Walkabouts

In becomes more and more obvious to me that going to Australia and not having a reliable mean of transportation is close to the biggest mistake one can make.

My recent trip to Greece made me realize that public transport has the major drawback of the unpredictable arrival times. Being limited by the first/last bus/subway is frustrating and waiting an night in remote bus stations could get you into trouble (so I've heard).

It's generally accepted that Logistics are really important, no matter what you do.

So, maybe a car will be too expensive to buy/rent once I get to Oz?
A bicycle is way up on my things-to-buy-there list. (as it's slower than a car and it would give me a chance to see the views, get properly aquintanted with the neighborhood)
Yeah, and I'd buy a GPS before the car (maybe use it on the bike a little)

As a general conclusion, owning a vehicle (car, bicycle, moped, bike, horse, whatever you like and can afford) that would make getting from point A to point B hassle-free is a must for anyone that wants to have an easy life getting around.

Edit: Under the new light shed by Rod on this matter I'll just buy a cheap bicycle and will probably already have a phone with incorporated GPS. This is the best cheap alternative and will probably keep me satisfied after my arrival.

Cheers,
treaz

Reading blogs

as one might expect there is abundant information about the process of moving to Oz. It will take someone a lot of time to sort it through, this is my attempt.

I just finished reading the blog of A venezuelan couple living their Australian dreams and all in all it contains good information. Has very few off topic posts and I liked it. I recommend.
As this is the first blog I read, I'm sorry, but I didn't mark the very important posts.

Reading this blog took me a day (but it's 40 posts at most). It's about a family of 5 that immigrated to Sydney and their 8 month of living there. It's a good read and I found these posts most interesting:
1) How to ease your integration in the social life
2) Spider in a newspaper
3) Getting ready to move to OZ
4) Property buying tutorial

A really small blog was Swivel's Blog. It's in Spanish and English and contains little useful info (but then again... it takes 2 hours max to read it). I found a couple of interesting things on it though:
1) A big list of useful links
2) Some shorts about OZ
3) A site on which you can search a migration agent by location

A blog with only 4 entries that's full of useful job finding advice is http://firstjobaustralia.blogspot.com/ This guy really tells it how it is and gives some practical specific tips that would help anyone new to OZ.

Another blog about life of a British in Australia is One Whinging Pom. I found myself amused reading quite a few of the posts there. So it's all worth reading, but the practical advise is in these posts:

1. Tips about banks
2. A short description of animals that could live in your yard
3. Buying second hand car
4. Australia after a year
5. Healthcare system? Yeah... it's hard
6. Cost of living seen through a brit's eyes
7. Driving madness

Soon to come... 

The city of Melbourne

so, I'm terribly enthusiastic that I found this site:
The City of Melbourne

Cheers

Linking up - Conneting - Surfing

It turns out that starting this blog was more than a really good idea. Besides allowing to organize ideas it helps connecting with likely minded people. Recently I've had some comments that were really valuable and have shed some light on visa obtaining process.

And a new idea came to me: connect to all the blogs that are related (it seems I'm not special, others have though of this WAY before me).

This took me 2 steps:

1. following everyone that had a relevant blog on blogspot and looking at what they followed (and followed relevant blogs they followed) and so on.
2. using a google search. Yeah, nothing miraculous here. The special thing was including a google search keyword: site:blogspot.com. This means that google will search only the site blogspot.com. And the result? All the blogs hosted on blogspot that contain references to Australia+moving+Melbourne+whatnot. Of course you could search any blog hosting platform. :)

So, for the moment I have so much information that it scares me. Check them out in Different Perspectives section.

Cheers

30 mins seminar 'bout Skilled Migration

Just found a 3 part presentation about the process of obtaining the visa and I wanted to share it with you.

Without further ado:
Part1, Part2 and Part3.

In case you're wondering: There are 606 days until Thursday, 1 December 2011.

Time is ticking away

This is such a great and simple idea that it deserves it's own entry.

From now on, I'm going to count the days that are left until my departure (1 December 2011).
It'll make the concept of leaving easier to grasp.

There are 627 days until Thursday, 1 December 2011.

Letting them know

It just struck me... the easiest way to tell the close ones about leaving is... (I'm gonna leave you some seconds to thing about it)... Yeah, you probably guessed it if yo already read this post.

Using baby steps is the way to do it... if you'll just wait until the final moment to bring it up, you could end up giving you old folks a heart attack. I didn't think about this at the beginning but as time passed it became more and more obvious. In fact the earlier your bring it up the better it is (you could even get their support).

So, it's quite simple, randomly start talking about Oz, about what you think it's cool about it. And keep on doing it until you encounter resistance, then just drop it. After some time start talking about it again. When you do this try to gradually get closer to the idea of moving there.

And people will eventually get accustomed to the idea that you're talking serious business.

And this behavior can be used almost everywhere and anywhere (as long as time permits it).

The only drawback that this particular situation has is that if you'll start talking to new people about this from the start some of them will be really careful about committing when it comes to you. Don't worry about it, it's only a few that react in this particular way.

Hooroo!