We arrived in Melbourne on the 12th March 2009 following a direct flight from London Heathrow via Hong Kong to Melbourne... Not a bad flight just long and we were in economy so not a lot of space... luckily though we got the emergency aisle exit seats which made it more bearable.... After staying overnight in a city centre hotel, we spent the Friday starting to sort out our new lives... Appointments with the bank to get our account activated, Medicare to get our health cards, TFN numbers etc before heading out to "home" until our container showed up... We were staying in St Kilda in a studio flat which although small was in a great location for Fitzroy St and Acland St. We had the weekend to recover and purchase essential stuff like mobile phones and laptops but were gutted when it absolutely chucked it down the whole time - this was not what we expected in Australia!!!!!!!
On the Monday we both started work. Chris had a horrendous commute which took about 1.5 h and consisted of a tram, train and bus but to be fair most of the time it worked out fine... Work for the first few weeks was a bit slow for both of us as expected.
We went to the Etihad Stadium to see St Kilda play the Sydney Swans. It was a great game and we both really enjoyed it. We adopted St Kilda as our team and somehow they are unbeaten and top of the league!!!!!
We also went to the Australian Grand Prix on a very hot day in March. It was held at the Albert Park which was about a 15 min walk from where we were staying in St Kilda so we figured we might as well go and see it as we were going to be disturbed by the noise. It was a great day out but sooo warm and dusty. No decent photos of the race though :-(
In March, there was a food and wine festival in Melbourne and we went wine tasting... Lots of wines to taste in the sunshine on the South Bank in the CBD..... A bit of a messy afternoon as it was incredibly warm but a good introduction to Victorian wine :-)
In April, we started thinking about where we would like to live... Part of my move to Australia was a desire to live near the beach and so we looked at a number of different suburbs... But we also had to be near a train station or tram line to get me into work and somewhere that Chris could easily drive to work. Not an easy task given the different needs. We initially started off looking at St Kilda, St Kilda East, Malvern and Prahan but soon realised we would not find what we wanted and so we expanded our search and found Brighton. We went there on an awesome sunny day and fell in love with the beachside living in the sunshine!!!
So we decided to find a place to live near there and found a nice house in a suburb called Gardenvale which ticked most of the boxes - 1 mile to the beach, 20 mins on the train to Flinders St and about 30 mins for Chris to drive to work. Gardenvale has a nice but small high street with a few restaurants, a take your own food (!) wine bar and a few wee shops. We took delivery of our container on the 5th of May - approximately 2 months since it had left our house in Hertford which we were very impressed by! We also picked up our new car about that time - a brand new ford focus - and at that time life over here really began to take off and stop feeling like a constant holiday! Although even now it still can feel a bit like that :-)
Over Easter, we took advantage of the bank holidays and headed over to Sydney for a long weekend which awesome. We met up with a friend of mine from Uni, Lorna, and she took us to the Blue Moutains for the day which was fab! We also explored lots of the beaches, the city and the harbour and had a fab time.
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