Seat Guru

Before I passed out from extreme exhaustion last night, I meant to tell you about Seat Guru. It’s a very helpful site that I always use when booking tickets.

They give you the seating plan and amenities for all planes, broken down by airline, including info about misaligned windows and reduced leg room for certain aisles.

It was on Seat Guru that we discover that the plane we’ve decided on for the 14 hour leg of our flight included:

“personal televisions at every seat and the new ICE entertainment system, you have video on demand, 500 channels and Video Games” as well as laptop recharging points. I think 500 channels will keep us busy for 14 hours.

The site also links to sample menus. Not bad for airline fare.

So we’re all set now. We booked our tickets to Gatwick this morning, and I’ll be booking a hotel in Sydney later today.

In 8 days we leave.

In 10 days we arrive.

Nice. . .

Oh, and before I forget, I’d just like to give a shout out to my beautiful baby for all the brand new Louis Vuitton luggage he gave me on Friday.  To quote an excellent song from a James Bond film, “Nobody does it half as good as you.  Baby you’re the best!”

A Funny Thing Happened

We were going to tell you all about the fort we just built.  We’ve pushed our two sofas together, got the duvet in, and were all set to cuddle up for the night.  Then and old Rick Stein cooking show came on and he was in Sydney.  He showed the fish markets (such choice), the friday night asian food festival (such choice) and he did a piece on all the restaurants in our preferred suburb Crow’s Nest (such amazing choice).

Perhaps it was the accents, or the further demonstration of why we are moving to Sydney, but we thought we’d do our nightly visa check.  You’ll recall that after much waiting there was finally some progress on Friday, so we were hopeful for a  further measure today.  We got a full measure.

Applicant Approved.

It’s ok if you need to read that again…we did…

Applicant Approved.

6 long weeks of waiting, and it’s all done by half 9 on a monday morning.  We have now emailed the travel agents to get our flights sorted as soon as possible.  We will now be able to leave before Amanda’s visa expires, hopefully on either the 23rd and 24th.  It’s going to take a while to sink in fully, not least the fact that in 10 days we will be in Sydney.

That is so cool!!

Case Officer to the Rescue!

After harassing contacting various people in Oz this week, begging for help processing our visas, at five minutes before their close of business today, we have finally been assigned a case officer!!!That does not mean that we have visas yet. She asked for a few additional documents, so Scott is going into the office today to scan and upload them. We should know more on Monday. Supposedly the next two weeks should go very quickly, and we should be gone by the end of the month, if not by the 24th!

Of course, we won’t be leaving before the 22nd because my wonderful baby gave me Radiohead tickets yesterday. We hadn’t gotten them originally because we weren’t supposed to be here, and I was quite upset about the prospect of being in town and not being able to go see them, but Scott made it all better!!

Yesterday was a good day for another reason as well. About twenty years ago, I had some medical problems and was lucky enough to get into a clinical drug trial for a type of chemotherapy. It was approved for use on children many years ago, but not at the levels that I received it every day for two years. There were other problems as well including the very high amounts of money patients were charged, etc. . . A few years ago, my Mom entered me into a class action suit that was going forward against the drug company, and yesterday, out of the blue I received a very generous settlement. Thank you Mom. I really appreciate you!

Scott is coming home for lunch today, so I’m making a salad with nectarine and gorgonzola, followed by some broiled rainbow trout. A nice little lunch.

As for the weekend, tomorrow we’re meeting Gavin at Eighty Queen Street to see his Dad’s band play, and Tim was nice enough to give us free passes to see A Scanner Darkly on Sunday. I hope it’s better than the last Keanu Reeves film we had free tickets to see (Constantine- such a disappointment compared to the graphic novels).

I feel so relieved today.

28 Days Later

It’s official: we’ll be homeless in exactly 28 days.  We’ve heard not a word about the status of our visa, and this is apparently normal (general processing time for the 457 visa is 4-8 weeks- right now we’re on 4).  Still, I can’t help starting to freak out. . .

All of our worldly possessions sit in boxes in our living room awaiting their departure, which is in just a few days.  We won’t be seeing them again for 8-12 weeks.

My British visa expires in exactly 24 days.  I have to leave the country.

I am no longer sleeping. . .not even the arrival of our shiny new DS has been able to distract me from my thoughts.

Well, it has a little.    My brain age is 30 21 20, which means that I haven’t damaged my brain near as much as I thought I had over the years.  Thanks for hanging in there with me brain.  I appreciate your support.

Health Checks

We have always been led to believe that the health check is an essential part of the visa application process.  You want a visa into Australia, you have a medical.  I can’t remember if we’ve mentioned it here before, but my Dad has also scored a job in Australia and is a couple months ahead of us in the process (he leaves for Mackay, many hundreds of miles North of Sydney in Queensland, in a week or so).  So he’s been feeding us all the information that he has learned on his visa journey.  Not only does the medical involve a trip to the doctors, but you have to have a chest X-ray, to scan for TB.  Apparently most places outside of Australia are considered of higher risk.  So we manage to schedule some appointments for early next week, and we’re worrying about whether we need our full medical records and how long it will take.

Turns out, we had it all wrong.  Firstly, you can’t just go to your local doctor, a fact that dad had neglected to mention until the other night.  There are a list of approved panel doctors for all around the world.  It’s broken down by country, and then city…there are only 2 licensed surgeries in the whole of the capital of Scotland.  Getting an appointment could be a problem.  Of course you actually can’t go to the appointment until you have the paperwork, which will be made available to you as part of the on-line application process.  All these little details add to the time it takes to get this done and slow us in our progression towards the promised land.

But like I said, “we” had it all wrong.  You do not have to have a medical.  It depends very much on your circumstances such as the type and duration of the visa.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something tells me that our youthful circumstances differ from those of my dad and his wife.  You will be told by the board if you need a medical, because it is not for definite that you will require one.  And looking at the background for ourselves, it appears to us that we will probably not need a medical.  There is a small chance we might need the X-ray, but it turns out this is a great deal easier to sort out than the medical appointment.  So hopefully…no medical for us at all!

I cannot tell you what a relief it was to learn this.  Of course, it only reduces our stress when/if it is confirmed that we do not need a medical.  Until we hear, we shall just have to continue to wait, as we have been doing for the last few months.  I can tell you it doesn’t get any easier.  The closer you get, the more excited you get about going, the harder it gets to have to wait.

The Application

So yesterday was our anniversary, and we had a very lovely day. Even though our picnic plans got chucked out the window, it was still a special day. My love for Amanda really does grow each day.

But it falls to me to discuss in greater detail, in the first official Visa post, what we did yesterday.

With landing the job at Macquarie, we will be going to Australia on a business sponsored 457 visa. This allows a business to nominated person from overseas to fill a position that they have. In this case, Macquarie has nominated me to fill the position that they have given me. The first stage of the process is dealt with solely by the business, and yesterday we found out the nomination had been successful.

The second stage of the process is for me to apply for the visa that Macquarie has been nominated. In days of yore, this was probably a long complicated form filling process resulting in a huge mound of paper, and a lot of hair pulling. While elements of that process remain, for this particular visa you can now apply on-line. This includes supporting documents.

So yesterday was spent on our old machine with a 56K modem completing the visa application form. One of the bonuses with this visa is that it includes the family of the nominated person – provided of course that the business is aware of all additional people at the time they make the nomination. This means that both Amanda and I will be going over on the one visa.

Of course, while I am nominated for this specific job, Amanda has as much right to work wherever she would like, just as if she had gone over on a general working visa. So yes, we completed the application on-line, nicely divided into small manageable section, with save options after each pages.

so we put in my details, Amanda’s details, you of course need the nomination ID from the previous stage, we answered questions about our health (we are healthy) , we answered questions about our character (we have no criminal record)…it was reasonably straightforward. Just time consuming.

The majority of paper work in an application like this, and probably what takes a lot of time, is sending supporting documents back and forth. This does not seem to be such a problem, with the ability to upload documents. So yesterday we uploaded the PDF copy of the offer letter that I was sent, to prove that I really have been offered the job in the nomination. Today I brought in our birth certificates, along with our marriage certificate, scanned them in, and uploaded them. It seems that should we need anything else, such as medical examinations etc, we will be informed as the application proceeds.

As far as we can tell, there is no reason why either of us should be refused, so it’s more a case of playing yet another waiting game. Here’s to a relatively speedy and painless application process.