Lord Pom Percy

The birds sh*t is probably less of a health hazard then the sh*t your eating at McDonalds.

aaron8123

good point

jad n rich

Memoires of melbourne maccas in the city was the toilets :scared: The ladies loos had tiny doors, like those saloon doors in western movies about 2 foot high in steel, no privacy prevents the junkies outside shooting up, it also prevented me having a pee

Never noticed the birds, it was december, was really shocked that melb had so many flies, had lived in melb in winter so had no idea how bad they were in summer.

Mercedes

I'm north of Marbella, 10 minutes slightly in the mountains, but can see valley and sea views 360 degrees from my terrace which has the sun on it all day.. I have great spanish neighbours. I had a water pump go on me a couple of weeks ago, and asked him if he knew anyone to fix it, the guy was there within an hour, I went away the next day, gave him my keys and when I came back 2 weeks later it was fixed. It was another week before I saw him to pay him, and even then he wasn't in a hurry to be. You can still get good bargains in Spain if you get the spanish papers, and don't use real estate agents, that's whats pumping up the price. I brought 3 years ago now for a very good price especially for my location, with quarter of acre with a variety of fruit trees, from bananas,grapes, mango, avacado, lieaches, oranges, lemons, pears, peaches. I have my own fruit salad bowl. I saved about 60k by buying in Spain and got a better property than I would have done in UK. I'm 8 minutes from the town and beach. So I also get the rural life, town, and beach and only 35 minutes to the airport and city, 2.5 hours to get to UK so I'm sorted. My business partner has left his house the same time as me, from the South Coast and arrived the same time at Brum airport as I have. I've met quite a few other Northern Europeans doing the same thing from Sweden, Norway, Germany etc, all commuting for their work. So it is quite popular.

woodyinoz

all this sounds bliss...

I only have one problem though and thats I can't speak a foreign language if my life depended on it. I have tried French a few times but I can't understand how something can be masculine or feminine

aaron8123

It sounds wonderful, if anyone is living the dream, I reckon its YOU. I realise that I would be going back to UK back to all the things I left, but when you go abroad you go for a better life, this does not happen to be OZ for me. I can honestly say hand on heart I had a better life in the UK. However, I do need my dose of sun from time to time and having a second property in espanol sounds all the more appealing. Having been to Marbella (touristy parts mind you) I love it there.

Mercedes

I didn't speak a word of spanish when I got here. But I tend now to be able to understand it better than I speak it, I'm very pigeon, but my neighbours keep rattling away in Spanish and I do get the gist of what they are saying. I've got to go and ask one of them to get his brother to come around as I need some work doing on the house, and it needs painting, so if in a few weeks my house is pink with purple spots, you know that I need more improvements on my spanish., But you can get away without speaking any spanish at all, many do, there is an expat community here, but personally I tend to go everywhere Spanish, I don't see the point living here otherwise, if I'm living in little England with sun.

ShozInOz

Oh yes, like all the anti-UK people do on the Australia forum you mean?

ShozInOz

Hmmm, world's most livable city according to whom? Melbournians? Yeah, right! And what does livable mean? If you prefer village life, then any city will not be your cup of tea. Maybe it means boring? Look, it is no secret that Australia is also the world's most parochial nation - or it aspires to be! Discomfort with this severe parochialism and self-satisfaction is particular strong coming from a country that is very willing to look outside itself and to examine its warts.

Yet I like most of the Aussies I met and knew. They are friendly folk. And we are all naturalised Aussies. But the parochialism and self-satisfaction of Australia I do not lilke. Australians' apparent inability to critique Australia is irritating, and leads to complacency and medicrity. Having a healthy attitude toward ones' country is great, but healthy involves the ability to look beyond yourself, and the desire to critique and take corrective action based on that. A good example is the ease with which the industrial relations reforms eased through: ironically, "UnAustralian" (meaning unfair to the rest of the world) yet it was too much effort for Australia to oppose it.

Lord Pom Percy

It was'nt Aussies that declared Melbourne the world's most liveable city, it was a London based organisation called the Economist intelligence Unit.
http://www.citymayors.com/environmen...estcities.html
www.invest.vic.gov.au/News/News/Liveable222.htm

aaron8123

Yeah, but like many of us expats, they have probably never been there and made this assumption from afar

woodyinoz

I don't know if it is just me but this who moving countries thing has tired me out to the point that I just want to move back to where I know and settle for good...

ShozInOz

In that case take it with an even bigger pinch of salt. Are these the same economists that have predicted a major crash (40%, 50%) in the housing market for the last 5 years? Economists are notorious for getting things wrong - their models are way out. My brother is an economics student and tells me the same.

And as MikeStanton observed: "The trouble with these surveys is that they don't take into account how boring a city is." Or the flies, the summers, the isolation...

Legoland would top the chart if the economists bothered to go there.

karaokeM

Hi aaron again,

I was just reading your quote, we seem so similar in our thoughts and experiences in OZ. I have met a few poms here who have come from rough backgrounds and are living well here. I honestly don't believe we are that much better off here ( we had a nice house and two cars in uk ). I honestly with natural progression, kids growing up etc. we would have been much better off in the UK by now. I gree that if we had the lifestyle of the of the last person, yeah you would miss it. But that is certainly not the lifestyle of any pom I know here, they seem to be struggling here more not less.

Taffyles

Can't comment on Australia as I haven't been there but have spent the last 15 years in US and now really want to go home.
I've just returned from a visit home- reluctantly- and I can assure you that there were England flags flying from everywhere- houses, cars, busses, trucks, petrol stations, shops.
Hey if anyone prefers to live in another country- fine whatever floats your particular boat, but for the reasons that England has changed, lost its identity, has too many immigrants? HUH?? I can't get my head round those being reasons to move to another country. Bizarre.
The reasons I want to return to UK is because its home and I feel as though I've come home every time I visit. We had planned to do the transatlantic snowbird thing when we retired but now that's changed to maybe keeping a very small place here as a holiday home and spending the majority of time in Wales.