I don't mean to moan but...

Sydney is absolutely without  doubt the most spectacularly beautiful city I have ever spent any time in. It harbour views are amazing and it has all of the airs and graces of of a bustling very modern metropolis. I love Sydney so I don't want to annoy any Australians by making out that I dont ... but ...

... there are one or two things about living here in Sydney that are pretty irritating and make me realise that Sydney is the financial capital of a country somewhat separated from the rest of the world by incredibly large distances, and under the surface - it can be a little behind the times. 

Sydney is a city fraught with charges. Charges for everything. My theory is that it must be to do with a lack of competition between companies, and a love of franchising various operations.

Sydney is the only place you can still get charged $1/minute on a same network mobile phone call, it still has download limit on broadband internet connections (meaning I got stung for an internet bill of multiple hundreds of dollars last month). In Sydney there are tolls for many of the roads. Only if you are a tourist they don't tell you that. The first you hear of it is when $20 worth of fines lands in your post box, and you find out that the car hire company has charged you another $50 for handling your toll fine. $50 just for passing on a fine!!

In Sydney the real estate agents rule the roost. They tell you exactly when you can view property and apparently are involved in creating hysteria about housing availability in order to more quickly get rid of properties.

And don't get me started on the banks. When I first came here I decided to set myself up with the same bank (which will remain nameless) as I am with in the UK, being as they call themselves a 'global bank'. I thought I would be able to see my bank accounts side by side on the internet (no such luck).

What I didn't reckon on was that when you have an account over here, you have to pay $5 a month for the honour of letting them take your money. Plus you don't earn interest until you have more than $2,000 in your account. In addition to this you can only take money out of certain cashpoints otherwise you get charged (my bank only has two in the whole of Sydney) and I hate the fact that you get charged for paying in cheques!

And the card you get? Well its fantastic as long as you don't want to buy anything over the Internet (it isn't a maestro or visa), so I have to pay on my UK credit card (because you need to give DNA to obtain an Australian Credit card) then transfer the money over to my UK account (which costs $20 each time) to pay it off.

The account comes with telephone and internet banking, unfortunately when I finally got my PIN number (which is obviously a completely different one to the card machine one, though they have the same name) after around 6 weeks, it didn't work so I had to send off a form (postal only) requesting another one (for the second time). However when I had chatted to the lady who had told me that my PIN didn't exist on the telephone banking service, she encouraged me to enter my PIN a number of times to check if it worked. All well and good until a couple of days later I got another letter saying that all of my telephone banking had been suspended as I had entered my PIN too many times!

So I had to spend two hours of my lunch break last week going into the city to the only branch of my Bank to pay my rent (of course is was chucking it down with rain). Only it costs $20 to make a one off payment when not using internet banking or you can set up a direct debit which costs $5 every time the transaction is made. So I had to withdraw the money in Cash and trapse round Sydney looking for the correct bank (my Landlords bank) in which to make the deposit. and of course then the landlord had no idea where the money had come from because they neglected to put a reference on it and by the way shouldn't my landlord be giving me a direct debit form for this or something and not be making me pay on my credit card all of the time ......ARGHHH!!!