the mall, the store....

I don’t know if it has been clear in our previous posts, but we didn’t exactly pack appropriately for this trip. For some reason, we thought it was going to be a tad bit cooler than it actually is. I am not sure how this miscalculation happened. The only thing I can point to is that it seems the only thing close to southern Australia is Antarctica (which I also think we are not equipped for, for the record), so subconsciously we thought it would be cooler. By the way, you could almost float the continental US in the space between Sydney and Antarctica. At the end of the day we were wrong and we needed to remedy the situation so today we were off to get better equipped. This includes cooler clothes for the El’s, sandals for Amy, and electronic things for Jason. I guess that is the other item I have forgotten to mention. We have somehow managed to fry about half of our electronic devices. We think we can fix (or band aid) the things that are now crispy bacon, but we need some expert advice. So like good American’s in a foreign country we headed off for our local mall…..which as you might imagine looks a little different than what we pictured.

First of all, I need to set the stage. Ella is teething again (nuf said on that note). And even though we are all on the right time frame, we are still a little tired from the journey. Finally, we have been lucky enough to have been loaned lots of wonderful baby equipment from our friends here down-under. One of these items is a seemingly 1980’s stroller (or Pram, as they call it) that was built to cross the Himalaya’s. It has this crazy suspension system that makes it maneuver and bounce like each tire is a basketball. Here it is as we came out of the train station and were making our way to the mall...







Well we didn’t get going quite as early as we had hoped. Ella ended up taking a long early morning nap and we finally had to wake her. I can remember a very wise person telling me early in parenthood that the worst thing you can do is wake a sleeping baby….let’s just call this strike one for the day. Next, we headed to the mall on the wonderful (and I mean that) train system here in Sydney. It really rocks. Ella is currently obsessed with the seats on the train and wants to climb all over them...





By the time, we actually got to the mall though, Ella was starving. A new thing for Ella is that she is actually becoming a pickier eater. And really the only “Mall food” she likes is chicken strips. Well, one thing the Aussie’s have not fully introduced into their culture is the Chicken Strip. Strike two. We ended up finding these little Chicken McNubbin’s at a McDonalds (which we will have to write more about McDonalds later, they are way different here). Anyhow, the McNubbins are chicken nuggets the size nickles. So we scraped off all of the breading from the McNubbins (don’t want her to have a reaction if there is any egg in the good stuff) and we were left with 10 chicken chunks that each were the size of a pea. So now we needed to find our stuff…the fact we didn’t know what exactly we needed or were to get it is not good with a teething, tired, hungry little Ella. There was crying…(baby and parents)


Finally, we found everything and headed for home. Mission accomplished!!! We even got most of the electronics to work again. Well, almost mission accomplished…we then just had to fight all of the students on the train (all students from K – College ride the train, it is like recess) and manage walk the short stent from the train station to the house.

The end of a long day....

So that is the adventure for the day…..oh wait, Jason did go to a seeming black market, high end, mobster field car auction in a warehouse…more about that and the Ferrari’s later.