Summer in the City

Yesterday we picked up our new car- new to us anyways and our very first GPS device. It took a while but we finally managed to make it into the 21st century. Both are awesome and I can honestly say that I am warming to technology. Today, we took the car out to look at our first home viewing. It was 1 1/2 blocks from the ocean, in our school catchment area, 4 bedrooms and has a pool. The pool and deck area was absolutely gorgeous but the rest of the house was only so-so, including the 80's style pink toilets and bathroom sinks. However, the biggest issue is that it's only available on December 20 and we need to move by December 3. So, it's almost certainly counted out.  Hopefully on Monday we'll be able to go into 3 more homes.  One of them is going to have to fit the bill or we are looking at being homeless.  The good news is thta we probably have enough room to sleep in the car at the beach.

2 out of 4 of us are happy to go driving in our new car:

After the house hunting was finished for the day we went to Hillary's Boat Harbour: a touristy area with a little cove for swimming and a bunch of restaurants and shops.  Today they had a fireworks display celebrating the launch of summer.  Like the sign says...

The fireworks were pretty good.  It was a very festive vibe with lots of people there.  There were quite a few of them swimming in the cove during the fireworks and if you look closely you can see their little pea-heads floating in the water.  I assume the heads were still attached to their bodies but sharks do come into the area on occasion.

 

Tomorrow, we are planning on going to Rockingham (just south of Perth) to visit a seal colony and natural area.  If we have time we also plan to get mobile phones presuming we can find a mall that's open on Sunday.  We would have done it by now but not only are the plans very expensive they are incredibly complicated.  The biggest carrier in the country is Telstra and they have a practical monopoly on the business.  They also are the largest provider for home phone service and internet service.  Finally, they have a true monopoly on digital television. They are literally the only digital TV provider. Other companies are trying to break in to the mobile market but Telstra owns all of the 4G towers and most of the coverage outside of the major cities.  That being said, companies like Optus/Virgin are improving their mobile coverage and are hopefully going to provide some competition in the market.  If you think mobile phone plans are expensive in Canada you should see them here.  I hate to continue to complain about the cost of stuff but it really is mind blowing.  The cheapest and simplest plan you can get here is $29/month for $400 worth of calls and text and 500mb of data.  Doesn't sound bad until you read the fine print and realize that each minute costs 99 cents plus a 40 cent connection fee for each call.  Each text message costs 25 cents.  That means, if you were to only use the phone for text messaging and no calling you'd be able to send 1600 text messages per month.  Zaren and Cyrus used to do that on a daily basis before breakfast.  If you were to only use it for calling you could average about 12 minutes a day.  We need more time than that to whine about the lousy and expensive phone plans. You can get full coverage plans but the cheapest one is on a network that doesn't have great coverage and it's $90/month.  The bottom line is that we're simply going to have to adjust to living here and eating rice and water for every meal.