New to Melbourne? Start here.

The short version of every settling-in thread we have ever read: get a myki and set up auto top-up before anything else, because the city runs on trams. Learn the free tram zone boundaries so you stop paying for CBD hops. Pick your library branch (State Library for the room, your local for the quiet). If you are choosing a suburb, walk it on a weeknight at 7pm, not a Saturday morning: that is the version you will actually live in. Then the part nobody writes down: the city is easy to move through and strangely hard to land in. Most people who arrived alone say the same thing, that the first three months were galleries and laneways by themselves. The fix is not more events. It is one repeated thing on one repeated night. That is the whole reason Hey Sini exists, but the advice stands even if you never sit with us: pick a night, protect it, repeat it. What do you wish someone had told you in week one? Reply below, this thread is the one we point every newcomer at.