‘Tasty on Turkish toasted', a couple of months ago that would have been double-dutch to me, but now I’m speaking Aussie! A cheese called ‘Tasty’, Turkish bread, flat white (coffee), vegemite, lamingtons, schooners of New, bundy and coke. But speaking Aussie isn’t just about food, there are dozens of sayings that capture the laid back nature of the place, ‘no worries’, ‘no drama’, ‘she’ll be right’, you get the picture...

Anyway apart from learning the lingo, we have been busy venturing out of Sydney at the weekends. In the last few weeks we’ve visited Canberra, the Blue Mountains and the Hunter Valley.

I really wanted to like Canberra as it gets such a bad rep amongst the Sydneysiders, but in all honesty they’re probably right. My everlasting memory of Canberra is of walking for two hours alongside what looked like the M4, encountering no signs of life apart from a hungry looking German tourist who asked us if we knew where ‘all the cafes and shops were’. The last we saw of him he was muttering ‘in the City Centre, there must be, there must be something’ as he made his way under the concrete underpass, problem was we’d just come from there and there was nothing there either…

The Blue Mountains was much more like it, cosy little towns filled with bookshops, cafes and buskers. We stayed in Katoomba in a beautiful hotel just 10 minutes walk from Echo Point lookout. The Blue Mountains weren’t like I imagined them at all, I was thinking along the lines of Scottish or Welsh mountains (cold and desolate!), but they were so much more tropical. From Echo Point we had a view across what looked like the Grand Canyon filled with thick jungle. The landscape was totally unspoilt, no signs of human disruption at all. From the dense canopy below rose a wall of jungle noise, we were convinced we could hear monkeys until we realised there are no monkeys in Australia. In the evening, the fog rolled down and it became clear why there are so many shops selling thick fleeces and waterproofs in Katoomba. But we warmed up in a packed pub listening to a fantastic local singer with Chelsea vs. Bolton live on the TV behind the bar, perfect!

But my favourite weekend getaway so far is definitely the Hunter Valley – peaceful countryside, as much wine as we could drink and a cottage with a spa. It was beaut!