Tuesday 25 December 2012

Getting to Brisbane


So we were escorted off the British Isles on 3 December (after some nervous looks at the heavily falling snow from Zoe's flat the night before) by Mum, Aunt Mary and Katie Keltie and sent on our way. Everyone asks us about the flight, the number of connections we had to get, their length and whether we were stressed or exhausted or drained by the whole journey, but I can honestly say it's the least stressful or exhausting passage to Australia I've ever experienced. This might have had something to do with the fact that the movies were both numerous and entirely on demand (I barely had time to lift my new Kindle, such was the variety of entertainment on offer) but Matt and I both suspect that the real reason was that, for a blissful 23 hours, we had no organising to do whatsoever! Well, I had to do a bit of stealth hair removal in an airport bathroom, because I'd forgotten to prepare for lighter clothes before our departure, but apart from that... We even stopped off at Matt's favourite haunt at Singapore airport - the Fish Place - where you can get those wee fish to nibble away the crusty bits from your feet. ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE I'd go anywhere near the wretched things, what with my feet being as ticklish (and, subsequently, resolutely crusty) as they are, but happily, the Fish Place also offers a whole menu of different massages and therapies - so I booked myself in for an upper back massage, while Matt did the fish malarkey and got a head and shoulder massage at the same time. Very restful and restorative, it has to be said. This is definitely the way to travel.
When we finally got to Australia (Brisbane) early on the morning of the 5th, the immigration queue was relatively fast moving. While we waited in the queue, a lovely black lab was put through his paces after one of the customs people asked a lady in front of us to hide something in her bag for the dog to detect. He passed the test with flying colours and furiously thumping tail! Because the flight was early, we were through customs and out the other end a good 20 mins ahead of schedule. Matt's parents were there to meet us, armed with a bunch of flowers for me and a pair of Australian flag-themed thongs (flip-flops!) for Matt. They then rode with us in the taxi back to (Matt's brother) Tim's place, where we hung out until our hotel room in the centre of Brisbane was ready for check-in.
It was ROASTING! Around 29-30 degree heat and humid - but Sharon assured us that it had been even hotter earlier in the week and what with her being 8.5 months pregnant and all, I felt it would be a bit churlish to complain about it. So I good-naturedly changed clothes (felt compelled to after triumphant stealth hair removal in Singapore). We then went round the corner from Tim and Sharon's place for coffee - well, Matt did the whole 'second breakfast' thing, but I just got the long black coffees and bottles of water in. We reckoned we'd caffeinate ourselves to the hilt and stay awake till evening to lick the jet lag. This has worked for me in the past - though I was in my twenties at the time and helped along with copious amounts of hard liquor.
We also spent some time getting to know our latest nephew, Max, who is a little honey and totally obsessed with gadgets. If it has a screen and/or buttons, he hones in on it like a laser. He was well fascinated with Matt's tablet, which has a face recognition panel on it, so he could see himself in the screen. He also showed me his paddling pool on the balcony and we spent a bit of time chucking a ball in and out of it, much to his evident amusement. Tim was at work for most of the time we were there, but Sharon was about, so it was good to catch up with her. Her pregnancy has gone well and she's quite relaxed about everything now that they've sorted out the elective date. She and Gail had been busy putting together a bag of Useful Things for us, like snacks, bowls and spoons, jars of coffee, chefs hats for matt, mags for me, and some Oyster Bay Sauv Blanc! Sharon and Tim also lent us their laptop for doing adminny things on and sending emails etc., which is coming in handy right now!
By 2 pm and check-in time however, we were pretty knackered and not so confident about our ability to make it through the next 6 hours or so without a snooze. So we got installed in the hotel - it's a studio apartment with a bed, sofa, table, chairs and a telly, an en-suite, fridge and stove top and what have you. They just leave you to it for a week and come in and clean/change sheets etc once a week. Then we decided we'd just get some quick shut eye ... and ... woke up at 8 pm. Cue several days of waking up in the middle of the night for several hours - we have a snack and do job/flat searches and then go back to sleep. It's like preparation for when we're older, I guess.
Next day, we were hyper productive, considering. We applied for medicare cards, got mobile phone numbers for Australia, opened bank accounts, contacted people we knew in Brisbane, got/applied for tax file numbers and got go-cards (which are like oyster cards for public transport). The two women who helped us open our bank accounts were absolute gems. They job-share and were so incredibly helpful and lovely, quite apart from being a hilarious double act. One of them is a kiwi and having not long moved to Australia, she'd prepared this sheet with helpful contact numbers and advice for migrants to Australia. Can't imagine HBOS giving anyone the same treatment back home!
By around lunch time, we found some time to lounge on a balcony in town and drink a glass of wine/beer before heading out to Matt's sister, Pam's neck of the woods (a suburb outside of Brisbane) to see her kids perform in their end-of-year school concert. That was a quintessentially Aussie experience, if ever there was one! The school, which services some very well-heeled, middle-class families, is a collection of corrugated iron-roofed buildings and the concert was taking place in a similarly roofed bandstand at the side of the school oval. The audience arranged themselves on the grassy slope in front of the bandstand as the sun sank behind the gum trees on the other side of the field and munched on sausages and burgers in a bun, while the kids sang things like 'Aussie Jingle Bells' (Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Christmas time is Beaut; Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden Ute...) Pam's children (Ruby, Joey, Archie and Daisy) were a bit shy of us - particularly the younger ones, who didn't even remember Matt much, but Archie (second youngest) chatted away when he and his Dad, Andrew, gave us a lift back to our hotel after the concert. He harbours a keen interest in Pokemon - Matt was able to dredge up some memories about this stuff, while I was fairly clueless - and he also speculated that Peter Pan must be an Australian story because Captain Hook is a bit like Captain Cook. He wondered if Neverland was actually Australia, and when I conceded that there was indeed a crocodile in the story, he announced that this confirmed his considered theory on the matter.
At 3 am the next morning we awoke like jacks in the box and stoated about doing job searches and updating our cvs and what not. Around that point I received a job alert on my phone from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with a job vacancy for a research support co-ordinator - which fits my skill set like a glove. I was a bit apprehensive about applying to work for a university again, but Australia is very different from home in terms of work culture, and on top of that, the job alert arrived precisely as I turned my attention to a job search, so I've been preparing an application for that over the last few days and have just submitted the application today. Deadline is Weds so fingers crossed!!!
The last few days have been days in which:

  • we have been continuing to struggle with jet lag resulting in us having numerous breakfasts (which is very enjoyable but slightly worrying viz a viz the waistline)
  • some of those breakfasts have included more tim tams than is really advisable (quintessentially Australian chocolate biscuits) (equally enjoyable but compounding waistline concerns)
  • I got bitten by mosquitos and decided to take affirmative action and down some anti-histamines, upon which I passed out in a stoned haze as I didn't realise they were also sedatives
  • we caught up with Shannon and Leigh whom we know through our friends Cris and Kenny and met their lovely little baby, Milla, over brunch
  • Matt has applied for about 5 jobs and has had responses from 2 already
  • we watched Skyfall at the cinema in town and I nearly froze my limbs off in the baltic gale that was the air conditioning (Skyfall wasn't one of the movies on the flight, I was disappointed to find, though the Scottish scenery in the film had me unexpectedly weeping buckets, which subsequently froze onto my face and chest in an interesting ice stalagmite (not really - that's actually a slight exaggeration)
  • I lost my brolly in a coffee shop (yes it's been raining on and off here - what a relief! cools the place down to manageable levels lovely!)
  • Matt has rediscovered Arnott's Shapes (baked savoury snacks)
  • I continue to be horrified by the prevalence of bad spelling (e.g. omlette; fetta; pidgeon; chiritso;) and amused by journalistic turns of phrase (e.g. 'swag of votes' that the coalition will lose as a result of automatic electoral enrolment being implemented by the labor party (government) here, young people being more likely to vote labor, and voting being mandatory for registered voters in Australia)
  • we've found a few possible apartments, some furnished, and some of which we will be going to see over the next few days 
  • we're continuing to meet up with people we've/Matt has known before, who live in Brisbane. (Matt's out catching up with one such personage currently, but I wanted to get more job stuff done so I stayed home)



Merry Christmas


By now everyone will have celebrated Christmas and realised that the Mayans were wrong about the end of the world, which is a relief after all the hassle we've been through to get here.  I'd have been right miffed if it had all ended before we got going at this end. 

I hope everyone had a fabulous time.  

Over here the heat (33-36 degrees) has continued - Now With Added Stickiness!  (Although still cooler than Melbourne has been, which is weird.) Intermittent rain has added to the humidity without persisting for long enough to cool the place down.  This has meant that I had to invest in a new bright red brolly.  But it has added significance because we have now left the air conditioned cocoon that was the hotel in the centre of town.  

Matt's sister, Pam, invited us to save a bit of cash and come stay at her house outside Brisbane for the Christmas/NY period.  We were going to spend Christmas with her family anyway, and most of the family are going away after Christmas to visit friends on Thursday Island (those In The Know refer to this as TI) for a week or so.  We were happy to take her up on her invite and the lack of air con is more than compensated for by the presence of a pool on the deck. 

The job search continued for a couple of weeks after we arrived but is now on hold until the new year.  Matt did a trial at a restaurant in Brisbane's West End, which is full of cool and groovy, slightly alternative eateries.  This he really enjoyed and was quite inspired at the prospect of working there.  The owner said after the trial that he had another person to interview and give a trial shift to, but that unless this person was outstanding, Matt had got the job.  I had half a mind to lie in wait outside the restaurant, waylaying any people approaching the entrance with any whiff of outstandingness about them, but Matt persuaded me that this was not going to be Appropriate Behaviour As Befitted A Newly Arrived Migrant.  Much to his detriment too, because the job went to the other guy.  He's applied for a few other jobs since then but been told that he's either over qualified or under-experienced in Australian cuisine.  

Meanwhile I got an email from QUT thanking me for my application and notifying me that shortlisting was taking place a day after the deadline and interviews three working days after that.  This rather astonished me, given the grade of job they were advertising.  At the very least you'd expect them to ask shortlisted candidates to prepare a presentation or report.  Needless to say I didn't get shortlisted.  A lot of people I've spoken to say that Universities often advertise for jobs externally as a mere formality to fulfil legal requirements, when they already have someone acting in post.  I'm also up against stiff competition, the Queensland Government having just fired something like 14,000 people from various departments and agencies, due to a recent change in government from Labor to National and this new government's discovery of a large deficit.  It seems that right wing politics over here takes as dim a view of Keynesian economic theory as that of the Tories back home.  I have another couple of jobs to apply for - both in Universities but their closing dates are after new year. 

So after stressing myself out and getting my knickers in a twist over the source of our future income, I decided that there was nothing I could do over the Christmas period, that Pam's offer of a place to stay for free was saving us lots of money, and that I should just relax and enjoy a holiday for a bit.  This works fine during the day for the most part, though my sleeping hours are filled with complicated and unsettling dreams which have all been very vivid.  The guy at the bottom of the bed thing has come back as well, but now it's a moody younger guy in a chicago bulls' baseball cap and a white ice-hockey shirt with yellow writing with a blue outline on it.  Even when I see it, and my rational mind is telling me that it's just a product of my dreaming brain, the rest of me crumbles into a gibbering mess.  

Although Pam's house is a way out of town, Matt's parents have lent us one of their cars to help us out with transport while we try to get settled.  It's great having wheels to get out the place with and will make house hunting a lot easier (we've also put this on hold until the new year).  

Our newest nephew was born on 18 November by caesarian section - Samuel Austin Goodman and both baby and mum are well.  We went to see Tim, Sharon, Max and the new addition on 22 December after they'd returned home.  Matt's parents had been looking after Max while his parents were at the hospital.  

On Christmas eve, a balmy and cool 28 degrees, we picked Gail and Bruce up from Tim's place and went to Indooroopilly (the nearest Brisbane suburb with a shopping mall to Pam's house) to meet up with a couple of Matt's friends for brunch.  We also picked up a few Christmas presents for Pam's kids.  With such a large family, the rule here is that you only get Christmas presents for children and only those you are spending Christmas with.  Then we got some final bits and pieces for Christmas dinner and headed back to Pam's. This included 3 kilos of prawns, which Matt cooked off, filling the entire house with prawny smell, much to Joey's chagrin. Gail kept us well supplied in Sauvignon Blanc and we spent the evening out on the deck with citronella candles and mozzy coils. 

Christmas day started at 5.30 am, with the kids tearing into their presents.  The following are the highlights of the day:
  • Water balloons and a massive catapult launcher;
  • Matt's turkey legs in cranberry flavoured stock;
  • Strawberry santa clauses;
  • a pink stretchy rubber thing with a face that has no discernible function;
  • Battle of Hoth Star Wars Lego game;
  • Angry Birds;
  • Ninja game in the pool; and
  • Skyping Mum and Ktk.

It's been a really surreal but enjoyable time.  Last night it rained a lot and the place has cooled down a fair bit.  With it still being rather grey outside, it's a perfect day to catch up on emails, blogs etc.  I think there is a plan to go to the cinema later today, for those not interested in the boxing day cricket.  Australia keeps back all the blockbusters over the Christmas period until Boxing Day, which means that The Hobbit is only being released today.  Not sure if we'll get in to see it today but it's definitely one on the list.  

Lots of love to everybody and I'll be in touch soon.

Blogging is the new email

Hi everyone

Thought it would be easier in terms of sharing to set up a blog to give you updates on our progress with moving to Australia and setting up a life here.  

I'll be posting here from time to time but will also send links to any new entries via Facebook/email.

Lots of love

Mary