No Middle Name

Now that we've been here for 5 weeks, I feel qualified to dispense my hard-earned wisdom. Firstly, visa choice. If you're coming to Australia, don't bother with a temporary visa - go for permanent residency, if you can, it makes things a lot easier. We're here on a Temporary Business Subclass 457 visa, sponsored by my wife's hospital. No problem, we thought, we can apply for residency once we're sure we like it. The problems are: you can't get finance for anything if you're on a temporary visa, so make sure you've got a shitload of cash available to you; you can't buy a home, you'll have to rent (well - you can buy a home but first you have to apply for permission with the Foreign Investment Bureau); you're unlikely to find someone who will give you a permanent job, since they can't be sure you're going to be around in 12 months' time (this is a problem for me, not my wife - who can't change jobs for 12 months anyway); yo...

Do you know what is the scariest thing about moving to another country? Everything. It's all new, and it's all scary. We've left behind family, friends, jobs, decent chocolate, and marmite. If you let yourself think about it for longer than a few seconds, you'd crap yourself. So, you don't. The people that do think it through carefully and thoroughly are the ones who say "oh, we thought about doing that for years, but we never went through with it". The vast majority of people who stay where they are, and are quite happy about it. We, however, are the sort that would always wonder "what if...", eventually becoming bitter and twisted, bringing it up in arguments 30 years later. "Yeah, well, little Johnny wouldn't even have been in the stolen car with the brazilian midget prostitutes, the cocaine-snorting donkey and the nuns if we'd moved to Australia, like I wanted to!" So, we went for it. Crossed our fingers, closed our eyes and...