Melbourne Rain

Thought I'd share a brief little film I shot earlier today of the rain outside my abode. Keep in mind that this came out of nowhere -- right now, an hour later, the sun is out, there's nary a cloud in the sky, and it's pretty damn warm. Goes to prove the popular Melbourne phrase "4 Seasons In a Day" correct, doesn't it?

Is One Healthy Enough?

If you're planning on moving to Australia, you're going to have to get a health check to ensure you're not a disease-addled creature who can wreak havoc on the good healthy folk of the natives or prove to be a burden on the tax-payer funded health system. So here I'd like to tell you what you need to do and where you need to go; and also what I've been through!


There are three aspects of your health the Australian government is interested in, and they basically boil down to Blood Test, Urine Test, and Chest X-Ray (heavy-ass smokers beware). For the tidy sum of $303.00, your one-stop place to go is the Medibank Health Solutions. There's a location in every state in Australia, and you can find them by visiting their website. The Melbourne office is located in the CBD, at 501 Swanston Street at the corner of Victoria Street. You need to take with you four things: 1) Your passport, 2) A copy of your passport (but you don't have to have it certified), 3) a filled-out Form #26, and 4) a filled-out Form #160. You can download and print both forms from the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship website. In fact, that website and its attendant telephone number (131 881) will be burned permanently in your brain, you're going to use it so very, very much.


So. It's a good idea to call Medibank ahead of time and make an appointment, but frankly when I showed up Tuesday afternoon at 1.30, the queue was already snaking around the medium-sized front room. Luckily it didn't take long, and when I approached the nice (actually, she was incredibly friendly and polite) lady at the processing counter, I gave her my paperwork and she took a photo of my mug for posterity's sake. I was given a receipt and told to sit down and wait for my name to be called. After all of five minutes, I was called. The woman remarked that there were a lot of Americans coming through their offices that day, to which I remarked, "Well, we're running out of room over there." She laughed, gave me a Styrofoam cup with "TB" written on it, and told me to piss in it and then leave it in a tiny dumbwaiter contraption in the lavatory. Done. After sitting for a spell in another smaller waiting room, I was called again by a jovial man for my blood test. I sat in a chair in his tiny office, and watched him nervously as he prepared the needle and vial. 
"Wow, it's been a long time since I've done this," I said. 
"Where you from?" he asked. 
"San Francisco," I said.
"Turn and look out the window," he gently said. I did so. "So, San Francisco, huh? I've always wanted to go there -- is it as beautiful as they say?" As he said "there," the needle slipped in, and it was over just like that.
"Even more beautiful than they say," I said as he withdrew the needle and I looked at the vial of my dark red blood as he put it in a biohazard plastic baggie.
"I am the best there is when it comes to taking blood," he informed me as he pressed a cotton swab on my puncture wound. "Hey, look at that - healed already!" 
He shook my hand and I returned to the front room. I'd barely sat down when a tall Chinese doctor called my name with a dramatic flourish that made me smile. This wasn't so bad, now, was it? So I go into Dr Low's office, strip to my underwear and socks, and lie down on a paper-covered cot. Dr Low does all the requisites such as my blood pressure, the stethoscope thingy as he asks me to breathe in and out, checks my eyes with a light, and feels my neck. I re-robe and sit down in front of him and watch as he ticks all the "normal" boxes on my form. Unfortunately, I notice that a box marked "abnormal" is also ticked. Uh-oh. And that's when Dr Low tells me that they found some blood and a certain protein called "albuminuria" in my urine. He gave me a letter to give to my treating doctor (which I didn't have yet) in order to have more tests done before the Medibank Health people could sign off on my forms to give to the authorities at Immigration and Citizenship.
"We need to know why you have these proteins in your urine. Until we know, we can't sign you off as healthy."


Whoops. I automatically went into "how could this have happened and what does it all mean" territory in my brain. Was it because I didn't eat enough before the test? Did I not drink enough water? Should I have avoided drinking OJ? Was it the vitamins in the smoothie? Great. Something I've been noticing about this whole bloody process of getting my visa is that nothing has been easy. Even something as straightforward as getting my police check has been stymied by unavailable services, too much paperwork, or hard-to-find information (but more on that later). Then Dr Low escorted me to the radiology unit, where I took my shirt off, stood in front of an X-ray unit, and had my insides peppered with radiation. Interestingly enough, right after the photo was taken, it popped up on a large computer screen behind the radiologist's blind. "Wow, is that me?" I asked. "Is that my heart?"
Sure was. The nice Asian guy and the red-headed woman looked at it for a moment with me. "No news is good news," said the Asian cryptically, and I put my shirt back on and I left Medibank Centre with only a letter to a future treating doctor to show for my visit.


The next day, I went to the Clinicare Family Practice people down the block from me and C's house in Fitzroy North, and got a chance to visit with a Dr Long. I gave him the letter, and told him the whole lowdown. So I peed in another cup! And when he started preparing a needle and asked me when the last time I had a blood test was, I told him, "Yesterday!" He thought that was pretty funny, and as it turns out, I did it again. He then dipped a swab into the urine and told me, "I think that first test you did yesterday was a fluke. Look here. No blood in your urine, and only a minimal presence of proteins. I think you're going to be OK, but we'll still send them off to be tested."


$65.00 later, I now have to wait until Monday at 2.00 to get my results from Dr Long. Fingers crossed, and all that shit. Will let everybody know what happened!

The Police Check!

When applying for Australian citizenship, there's a few things you're going to need to do, and you're better off getting them taken care of as soon as humanly possible. One of these things is a police check from your hometown municipality. Obviously, Australia doesn't want any hardened criminals arriving on her shores (anymore), so take it from me - this is what needs to be done!


What you want to do is to contact the police department in your home city (San Francisco Police Department in my case) and ask to speak to the Identification Bureau. Basically, in order to do a police check on you, they'll need some information sent to them:


1. Your date of birth,
2. Your race,
3. Your gender,
4. Your Social Security Number,
5. Your Driver's License Number, and 
6. A self-addressed, stamped envelope so they can send you the document.


They also require you to send all this information to them accompanied by a notarized letter. Luckily, there are many people in Australia who can notarize things for you:


1. A chiropractor,
2. A medical practitioner,
3. A patent attorney,
4. A psychologist,
5. A dentist,
6. A nurse,
7. A pharmacist,
8. A trade marks attorney,
9. A legal practitioner,
10. An optometrist,
11. A physiotherapist,
12. A police officer,
13. A justice of the peace,
14. A veterinary surgeon, or
15. A postal clerk.


So the choice is yours! HOWEVER - they notarize documents, not letters. Trust me, write a letter and go to one of these people to notarize it; you'll leave empty-handed. So here's what you do: Download a STATUTORY DECLARATION template from the Intertubes, and fill in where necessary. THEN you take the document one of the above people, and get it done. While you're at it, get a photocopy of your driver's license and passport, and have those copies notarized as well - it's always better to provide a little more information than required, as opposed to not enough.


ONE MORE THING. When I spoke to the friendly Identification Bureau lady, she gave me a very high QT: Don't send by post. This will take weeks (!) to process and get through. Instead, this nice lady told me, send via FedEx with a self-addressed and paid FedEx envelope. The department gets to FedExed parcels much, much faster than with regular post, and they can have the police check documents delivered to you much, much quicker (like within a week).


SO NOW YOU KNOW. AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE.

Oz-ward Bound

Well! Long story short - I'm originally from San Francisco, CA in the United States. Three years ago Christmas whilst on holiday in Reykjavik, Iceland, I met my current girlfriend C at Christmas dinner in the Hótel Borg. The catch was she was an Australian living in the UK. A veritable shitload of travel was necessary in order to maintain our blossoming relationship, and as the months flew past, we realized that things as they stood needed to change at some point. 


That point arrived after the brutal winter London suffered during the span of time between Christmas and New Year's in 2008. The winter was absolutely brutal; dirty urban snow, blistering cold winds, icy pavements, and general misery was suffered by all. C, who was born and brought up in sunny Perth, Western Australia and had lived in Melbourne, Victoria for the seven years before her move to England, and had been putting up with the weather in Dear Old Blighty for the previous three and a half years, finally snapped. Within a space of weeks, she resigned from her job, evicted the tenant who was living in her Melbourne house, and moved back Down Under to the mystical land of Oz. 


I'd been to Australia once before - for three weeks during March and April earlier in 2010, meeting her friends and family in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Pacific Palms up north in NSW. A wonderful time was had. 


But now has come the point where, as some ruder punters might say, for me to shit or get off the pot. So I packed up some bags, shipped some boxes, got on a plane, and flew to Melbourne to live with my honey for three months on a tourist visa - to find out a bit more about myself, my relationship with C, and whether or not this relationship was worth uprooting myself from lovely San Francisco and transplanting myself all the way across the world.


This blog will be all about that voyage of discovery. And it will also, I hope, serve as an unconventional aide for those who might also be considering this trip sometime in the future! I will be detailing every aspect of this journey, whether they be governmental offices, websites, application forms, people to talk to in order to learn various ins and outs of trying to become an Australian citizen, etc etc etc.


Let's have fun, shall we? Ciao.