Yesterday was the 1st anniversary of our arrival in Australia. I was going to do a big blog post to mark the occasion but I can’t be arsed – too busy working on my website. Suffice to say it’s been a fantastic first year – everything we hoped for and more. There are lots of positives and very few negatives.

We do miss everyone but there’s definitely no going back!

Our stuff finally cleared customs and arrived at our house yesterday, two weeks after arriving in Brisbane. Unfortunately we were one of the unlucky ones and we got levied for an inspection fee by Customs, which cost us $270.

They didn’t do a very good job though because on opening our boxes we found that aftershave, pot-puree, and even a spider that was trapped at the bottom of glass display thing full of stones (I don’t know what to call it – it’s a woman’s thing), all made it through customs.

We now have boxes full of stuff all over the house ready to be sorted out and found an home, so it’s not going to be much of a relaxing weekend this weekend.

We need a bigger house, I’m sure we didn’t need to ship half of the items we did.

After a couple of days of torrential rain and then an unusually cold day, we’re finally back to business as usual – clear blue skies and warm sunshine!

You might have seen on the news that a cyclone has hit New South Wales, including Sydney, and killed a few people. I think we caught the edges of it here. In fact we couldn’t believe how cold it was yesterday. The houses here aren’t prepared for cold weather; they’re built to keep the inside cool and many, including ours, doesn’t have heating. Well I think it might have, just we haven’t figured out how to get it working. The A/C unit is supposedly one of those reverse cycle ones where it can kick out warm air but whatever setting we tried it just seemed to be set to ARCTIC.

Today couldn’t have been more different. It was like a different season never mind a different day.

It’s Queensland Week this week, and with this weekend also being a long weekend due to a public holiday on Monday for the Queen’s birthday (funny how there’s a public holiday for it here yet not in Britain), there’s loads of stuff happening all over Brisbane this weekend.

Today we started off by going to the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre on the South Bank for what was billed as the world’s largest second-hand book sale. There were over 2 million books for sale, starting for as little as 20 cents. We bought a stack of paperbacks and hardbacks, some fairly new, including DVD’s for a total of only $50 (£20).

We then drove over the river to Roma St Parkland where they were holding the Big Queensland BBQ. It’s the first time we’ve visited the Roma St Parkland and we were really impressed. It contains the world’s largest urban sub-tropical garden – and it’s absolutely beautiful.

The Big Queensland BBQ was completely free and there was plenty to see and do (besides eat of course). Lauren loved it. Hi-5 were performing on the main stage, and all around there were tents with different acts and fun for the kids.

More new photo’s on flickr.

One of the things I love about this country is that there are always things happening, places to go and things to see, and most of the time it’s completely free. Today, even the parking was cheap.

In other news… (this is the BBC from London).. Rach has got herself a couple of interviews lined up. One next week and one the week after. They’re both for office manager type roles. I’ve proposed the idea of her working full time and me staying at home, writing a best-selling novel or working on my perpetual motion invention, but she’s having none of it. At least if she does get a job it takes the pressure of me a little and will at least pay for the roof above our head. What I’m starting to realise here is that because everyone’s so laid back, everything takes ages to sort out. In the UK, I’d submit my CV for a job in the afternoon and then be following it up with a phone call to the agency the next morning. It doesn’t work like that here. It seems it takes them a week just to check their e-mail.

Patience my dear boy..

We went out for a drink last night at ‘our club’ with our new neighbours Paul and Julie, from Coventry. Paul drove and parked his car underneath some trees brimming with Lorikeets. When we came out the car was absolutely covered in bird shit! It was that bad he had to take it through the car wash there and then, and even that didn’t get it all off. We did laugh!

I’m getting the hang of the language by the way. It’s simple. You just abbreviate everything to the first 3 letters and then add an o. For instance, your car registration over here is rego, an ambulance is ambo, etc (you get the picture).

I also love some of the shop and brand names over here. I particularly like Coon Cheese and the bedding company – Holy Sheet.

I’m finally up and running on broadband again. It wasn’t straightforward though. I went back to 3 on Monday with all the necessary I.D. They spoke to their accounts department and explained my situation. In the end the accounts department just needed some proof of recent income. So I had to go to the Carina Leagues Club (henceforth known as “my club”) to use their internet room, which has a free printing service when you purchase the internet card, and print off proof of my income from contracting over the last few months. I took the paperwork back to 3 and eventually, late Monday, I got a phone call from them to say their accounts department had accepted me. Thank god!

I took the new broadband data card home Monday evening and of course – it didn’t work.

I rang their technical support line who told me I had to wait 24 hours for the service to be activated. So I waited and tried again late Tuesday.

Come Tuesday it still wasn’t working so I rang them again. They told me that the web surfing package had not been activated on my account, they would activate it now but I’d have to wait between 4 and 24 hours before I could use it. So I waited again.

I kept trying all morning and nothing. I rang them up this afternoon and would you believe it, just as I started talking to them I got a blue flashing light on my data card to show their was a network available.

I’m all up and running now, finally, and what’s more I’m getting a decent speed – nearly 1Mb. I’ve also got a 2Gb allowance which is twice what I had with Telstra although not nearly enough for me to download music, podcasts, or movies; or watch Liverpool FC matches streamed on Liverpoolfc.tv, or even use Skype with my webcam, etc. I could, but that would eat up my allowance in less than a week.

Funnily enough, at just about the same time as my mobile broadband started working, so did my landline. We’re now up and running on a home phone number so will be calling home over the next few days (we promise not to call in the middle of the night, honest!).

I’ve just had a call from a recruitment consultant who told me he’s working on setting me up an interview with a large security consultant, possibly next week. It doesn’t sound like they’re recruiting at the moment but he said they were interested in my CV. It could be one of those where they set me on on the basis that I go out and win some business for them.

On Monday we got ourselves enrolled for Medicare. Hopefully, when I’m working full-time we’ll be able to top this up with private medical insurance. I still need to read up on how it all works but from what I understand we use our Medicare card to claim back a percentage of any medical fees incurred. Medicare covers 75% of the schedule fee for in-hospital services, 85% of the schedule fee for out-of-hospital services, and 100% of the schedule fee for out of hospital GP attendance items. However, the schedule fee is a fee for service set by the Australian Government and not necessarily what the doctors may charge. A lot of people have private medical insurance here to cover the remaining fees. In fact, the federal government penalises those that haven’t. According to a government website:

Lifetime Health Cover is essentially a financial penalty imposed on people over the age of 31 who do not have hospital cover. If a person does not have hospital cover on 1 July following their 31st birthday and decides to take out hospital cover later in life, they will pay a loading of 2% on top of the base premium for every 1st July that has occurred since their 31st birthday.

It looks like it’s going to be a bit more expensive for me.

By the way, the heavens have truly opened on Brisbane. It started pelting it down late yesterday afternoon and it hasn’t stopped raining since – 24 hours of non-stop rain. The locals are loving it as there has been a drought here for months. I can’t say we share their joy.

All was going well with the new wireless broadband USB adaptor for my laptop up until Friday when I broke it! All I did was pull it out of the USB port and the thing came apart on me. I took it into the shop I purchased it from Saturday morning and they told me they couldn’t replace it there, I’d have to ring up Telstra and ask them to send me a replacement. So I rang up Telstra and eventually get through (the phone services over here are even worse than in the UK, even worse than BT in fact) only to be told I’d have to wait 5 days for a new one. That’s completely unacceptable, I can’t afford to wait 5 days especially while I’m looking for work. Anyway, I told them to cancel my account. And I took the adaptor back to the shop and got my money refunded.

I was back to square one – no internet. I then went in Vodafone to sign up for one of their packages but of course I didn’t have my passport with me or any other form of identification that they would accept. By this time the shops were shutting up so I knew I’d have to wait until Sunday. So I went back this morning with I.D. and applied for the Vodafone package, only to get refused because I failed the credit score.

They weren’t very helpful at all. I explained the situation – it’s hard to pass the credit score when I’ve never had credit in Australia and when I haven’t yet got a job. I told them I was willing to pay for 12 month usage in advance but they weren’t having it.

I then made my way to the 3 shop to give their package a go. They have different rules and couldn’t accept the passport – they needed to see something with my current address on, and it can’t be the tenancy agreement. The thing is, we haven’t had any bills yet to our new address so I thought I was stuck.

I went home extremely frustrated to say the least. Anyway, luckily, our first bill arrived today for electricity. So I’m going to try again tomorrow. It could still be a problem though with the credit check. I explained to them that while I haven’t sorted out employment yet I’m still officially a director of a UK company so hopefully that could be taken into consideration. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

So to summarise, I still love Australia but they really need to sort their telecommunications out. I’m still without a landline – we’ve been told it will be fixed on Wednesday. It took us days to activate our mobile SIM’s because Vodafone was going through an IT upgrade that seemed to last a week (I don’t think much of their change control!). I can’t get ADSL to the house, and I’m not having much look with wireless broadband.

Besides that everything else is good. Rach did a good days work yesterday. She was originally only going to work in the morning helping set up for a wedding reception but she got asked back in the evening to help out. I’m not sure if she’ll be doing it again though. She didn’t mind setting up, or even helping the soux chef in the evening, but she draws the line at washing pots. I don’t blame her – we’re not that desperate. Yet.

I’m typing this from the Carina Leagues Club, which we’ve just become members of. Think Phoenix Nights but less Northern UK. The beer is cheap, so is the food. There’s a live band on (sorry, ‘turn’), and there’s a kids club for Lauren. What more does anyone want from life! I’m going to have to get to grips with the language though. I asked for a beer and they asked me whether I wanted a skooner or a pot. Pot sounded larger so I went with that. I got an half! Skooner is the pint glass.

It’s officially the first day of winter here today. You wouldn’t know it. It’s a bit weird actually. All the clothes shops are stocking jumpers and other winter clothes and yet it’s 25 degrees outside!

We’ve spent the last couple of days getting into the ozzie lifestyle. We had Kangaroo steak for dinner last night. Very nice indeed. A bit like beef. It’s red meat but apparently it’s extremely lean and quite good for you. There are 53 million Kangaroos in Australia and there’s a debate about whether or not they should be culled back so there’s no qualms here about eating roo. We also had a look around yesterday at a few barbies – you can’t live in Australia and not have a BBQ in your back yard! You ought to see the size of some of them; you could feed a ship’s company! We’re debating whether or not to get a cheap one now to tide us over or wait until I get a job and buy a decent one. I suppose we can wait, after all, there’s a shared barbeque in our complex that we can use, next to the pool, and there’s public barbeques all over the place – down by South Bank, by the river, and in most of the parks.

Talking about parks, we had a walk around the parkland near our house yesterday afternoon. It’s quite beautiful. There’s a nice walk around a large lake in the middle (although the lake is mostly empty due to the drought), and there’s lots of off-shoots to picnic, BBQ and children’s play areas. It’s going to be my local jogging spot starting today. Yes, me, jogging! Rach is starting a Body Pump class tomorrow (Saturday) down at one of the many fitness centres here.

Nothing going work-wise for me yet. I did get one phone call from an agency asking me if I’d be interested in a contract, but unfortunately it was in Sydney. I don’t really fancy the 1200 mile round-trip commute! Most of the jobs I’m seeing are in Sydney. There’s also a lot in Melbourne and Canberra. Melbourne and Canberra are quite cold this time of the year, and Canberra is inland – too far from the beach for my liking. Actually, you get to realise the vast size of Australia when you look at the temperatures. Yesterday, it was 12 degrees in Canberra (South East), whereas it was 33 degrees in Darwin (North).

Rach has been given some work. A friend of Cath’s has offered her some casual cash-in-hand work helping set up for weddings. She’s got a few hours on Saturday so at least there’s some money coming in. Myself and Lauren are going to have a look for a car while Rach is working.

The daylight hours here are taking a bit of getting used to. At the moment it’s dark by 5:30, and it gets dark really quickly – not much of a twilight to speak of. From the minute it starts to go dark it’s pitch black in less than 15 minutes. And then the sun is up and shining again about 5 in the morning. The only problem is that as soon as the sun is up, so are the birds – at 4:30am. You wouldn’t believe the sound of the birds here, it’s like living in a tropical aviary! In the UK I used to go to bed about midnight and get up between 7 and 8am. There’s no chance of that here. There’s a reason why everyone gets up at the crack of dawn and goes to bed at 9:30.

I’m still really peeved about this broadband business. I’ve only had it a few days and I’ve already used 150Mb. That’s just general internet use, without multimedia or downloading. There was a number of podcasts I used to download in the UK which I wanted to continue to subscribe to here but there’s no chance at the moment, it would take up all my allowance.

We were supposed to have our landline connected yesterday but it’s not working. I’m waiting for the phone company to get back to me to tell me why it’s not working. Technology doesn’t seem to work very well over here.

The TV is also doing my head in. I can’t wait until we get Foxtel (Sky) so we can forward through the adverts. They have adverts every 10 minutes here. Honestly, in a 30 minute programme there’s 3 lots of adverts, it’s ridiculous. I used to moan about the licence fee in the UK but now I say god bless the BBC.

It looks like I’m going to miss the England v Brazil match. It’s not being shown on any of the terrestrial channels here and my last attempt at finding somewhere in the city to watch it at 5am wasn’t very successful.

These are only little things in the scheme of things though. We’re here for a change of lifestyle so I’m secretly quite pleased that we’re being forced to watch less telly and use the Internet less. I’m adapting quite well I think. Although I’m not going to be able to live without the footy for too long.

So much for the broadband order being processed and activated 10 days after Thursday. After speaking to a neighbour last night (who incidentally has recently moved her from Coventry), it seems that there’s no more ports available on the local telephone exchange for ADSL broadband and they’re not likely to upgrade capacity for another year.

I rang Optus this morning, the ISP who I had registered with asking them to clarify. They told me they had no way of checking this until my phone line is activated on Thursday and the application begins processing. So I then tried ringing Telstra Wholesale who are responsible for the phone line, but their switchboard just kept putting me through to the ISP. Twice. Even though after the first time I specifically told them I didn’t want to speak to the ISP I wanted to speak to the people who are responsible for exchange. When finally they did put me through to the right number I was left in a queue for at least 30 minutes before I gave up and put the phone down.

I tried looking on the web via my phone but I couldn’t get a web connection. After speaking to Vodafone (I can’t even be bothered to go into the problems we’ve been having with Vodafone Aus over the last few days) it turns out that may PAYG package doesn’t include web. So I had to purchase an ‘Extras pack’.

I tried navigating to the Telstra Wholesale pages on my phone but it was like pulling teeth so I gave up in the end and we drove to our local shopping centre to use the internet kiosks.

Anyway it turned out that yes, there are no more available ports on our local exchange, and the same is true of much of Brisbane due to the massive growth it is experiencing (probably due to the thousands of Brits that are descending here at the moment).

There’s no Cable in this area either so that left me with only one choice – 3G data card.

At least I’m up and running on the internet now from home, even though I am restricted to 1Gb per month usage and the maximum speed I can get out of this thing is 200kbps – half the speed of basic ADSL. It’s ok for surfing the web but I guess I have to forget bit torrent downloads for a while. I also need to test Skype as I’m not sure if I have enough bandwidth to make VoIP calls back home, never mind using the webcam that we purchased before we left so our parents can regularly see Lauren.

If I’d have known this was the situation with broadband beforehand I probably wouldn’t have signed the tenancy agreement, I would have looked elsewhere.

Oh well, I’m sure I’ll adapt.

Besides that, everything else is good. Mind you, we had our first day of rain today – they didn’t put that on our visa!

We’ve nearly finished putting the house together, only one more bedside table to put together. I’ve also applied for a couple of jobs. I’ll ring round the agencies tomorrow to suss them out. I’ll also catch up on my e-mail tomorrow and reply to those of you who have e-mailed me. Sorry I haven’t replied yet.