In Pursuit of The Worthwhile: I'm In Australia!!!!!! (Still Can't Quite Believe It!)

Hello again!

It has been a little while since I was on here last, and I’m afraid that this won’t be a brilliant post either… Since I was here last, we have moved into our apartment, which is pretty exciting! At first we were provided with a rental pack of furniture and essential household items, so that we could get by, but soon afterwards all of our stuff (well, most of our stuff…) arrived safely from its journey halfway round the world.

Only a few things were broken, although a couple of things were a bit upsetting – I was most upset by the shattering of my Iznik decorated plate that I got from the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, while Adam was most upset by the shattering of the clay tagine we got from the souks of Marrakech. My Iznik plate hung in pride of place in our last home, while Adam often used the tagine to cook delicious meals, so both items will be missed lots :( That said, I think we were lucky that so few things were broken, and so far we have only noticed that my tool box and a pair of flip flops have gone missing. I have heard of entire shipping containers falling overboard, so it could certainly have been a lot worse!

Although we are now set up in our new home, we are having lots of trouble getting internet connected. In our area the only available internet is ADSL – which goes through the existing copper wires of the phone network. After waiting a couple of weeks for an appointment to have this switched on by an engineer, it didn’t work! We had to go back and arrange for it to get checked out. A few days later an engineer arrived and connected it properly – the previous engineer had connected the wrong block of buildings entirely! After the new engineer had switched on to the correct cable, she came up to our apartment to check that the signal was working. Alas it was not! She used her equipment to ping the lines, but nothing was working at all. Why not was/is a mystery, as previous occupants had been connected. Unfortunately, the problem lies beyond the region of responsibility of the network company, and within the building responsibility. This means that I have to apply through the ‘Body Corporate’ for our ‘units’ (apartments) in order to get anything done. Several days after writing to them, and I am still waiting to hear back. Rubbish!!

Weirdly, there seem to be no cafés around here that offer wifi, so heading out to sip coffee and use the internet isn’t even possible! But!! All is not entirely lost: yesterday I discovered a shopping centre with wifi, so I am uploading this from there. Phew!!

My plan is to write up a few posts in advance, and then upload them all as and when I get the chance. Hopefully then I can publish them from my phone if I get onto wifi, so I’m not carrying a laptop with me all the time! We’ll see if it works – I’m really hoping that I will be able to add photos!

Soooo, I thought I should take this opportunity to tell you a little about my transition from Britain to tropical Australia!

It’s obviously a huge wrench to leave behind everything you know, and to move permanently to a new place where you have never been before. I knew this, and yet it was still far more emotional than I had realised it would be. I felt pretty terrible as we took off, as the realisation hit me that I was actually going. I did hear afterwards that it has happened before that people arrive in Australia and immediately book their flight back home, as the moment of leaving home affects them so deeply that they realise that they can’t leave, and now I can sympathise with that feeling!

This is a beautiful place though, and despite some emotional ups and downs since arriving, I do like it here and I already have a bit of a plan for what to do with myself, having discovered that my UK qualifications don’t translate to over here (more about that another time).

I’ve met a few other people who came over here at the same time as us, and we all seem to have approached things slightly differently. Some people had a child to think of, so they have gotten organised very quickly. The rest of us without children are all at different stages – only one of our little group can use her qualifications here (she is an Aussie though, and she studied here in the first place!) so she has recently started work. The couple I know the best have taken a pretty laid back attitude to things, and are taking it slow with regard to everything both practical and fun. Another couple have been having loads of fun and doing and seeing so much, while putting practical boring bits on the back burner. Adam and I have done a bit of each – with Adam pushing the boring bits, and me lobbying to have fun too. So we now have Queensland driving licences (Australia does driving licences by state, rather than nationally), a car, basic medicare cover, our electric plugs have been switched over, and hopefully soon we will have internet! We have also seen loads of interesting wildlife, been on a couple of trips to Charters Towers and Magnetic Island (which I will write about separately) and explored the town’s coffee shops, walking routes, shopping centres, and swimming pools etc. Wow!

This is quite wordy now with very few pictures, so I thought I would try to upload one picture of the view from our balcony - we live in an apartment complex that has a really great pool, good enough to make up for the fact that our new home is pretty small and we can't quite fit all of our stuff there comfortably! I’ve taken the image from my own facebook page so it will be compressed, and will hopefully upload ok!