new job, old job

so that chugging job? yep, did that. it wasn't as cool as i thought it would be. anyone requiring further details on that can drop me an email - i'll be happy to talk about it but not everyone might want to read what i say...

so council street is a dream. we have a lovely house and a great garden and some awesome housemates. you might say we landed on our feet.

now we just have to find jobs...

the view from our window

our living room

our kitchen

our garden

anita's a hula-hooper. she's particularly good. i'm particularly not.

new house

so we've been in melbourne a few days by now and things are moving very quickly indeed. we began our house-search on friday, just two days after getting to town and by then i already had one job lined up.

the day we got to melbourne, one of my family's old friends stopped by to say hi. when we got into the subject of working in melbourne she suggested that i might be able to use any café experience in her son's coffee shop. a few phone calls later, i had a trial lined up.

however, on friday, being house-searching day, we were wandering around the city when a yorkshire lad randomly asked if we were looking for work in melbourne. we asked some questions, he asked some questions, and it turned out he works for a chugging company raising money for a couple of very deserving NGOs - sweet! this melbourne gig is working out pretty nicely, if i may say. (photo: trams in melbourne CBD)

a few hours of roaming the streets writing down shop-window ads and ringing people with spare rooms later, we collapse into an internet café to search out online ads. the first ad we see on gumtree is only 10 minutes old so we rattle off a quick call to the number and line up our first viewing in a matter of minutes. the friendly german guy on the other end is called toby and he tells us to come round tomorrow morning.

it felt good to be able to go back to a house full of cynical chinese women and tell them we had made some progress. better still to wake up in the morning feeling full of promise and possibilities. we had some trouble finding the house on account of my complete innumeracy but we got there. (photo: 38 council street)

and we stayed there so long we were invited for breakfast with the neighbours - peter, fumiko and taka... who turned out to be local musicians (well, taka not quite yet) and invited us to join them and their friends for the AFL grand final that arvo. having spent the entire morning with toby and anita, it didn't feel so strange tagging along with their neighbours.

i'll leave justin to post about that day's events but, suffice to say we were offered the room in toby and anita's house. or should i say, our house?

arriving in melbourne

we arrived in melbourne at 7.15am on wednesday 24 september 2008. it was 8ºC when our plane touched down, having left KL on a 35ºC afternoon... i don't know if i can describe how good it felt to have the chilly wind swirling around my shorts-clad legs. i'll never complain about the cold again!

heading straight to box hill it was surreal to be reunited with my folks on the wrong side of the planet. with my aunt and cousin from the uk there as well, (photo L-R: 5-ee, jodie, petra, ah-kim, randolph, kou-kou, me) it was practically like we'd landed in london... the metlink system soon had us realising how far away we were from home, though!

so, here you buy either 2-hour or all-day tickets. 2-hour ones cost half of all-day ones but, you've guessed it, only last for 2-hours from activation - i.e. when you first enter the turnstile (which isn't a turnstile but one of those electronic ticket flappy-door newfangled devices that they've had all over the world for several years but i've never learned the name of). simple enough, except if you activate a 2-hour ticket after 5.30pm it turns into an all-night ticket that lasts until 3am... too clever by half.

in spite of learning the intricacies of the public transport system, we arrived in box hill and purchased a SIM card with relatively little difficulty. yes, we are seasoned travellers now!

we spend the next few days kicking around box hill with my folks and extended family, discovering how it's the chinese quarter of suburban melbourne in more than just the appearance of its locals... (photo: justin eating a hen foot - yummy!)

finally...

i've started that damn blog! having promised it to folk before we left, i never realised how hard it would be to put the wheels in motion.

of course, not wanting to give all away, i'm not going to go into detail on this post, but i'll try to backdate our actions as accurately as possible to allow for an online diary that y'all can browse at your leisure.

so, keep on reading and learn why we didn't write home sooner...