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| We might miss being so close to the beach. It's a 2 min walk compared to a 30-minute bike ride when we move to the CBD (Central Business District). Life is so hard sometimes. 🏝 |
We are surviving the heat and the rental market. The temperature is consistently somewhere between 20-35 degrees. I would say Melbourne is a good entry point for two white Canadians who have just come from winter in the Great White North. Melbourne doesn’t get those consistent 40 or 50-degree weeks that a lot of other parts of Australia get as far as I am aware, so it is nice to ease into the acclimatization process. Although, Travis and I went on a walk the other night and it was 19 degrees and we both thought it was a little chilly, so we are on our way to acclimatizing.  |
| Cute beach huts all around. |
Now to talk about the rental market... The rental mark here is just so wild. After inspecting 24 apartments in 12 days we finally picked one that we thought was suitable and applied for it on Saturday the Jan 15th. It was a very long and exhausting process. The process here in Australia is very different from Canada and most other countries from what I have heard. You never actually meet the owner of the apartment because they hire agents to manage their apartments/buildings for them. When you book a time to see a place (called an inspection) you show up and there are usually between 5-25 other people there all competing for the same place. It’s a pretty cutthroat market. Often people offer more money per week to secure an apartment that they want because there is so much competition. The highest bidder gets the apartment, so you kind of hope no one offers more on one that you want. In Victoria this practice is illegal but we experienced it so yeah it still goes on. After the inspection, you then submit an application and they are then chosen by the owner or agent. It seems like you have to be one lucky person to be chosen by a landlord. We eventaully found an apartment that was new, clean, and in a very good location for school, work, and grocery shopping so we applied for it. Oh, also the application is very extensive. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they wanted a blood sample from us because they wanted so much other personal and financial information. We turned out to be lucky people after all because we got chosen! Our adopted Aussie mom (Meg) was surprised and impressed we found a place so soon, but from what we know, 16 days of searching for a place and 12 days of inspecting apartments is pretty normal. Our apartment is a very small place but when living in a big city that is standard. We are happy that we found something before we both start school and work.
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This is from the add from the website. Notice the copper faucet. It was kind of a done deal for me becasue of that. Haha! Agents commonly use wide-angle lenses to make the spaces look bigger than they are in real life. A plus is that we won't need a kitchen table becasue of the bar stool area. It will give us more living room space to maybe put a pantry and have a bigger couch in that area. Every space-saving measure counts haha.
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| This is the living area which is opposite the previous picture. |
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| This is our bedroom that will fit our "queen size" bed and maybe a side table (we are pretty sure Queen size is bigger in Canada). The big black-out blind with a full size floor to celing window behind it is very nice. There is also "another room" being just a small study for Travis/storage area. |
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| The bathroom also has matching copper accents! |
Now that we have found a place the new challenge is trying to stock the apartment. We went to Ikea and the place was quite picked through. When we got home we tried to make an order online and it said the items would not arrive to us until March 3rd. Oh, the joys of Covid are ever-lasting.
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| Travis and I decided to grab the classic Ikea Swedish meatball meal. It tastes the same in Australia as it does in Canada! My dream of having a big Ikea delivery right to my door was crushed so the meatball meal helped with those sad feelings and all was right in the world again. |
The other funny thing about apartment hunting is none of these apartments have a washing machine or fridge. So we have to buy a fridge and washing machine. Most people don’t have the space for dryers and just hang dry their clothing, so we will do that as well. One odd thing is that people will commonly sell their appliances when they "move house". This is because moving them is either too tedious and the place they move into may not have large enough spaces for them. This means there are lots of people who broker white goods. We felt really odd buying them from Facebook marketplace. So far they are working and seem like they will go the distance 🤞🙏 .
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| After one of our inspections, we were walking along this bridge and we looked up becasue we heard all this sqwaking where we saw a bunch of colorful birds! We think are parrots. |
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| We also spied this place when we were waiting for our inspection to start. Old churches are being turned into houses for people to purchase and live in. |
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| This is the church that has been renovated inside from the picture above.👆🏻Pretty cool to have a stain-glass window in your house. |
The day Travis jumped into the ocean: Friday Jan 14th was a very hot day so we decided to go to Aspendale beach. I didn’t go in the water because I had a big blister on my foot from running to an inspection with very sweaty feet in sandals the day before. We had to run to one inspection because we were late as the bus that we were supposed to take never showed up. We found out that there is a bus driver shortage thanks to Covid. Running for 11 mins in hot humid air almost finished Travis and me off. I decided the ocean saltwater on my blister would not be so nice but Travis was still going to go in. Now, Travis claims that he is scared of the ocean but when we got there he just left me and went straight in 🤷🏻♀️. He came back to me and then decided he was going to go out again and explore this sand bar further out. Don’t worry we were educated by our Aussie parents (Meg and Wayne) about ocean safety in Australia. Travis came back to me again and showed me all the things he found and then went back in 2 more times. He was just like a little kid collecting ocean shells. I stayed on the sand with my umbrella. Not a beach umbrella but just a regular small rain umbrella for extra sun protection. We plan on going back to the beach sometime next week and then I will get my turn to search for shells. The Aspendale beach is just one of many beaches along the Melbourne bay. You could walk along the beach for ages. It's never-ending.
The Queen Victorian Market was an abslute gem that we found. It is this big historical outdoor market that covers 7 hectares of land. We found that buying our produce, vegetables, and possibly our meat and fish will be a lot cheaper at the market compared to the grocery store. BIG WIN!! Fruit and vegetables are very expensive in the grocery stores, so to find this out just made us so very happy. Also the fruit here is just packed full of flovour. I have also noticed that there are fewer packaged and processed items in the grocery stores here. The freezer sections are pretty small and don’t have much in them. There is still ice cream in those freezer sections though so I will have to find out which ones are best. We did see there might be some frozen yogurt ones for Travis. Sadly, no Chapman frozen yogurt…It will be missed.
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| Everyone will tell you that you need to visit Lygon Street, and so we did. We stopped at an Italian resturant for some lunch. Lygon street is basically a little Italy. It's full of Italian restaurants, and yummy gelato. Travis's loves gelato and this street is pretty close to his school so he made a joke of starting a secret gelato bank account. For his birthday we were sure to get him some licorice-flavoured gelato that we could only find at one particular gelateria. I think it's not that appealing but Travis loves it. They had no orange at the time for him to make Tiger (his favorite flavor of ice cream) |
Susan's seafood dish. It had a lot of surprises in it including octopus suction cups 😳. |
Australian-ism:
Sweet-As = very sweet
(add "as" on to the end of a word to emphasize it)
When Travis and I were at the resturant on Lygon street there were these two Aussies behind us and one of them exclamined: “Ah, mate it's hot as today!”
