thing about moving (this time anyway) was not the stupid IKEA furniture. There are so many things to choose from that could be considered the worse. Was it the disconnected electricity that prevented us moving in for a full week after signing the lease? Or the filthy new apartment complete with cupboard filled insect droppings and grease from a thousand fry pans. Or maybe its the rats in the attic which wake us up at 5am every morning with their gnawing and scratching. Then there's the leaky taps, etc... And all that is without mentioning the cleaners who I'd been forced to hire (after a mean, mean letting agent threatened to keep our deposit) turned out to be drug addicts. I've also been without internet for the last month. It should only have been a week but the internet provider forgot to ask me for some details, left my application on hold and I only found out after I called up to complain. So I've had to apply to a different, more expensive place to have a hope of getting an internet connection soon. It really would be nice to buy a house next time.

Well we've finally had enough of paying through the nose for our current place and we're moving down the road by about half an hour drive. Much closer to work and much cheaper rent. On the other hand, much much grubbier apartment. The worst part of moving is the disassembling of the bloody IKEA furniture. Patiently unscrewing every bolt with the tiny allen key, trying not to breath in two years worth of dust from crevices that haven't seen daylight since then, knowing that in 24 hours I'll have to do the whole thing in reverse. Coming a close second to that is spending literally hours and hours on hold, during work and on my mobile, to various utilities to tell them I'm moving, only to have them inform me of the $50 moving fee or disconnection and reconnection fee, or of the 10 business days it will take to setup or whatever. We're definitely going to miss living near Crows Nest. So many nice cafes and restaurants open all hours right at your feet. Plenty of amenities, parks, and a really nice trains station equipped with it's own plaza and outdoor dining. The closest thing to scangers we usually saw were the magpies that would try and steal your food.

"Aussie home prices world's most-overpriced: survey" More confirmation (if any was needed) that living in Sydney seems to be getting more and more expensive - this time from the Economist. When I first got here I thought things were a little cheaper than back home, if more expensive compared to other places in Oz. Now it's just feckin' expensive plain and simple. We're currently apartment hunting again because they just keep jacking up the rent here by $20 a week every 6 months (and because of the horribly loud construction site outside). The way things are going I could never imagine being able to afford somewhere that wasn't a 3 hour commute from everywhere.

I've been pretty lax in checking in here because the mother superior was over for a few weeks on her first visit/inspection down under. I took a couple of those weeks off work and donned my best tour guide cap to show her around. We went to the beach, the blue mountains, the fish market, the Hunter Valley - basically all the places I went to after coming here. If it hadn't been for the fact that almost everywhere we ate out had awful service (is that just bad luck or the result of having 3 at a table instead of 2??) she would have been well impressed. The one new place we got to visit was Jervis Bay, south of Sydney about 3 hours. We stayed overnight in a shabby motel at Huskisson town by the beach looking forward to the area's famed white sands the next day. Of course it was raining. Again. (I took about 100 photos during the 5-minutes of sunshine in the whole day). But the break and the drive south was really nice and I saw my first wallaby in the wild! However, it's just as well she only stayed for three weeks though, because any longer and we would have seriously run out of things to do. As nice as Sydney is, there's only so much to see without getting bored of the beach or coffee, and especially without a car permanently at your disposal.

This week has been hot. Waay too hot. Last Tuesday it was 33C at midnight and today it just hung around 41C for most of the afternoon and evening (it was still 35 at midnight!). I thought I'd experienced this sort of thing last year but it seems that this week's run of 30+ days has broken some 150 year record for Sydney. With all the flooding in the rest of Australia and the huge Cyclone this week the weather is truly crazy here. 75% of Australia's banana crop has been wiped out and already the prices have double in the supermarket. Thankfully the prices aren't quite what they've been advertised in work.. Update: ok that's a huge change in the space of 24 hours! It started out in the mid 30's this afternoon when we went to a shopping centre to abuse their air-con (just like everyone else) but when we came out literally a couple of hours later it was 20! Thats a whopping 21-degree drop in 24 hours..

Wandering into a Chinese supermarket here recently (and there are loads of 'em) it's nice to see that you can find the sort of strange food that I used to find all the time in Japan. Stuff like drinks that look like they consist of frogs eggs: Or even drinks that can't decide if they're cans or bottles:

Before Christmas we managed to grab a couple of tickets to see an outdoor movie recently in the Botanic Gardens. Tried to do this last year but all the tickets for all the showings sold out in 45mins. This year I was prepared and got them just after they went on sale. The screen is actually in the water, and you get to watch the film with the city and opera house in the background. It was pretty cool and the weather was perfect, but I actually preferred last years one. It was much more rough and ready (just and inflatable screen on a cricket pitch and everybody brought they're own chairs). We arrived this year prepared, with extra clothes in case it got cold and snacks and dressed for a Saturday morning. However when we got there were loads of people dressed up for the night, people were eating and drinking at a wine bar set up for the occasion (I think some people stayed there for the movie too) and the seats were packed in together. Lots of people looked like they'd just stepped out of their high-flying financial jobs in their 30th floor offices. When we arrived early I thought there were lots of empty seats but practically all of them had been reserved - one person would just reserve 10 seats for his friend and in such a way there was almost no where to sit. The movie itself was pretty good (black swan) apart from the audience busting out laughing at one or two bits that I don't think were supposed to be funny.

I was ready to write how the doting and obsessing on Oprah Winfrey's current trip to Australia is so embarassing, bordering on the pathetic. But perhaps if she had decided to go to Ireland instead (bringing with her the studio audience) I can't really say that the Irish tourist industry wouldn't do the same thing. And already all the money the government here has spent on the whole exercise has already been recouped in advertising exposure in America and everywhere else where Oprah is a star. But it's amazing the extent to which every last thing she's done and visited here so far has been headline news, wiping this weeks Wikileaks and Julian Assange news off the front pages of some newspapers. Flagpoles that usually hang banners for arts festivals or other events now have big flags with Oprah on them instead.

A few weeks ago we were in town to have a look around the rebuilt Centre Point complex which sits at the base of Sydney tower, right slap bang in the middle of the city. While walking around we noticed a lot of seniors strolling around with brochures of some sort and queuing up outside certain buildings. It turned out to be an open day for Sydney buildings, the one day out of the year that the public can go in a view some of Sydneys more interesting architectural relics. So it was a pretty happy coincidence to walk by the State Theatre on the one day of the year its open to the public , 30 minutes before it was due to close. I'd never consider buying a ticket to see anything there so it was probably the only time I'll ever see it. And its a pretty nice example inside of art deco overload.

Proof, as if any was needed, that Sydney is now one of the most expensive cities in the world (at least in terms of property). According to this recent article: "A survey of global cities put Sydney at the top when it came to the percentage of income spent on mortgages." The Sydney Morning Herald was mentioning this back in January too: ''The average household would be required to pay more than 50 per cent of its income to service a new mortgage on the median-priced house in Sydney or Melbourne" Just another reason why I doubt I'll be buying a house in Sydney, just like so many other people in work too..

I ran my first 10km race last weekend, though 'ran' seems a little generous - more like stumbled continuously. It's one of the only times when the Sydney Harbour Bridge is closed to traffic and open for crazy pedestrians. Held as part of the Sydney Running festival the whole day consists of a Marathon, Half marathon, Bridge Run and Family Fun run. I think some of the people in the latter must have got confused because for most of my run I was behind a family pushing a stroller; mother and father taking turns pushing an oblivious child. Last week we picked up our running packs from the sponsor, consisting of our t-shirt number, timing tag (to tie to our shoes and let us check our finishing time on the web later), and little biscuit bar that I guess we were to save until the 7km mark. It was pretty cool actually to run across the bridge, looking back briefly to see thousands of people behind you. Unfortunately, not having a fancy phone, I couldn't take any photos of what it was like (unlike all those iPhone people) but I did manage to find a photo from a previous run which shows what it was like (courtesy flickr user besiblaskantis) I felt pretty good at the end, having finished without stopping, but any satisfaction dripped away as I watched all the 50+ year olds finishing the marathon after 4hours while I recovered with a meat pie.

I saw this guy when I passed through Hong Kong on the way here, and today he was in Sydney. Not sure why he chose this particular building to climb, directly above a KFC in the city centre. I was more surprised to hear the building is actually 57 stories; it doesn't look that tall. link Actually it seems he's been here before