Australian Diary, Week 6 – There’s something about Perth

It’s been over a month since I last posted a blog to which I blame the migration and sheer ease of settling in to an Australian lifestyle.

Gord and I are still in Perth, we’re still room sharing and still working. I can’t speak entirely for Gord, but I’m sure he would share similar views, Perth has been one of my favourite destinations on the whole trip. There is something truly special about Perth.

In Perth one can wake up to a sunny morning with barely a cloud in the sky, stroll to work or catch the free public bus to the centre, say pardon or excuse me and receive a “no worries” reply as you accidently block someone’s path. Every morning I’ve been happy to get up at the crack of dawn and amble down the street to work. I could wax lyrical about Perth, it would be so easy to do so.

What jobs are we doing?

I’m in IT support and Gord is a Keyboard Monkey (his own words!). He’s working for a small firm who receive letters and documents regarding court cases and he enters the required data in to a database. He describes his job as mind-numbingly boring, to put it mildly.

I feel bad that he’s doing that as I’m really enjoying my job at Aecom ANZ, I’ve got a great group of work colleagues that I’m sharing my spare time with also and with the job I’m always meeting new people. I’m just a support monkey, to try to paraphrase Gord, and our small team is the sole IT support for the whole building housing 500 staff. It’s not challenging and my brain is yearning for a challenge, but it’s so fast paced you can’t get bored.

Is the Australian lifestyle so much different to the UK?

Yes, it really is. I sense a work-hard play-hard ethic to life, this view has been met with great debate but even so, at Aecom we tend to share a Friday evening with the work colleagues around us.

It’s expensive here in Perth and I’m excited to check-out the East coast, especially after reports that most things are half the price to Perth. It’s very easy to spend $100 on a night out and still not feel the effects of alcohol.

The playing-hard ethic, this is something else – Sunday sessions. Read further in to the name given and Australians and those alike will go to a bar on an afternoon, usually when sport is involved and drink until well past dusk. Jeez, I hate working on a hangover. Hats off to them though!

Everyone is incredibly friendly here, the pleases and thankyous come out in force as well as a genuine feeling of a content state. The only times the level of content is questioned is when a foreigner is involved in a misdemeanour of manners; be it British, Asian or any other ethnicity.

The weather here is incredible. We’ve had 2 days of rain since being here – this will be a problem come summer though. The scorching sun makes for weekend fun at the beach, failing miserably to surf but happily soaking up the cancerous UV rays due to an uncovered ozone layer.

Have we done anything except work?

Of course! We generally don’t do anything on weekdays – I do a lot of overtime and don’t get home until 8pm most evenings. Weekends however are our own, so we try and experience the suburbs and sights around and outside of Perth city. As it has been a long time since posting my last blog, I’ll bullet point what we have done:

• Western Australia Australian Football Grand Final – Subiaco Oval Stadium
  • Bought tickets to the final – Swan District vs Claremont
  • Players run the length of 2 soccer pitches for 2 hours punching and kicking the ball and players (smaller than a rugby ball)
  • 6 points for kicking the ball in the centre goal, 1 point for the goals eitherside
  • Swan District won by 1 point, 100 to 99

• The Pinnacles Desert
  • 3 hours north of Perth near Cervantes
  • Phallus shaped rocks poke out from the ground to show a truely unique geo-rock formation
  • Stopped off at Lancelin on the way home for a beer. Awesome atmosphere in the small, full or character pub that overlooks the sea

• Perth Glory Soccer – niB Stadium
  • The well-known verteran Robbie Fowler plays for glory and is a hero
  • Disappointingly it ended 0-0 vs Gold Coast

• Fremantle and Cottesloe
  • Both have beaches, Cottesloe has crisp, white sand, traditional fish and chip shops and generally much quieter
  • Fremantle is the busier, but has a poor beach. The Little Creatures Brewery has a bar serving local brews with a young, yuppie hang out

• Scarborough beach
  • Fantastic spot to surf and jump waves
  • Failed miserably to surf but on the plus side Gord face planted in to the sand

• Subiaco and Innaloo
  • Our friends Mark and Kerry live in Innaloo
  • Mark and Kerry, a cool South African couple, have generously lent us a Holden Barina (Vauxhall Corsa) for us to use on weekends around Perth
  • Kirsty and Kristina, another cool Kiwi and British flatmate mix. Kirsty I know through work we have spent time chilling at the beach and Pinnacles
• Drinking hole highlights include
  • CBD, The Garden, Squires, The Queens

What’s on the cards now?

We’re still in Perth working for the next month. My contract has been extended with Aecom until start of November. Gord and I are going our separate ways for a month, housing issues, I’m moving in with Mark and Kerry and Gord with a work colleague. We only need it for 3 weeks and renting properties is usually for longer.

Mark and Kerry have some stories from their childhoods, but you couldn’t meet a more generous and cool couple as these guys. They have a Golden Retriever call Lexy, I can’t wait to move in!

The dates all tie in nicely to when Gord and I head to Adelaide to meet Claire, Loz and Karl for our next epic 3 week-long leg to begin – following the coast from Adelaide to Brisbane in a Station Wagon!

Theoretically, would I move here?

With one small doubt, yes I would. My health being the major factor – medical bills for private CF health care is pretty high. I’d need an excellently paid job to pay for them.

Although Australia has a reciprocal health agreement with the UK, sadly, it does not cover pre-existing medical conditions. Damn!

Realistically I’m not contemplating coming back out to Australia to work/settle for a long time. It could happen, but with a return to the UK for Christmas I do have plans to stay in the UK.

Cystic Fibrosis related problems?

None, thankfully. I’m in reasonable health but still not fully content with how it’s behaving, especially with my cough. My main gripe is when I talk to people, I constantly have to clear my throat mid-sentence. I not only find this rude, but fairly disgusting too.

I don’t have my DNAse with me; it helps break down the waste in my lungs that’s left from constantly fighting off the infection. I’m getting a fair amount of exercise but still not enough. For the time being I am fine and don’t envisage any problems from now until my return to the UK.

Australia Diary, Week 1 – Becoming a Perthian

Bearing no relation to a Persian, Gord and I have been in Perth, Western Australia state, for a week now and have had no regrets about picking out this city to settle in.

Perth is arguably the only major city on the Western coast with Broome being the only other contender. It is a very quiet city and as when you see a traffic jam of 10 cars on the road, this is at its busiest. I think free public buses and cheap rail transport answer the question of peak time traffic, something England could benefit majorly from. The free buses work fantastically well.

Enjoying the best economy of Australia, something we learnt the hard way, Perth commodities attracts much higher pricing for everything requiring a parting of money. Food, clothes, accommodation, and beer all enjoy an inflated price tag with a pint of the latter costing a mere £6… What?! Yes, my heart sank too.

What are we doing in Perth?

Landing at 7am from Bangkok we took the Connect Bus service (£8) from Perth International Airport to our hostel. Staying in a hostel called Britannia on William for 1 night, which located 1km away from the centre of Perth and it was alright. It’s expensive for what you get (£20 each a night with shared bathroom), but this isn’t Asia anymore and we are in the most expensive part of Oz.

Our intention was to gun for a job; most importantly one to start immediately, this was/is our priority. With settling in to an Aussie working life top of the agenda so was decent accommodation. Living in a hostel while working is not ideal, both on my health and working so on the day we landed from Bangkok we went out to view properties I had already earmarked on www.gumtree.com.au

Before we left Bangkok I’d been researching places to stay as well as applying for jobs via www.seek.com.au targeting mainly IT related jobs I applied for others without much prejudice.

Where are we staying?

I had arranged some flat viewings for our first day in Perth; it just so happened that the first viewing blew us away. Right in the Perth CBD, Wellington Place opposite a huge park we could move in the day after for $250 p/w including bills for the both of us. It’s a large(ish) flat which we are sharing with a starting out Thai family and a Frenchman. The apartment block has a shared swimming pool, Jacuzzi and gym.

On the job front?

A friend told me that jobs in Australia are easy to come by and we’d probably have one in 3-4 days upon arrival. This wasn’t the case but it didn’t deter us in tackling the hunt hard.

As I write this article I start work for Aecom, a massive company with fingers in all pies, tomorrow. Employing 45,000 globally they mainly run projects for governments and other bodies in Architecture, Engineering, Consulting, Operations and Management – summed up in an acronym! I went through a recruitment agency called Hays who put me forward for an interview for a 2^nd/3^rd level IT Support role – I was offered the position and start tomorrow morning! I’m incredibly excited and the prospects if I apply myself could be hugely rewarding. I’m on an initial 6 week contract with extension opportunity.

Gord doesn’t have anything yet but he’s confident of a Data Entry/Document Controller position offer in the next coming days.

We actually both had job offers from Make-A-Wish as Street Marketers, collecting Direct Debits from shoppers to go towards fundraising efforts. The interview process was pretty original, amongst individual interviews we were given a questionnaire and a pen and sent amongst the public asking “If you had to choose a charity to donate to who would you prefer? Heart Foundation, WWF or Child Fund?” We had to ask shoppers and gather tallies of each – testing our confidence, manner and rejection skills! Paying $17.80 per hour with generous bonuses we declined the offer. My IT role pays a lot more and Gord’s potential pay in the pipeline is a significant amount.

One last job to talk about – Sales Assistant for Foxtel. I was offered a commission only role to knock on people’s doors selling Foxtel (Sky, in the UK) entertainment packages. I declined this position as there were inconsistencies in the pay structure between 3 people I spoke to. I’m Certainly not comfortable with mis-information.

Have we done anything else in Perth?

Apart from buying clothes on a budget and sharing them for job interviews to secure jobs, we have been doing a little bit of exploring.

Wellington Park- the park opposite is excellent to kick a Rugby ball around but we visited Cottesloe and Fremantle which are both coastal towns.

Our live-in-landlord, Kille, works at a Fish and Chip restaurant in Cottesloe and offered us free food if we visited. Taking the train to Cottesloe (£2) we had delicious, near English, food and stuffed like a Turkey at Christmas. On his lunch break, Kille drove us to Fremantle (Freo if you’re Aussie) and dropped us off in the town to have an explore. It didn’t take us long to find the Little Creatures Brewery and Pub! Offering Stout, Ales and lagers we celebrated our impending employments and relaxed by the sea.

Cystic Fibrosis related problems?

No, I’m in good health. The Samitivej Bangkok Sukhumvit Hospital has done a good job! They gave me 2 bottles of Saline to spray up my nose which still makes me laugh when I do it – I look ridiculous!

Stepping off the plane that instant fresh, green countryside air hits you. I “breathed” a sigh of relief and ready to fully embrace this new chapter to the world trip.