So having arrived in Melbourne and things have settled a bit in terms of settling in to house and getting around the city (although no job yet) I have decided to start blogging about what I'm up to. Mainly it's so that my friends in Ireland and elsewhere can check out what I'm up to - I feel guilty not respond to lovely mails from my friends back in RoI and whilst this is not a substitute for a response, it's perhaps a way of filling in the space between receiving and responding to mail! Maybe.

Plus I have also found a great park to hang out with very close to my cousin's house, where I am staying until July and it's great sitting here overlooking the mini lake and public swimming pool and enjoying Melbourne's sunny weather.

Melbourne is going really well for me at the moment and whilst the job scene has been pretty quiet (I'm told it's always that way in January so hopefully it will pick up next week) I haven't actually found anything about Melbourne that isn't great. I was talking to a girl from Brisbane at a bbq on Australia who when asked what the down sides were about Melbourne, all she could think of was that the weather isn't great. Luckily for me, having lived for a decade inn Dublin, I have become pretty used to not getting hung up on weather and after all, Melbourne's winters seem like nothing compared to sliding around on ice and drizzly weather on the way to work in Dublin. If that's the only negative about this place, I think I'm in for a great time! As was pointed out to me yesterday, the great thing about winter in this part of the world is that you can go skiing at decent ski fields that are just over 2 hr drive away. I'm really looking forward to that opportunity as I've never skied before - apart from the dry slop in Kilternan – will never forget the night my friend and complete novice Kenny decided to go to the top of the slope and hurtle his way down – whilst watching that I remember thinking (as gravity pulled him closer and closer to the crash barrier at the bottom of the slope) that I had never seen the results of a horrific accident before but in a few seconds that would all change. But instead he somehow managed to decelerate and ended up slowing down enough to hit the crash barrier without injury. I gained even more respect for that guy that night!

But forget about winter – the summer here is fantastic. It really does lift your spirits every day when you know it's going to be another sunny day. I have been cycling down to this park every day and sitting by the lake in the sun with my laptop and mobile broadband dongle, applying for work, looking up architectural practices on the internet and occaisionally stopping to watch the old ones slowly pacingup and down the 50m length the public open air swimming pool behind me. If I get sick of that, I head over to Puckle Street in Moonee Ponds (the home suburb of Dame Edna and slightly different to the suburbia that I'd imagined it to be) for coffee, snacks or 7eleven slurpies – extremely sweet cola or rasberry flavoured frozen ice drinks that have a tendency to give you major icecream headache and which I am become severly addicted to. My name is Matthew and I am a Slurpie addict.

If I get bored of that, I cycle somewhere else and continue my laptopping or else I turn it into a longer exploratory adventure to help build my mind's map of my new hometown. Yesterday I headed out at around 9am and by time I'd eventually ended up in town (about 8 km from where I'm living) cycling up and down Melbourne's gridiron street layout to look at new buildings that have popped up or are popping up, checked out the new Rectangular football stadium, tennis centre and MCG and then up to Fitzroy to check out Alex and Renee's new pad, it was 6pm already. I did however make up for any energy lost during the cycle by having a Bogan Burger (huge burger comprising a minute steak, chicken schnizte, rasher of bacon, an egg and a potato cake – culinary genius and about 2500cal I'd day) at the Napier - a fantastic pub literally within a decent stone throw's distance from Alex and Ren's balcony.

Despite making the most of my time of leisure, I am keen to get stuck into a decent job hopefully somewhere doing nice projects and with good bosses. I have spent a lot of hours checking out architecs in Melbourne and whilst there is a trend here for what I would consider overly fashionable architecture, I am sure there are some offices out there doing meaningful, sound architecture. I think I might have found one or two on the net over the past week so next week will be starting cold calling – beware receptionists in architectural practices in greater Melbourne.

I had been relying almost solely on architectural recruitment agents until now but considering I'm registered with five agents so far and only had two interviews, things are nowhere near as easy as I'd first thought they might be. Sadly the job that I had an interview via Skype with was filled internally by someone from their Sydney office – I was pretty annoyed by that as it seemed to fullfil a lot of the criteria that I am looking for in an ideal job, including office size, role and the fact that it was a design-end project rather than construction end (which I am keen to have a break from followign considerable contract administration on site during my time in Dublin). Following that interview, the director had contacted my referees and seemed very keen to talk to me when I arrived in Melbourne but sadly the recruitment agent was on holidays for several weeks after christmas and I stupidly was loyal to him and decided not to contact the practice directly – as it turns out that will be the first and last time I put the interests of employment agents.

I might end up having to brush off that experience of five years at McDonald's soon enough. By the sound of it, it may be a slow start to the construction industy's year, with a lot of places having projects put on hold and talk that a lot of public funding to things like the big Regional Rail Network scheme being put on hold in order to divert funds to flood relief. I hadn't really wanted to get back into railway projects but considering it looks like all the funding on school projects has all but finished (seems like every school in Aus has had millions spent on it over the past two years) I might be having to turn my attention to rail and also my residential experience. If I have to get into residential schemes, I'd love to get into alternative public housing projects like the first project I ever worked on with James Morrison in Hobart – a low cost cohousing project for a really decent group of families with fantastic new ideas about how communities should live together.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. Australia is a lot more expensive than I'd remembered and almost twelve months with no proper income has taken significant toll on the old bank balance. I'm lucky to have a great tenant for my house in Dublin and I've got a E20k credit limit on my John Rocha designed credit card (how Celtic Tiger cub-esque is that!) so I will hopefully stretch it out in the world of unemployment for a while.

I think it's time for another Slurpie. This has been a pretty mundane start to the blog. There is plenty more to report in due course and I'm sure there'll be plenty more to report.

I hope all is well with everyone back in Ireland despite the crazy government shenanigans etc.

More soon......

Matt