Tag Archives: overseas

Can you tell where I’m writing this blog from? I don’t know where you are and, mostly, it doesn’t matter where I am. But I’m moving house. To a galaxy far far away… Or rather, from Sydney to London. There may be a few more “Now that I am in London …” posts.

It’s all at once exciting, terrifying, sad and brilliant.

Happy face 🙂

• All the years of Facebook stalking old London friends and colleagues have paid off. I’m already building a London network.
• As I say goodbye to my friends and family, they inevitably mention Skype and email and Facebook. We’re never truly cut off from each other are we?
• The process of filing and organising our possessions has left me lighter and more streamlined.
• The great big Internet has been incredibly useful for researching London. I can’t quite remember how I used to prepare for trips, pre-WWW. Travel brochures? Old guidebooks from the library? Static-filled, echoing phone calls to distant relatives, worrying about how much the call cost per second?
• I can stop obsessing about avoiding skin cancer.

Sad face 😦

• I’m quite happy here. I sometimes wonder if what we are going to, will be worth what we are leaving. My dad always says: “One door shuts, another one opens”. I’m just poking my head around the London door and gently closing the Sydney one behind me.
• Sydney is such an easy place to live. As Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” [I love the bit about the tree museum … and right at the end when she does crazy high and low singing.]
• I will very quickly develop a BBC-style English accent. Probably within hours of landing. I’m not taking the piss*. My brain just switches over to Penelope Keith and when I try to speak Australian, I sound like Steve Irwin.
• Skype and Facebook are just not the same as chatting over a mountain of dumplings (see above).
• Gloves, hats, scarves, coats. Even more bits of clothing for the kids to lose.

*That’s Australian for mocking something…

 Anecdote: One of my older lady colleagues in the UK told me that she had never travelled abroad, and never planned to. She didn’t have any specific complaints, but just thought that she “might not like it over there”.

Brought to you by the InterWeb – Tiny tiny mail

I am hoping that my friends might keep in touch via the world’s smallest post office.