Devonair

We have been here just over a month. Spent one week in Woodcroft and three weeks in Seaford Rise in a holiday rental, which was just long enough to sort out a longer term rental. The house in Seaford Rise was really close to Moana beach so was really nice, after all of the stresses of looking for rentals, cars etc.., to pop down to the beach at the end of the day. Really liked the Seaford area ( and Tykes holiday rental is awesome!) but was just a bit too far South for us at the moment as we don't have jobs yet so needed to be more centrally based. Found a rental in Burnside - Wattle Park- which is a leafy, very affluent area. It has three of the best state high schools in Adelaide ( Gelnunga, Marryatville and Norwwod Morialta). What I have noticed in the couple of weeks we have been here, is that everyone seems obsessed with schooling around here. I have been asked on a number of occasions what high school my eldest is going to next year.. I keep reminding people that we have only just got them into primary school!! We are zoned for Norwood Morilata High School which was probably the best school we could have hoped for when we were back in the UK - in that we didn't expect to be able to live in the zones for Glenunga etc.. but goodness, around here you would think that Norwood was some terrible sink school!! I was actually advised to write to Glenunga and plead my case to try and get my daughter in. Frankly, I am not bothered at the moment. We have been through enough of an upheaval to start getting in a tis about next years schooling options! By the way, if anyone does know about Norwood please pm me ( GOOD OR BAD) just so I can put my mind at rest. It gets pretty good NAPLAN results and I have heard from a couple of people who live in Adelaide and they all say it is an excellent school, I just think the area we live in ( lovely as it is) is a bit snobby in that sense. Anyway, I digress.. we found our rental ( wasn't as easy as we had thought initially but I have posted about that on another thread) and emailed the local school's Head. It was the Thursday before the start of the school term and the Head emailed me back immediately and asked us to go into the school the next morning, to look around and get school uniforms etc.. so that my eldest two ( 10 and 12) could start school at the beginning of the school term. This meant an hours commute each way for the first two weeks ( which was a bit of a killer in the heat!) but it was really good to get the kids in school asap and the school were fantastic at accommodating my children. They are at Burnside primary and I have to say that initial impressions are very good. Standards are high from what I can see and my year 6 son gets a lot more homework than he did in his uk primary. He has homework every night mon-thurs (2/3 items) and he also has to do a presentation every week on a given topic. This is something which he rarely did in the UK and I think it is an excellent idea as it makes everyone in the class stand up and do some form of public speaking. In his old primary it was only the "chosen" few who ever got to speak in assemblies etc.. year 7 daughter has a school tablet, will be going on a school trip to Canberra this year and is loving the set up of being in a middle school environment and having their own year 7 common room etc.. The area we live in has a lovely outdoor swimming pool, which you pay $19 for a family ticket for but there is also a lovely padding pool at Tusmore Park which is free. We popped down there yesterday afternoon for a quick cool off in the heat! Shopping has been a surprise in that I had built myself up for a big increase in shopping costs but there are some decent supermarkets around ( Coles, Foodland, Woolworths) which haven't been much more expensive than the UK and I have found K-Mart for all household items to be very cheap! Got some t-shirts for the kids the other day for $1 AND $2 EACH plus some swimming towels for $4 each which at today's exchange rate is pretty good! Have been to Norwood and sat outside partaking in the cafe street culture - went to a really good smoothie shop (Argo ??) which had amazing smoothies and not too expensive. Our local shopping mall is Burnside shopping village which is probably not really representative of all shopping centres in Adelaide. Very nice..think Zara, Laura Ashley and a few designer stores all under one swanky air-conditioned roof - lovely to have a browse and it does have a coles I think too, although when I popped in for bread yesterday it was really busy. Shopping at Wesfield Marion and Port Noarlunga is also pretty good and all under one roof. For everyday value and shopping though we pop to our local large Coles and this has everything you need and I did a weekly shop for $160 dollars for a family of five the other day so comparative to what I world send in Tesco, although I will need to get more milk, bread etc,, before the weeks out. Generally, people have been friendly and interested in our story as to why we are here ( gets a bit tedious after a while) but we are really enjoying ourselves. It is early days yet and we don't have jobs so we are living in a bit of a holiday bubble still - but hopefully if one of us can secure work soon then we will start to be able to settle into more of a routine. Hope this helps to all those intending to make the move. Good Luck!! It has been much less stressful that I had imagined.

We arrived two weeks ago and also used East Coast car rentals. They don't have an office at the airport but you give them a call and they come and pick you up in their shuttle bus. We found them to be very helpful and professional. We had a huge amount of luggage ( 159kgs and 9 x hand baggage, plus we are a family of five. We hired a Hyundai I-Max 8 seater. They loaded all of our luggage into the car for us whilst we sorted out the paperwork, let me use their phone to make a personal call and fitted the toddler car seat. They also lent us a street map free of charge. We returned our 8 seater after a week and down-sized to a smaller car whilst we looked for one to buy. when we dropped off our hire car a day early ( as we had bought our own car by then), they credited us the day! Would use them again!

Just as an update to my last post which was a bit gloomy.....we have since heard that we have secured a rental!! So, actually, after all my panicking, it took exactly a week! It is the rental that we had to view with the curtains closed though, full of clutter, so who knows what we might find behind the mess! However, it is in a great catchment area for schools and when I looked up which school it was zoned for it came up with Burnside primary. I emailed the school last night, got an almost instant response from the Headmistress and went in for an appointment this morning to meet the teachers and get the uniform. The school looks great and I was very impressed with the response from the Head and all of the other staff we met today who have bent over backwards to accommodate our children. So, we have secured a rental and sorted schools in a week so it can be done with a bit of perseverance. I think uploading extra references helped with the application also. Good luck with your move, I am sure it will all fall into place in the end.

We flew last week with Singapore Airlines who were fine. We had an extra seat on the first leg next to us which was great but the second leg was full. We booked direct with Singapore Airlines website in UK. 30kg baggage allowance however as I was on permanent resident visa I was allowed 40kg. We are a family of 5 so we had a total of 160kg and we came in at 159kg!! We also had a cabin baggage each plus my handbag, husbands laptop and toddler's lunch box. ( We had checked previously with Airline that we could take little one's food as he is extremely fussy and they were fine with this so long as no drinks over 100ml), plus we had an extra backpack so 9 hand luggage bags in total. I think they weighed them at check in at Heathrow and two were over the 7kg allowance but they didn't charge us or ask us to check one of the bags in although I think we were just lucky as at Singapore when the flight was full, they were announcing that any more than one cabin bag per person would need to be checked in. Nobody asked us to check anything in when we boarded the flight so we managed to just about get away with it! One tip if you do fly with Singapore Airlines is to try and have a swim in the transit hotel roof top swimming pool. We had about 5 hours between flights and we all had a dip in the pool, shower and change of clothes. This was the best bit of the flight! Swimming in the humid, tropical night after a gruelling flight was bliss and made us feel just about able to face the second leg of the journey pretty refreshed. You get a free soft drink as well along with towels for about 13 Singapore dollars per person. I don't know the exchange rate but it was well worth the money.

We are doing this at the moment having arrived in Adelaide exactly a week ago. It has been pretty hard in my opinion. We have looked at about six properties in a week and have applied for two now. The first one we applied for there weren't that many people at the open inspection and it was through the owners and not an agent but we still weren't successful with our application. We even offered to pay six months rent up front but sadly without jobs lined up or local references, it is a lot harder to secure rentals in decent areas. Having said that, we are after a four bed and have been looking in pretty expensive areas. We went to an open in Millswood the other day and there were about 50 people queueing up the street waiting to view the property - all the locals couldn't believe what was going on and kept popping over to ask us what we were all queueing for! The house had enormous cracks running through it and would not have been big enough for us but some people had already pre-submitted applications before even viewing it! We looked at a house yesterday in Flagstaff Hill and again, there were cars parked up the street all waiting to view. The agent had to open the inspection early to let everyone in! The house, again, was not all that, and would have been too small for a family of five. I asked the agent if it was usual to have this many at an open inspection and she said that, for the area, the house was quite cheap and so attracted a lot of families. We looked at another house yesterday which was really messy - (cluttered, all curtains closed, clothes on floor, Xmas tree still up!!.. ) It was quite embarrassing for the agent I think who stood by the front door without venturing any further into the property - however, the house had potential if you looked through the clutter. I am hoping that the mess put other applicants off and we may just get lucky however, I am not sure what I might find lurking behind the curtains/clutter as you couldn't really get a decent look around in the dark! we submitted an application anyway as again, the area is good. My advice would be to go to all of the open inspections you think may be suitable - you can search on realestate.com.au and put in SA and filter by no of bedrooms/price etc.. and it will list all the inspections for that week in date order. You can always ask the agent how much interest/applications they have already received to gauge interest - if it is a property you really like then we have been told by one agent (unofficially) that you can always offer over the asking price per week and offer to pay a lump sum in advance. Also, we have taken to up-loading professional references with the application - a lot will need 100 points of ID ( passport and driving licence will do) and these need to be uploaded/sent in with the initial application. My husband has a police reference which we have also uploaded with our latest application-basically anything that helps. Tyke on here also advised us to add a bit of detail within the application form itself - e.g we have put that we are all citizens ( bar me who has PR), who are here permanently, as a lot of agents are a bit wary of poms in case they have visa restrictions or decide they want to go home. I have read on this forum before that people have even shown agents their previous property sale details - to show the agents that they have looked after and maintained a home before. To be honest, we haven't done this yet as our old property details are still on the ship waiting to arrive and there has usually been so much interest in the properties that the agents are a bit busy at the opens but I guess you could always upload/email in a copy. Like everything though, a lot is down to luck. At one of the opens we went to where there were loads of people, we met a couple in the queue outside and started to chat to them. Before you know it, my husband has a contact to submit his cv in, as the lovely guy works for a recruitment company in the city, (albeit not in our fields) but he still offered to forward it on to the relevant department - so we may not have got the house but, you never know, we may have found a route into a job! Finally, my advice would be to try and enjoy yourselves along the way. We have three kids and they have had a pretty boring first week, trailing around opens and looking for cars, so today we are off to the beach!!

Thanks Snifter Husband and kids all have dual nationality so should be ok to return to UK but thanks for the heads up. I have looked online at Craigburn primary and it looks good but most primary schools in that area seem good so it'll just depend where we end up. Anyway, Happy Easter - back to the choccies in drizzly UK!

Hello!!! Just thought I'd better introduce ourselves as we've been browsing this forum on and off for years now and have finally managed to get ourselves into gear with moving over to Adelaide. As a bit of background, we came over 5 years ago and stayed at Tyke's place in Woodcroft for a reccie. Had an excellent time and hubbie would have moved over then but house in Uk took ages to sell and exchange rate started to dip which meant that for us, a move was postponed until we were in a better place financially. Well, since then we have always had an eye on moving to Adelaide and now that eldest is due to start secondary school here in sept we decided it was " now or never" and have applied for Partner Visa for me (hubbie is an Aus citizen and kids now also have citizenship). We have just agreed a sale on our UK house and hope this will be processed by July which is when my partner visa should be through and then...............the adventure begins! Anyway, "Hi" to you all. There is myself ( 38 year old Probation admin), hubby ( 39 year old Police civilian) daughter 11, and two boys 10 and nearly 3. Daughter likes most sports and plays violin, eldest son loves his x box and Dr Who and little one just muddles along amongst the chaos! Husband is a major American Football fan but will be in a need of a new team team to support now and I am just happy to be sitting in the sun sipping wine! We are looking at the hills areas( belair, coromandel valley, flagstaff etc. as liked these previously and they seem to have good schools. Also looking at areas around Norwood Morialta High school zone but may prove out of our price range. Hi all! hope to meet some of you lovely people very soon..... Devonair

Thanks LC I know what you mean about seeing for yourself. My daughter likes dance and my son probably would need some extra support at some point, so APHS would suit both on that front. It's very much about what suits the individual. Did look at Umbrae and maths and science and straight away thougt, hhm, would we get in? (since neither of my kids have ever professed an interest in Agriculture! ) Shame as both look like they employ more practical learning stratergies that certainly my son would enjoy but I always get the "fear" when there is an entrance interview/application process etc. as he would not have the confidence to shine in that situation. Had to laugh at "the elastic bands round the back of their polos" - the mind boggels!

Well done on conquering your fear! I HATE driving too, only learnt when I moved out of London to Devon and I had small children to ferry around. I am still pretty scared of driving on "big" roads - sounds so lame typing that! But, I too will have to just get on with it when we move over to Adelaide as we are hoping to move to the Hills. Thanks for sharing your success!

Many Thanks for all opinions and for the links to Urrbrae and the maths and science school. Not sure that either of my two eldest are maths/science whizz's (yet!) TBH, my eldest will prob be fine anywhere as she tends to adapt/ make friends pretty quickly and is quite driven to do well but her younger brother needs a more "nurturing" environment, or else, left to his own devices, he would do v. little! Lots to mull over but thanks again!

Hi all! We are liking the look of Adelaide Hills area and see that there are some pretty good primary schools around there - Coromandel Valley and Craigburn both look good. I have 3 children, 10, 9 and 19 months. Just wondering what people's opinions are of the high schools in the area. I don't really want to move kids more than necessary - we are still in Uk at present- and ideally want them to "move up" to High school with their friends. I know it's a few years off yet but want to settle them as soon as possible. We have visited Adelaide before and all liked the hills area and it would be just about within our budget so just schools to consider. We haven't ruled out private but probably not in our budget. I have searched previous posts but was concerned that Aberfoyle Park was referred to as "Stabafoyle Park" and there was some mention of the Blackwood Head saying the all the girls looked like "s***s" or something when challenged about the length of their skirts! However, these threads were back in 2008 - am hoping Heads have changed as NAPLAN results from both schools are pretty impresive. Also, any recommendations for kindy for the littleone? Many Thanks in advance!