I arrived at Adelaide at 20:08 local time on 20 June 2013.The Australian Customs and Border protection should have a new motto - 'we are not here to clean your shoes'. This is quoting verbatim from the frog who decided to give me a condescending lesson on cleanliness despite the fact that I had already admitted guilt by duly declaring the shoes upon arrival - as requested. I shouldn't complain, as a shoe-cleaning service they are highly recommended.
On my first night in Adelaide, I woke up abruptly around 3 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. In the end I had to get up and into the living room. Ten minutes later after much tottering in the darkness around a totally unfamiliar home, having groped out and clicked three different switches - hitting shins, toes and knees into tables, chairs and sofas, with various combinations of all of the above - I twigged that we were in the middle of a powercut. I sat in complete darkness, wondering about lady luck and her whims. All I could do was play with the one remaining distraction - a mobile phone - as it was running on a battery charge and connected to the outside world via 3G. Around fifteen minutes later, there was a beep followed by the lights flooding the room as electricity came back.You might call it an inauspicious start to the new adventure.
Once set up with a cup of tea, I proceeded to get myself registered for the Tax File Number - a bit like National Insurance Number in the UK, only different. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) website was not reachable - and it seems to affect only me! Trying to solve this particular problem taught me several extremely useful IT lessons - how to change your DNS provider, how to flush your DNS (no, I don't know what that means!), how to change your IP address, which free VPN software is best, how to cheat your laptop to assign administrator privileges on user accounts, and when it's a good idea to clear your browsers' cache. It works now, although I still don't know what the problem was in the first place; I dare not ask.
Main thing is, I've got my TFN now. One should never start a new adventure without sorting out one's tax first!
Helen landed her new job within a month of arriving, and it included the use of a company car. She was given a chunky grey Holden (Ozzie equivalent of Vauxhall/Opel) to use until her new car arrived.
As one of our first trips, on Sunday we went for a walk around the Morialta Gorge and Falls, a 20 minute drive from Adelaide. It was a cold but sunny morning and as the day progressed, the sun grew stronger and the temperature rose to around 18 degrees C.
Once I got to the ocean and on to Henley Beach, I strolled out on the pier - ice cream in hand, yummy wildberry yoghurt flavour if you wanna know - and found this rather persistent pelican perched on the promenade. He kept striding up and down the pier and you got the feeling he was a sergeant major overseeing the two angler grunts as they pulled up HIS fish. And if he didn't get the fish... well, you just didn't want to go there, believe me!
