24 Oct 2013 Skud   » (Master)

Ballarat!

I’ve been kind of rubbish about posting life updates over here, so I just thought I should make a note that I’m planning to move to Ballarat by the end of the year. Why? Well, my current housemates are going their separate ways and it was either find two new ones, or get a place by myself. Ballarat has cheap rent (not much more for a full house than it currently costs me for a room in a share house), fast internet, is only an hour or so from Melbourne by public transport (I expect to be back pretty regularly, maybe every week or two), and I can have a proper veggie garden.

For those not from around here: Ballarat is a small city of ~80,000 people near Melbourne, and was at the centre of the Victorian gold rush and also the site of the Eureka Rebellion of miners and others seeking reform (i.e. voting rights). In US terms it’s a “college town”, in that the local university is one of the biggest features. Although only the size of Boca Raton or Yuma it’s not as conservative as a similar-sized US city would be; it has a Labor (centre-left) member of parliament, a decent portion of Green voters, and workable public transit, albeit on a small scale. UK people may like to compare it in size to Chester, Durham, or Bath.

I lived in Ballarat for a semester in the 1990s, on an internship with Mars Confectionery, whose Asia-Pacific HQ is on the edge of town. I found it pleasant apart from the work — Windows 3.1 and Novell support, which involved a lot of crawling under desks and scraping chocolate off the inside of keyboards. I was one of the few civilians in town to have any Internet access, as I managed to beg a 2400 bps dialup off someone at the uni computer centre. At age 19, it was only my dialup connection and weekend trips to Melbourne that managed to offset the boredom of office colleagues talking about football and lawncare; 20 years later, I don’t have to work in an office, pretty much everyone torrents Game of Thrones, and though I don’t much care about lawns people usually find my veggie-garden talk less weird than my obsession with Linux and cyberpunk SF was back then.

To answer a FAQ: yes, Ballarat is colder by Melbourne by a couple of degrees. I’m pretty sure I’ll cope with it, since I lived 4 years in Canada. Bit of frost? Bring it!

To answer another FAQ: yes, I’ll be expecting friends to visit!

More detail to follow once I actually have a house and stuff.

Syndicated 2013-10-24 07:11:21 from Infotropism

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