It has been more than 4 months since we last landed in Perth, Australia. We are pretty much settled with most of the essential things in place and life has now moving from been chaotic into a more "routine" mode. Nothing has come easy for us as we were basically started off everything from scratch, with no relatives and friends here to begin with. We were very fortunate as we made a few friends here through other friends and relatives in Malaysia and there were two Malaysian couples in particular who had rendered a lot of advice, and tips in helping us to start up here. They have shared their experience in various aspects ranging from where to buy oriental food, which are the good area to live, to tips in securing a rented property, etc.
A) Temporary AccommodationTo get into the swing of an entirely new life down under, accommodation has certainly become the first priority among all other stuff. I booked a room in a family home for 8 days to begin with, hoping to get a rented house within two weeks of us setting our feet here. Booking and payment was done through airbnb, which I only got to know much later from the locals that it is a very popular portal for people to rent rooms in a non-conventional way (as it is not hotel room, but a room in a house).
The rate was definitely much cheaper than hotel but still it was a whopping $60 a day for just a room. The positive side of renting a room in this manner was that we have got to live in the desired suburb for us to experience the life before we finally decided on the desired suburb for renting a house for longer term. To cut a long story short, we rented a room in Leeming, which is only 4 km from Wen Jia's school.
B) Renting a homeRenting a house has not been an easy task here. Due to the influx of migrants and the high demands in suburbs with proximity to good schools, getting a rented home is indeed very challenging. Imagine we had to compete with so many other home seekers out there to the extend of there are more demands than supplies. Unlike those in Malaysia, house viewing here has to be done at the timeframe stipulated by the property agent and it is usually done only when there are sufficient viewers committed to turn up. The timeframe was usually a short 15 minutes and home viewers were expected to put in an offer based on the limited knowledge they had on the house from the 15 minutes viewing. It is so competitive that at times there was more than 10 viewers turned up for a single viewing.
We were required to submit an application for rental within 24 hours from the viewing. There were so much details to be filled in, such as financial details, details of all family members intended to live in the house, details of previous rented property, "why did you leave the previous rented house?", contact details of 2 reference in Perth, etc. It was a tedious process as we needed to submit a full stack of documents to support our application, let alone the lack of local financial information amid we were new here.
The hassles aside, we ultimately got a 3 bed room, 1 bath room house at a suburb called Parkwood. Though the house is a bit small and the rental is expensive, it nevertheless was a good beginning for us.
C) SchoolingWen Jia goes to Oberthur Primary School which is situated at a suburb called Bullcreek, some 6km from our rented house in Parkwood. We secured a place for Wen Jia back in October when the school contacted us via email that they accepted Wen Jia's enrollment, much to our relief as the school actually took in students out of its local intake area. This means that we could live outside of the catchment area of the school for at least until Wen Jia reaches her age for Senior High School. The Senior High Schools here on the other hand do not usually take students outside of their catchment areas.
Oberthur Primary School is a medium size school with just over 400 students from Pre-primary to Year 7. Australian Curriculum is somehow different from Malaysia's. One prominent difference is that she does not carry heavy school bag as most of the learning materials are not text book based. She has a workbook that she brings home everyday and that usually contains sheets of exercise or homework. It is learning in a fun way and more well balanced as subjects such as music, swimming, and gymnastic are introduced at various stages in the term besides the conventional language, maths, and science subjects.
Overall, Wen Jia enjoys her schooling here.
More to come.....
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