BurbleChaz

Unsurprisingly, more work today. I phoned a couple more estate agents about properties. One viewing, that we were told would be at the weekend, is now listed for tomorrow. The receptionist at that agent had suggested we look at the web again on Thursday. More evidence that incompetence will always beat malice.

Another decent-looking flat turned up with a public viewing scheduled for 5:45 today. We planned our day around that. Tram tickets purchased - check. Tram stop identified - check. Journey time researched - er, well, not really. But it can't be slower than the bicycles we rode there on Saturday, can it?

It turns out that trams in the rush hour are a lot slower than bicycles. However, we left a time buffer that allowed for a winter assault on Moscow, so we arrived in Port Melbourne with twenty minutes to spare. We strolled down Bay Street, the local retail centre, and had a look at the general residential environment. We're not very impressed. The sea front is lovely, but when you go back a couple of hundred metres, the area becomes a bit tawdry and seedy. Docklands is looking more tempting.

We arrived at the doorstep of the flat a few minutes early, and hung around with a couple of women who had arrived before us. The atmosphere was one of polite but intense competition. The flat is still occupied by the current tenants, and the viewing was limited to 15 minutes. The tenants were there, cheerful, helpful, and hating every second. We had a good look round, and didn't like it very much. On the plus side, it had two balconies. You could throw things to each other, or something. On the down side, it's on the second floor, there's no lift, it faces directly onto a busy four-lane commuter run, and it's a long walk to the beach and the tram stop. We could live there, but we're hoping for better. Also, a note to Estate Agents: Port Melbourne is not the new name for everything north of Elwood. Specifically, if it's a 20-minute walk to the Port Melbourne tram, that's Albert Park. No charge for this advice.

Don't want to live here

Later, we had a good rootle on the web, and we're going to widen the search to apartments in Docklands, and houses in St Kilda or Elwood. Port Melbourne seems to have a high level of artificial scarcity. Plus, we failed to find a decent pub there. My natural sense of North may be screwed, but if I can't find a good bar in half an hour, the region has a problem.

The agent we spoke to assuaged some of our worries about being Eurogeeks. Apparently, it shouldn't be an issue. I'll believe that when it happens, but it's good to hear.

I've hacked together some slightly more sophisticated stuff to build this blog. It is now nearly as good as cat `ls -t *.blog`. Once I'm convinced that 250 lines of code can do as much as that, we'll start using it for real. This one, however, was generated the old way. That's one of the things I love about software. In this case, the 'old way' is less than two weeks old.