Survival of a naive travel nurse.

Preparation is key right?

Let me back up and explain a few things. I am normally a well-prepared type of girl. I always try to be organized and do a fair bit of planning before any big trip. Moving to Australia was no different, I spent months researching the hospital, the neighborhoods, hotels, and potential future apartments to live in. Realizing my naivety in the beginning, I knew I would need some help with details and advice on best places to stay, which is why I went on the trip advisor website to ask a few basic questions and get the search started. My questions and responses must have come across as a bit clueless because as my seemingly inexperienced questions continued, my inbox started filling up with messages from people trying to help. Everyone had advice to give, but it all just seemed so confusing and overwhelming. They would say things like make sure you are near a train line or a bus route. You will want be within walking distance to those things. The advice made sense in that of course one would want to be close to commodities, but that is as far as I got with understanding their advice.
I'm pretty sure I had taken for granted how easy it is to find a nice hotel and even to buy a car in America. I figured that the same could be said for Australia, but clearly I was wrong . When asking for hotel suggestions online, I expected to get flooded with responses from people saying, "Oh this one is fabulous and oh you really should stay here."
This was not the case. All the advice was geared towards distance such as, be sure that you find something near trains or buses. One would think any level headed traveler would have been tipped off that something was amiss. What with the absence of good hotel suggestions and lack of fabulous reviews. For some reason, be it excitement or just lack of knowledge, the limited information didn't affect my search tactics. This naivety is how I ended up booking a room in what I mistakenly thought was a normal hotel.