Not Just for Christmas!

We all know the mantra... a puppy's not just for Christmas, but for their lifetime.  It's interesting to apply this to emigration.  There are a vast number of people who see their move to another country as being a forever trip to Utopia, whilst others (like me) see it as a stepping stone to future options - in the case of Australia, a 4 year commitment can provide citizenship and the right to live and work in Australia or New Zealand for the rest of your life.  Quite often those aiming for Utopia return home in a matter of months or a couple of years having failed to find what they're looking for.  So what about those who only definitely plan to be here for a period to achieve their aims... do they move home or move on after they've done what they set out to do?  Or do they stay?

This has come to the forefront of my mind over the past couple of weeks as I've been grappling with some practicalities of my current life. I live in Sydney, work 1 day a week here, 4 days a week in Canberra and have been flying into Canberra on a Tuesday morning and busing back on a Friday night.  This works fine until you hit winter when on 9 out of 10 days, Canberra is shrouded in fog until about 10am when the sun's got up high enough to burn it off.  The result is no planes into the airport until the fog clears and me being very late for work every Tuesday!  There were 2 options to address this - either move to Canberra, or get a car.  Given that moving to Canberra still isn't something I'd want to do, it seemed the car was the way to go!

Friends of mine were selling their 6 year old Hyundai i30, so this seemed like a potentially good option for me, although driving 600km a week and being totally reliant on my car to get me to/from Canberra did mean I was somewhat sceptical about the idea of buying a second hand rather than a new car.  As I'm not a mechanic and rely on the feel of a drive to tell me whether there's anything wrong with a second hand car, I decided it would be worth test driving a new Hyundai before seeing my friends' one.  So I spoke to my local dealer in Rosebery and made an appointment for first thing Saturday morning.

At 8.45am Saturday, I met my friendly car salesman, Dale - he certainly looked the part with slicked back hair and dark sunnies!  I had a hire car out which was a Hyundai i20 and was the most uncomfortable car I'd ever driven with a bar running along the bottom of the seat back which seemed to have no padding and just dug into your bones!  I mentioned this to him and he said it must be a very old model (of course he would!), then promptly got me to sit in the i30SR to prove his point!  Beautiful solid leather seats (just like in my previous BMW 3 Series M Sport Coupe) enveloped me, with a perfectly positioned, adjustable lumbar support!  OK, so the i20 I was driving must have been very old... take note and don't hire from Europcar as they don't regularly update their cars!  He asked me what model I was interested and I told him the Elite which was 2 down from the SR.  He found one for me, I sat in and the first thing I thought was the seats were fine, but nowhere near as comfortable as the SR!  So it ended up being the SR I took for a test drive... and what a drive!  It was a manual with a full foot alloy accelerator pedal, amazingly smooth transition, adjustable steering stiffness (light to be able to quickly whizz the wheel round when parking, normal and stiff for when driving on long motorway drives) and to top it off a panoramic sunroof!  I was smitten!  We went back and started discussing price - they had an end of quarter sale on, so there were deals to be had!  I got ball-park figures and said I'd get back to them the next day once I'd driven my friends' second hand version.

So the next morning, I tried out my second hand option.  One of the biggest surprises was that it drove as well as a brand new car, which says something about the longevity of Hyundai.  It didn't have all the bells and whistles which the SR has (cruise control, GPS, reverse cameras, sunroof, etc), but seemed like a good buy for a car I would put lots of miles on.  I left my friends thinking that this was the way to go, but something was niggling at the back of my mind.  It's an hour & a half bus ride back to town from the top end of the northern beaches and by the time I'd got there, I'd done some homework and decided I'd go back to Hyundai and see what deal we could actually pin down.  Toyota were offering 1% finance on some models (not the Corolla as these tend to walk off the forecourt without any additional persuasion - the most popular car in Australia!), but I figured that if they really wanted to sell a car, they might just offer it on a Corolla!  So I'd used their online finance calculator and came up with a repayment quote on a Corolla Levin SR with 1% finance, to use as leverage with Hyundai.

After half an hour of negotiation, I had a potential offer from Hyundai (needed approval from the big boss!) that was comparable with Toyota, but financed over an additional year (5 years instead of 4), being the difference of the 1% finance.  Given the i30SR was a higher spec, this was impressive.  I went away to think about it overnight - the last day of their sale (and the last day the offer was on the table) being the following day - Monday.  I swung backwards and forwards between my options overnight, but couldn't help thinking that this was my best opportunity to buy a new car when I didn't have a mortgage to worry about and when I was actually driving long distances regularly to enjoy it!

Monday morning I called up and said if he could get approval for what we'd agreed, I'd go ahead.  Ten minutes later I had the acceptance forms and was signing up to a 5 year commitment, without blinking an eye.  Given that I've nearly been here a year and only need to be here 3 more to get citizenship, this is actually quite a mammoth decision because it's saying I'm going to be staying in Australia for at least another 5 years!  As it didn't seem to concern me, I can only assume that I'm feeling so settled, I can't imagine moving back to the UK or onto somewhere else in 3 years time!  Thinking about it, this place feels so much more like home than anywhere in the UK.  If I moved back, I'd struggle to identify where to move to as nowhere feels like it's where my roots are.  This is obviously a work in progress (I can't say for definite that people who only plan to be here for a specific period end up staying), so continue to watch this space and see how it all pans out!