Was one of the questions on our landing card for the flight to Perth!!

We had finally made it to the Land of Oz. Of course we had changed our flight date twice 😉

Perth in particular and Western Australia in general would be our first stops for the initial few weeks of our Australian Adventure.

Perth is the capital city of the State of Western Australia. With only 1.7 million population it immediately felt cosy. With all the old historic buildings, banter on the bus and cold weather it reminded Karen of Glasgow. Off the bus we had a small walking tour of the city, in order to get across to our hostel, City Backpackers Perth, situated in the district of Northbridge.

Luckily we had had some dinner on the flight, which was surprising tasty, good job Virgin Australia!. The reason we say luckily is because our first visit to a shop in Perth scared us. It would be expensive here.

The next day was a bit of a ‘do errands’ kind of day. The hostel had a full working kitchen so we would be able to cook dinner for the first time since December 2013. Would we remember how to do it?

Our landlord pointed us towards the nearest supermarket, a branch of Coles. A company we would be become intimate with over the next few weeks. While shopping for essentials, bread (for John), pasta, cereal etc., we noticed a few oddities on the shelves.

• Australia is a big friend of Gluten Free
• Peppers are called Capsicums here
• Apparently Tayto is a British food!
• Karen was reunited with her beloved Robinsons Orange Squash
• Irn Bru can survive the monthes long sea journey to Australia

After shopping we took to the streets of Perth to take in our new surroundings. While a lot of construction is going on, there is a sense that Perth is proud of it’s history with tons of old buildings and streets such as London Court – a re-imagening of Edwardian London complete with an old fashioned sweet shop full of Scottish delicacies and a candyman from Stranraer behind the till (+1 for Karen!). In fact we would meet a lot of Scottish people in Perth.

From here we went to the State House and it’s small gardens to have a picnic near the Kangaroo statues. After eating our home made sandwiches – delicious, we went for a walk down by the Swan River. This part of Perth is just lovely, full of green spaces, cycle lanes and running tracks that sweep round the Swan River.

That evening we made Spag Bol and ate the first of many Timtams! We had finally found them (See our About Page!)

Tomorrow we would be meeting Karen’s best friend’s childhood friend, Elidih, from Ayr who was living in Fremantle. That’s Freo for the locals!