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!

Fingers crossed, I’ll be back with more as soon as I can get it all written up and uploaded.

Take care everyone, and hopefully I will have my own internet again soon!

D xx

A New Life Down Under!

I apologise in advance as this won't be a 'proper' post, but I felt the need to (finally!!) come on here and let you know that I have arrived safe and well in Australia!

I had so much to write about, so many things I wanted to say, but between the tiredness of travelling and changing time zones, combined with lack of internet access, I haven't quite gotten around to writing anything up...

I will work on it though, and hopefully I will get proper internet access soon so that I can upload something decent! (With pictures!!)

For now though, I will have to say bye bye from Townsville, Queensland - see you soon!!!

It's All Go!

It feels like it can’t be that long since I was on here, but so much has happened since last time!

First of all, the day after my last post the movers came round to the store. They had 2 days for our job, and on the first day they packed up pretty much all of our stuff, ready to finish off on the second day and then load everything into our container for shipping!

I meant to take a photo of our store when it was all full of our stuff, but I forgot until it was half empty. So instead here is a photo of our store after a lot of packing had been done by the movers:

Did you spot that plastic box containing some of my stash there? I got teased quite a lot by the movers for my crochet habit, and I had to point out that while I did own a lot of yarn, the mountain bike, surf board, skis etc were also mine…

Here is the packing in progress:

And here is our container on its lorry, partially packed.

I had to leave before they finished on the Friday as I wasn’t feeling very well, so I didn’t get a photo of the fully loaded container unfortunately. The reason I wasn’t feeling too well was because I had been in hospital that morning for some very minor surgery to remove some lesions from my skin.

One was a suspected dermatofibroma, which is a common non-cancerous skin tumour, which - while not dangerous - was causing me some discomfort. The other was a small cyst on my eyebrow. It had been there for several years, and it had bothered me the whole time ever since it turned up. 

I’m not a fan of photos of me, and I rarely take a selfie, but look how neat those stitches are!

I just had these stitches out yesterday, and I only really looked in the mirror briefly yesterday evening, but I'm surprised at how happy I felt at seeing that the little white lump was gone! I mean, I knew I didn’t like it there, and I thought I would be glad it was gone, but I was surprised at quite how happy I felt, and how exciting it feels to think of it not being there any more! I can't wait for the scar to heal fully and settle down, so I can enjoy the lump's absence to the full ;)

Both of the surgery sites are still pretty sore (it has only been 6 days after all!), but the nurse who sorted the stitches said that they are healing really nicely so I don’t have any worries about them :)

The other big thing that has happened is that I have left my in-laws house now – I have to say, that is something of a relief! – and now I am back in Wales and staying with my mum until I have to leave for London and our flights… Eeek!  I have been quite organised though, and I already bought my train ticket to London. Buying it so far in advance, I was able to get a First Class ticket (Ooh, get me!) from Swansea for only £25! Bargain! (Now I just have to get to Swansea first…)

I have also now got my renewed driving licence, which meant I could get my International Driver’s Permit (IDP) today, so that in turn I can get a Queensland driving licence in Australia.

The IDP is a mystery to me – you fill in a form with details from your driving licence, and then a card IDP is filled out by the Post Office staff, and into this is glued a passport-style photo. Then it’s stamped with an AA stamp, and this means you can use your driving licence abroad in certain countries. As far as I can tell, it tells you NOTHING that your actual driving licence can’t tell, while at the same time being much easier to forge! I really can’t see the point of it!!! But still, there’s now £5.50 that I no longer have to worry about, while I have yet another important document that I must keep safe…

And finally....  Now that I’m back in Wales, I should be able to get photos of my finished Walled Garden Blanket to share too! Yay! And this evening I have been having a bit of a play with some fun crochet, so I will share that later, and I have another little non-handcrafted project on its way to me (I just got the email confirming it is dispatched while writing this) so I can share about that when it arrives too :)  

How is everything with you? It seems to be all go here! :)

Emigration Update...

Wow, Time is just flying by!! I started writing this post days ago, but constant interruptions and a vast amount of stuff to do meant that I am still working on it now! 

I thought, though, that rather than re-edit it and waste more time, I would just explain that it was started days ago (done!) and then put what I started, then carry on afterwards :)   So, the next purple bit is as far as I got over 2 separate days, then I'll finish off :)

We just got back yesterday from a couple of days spent with one of my husband Adam’s old school friends. He is a really nice guy, and I have quite a bit in common with him as he is really into rock climbing and other adventurous stuff, although he has done a lot more than me – and at a much higher standard too! We met up with him at the home of his new girlfriend, who also seemed really great and interesting and who has lots of outdoorsy interests. It was lovely just to get away again and relax in good company :)

Stuff here has been pretty stressy of late. I don’t want to go into details as I believe in personal privacy and I wouldn’t want to violate someone else’s privacy at all, but let’s just say that I am looking forward to our stuff being collected for shipping, so I can get away to Pembrokeshire for a little while :)

Speaking of shipping our stuff, there are lots of developments on that front! We are moving to Australia on my husband’s visa, and he is being sponsored by his new employer. They are helping sort out most of the admin for the move, and as part of that we have now been assigned a moving company – 2 of them in fact, one to send things from this side, and one to continue the move at the other end. Both have now been in touch, and we have a provisional collection date at the end of this month. They will do all of the packing as well, which is frustrating after all the time we have spent packing things as well as we could!! Still, I guess everything fits better in the store for being packed well, and at least it means that we can do the last bits more quickly and with less worry!

This news has also generated a lot of paperwork, so we now have even more forms to fill in about our stuff. All this form-filling gets me really stressed – like, far more than seems rational - for some reason, so much as I am not looking forward to saying goodbye to people and actually leaving, I am looking forward to all the packing / shipping / forms etc being finished with!

We don’t have a house lined up yet for when we get there, but we will get help with this from Adam’s employer too, and we have been told that when we first arrive we will be given some temporary accommodation for while we choose a place to live. That’s quite a relief!

We might not know exactly where we’ll live when we get there, but we do also know how we’ll get there now. Our flights have been booked!!!! We’ll be flying on the 1^st October from London, and we’ll get a stopover in Hong Kong on the way. This is quite exciting to us; we have spoken to a few people who can’t understand taking a stopover and who say that they would just want to get all the way there as quickly as possible, but to us it a free mini-holiday in a place that neither of us have been before. Not to mention being a break in the otherwise hugely long flight! I would not be keen on having to sit still for over 24 hours!

So, it is all very real now. Everything is in progress, or at least on track to be in progress when it is needed. 

And back to today :) Today we have done a little more putting stuff into store, I have had to apply for a new driving licence as I have lost mine (Ooops!), and then I will need to apply for an International Drivers Permit so that I can use my licence when we arrive. I do hope everything gets back in time, I am rubbish for leaving it so late to deal with everything :(

Tomorrow, however, is a day off from all of this. It's a mixture of relief to get away from everything, and panic that it means we are losing badly needed time, but we have a lovely short trip planned: courtesy of Adam's dad, we are going to Edinburgh overnight! We will go up on the train, stay in a hotel, and get to see the Edinburgh Tattoo! I'm pretty excited about that, so hopefully I will manage to get some good pictures to post. The day after we get back is the day the removals company come to do an assessment prior to beginning the 'uplift' of all our stuff, so things will be continuing at full pace a little while longer. Hopefully then I can get a chance to relax a little and spend time with people who are important to me :)

Phew!! Lots going on, but the end is in sight!

 

 

 

Change of Plans

Wow, we are having some hideous weather this weekend! The sky keeps getting so dark that it looks like night time, the rain is coming down in deluge-form, and the thunder is spectacularly loud! I’m kind of feeling like I had a lucky escape – I had been planning to go to North Wales to meet my brother for the weekend; we were going to be camping, and going out walking and/or climbing.

I had really wanted to go, for the sake of several things: seeing my brother, being in North Wales, walking in the mountains and rock climbing. I even have my new helmet to take out, as well as a new climbing harness that my brother gave me. He had bought it for his wife, but it was a bit big for her. She’s slimmer than me though, so it turned out to be a perfect fit for me! 

Petzl Elia Helmet

Black Diamond Primrose AL Climbing Harness

It was a sore decision to make when I decided not to go, and one I only made as my husband said that while I was away he would stay behind and do more work on our inventory of stuff that really needs to be sent off, and packing up more bits and bobs. This made me feel pretty guilty, as I should be helping with this too, so I decided to stay as well.

I have to say, we did get quite a lot done today! Lots more stuff in boxes ready to go to the store on Monday morning. I tidied up a few crafting supplies so that they are prepped to move, we sorted through the remainder of my husband’s work gear – stuff he may need again getting packed, stuff he won’t getting tidied to one side so we can sell it. 

I also packed our coat hangers – how difficult are they to pack efficiently??? In the end, what worked for me was buying one of those long and wide under-bed storage boxes from Wilkos. 

www.wilko.com

I sorted the hangers into bundles of the same size and shape, and used little hair bands to hold them together. 

Then I placed them in the box as neatly as possible, and finally I filled the gaps with any unusually shaped hangers (such as the ones with clips for skirts and trousers), laying the chunkier jacket hangers over the top however they would fit. 

Somehow this picture just will not upload in the landscape format!

I’m so pleased this worked out, as coat hangers become so bulky and awkward when packed, but now I can be confident that they will arrive intact so we can unpack easily, plus afterwards we will have some more handy storage to use! (I’m hoping that we will never again be quite so disorganised as we were in our last (and first!) home together, and that the next time we move it will all be a bit smoother…)

I feel like I’ve been wittering on about packing for so many posts now, but it just feels so complicated! I feel like it would be easier if we had just moved house, taking our stuff from one place to another directly. But instead, we had to pack everything we wouldn’t need for some time, and put it in storage. Pack everything we might need, and take it to Adam’s parents, and also somehow keep separate everything that needed extra work – either sorting out the mounds of paperwork we have somehow acquired, or deciding what ‘hobby stuff’ we need with us for use while we wait to leave (crafting supplies, outdoors equipment etc). Even deciding which clothes we need with us now and which can be shipped is tricky – we will need to keep some hot weather clothes with us, and we’ll need whatever clothes we’ll be wearing in the UK, but it must all fit in the suitcase we’ll take with us…

It’s all enough to make you need a break, so I’m now working on my Walled Garden Blanket some more – hooking up the 14^th panel!! It’s far too wet and gloomy for a nice progress picture, but number 14 looks just like all the others…

The first 6

I’ve also tidied up my project basket. Its lids were tied on with some weird stuff that was quite stiff, and so used to snag my yarn. I therefore removed it and replaced it with some ribbon that I came across when tidying up my sewing box. I also just gave it a bit of a shake out, and then neatly replaced all my project yarn. There’s quite a lot now since I restocked to make sure I would have all I needed for the edging, so the basket is pretty full! 

And speaking of edging, also in the basket are a couple of books to help choose an edging design with my mum. One is my own:

And I have this one from the library, I will let you know if I spot anything useful in it once I take a proper look :)

Well, that's all for now I guess, I am being called for dinner! Hopefully I can put some more Cornish tales together soon :)