5 Months Off

I can't believe I've only been here 2 full days. It's been a very long couple of days, filled with so many new things.

Overall I feel much better than I did when I got here. I mostly bummed around yesterday, checking out the downtown area. I was kept from doing some of the things I needed to (contacting the bank, contacting the agency helping me out to schedule my orientation) because the Australian mobile sim card I bought took a day and a half to activate. It was only supposed to take an hour or two, but it only finally worked today at about 2 or so. But I had made an appt anyway with the agency and I saw them this afternoon. Got all sorts of info and goodies. My appt was rather late though, so I only had a bit of time at the computer there before it was closing time. So I'll go in tomorrow and print off copies of my CV and make a list of places to hit asking for a job. I'll also see if there are job postings to apply for, but going door to door might be more successful.

I also went to the bank today to get my bank card. I had already set up the account from abroad, I had even transferred money from my Dutch account, but I needed to go in and identify myself and get my card and info on how the account works, etc. The guy who helped me was soooo nice, he didn't just give me bank info, he gave me some leads on job openings and also tips on where to look for a shared house. It was awesome, plus I'm so glad to have my bank account sorted out, unlike when I went to the UK and didn't have an account for weeks and couldn't be paid and it rather sucked. I even paid for my groceries this evening with my new Australian bankcard. Oooh, exciting stuff. =)

On the housing front, I replied to an online ad and will go view this room tomorrow evening (how the week flies, she asked me to come by Thursday and I thought that was ages from now, but it's tomorrow!) It sounds promising, but the suburb the house is in is a little farther out of the city than I would like. Not "I need a car" far, and it's across the street from a tram stop linking you to the center, but I'll see how long it takes me to get there.

So, things are moving. Hope to post more soon...

After many, many hours, I made it to Melbourne last night (Monday). It was a very long trip, and I'm very glad that when I go back to Amsterdam I break up the journey by staying in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of days.

The flights went fine though. From Amsterdam to KL was my first time in a 747. It didn't feel that huge inside, but you can't really see down the whole plane at once. I had a friendly middle-aged couple sitting next to me, I had assumed they were Malaysian, but I think they were Indonesian. The woman was sitting next to me and though they didn't speak much English, we communicated sometimes with looks and such, like when she'd lean across me to peek out the window and we'd both shrug that there was still nothing to see, it was all dark out there. She was kind and a bit motherly, patting me on the arm sometimes, it was nice. The sleeping pills my doctor gave me were near useless. I was expecting to be knocked out for most of the flight, instead it was like my body clock won, telling me it was midday, not time to sleep, so I only slept a couple of hours. I snoozed a lot more during the second flight, but that was not going to help me get on schedule here. Oh well, I slept remarkably well last night. Feeling a bit sleepy and not with it now, but hopefully I get over it in a couple of days.

I was quite a wreck by the time we got to KL and I managed to doze a bit on some seats in the terminal (I had about 3 hours to wait til the next flight). The international terminal is pretty cool, a circle with four wings extending out with the gates, and in the middle of the circle are all these tropical plants that you can view through windows. The circle thing was a bit confusing though, I wandered around too much and in my sleepy state would lose track of what part I was at. I also swear I saw Floortje Dessing at one point, but I'm not 100% sure it was her, heh...

Our flight to Melbourne was delayed by half an hour because they decided to wait for some family who was late, not sure why we all had to wait. Also I would have had a window seat if they hadn't have showed up. I had moved from my middle seat to the empty window seat, so had another girl, but then the family ran on and we got booted back to our assigned seats. Boo. I evil-eyed them since they also made us late.

I slept on and off all the way to Melbourne. At one point though I went to stand at the back of the plane a bit since my back was stiff from sitting so long and I ended up chatting with one of the airline stewards (the purser maybe? he was dressed slightly differently than the other flight attendants). We talked for awhile, a good 30-45 mins about everything from my job and his job to why I was going to Australia to living in Amsterdam and why I don't want to live in the US to why Oregon is awesome. It was great and he was so friendly. Definitely a good way to kill some time, plus it helped wake me up a bit.

I also had gone to the back of the plane so I could peer out the little window on the emergency exit door. The map showed we were finally over Australia and I wanted to have a look. Our route took us over Australia from the NW corner diagonally across Western Australia, past Adelaide and across Victoria to Melbourne. So a lot of the flight was over the huge deserts of Western Australia. And it looked pretty much as I imagined: dry and empty and red. It did feel like we might have been flying over Mars. And the few times I peeked out, I never saw any sign of civilization; no roads or clumps of buildings. It's all just a lot of barren nothingness, and over such an unbelievably vast area.

Once in Melbourne, I took a bus to the city and then, because it was late in the evening and the hotel shuttle was no longer going, I had to take a taxi to the hostel. By chance there was a girl on the bus who was also going to the same hostel, so we shared a cab. We got some newbie cab driver, he had never heard of the hostel and was asking us to direct him there. We told him the address and I had a map so I said what the nearest street was, but he still was looking it up on a map when we were stopped at red lights. Anyway, the girl was really nice, an Irish girl with an Irish name I can't pronounce, and we ended up being placed in the same room. We didn't really hang out much, but it was nice to meet someone straight off.

I felt very weird once I was here, like I still couldn't comprehend that I'd be living here for months. It was like I'd been just going through all the stages of packing and going to the airport and getting through the flights, but not really realizing what the purpose was at the end of it all. If that makes sense. I mean, of course I know what I'm here for and what the plan is, it's just hard to realize it all right now. I was a bit overwhelmed when I got to the hostel, just so much newness and trying to fit into a small space with 4 other people and all of that, and I was having "why am I doing this?!!" thoughts, but I'm sure in a week or two I'll look back and laugh at that. I hope anyway, heh.

Anyway, off to look at the city a bit and probably nap later and get more settled. It's wonderful and sunny out, I sat on a bench munching what I bought for breakfast and it was nearly as warm as it has been in general lately in Amsterdam. But it's late winter. The only way I was reminded of that is that the trees are all bare. Hopefully we have a lovely spring.

Last week I turned myself into one big stress bunny. I didn't sleep well most of the week. I was trying to sort out all the travelling I'd be doing in New Zealand and Australia, and then trying to book various things, not to mention adding more and more things to the various lists I have going and basically trying to keep my head from exploding. I'm a bit better now, I have both trips mapped out and most of the main things booked. I just booked the outback tour I'll be going on (which I read about months ago and have been anticipating since), as well as a 6-day tour around Tasmania (that little island has a remarkable amount of things to see and do).

Saturday I bought a little rolling bag that is like a cross between a standard carry-on case and a duffel bag. I'm very happy with it, and it'll likely be the only bag I use while travelling around (I'll also be taking a bigger Samsonite, but I'll leave it behind in Melbourne). Most everything else for the beginning part of my trip (the working part) is sorted, I'm just trying to book holiday things while I have ready access to a computer.

I have been able to turn a bit more attention to planning the party I'll have next Saturday, which will involve a lot of homemade Mexican food. Yum! It'll be great to see most of my friends before I head off. I need to be sure to take lots of photos...

The couple of days O and I will spend in Malaysia on our way back from Australia is not a part of the trip we've thought about much, but the other day I was looking up info on visas and I ended up reading a guide to Kuala Lumpur. For whatever reason, I didn't realize how cheap Malaysia is. Sure, it's in SE Asia which is known for being cheap by Western standards, but maybe it seemed more modern to me and thus it would be more Western? But in this guide I was reading, it was saying that mid-range hotels, like O and I would normally look at staying in, cost between 70 and 150 ringgits (RM). So I checked out what, say, RM100 was in euros: about 21 euros. I didn't think that was right. I started digging around in the Rough Guide and online travel agencies, and I found that, yes, things are very cheap. On the D-Reizen site (a Dutch travel agency), you can get deals for a stay in a posh four or five-star hotel for 50-70 eur a night! I was shocked that it was so incredibly cheap. And the food is even cheaper! The Rough Guide listed Indian and Chinese restaurants that served whole meals for only a couple of euros, plus there are tons of street vendors serving up fried noodles and curries for near nothing, like 50 cents or so. It'll be a nice ending to the trip, living it up in a fancy hotel and gorging ourselves on Asian food.

As an introduction, I thought I'd explain the story behind the working holiday I'll be taking and what the plans are so far.

I've wanted to go to Australia since college, when I took a class on an Australian writer. I remember even telling a friend (when we were still in college) that I really wanted to go to England and Australia, but England was slightly more doable, so I made it there first and then ended up living in Europe, in Amsterdam. Living in Amsterdam has been wonderful, but I wasn't totally happy with it, and I kept wondering if there was a place where I'd feel more at home (or at least happier with the weather). Spain was an option for awhile, and then Vancouver, and eventually I started eyeing Australia because it seems so laid-back and everyone raves about it and I'm sure the weather beats Amsterdam's. Then, a couple of years ago, an Australian friend and former co-worker visited me from Melbourne and it made me think about Australia more. I started looking into visas for working in Australia and I had the idea of going there for a year to see what it was like. But then I found out that there were working holiday visas for 4 months for Americans. I thought that would be a much more reasonable amount of time to go and my plan for awhile was to go there for those few months as a test to see if I'd like living there.

The plan began in the summer of 2005. One of the stipulations of the visa is that you have to be between 18 and 30 years old, and at the time I was almost 28. I decided I would go to Australia in 2007, when I'd be turning 30 (so at the last possible moment) and I'd use the time until then to save up for the trip. And that's pretty much what I've done. But I'm not thinking about moving permanently to Australia anymore, mostly because it is just so far away. Even though I decided I wasn't going to be using the working holiday as a trial period anymore, I still definitely wanted to go because I wouldn't be able to do it after I turned 30, and I didn't want to miss the opportunity to have the experience of being able to live there for a few months.

This year has involved a lot of planning after just saving and talking about it for over a year. One of the first things I had to do was ask my boss if they would let me go on a leave of 5 months so I could return to my job afterwards. I feel very lucky because my company is allowing me the time off. But then I did basically tell them that if they didn't let me have this time off, I would quit my job to go because not going was not an option.

Besides that I've applied for the visa and booked flights and started to read about the many places I want to visit. I've only recently started actually looking into things regarding the work part of the trip, but that's ok, there's still quite a bit of time to sort that stuff out.

The plan at the moment is that I'll leave for Melbourne at the end of August and I plan to work there for 3 months. Onno will come over to join me at the end of November and we'll hang out in Melbourne for about a week. Then we fly to Auckland to begin a trip through New Zealand. We are there for a bit more than 2 weeks, which isn't long, but fortunately it's a smaller country than Australia. After we wind our way down to Dunedin, we fly back to Australia on Christmas Eve, to Sydney, and we spend Christmas in the Blue Mountains, just to the east of Sydney. After that we spend about a week in Sydney, including New Year's, which is meant to be absolutely amazing there. The next part of the trip is a bit more vague right now, but we want to drive through southeastern Australia and also spend some time in Tasmania. Eventually we'll end up in Adelaide and from there begin an Outback tour which ends in Alice Springs, in the very center of the country. We'll go to Uluru and Kings Canyon and go on hikes and sleep under the stars in the middle of the desert. After the tour and after spending some time in Alice Springs, we'll fly back to Melbourne and spend another couple of days there (including Australia Day) before flying out of the country. We don't go back to Amsterdam yet though, we'll spend a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, since we fly back through there. We arrive back in Amsterdam on February 1, and I'm thinking now that arriving in the middle of winter was probably not the smartest of ideas, but it can't be changed now.

I'll probably write a bit more before I leave, if I have any interesting developments to share, otherwise it'll be news on how things are going in Australia.