Fiam

Beautiful trees and a shopping village initially it's great to live here. It does have great schools and is close to lots of pools and parks. The house lots are a lot bigger than other inner city areas and it's quiet...Until you realise if you live anywhere near the ferry or Oxford st due to total lack of council planning commuters take all the car parks from 7am-6pm. Wanting to pop into a cafe, impossible to park. Wanting a friend to come over for lunch? No hope they will find a park anywhere near your house. Unlike other suburbs parking is not restricted to 4 hrs apart from residents. Also commuters constantly park across driveways blockin entry. There is ' no park and go' car parks for commuters and soon with the huge development at Apollo Rd about to start I imagine it will be worse. Also there are new apartments being built everywhere, creating huge traffic issues. I also imagine no infrastructure will be built to cope with this. A bus takes 45mins to get to town and are infrequent. The main playground in the oval has one park bench for seating, one! So parents stand around for hours or sit on plastic bags on the ground to avoid the morning dew. The other playground in Riding Rd also has one or two seats only. Not conducive to meeting other parents. The restaurants are, as everyone writes, mainly awful quality 90's food, apart from the Jetty, the Paleo cafe, Barcadia and Raw, which are lunch cafés mainly, you really need to drive for a nice dinner, although the Pub actually does lovely meals it's not family friendly. There are no nice river walks as the houses are built right to the water and the ferry to get to the board walk at Teneriffe is too $$ to use daily, and there is no bridge anywhere to go across the river by bike or foot. A real disappointment. Regarding neighbourliness, I really noticed on Neighbour day the total lack of st parties in Bulimba while all friends in other suburbs told us what a great time they had there were none to be seen on Bulimba. There is a difference to having a neighbour say hi! to being a great neighbour, we really miss that here, however older residents tell us it used to be great that way in the past. I still think it's a nice suburb and would be great if 'community' was encouraged, and I think the restaurants will slowly improve as great new bars have opened up.