Melbourne Weekend Walk

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Team Kris Kringle & Xmas Lunch

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House hunting Day 1

The company has allocated Crown Relocation service for the arrangement of our permanent place in Melbourne. It consists a good 16 hours inclusive of understanding our requirement, research for the appropriate property , house viewing, contract negotiation and such.

This is suppose to be Darren house hunting with his agent, but since we both are considering sharing a house, thus I tagged along his house hunting adventure!

We started off to view a huge house (I mean for a 2-person sharing, it is huge) in Fitroy area.

This is a typical victorian style terrace house in Melbourne. Fitroy is just slightly above the north east side of Melbourne CBD. It is kind of a fun and funky place for young people.

The house is huge with 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, and with a big backyard. However, the furniture were not really our taste.

Since this is only the first house, we just keep this in mind, and hop on to the second place. The street of this house look pretty ok for me though.

Before viewing the second place, the agent need to collect keys from another proprety agent office in Queen street. The other end of where we are staying now. In the CBD, all parking required payment. The one we have here is coin operated. This parking bay is $3.50 per hour, and the maximum time you can park here is only for one hour! Good thing is you don’t have to buy the entire hour, if you are just dropping by, you can just buy 5 minutes.

As we are still exploring options of staying seperately in one bedroom apartment, the second place we viewed is a studio apartment in LaTrobe street. Nice Security, all furnish are new, close walking distance to office, convenient location to amenities, but for a price of $300, you only get a shoe box size apartment. I do mean it, the entire studio is no larger than my own room back home in Malaysia. Can you imagine living in a pigeon hole like this for the next 1 year? Definitely not for me.

After looking at this studio apartment, we thought may be it is a better idea to share a place with 2 bedrooms and bathrooms so that we get a better deal. Happened that the agent has another place in the list which meet our requirement, thus we jump into the car and drove to Bourke street which is near to the Southern Cross Station.

With $600 per week, this is quite a good deal looking at the location, the space and the finishing of the apartment.
  

And because we are on the 22nd floor, you get this view!

Next, we are into the East Melbourne area. It is really good that we get the chance to explore this area. Is a very nice residential place with the famous MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground), parks and it is very close to our office in Spring Street! The 2 bedrooms apartment we view is on the 11th floor and also has a magnificent view overlooking the MCG. But the second bedroom does not have a window and it is kind of dark. However we do like this area for the homing feel.

Then we checked out another two places in St. Kilda, one in the St. Kilda sururb which is near the beach, and the other in St. Kilda Road which is closer to the CBD.

The one in St. Kilda Road is a nice building itself, but also has the problem of a second darker room plus the furnishing is not superb and it is not closed to amenities. However, the greatest selling point of this place is that it overlook into the Albert lake, and guess what, if you are on the roof top of this building, you actually can see almost the entire track of the F1 Grand Prix…That’s really great, isn’t it?

There were nothing concrete after this half day house hunting. We have not find the perfert place that scores ten in every requirement. But is a good house hunting adventure, and we both now have better idea what kind of places that we like and which priority comes first. It also gave us pretty good idea how does the different place in Melbourne CBD and the surrounding inner suburb feels like. It is definitely a good day out, looking forward for the second house hunting day and do hope we can nail down the place by that time!

To view larger photors, click here.

A walk in Southbank area & Crown Casino

A picture is worth more than thousand words, READ the million words here.

Requirements Manager’s Team Welcome Lunch

Date: 4th Dec, 2008
Time: 12pm – 2pm
Venue: Kri Kri Restaurant, Lt. Bourke Street

 This is the team welcome lunch for me, Darren and Vijay for joining the Requirement Managers team. It took place in a Greek restaurant. Greek food is mainly about BBQ and cheese, it is definitly delicious, but this greek lunch cost each of us a whopping $35!

        

The Greek liquor, Ouzo – with the taste of mint

Yiamas! Cheers to everyone.

Guess which two are the Greek?

More photos at here.