Day 2 - Lets Go Shopping

So let me start off by saying they do things quite a bit different over here. In the states if you want to rent/buy a house, you drive around looking for for sale/rent signs. Maybe get online to get an idea of what is out there. Here they don't do the sign thing at all. If you want to find a house you need to go online and look at what is available, or go to each individual real estate office to get their rental lists. Now your thinking OK, I will just go to the main office and get all of there listings, or maybe talk to an agent and they can help me with all listings, even those for other agents - like in the states. Here they do not do that.
If you want to look at whats available in city A - you need to go to city A's real estate office and get there listings and they only know about city A and the listings with their company.
So once you have either driven around to all the offices or tried to look online at there listings, you can then start application process, but wait no you can't. In Australia they have a law that you have to physically view a house before you can even start an application process, OK that makes sense why won't i want to look at a house before i rent it. But, and there is always a but, you can't just call up the agent and say take me to these lists of houses so i can look at them. You call up the agent and they tell you (have all told me) there are no viewings scheduled, but they will phone me when some our scheduled. From what i understand of the process, viewings are like 15 minutes at a time at a house, and there might be 10-20 people there looking at a specific property. then you have to put in an offer/application with anyone else that might want it and if your lucky you might get a house.
So I went into this thinking great i'll be able to drive around check out some houses, look at a bunch before Chrissi gets here, and ended up instead being Chrissi and I looking at houses over Skype video chat trying to set up some viewing times to look at houses.
Houses viewed = 0
Houses scheduled to viewed = 1
Houses waiting call back from Realtor = 15

So I kinda jumped ahead of myself a little bit. My day started off with John picking me up and taking me to the car rental company to pick up my car. I take my time getting int he car so John can take off, i don't need any added pressure of him following me or watching me screw up! I drive out of the parking lot and right away I screw up pulling out of the parking lot on the right side instead of the left. But that was really the extend of my troubles, Once you are driving on the other side of the road and also driving on the other side of the car it becomes a bit easier. Though i will tell you i went to the right side of the car at least 5 times when going to the drive away. I felt a bit foolish opening the passenger door, closing it and walking around to the other side. Also, once in the car and reaching for the seat belt on my left shoulder, when its on my right shoulder instead. The Mirrors are also ALL in the wrong place, its just going to take some time to get use to where i am in the car.

After my failure at house shopping i decided to go to the "mile" and try to see about a car. This was just like any other car lot experience. Though I will say my experiences there where a lot easier. I found a couple of potentials, though they move inventory so fast(so they say) that the cars I liked yesterday might not be there tomorrow. But at least I was able to drive around a bit and get a better feel for the land.

Tomorrow is another day.
NAT