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)