Driving for the first time in Melbourne

So I drove for the first time in Melbourne yesterday...

After suffering serious stress from dealing with the hell-on-earth traffic in the eastern suburbs/CBD of Sydney.. it wasn't much better in Melbourne. 

When we were driving to Canberra and trying to get to the Harbour tunnel we had to pass a HUGE amount of traffic (on a Saturday) with like 10 lanes not moving (hello Los Angeles?!) just due to ONE accident on the Cahill expressway... I thank the Gods we were taking the tunnel and not the harbour bridge which meant we might've been stuck there for 2 hours...

WTF is up with this shit? Traffic is a nightmare. Why are there constant accidents? Why are people such bad drivers?

They should seriously raise the age to 21 I reckon, and make those over 60 or 70 re-take the exam because people here seriously cannot drive! And everyone is so anti-public transport.. ugh... so they have to drive absolutely everywhere, even 500m down the road...

So my GPS and Google maps told me it'd take less than 40 mins to drive to hubby's office.. guess how long it took me? 1hour and 45mins! There was a huge accident somewhere and I saw a HUGE long piece of red on Google maps on the freeway (I was already stuck in a very short piece of red with non-moving traffic) so decided to take another route which was not as congested (but more traffic lights) and I was driving mostly 70-80km/hr but still. how the FUCK did it take this long? OMG losing my mind at how seriously fucked up the traffic is here...

Meanwhile.. I didn't find the Amazon headquarters but I can understand why they chose to build it there.. so much space and so much land... I didn't have a clue what Dandenong was like but given its distance to the CBD I could make some assumptions.. I said to hubby that we're not living there and he agreed.

So out of curiosity I looked up how much a 2br apartment there costs to rent and it's about HALF the price of our suburb (much closer to the city) .. OMG ... For those Sydneysiders wondering.. it kind of looks like how Parramatta might've looked 30 years ago IMHO. It seems to be bigger than a typical suburb but not big enough to be like Sydney's mini CBD-like suburbs. It is also mainly full of ethnic immigrants.

Then again, I find a lot of suburbs in Melbourne look like how Sydney's suburbs looked 20-30 years ago... everything seems so much quieter and slower...

On a good note, parking is SO much easier in Melbourne. Much easier to find, and fewer stupid time restrictions and nowhere near as expensive as Sydney !

And it's for that reason we got an apartment super close to the train station.. If I had to drive all the time I would end up in a hospital from stress. No matter how crappy the trains are (and they are actually not too bad even though I still can't understand the map and the city loop.. what loop?)* I would rather take that and relax and read than sit in this fucking hellish traffic hell. Luckily for hubby he is driving in the 'wrong' direction so doesn't have to deal with peak hour congestion (unless some idiot who can't drive decides to have a crash and block the whole freeway for commuters).

*Last week I tried to catch the train in the CBD based on what I saw on the diagram.. oh wait, nothing about Melbourne's public transport makes sense.. you have a loop in the diagram but (apparently) apart from the morning and weekends it only runs in ONE DIRECTION (and nowhere does it say there, no signs, no nothing).. I'm running around like a lost idiot (when I never even got lost in Tokyo's, Seoul's, London's or Paris' huge metro networks).. finally I ask the guy working there who tells me there is no train between Melbourne Central and Flinders St.. wtf? There is no direct connection between two of the BIGGEST stations in the city? Geez. Which genius designed this? No wonder they're building that tunnel thing.. He says I have to go to Swanston st to take the tram.. Have to go up 2 floors through a shopping mall... not a single diagram, map or sign anywhere pointing where to go... I have to use my memory based on what he told me and guess a lot... I seriously don't know how non-English speaking tourists get around...

And then, like in Europe, you have to open the train doors by yourself! which is fine.. on some trains there is just a button to press and it opens by itself, BUT on certain older trains you have to really crank open the door with you bare hands (it feels stuck ) and I feel I have to break my arm off with that amount of strength to open the door. Don't remind me how many times I've stood there like an idiot waiting for the door to open... and then when you try to open it it actually feels stuck/broken.