Yayboo

We moved into our new house on Thursday and spent the next three days with exactly one piece of furniture: our very nice bed. On Sunday we got some chairs - chairs! I'm writing this while seated in one at our dining room table next to a cup of tea and a crumpet. The house is very much liveable at this point - if you ignore the completely empty front room.

With all the house hunting and then house setting up and all the other stuff that goes into moving country, we haven't had a whole lot of time to explore Melbourne. But I can tell you that I really like it so far. Sure there are some quirky annoying things, but people are really friendly - really friendly. In fact, we have friends - friends! There's also a lower middle class here that simply does not exist in San Francisco; ads on TV entice people into certificate programs in construction. While it's hard to pinpoint exactly what this adds to a city - flavor? bargains? less snobbishness? - it seems clear that it's a good thing. Another good thing is that there are no Walgreens or RiteAids - just smaller, more personal pharmacies.

On the down side, Melbourne street signs are the size of a dollar bill and placed in the darkest part of an intersection at an angle that makes them legible only to an acrobat on a pogo stick. It makes for some interesting driving experiences in which tension in the car mount as I try to remember which side of the road to drive on and how to shift gears with my left hand while Z struggles with the maps and geography of a city he barely knows. Ah, fun.

While Melbourne may get a D in street signage, it gets an F minus in street numbering. Unlike the States, blocks are not numbered by the hundreds. This is merely annoying. What really sucks is that the numbers for a street will often start over in a new suburb. This means that there's a 203 Lygon Street in Carlton and, a few blocks north, a 203 Lygon Street in Brunswick. This has got to be the most stupid thing EVER. Who's idea was that???

But despite the road issues, I like Melbourne. I like the diversity, the comfort, the friendliness and the plethora of interesting things to explore. We have been here three weeks and haven't even scratched the surface of places to see and things to do. On the Yayboo Scale it falls clearly in the Yay.