Greeting from "Down Under"

Sorry it's taken so long to post this. It's been a crazy month! I'll do my best to fill you in on the past few weeks. Anthony's been writing a little journal about each day, so I'll post that next. It's really good! :) We did make it to Melbourne and we're getting all situated here.

This is us, waiting to board the plane in L.A. We left the Portland airport on April 27th and flew to L.A. We had a 4-hour layover there and then we headed to Melbourne. It was a 15 1/2 hour flight. Anthony was worried about not being able to sleep, but we each took an Advil PM about 3 hours into the flight and were able to sleep (on and off) for 8-9 hours. It worked perfectly! The flight was smooth and went better than we expected.

We took a few pictures while we were flying:

When we landed in Australia, it was 8am on Tuesday. Crazy, huh?! This is a picture outside the Melbourne airport. It was really big and a little confusing to get around, but we figured it out.

We took a cab to our hotel (where we stayed for the first 2 weeks). It was in Southbank, along the Yarra River. It was a really pretty place to stay. Our room wasn't ready when we got there, so we did a little "exploring" around. Here are a few pictures we took that day.

This is the Yarra River in Southbank. There are some really neat buildings and pedestrian bridges to get across to the other side. They also have water taxis - I'd love to take one of those someday! :)

This is the PricewaterhouseCoopers building where Anthony works. It's one of the tallest buildings in Melbourne!

Then, we went to Federation Square. It's a neat little place where the visitor's center is located. There were some really neat buildings as well. Here's a couple of them:

We found an apartment in Port Melbourne. It's right on the bay, close to the water! We really like it so far! We're still waiting for most of our furniture to come in (we ordered it over 2 weeks ago!). Hopefully, it will be in early next week. We're waiting on our couch, chair, coffee table, end table, dining room table & chairs, night stands, and bedroom dresser. We do have a bed, TV, TV stand, and a wardrobe -type storage unit. So, we have the basics :) We've been using our fold-out camping chairs, which looks a little funny but gets us up off the floor! :) As soon as we get our furiture, I'll post pictures of our place. But, for now, I'll show you our view. It's beautiful! We can see the water from our place.

This is our apartment building (taken from the beach). It's the big, gray building in the back.

Here's a couple of us at the beach. It was a little chilly, but nice. Apparently, it gets really hot in the summer, so that should be fun!

Well, that's all the pictures I have for now! I'll post more as soon as our furniture gets here...hopefully soon!! In the meantime, we have a couple of prayer requests. The first one is that we'll find a church home. There are not a lot of churches in this area and we don't have a car, so our options are limited. The second one is that I'll find a job. I had an interview last Monday (with the same company I worked for in Sacramento) that went really well, but they're not sure there's an available position right now. I may have to begin looking elsewhere for a job.

Thanks for all the comments and emails. We love to hear from everyone!