Settling down

Coming to the end of my second week here in Melbourne, and I’ve begun to feel at home. I have a job starting on Monday, as a temp for a recruitment agency, and it sounds like most of my jobs will be short term, with a potential 2 week assignment, followed by a 1 week assignment. Despite the rately hour being better than the others in my house, I also have no sick pay or annual leave, and less job security.  I had had previous interviews, for a waitressing job and working for a promotions agency. I received a call accepting me for training and a trial with the promotions agency as I arrived for the interview with the recruitment agency, which was a little awkward! I was given the first assignment for the recruitment agency immediately, and settled on that for 2 main reasons. Pay and sitting down! With bad knees, standing for the majority of 8 hours a day would not go so well, especially when I don’t have the incentive of higher pay.  So starting on Monday, I will be doing mainly data entry for a local council.

I have been out for several meals since arriving here (our cupboards are quite bare!) and driven all the way out to the sticks to visit a friend. Driving out, I understood a main difference between Australia and UK. In Australia, there is a relatively spread out city, surrounded by suburbs - with interspersed parks and reserves, but no real ’space’ until you reach the edge of the suburbs, and hit bush. In the UK, there are cities, towns and villages, with farmland and woods in between, until you reach coast. Australia’s main residential areas are based around the coast, and farmland is situated around it all, rather than being in between and separating the towns and villages, as it does in the UK.

A few more notes about driving, leading on from my previous comments. The main one is that people have clutch control! In the UK, new drivers are taught to put on the hand-brake when stopping on a hill - but then never given chances to practice not doing so. In Australia, when traffic stops on a hill, brake lights still shine and cars don’t roll because they practice stopping, coming to the bite point and then accelerating - without rolling back. Cars also leave larger gaps between each other, which in the UK, greatly annoyed me, but in Australia makes sense. There is simply more space, with less traffic and wider roads.

Anyway, I shall update this more later on when things change and I notice more changes!