Definitely a place to visit, and as people who moved or live here say: “dream city to raise a family”. We spent 25 days in Perth and were able to pick up the “vibe”, see how people live here. We visited lots of places, checked out prices and service and tried to generalize it for You guys.
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| Perth |
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| Grill plate |
Social: What we especially liked, the city is low tempo. There is no rush to do anything, people in the lines are not grumpy, waiters and cashiers are very polite and will small talk with a smile. At first I was weirded out by a cashier who asked me “how was Your day?” and my first thought was “why do You care?” but I was polite and had a nice talk to her that actually put a smile on my face. After some time spent like that, beats paying in silence if You ask me. There are some subtle things that let You know that the system is working really nice and that people are well behaved - for example: shopping carts in shopping centers are all put in their place, not tossed around the parking, dog poo bags are in the appropriate place for it, nobody steals them, there is always toilet paper in the public toilettes (this one blew my mind) and to top it all off trough the city parks there are free grill plates. Yes they are
free, no coins needed, just press a button and fry Your food, have fun and clean it up afterwards.
In general, people do not show stress, anger or nervousness – they are relaxed and polite so that is what they meant when they said: “an environment to raise Your children”.
Tourism: The city offers so much content it was impossible to see all we wanted in time spent there and I will review all places we went to in separate articles. The most important aspect of “places to go evaluation” was: is it interesting to kids?. There was loads. For starters the most important thing - petting kangaroos and koalas is definitely what Your kid would like - go to Caversham wildlife park inside the Whiteman park.
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| Whiteman park - Caversham wildlife park |
Perth has lots of playgrounds, museums, water park, swimming pools, bars. Every playground we visited had it's own theme and inventive gadgets to play with. Our son was enjoying riding ships, planes, trucks, there was even running water in the sandboxes next to the toy excavators and every time it was hard to get him to leave. The biggest park in Perth is Kings park and to visit it whole You might need a few days for different parts but it is worth it since it has lots of parks for children and a botanic garden.
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| Botanic garden entrance |
Tourist bus is definitely a thing to visit as You can see lots of interesting sights and hear interesting facts and stories about Perth and Australia. The ticket is usable 24h so You can step of the bus and look around, do shopping, rest and than hop on to the next one and continue sight seeing.
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| Tourist bus |
During our stay we visited only Scitech and Maritime museum, I visited the prison by myself. We missed out on a shipwreck museum and there are loads more to visit. Scitech is science and technology museum with playground and planetarium fully adjusted for children to learn understand science and technology. Maritime museum was interesting to our son by itself, and to the end when he had enough the table with coloring papers saved the day. You could scan colored fish and they would appear on the screen – totally cool for kids... And some parents.
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| Maritime museum |
The museum I visited myself was the Fremantle prison, definitely cool but a bit scary tour. If You have time and will to travel outside city You should visit the Pinnacles, the place feels and looks like You are on another planet. I am sure I did not list all attractions to visit, but there is so much that just listing them would make the article too long.
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| Pinnacles |
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| Fremantle |
Food: I was surprised by the quality of food in Perth. If I would have to pick top food in Perth it
would be beef. Beef stakes to be exact. There was not a place where stake was bad, I can say with certainty Australia has the best beef stakes in the world. What I thought is that in big cities is hard to find good food, and when You do, it will be expensive. For Perth this is not true at all, as a matter of fact, I noticed that the price of food is mostly the same in all kinds and types of restaurants. For example, we sat inside a beautiful restaurant and expected to pay extra just for the ambience and were pleasantly surprised when the price was the same like other places.
Prices: Prices of groceries in Perth stores are the same as in Zagreb so we did not feel any different than home but compared to Australian salaries I would say food is cheap. To put things into perspective, Australian salaries are 3-5 times higher than the ones in Croatia. For that reason, all services cost 3 times more than in Zagreb. If You want a cook to prepare food and a waiter to bring it, pay for it.
Conclusion: In the end I have to agree that Perth is the place to raise a family. Tons of things to see and do, slow tempo, low prices compared to salaries... If someone dropped me in Perth and told me I have to live here I would not complain. Look for more detailed reviews in next posts.
Happy travels, have a nice time!
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