Monday, September 28, 2009

Arrival in Brissie

After the cold night in the plane from Singapore to Brisbane it was a relief to be in the warmer Airport hall. Again there is air conditioning everywhere so it's never really hot anywhere. After we passed the initial "stamp booth" where a customs officer stamped out date of arrival and thus activated our visa, we picked up our luggage from the conveyor belts and proceeded to the long queue which had formed at the border security tables. There were 4 tables and there were two customs officers at each table. There was also a waggly dog and if he sat down next to your bags you'd be in BIG trouble ( dog sitting down = drugs detected ). We had filled in the little cards that you get in the plane from Singapore to declare some wooden items and some leather bag. We were surprised that about 80% of the people all declared something. If they pick you out of the line ( we were picked out ) and you don't have anything declared on paper then they will search your bags, which can take up to 2-4 hours. If you have declared something, they will put your bags through the Xray and if they see nothing strange you can go. This happened to us and before we knew it we were in Australia.
We picked up our car from Thrifty Rentals ( Tip : Thrifty Rental cars is the cheapest rental there , we checked ) and got our bags in the trunk and very carefully inspected the car from inside to make sure there were no big spiders in ambush mode ready for the attack on us. It was dark and thus this barely helped and we stepped in hoping that the spiders would leave us alone. ( of course, there wasn't a single spider anywhere near ).

Driving on the left side of the road was surprisingly easy considering we had just done 27 hours travel. The hardest part is the positioning of the mirrors which are completely different when sitting on the "right" side. We brought our Garmin Nuvi with us ( which I already had installed the Australian maps on in Europe ) and simply put the address in there and this helped a lot : The ease of GPS !

We were greeted by Dale , the home owner here who rents the room out to migrants. It's a smallish room of about 4 by 5 meters + ensuite bathroom. There are cooking plates in the room but we haven't used them for several reasons ( smelly food in the bedroom is not fun ). We do however use the small gas BBQ outside almost every day to cook our meat on, but more on that later. Dale showed us around the place and gave us the keys, we all needed to get up early the next morning and decided to call it a night.

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