Beginning to see the light : Getting settled in Melbourne

A typical Australian street sign. Possibly.

 As we've wound our way across countries and continents over the past twelve months, the blog has rarely been more than one or two 'stops' behind. While this has been a source of pride to us for most of the trip, it also doesn't really tell the whole story, especially as the one 'stop' that we are currently behind lasted all of... er... five months. Welcome to Australia.

Oh, Australia. The 'fair go' country to its immigrant inhabitants; a cruel and unusual construct to many of its long suffering indigenous peoples; home in the sun to a large, diverse ex-pat community; and career suicide for Baz Luhrmann.

Louise and I arrived in Melbourne after a wonderful month traversing New Zealand, and it's fair to say that our original impressions were not good. That said, our original impressions were based entirely on a train station waiting room that smelled like a drunken grannies incontinence pad, a visit to Hungry Jacks (Euro-dwellers read Burger King) and a few glimpses of a city centre that seemed to rival Birmingham in its underwhelming, hum-drum, workaday aesthetic. That, almost six months later, Louise and I were tantalisingly close to staying and making Melbourne our home for at least the foreseeable future gives you an idea of just how much we fell for the place. And, truth be told, how good the wages were.

But how can you fit five fantastic months into a blog post? Well, you can't. And in this instance, my usual maxim of 'begin at the beginning' isn't that useful either, as three weeks hopping from hostel to hostel, failing to get a job and rapidly running out of money doesn't make for that great a read either. So it's probably best to fast-forward to the point where things started to make sense and the fun actually began in earnest. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Dee and Bernie.

***

Free breakfasts served here. And the odd corpse.

Standing on the overcrowded tram on the way to Rathdowne Street in Melbourne's trendy Carlton North, Lou and I had hit something of a plateau. Though Lou was working a steady, well-paying job in the Social Research Centre, I was still spending my time schlepping the streets forlornly handing out CVs and waiting for recruitment agencies to call. The hostel we were living in, though not without its peculiar charms, was nonetheless a former retirement home with a few of its hard-line tenants still ensconced in a locked wing. That one of these tenants was lying dead on a hospital gurney in the hall that morning (thankfully taking with her the indefinable smell that had hung round the place for a few days) probably gave us the final push we needed to find somewhere proper to live. Or at least somewhere where our room mates were less likely to croak in the night. Our viewings thus far hadn't gone that well, with the last one being a two bed flat currently housing five people in its 'rooms' – two each in the rooms and a South African in a cupboard. That a slender Thai chap lived in the kitchen diner – with his chinchilla – was probably the deal breaker for me. And so we found ourselves fare-dodging across the city for one last throw of the dice. And thank fuck we did.

Dee and Bernie, about to to go to work.

Lou and I were sold on the place the moment we walked in through the door. Quite apart from the massive red leather couch that snaked its way around half the living room, we were reliably in formed that no one lived behind it, which was amazing enough in itself. That Dee (an effervescent, hilarious and generally fantastic Perth native) and Bernie (impossibly likeable, impressively chilled Warrington born, Everton supporter) didn't bat an eye when I inadvertently dropped the C-bomb moments into our viewing just underlined our hunch that this was the place for us. Four days later – during which we though they'd given the room to someone else, in fact they'd just each thought the other was going to call – we met in town to 'sort things out'. While we failed singularly to do anything of the sort, we did wind up get utterly shit-faced and end up a Led Zeppelin-themed ten pin bowling night, in what would turn out to be the first of very, very many such shenanigans. More of which in due course.

'Til then, stay warm,

Luke and Louise

(Posted by Luke)