I have now been in Sydney for three months and so am ready for a change. It's been great living here and seeing everything that goes on in summer but there is so much more of this country to see. So this week I applied for work in the outback and will be leaving Sydney on Thursday. I'm off to work in outback Northern Territory, about 2 hours northwest of Alice Springs. I'm so excited!

I will be working on Napperby Station, which is a cattle station. I will be working the shop, because apparently there is a shop out there! I have no idea how that works but anyway, that is what I will be doing, serving takeaway to the Aboriginal population there and when I'm not doing that I will be doing housework. I have been reassured that the building is air conditioned so hopefully I should be OK in the heat. Which is good as while it has been raining in Sydney for the last few days, it's about 40 degrees out there.

So I'm going to be doing this until May and will therefore not have mobile reception or the internet so won't able to update this thing very often. But rest assured I will still be thinking of you all, and I will have a postal address too so I'll let you all know it when I do. Sorting this out also means I can make my plans for life after Oz which involve New Zealand and Fiji. I stop in LA on the way home but I think I may just spend a couple of days there and not actually travel around, and save that for another time! I'll be home in the middle of July.

So this week I have been doing the stuff in Sydney that still needed doing. I've been to the Aquarium, which is brilliant because it has dugongs and ENORMOUS sharks in it. The windows are massive and you can see so much. There's a huge Great Barrier Reef exhibition in there too, which I loved. I could remember the names of so many fish which made me happy, and it was lovely to just sit and look through the viewing windows at all the little things without worrying about remembering to breath or where my buddy was or how much air I had what that dark shadow over there was... I sooooo can't wait to go diving again! I've also been on a tour around the Opera House so I've seen inside the main concert hall now. It's beautiful. They go through 15000 lightbulbs a year! Crazy. I've been to the Rocks markets too, and had fish and chips in the Sydney fish market with my roommate Claire yesterday. I turned up just as they were closing and I think the manager was drunk so he gave me mine for free! It was shark I think, and it was nice, but it tasted more of barbeque than of fish. He gave us free salad and sushi too so I have now had raw tuna. It's a lot nicer than I thought it would be!

So I'm now in my last few days in Sydney. I still have a couple of things left to do on my list and plan to go on one last photo-taking frenzy if it ever stops raining!