One year ago today we arrived in Australia. We had been planning and preparing for this for years. Moving countries is not a new experience for me: the move to Australia was the seventh intercontinental transfer of my life to date. I know how to do it and pretty much what to expect in creating a new life in a new place.
Except… pandemic. Not much went as expected. We packed up our entire household ourselves, and Brendan moved it all into the garage for the movers to take, to minimize potential exposure. We flew to Australia with relatively little bother, counting ourselves very fortunate because many others were having a much harder time getting home. Upon arrival, we were quarantined for two weeks in a downtown apartment hotel – again, we had a far nicer time of it than many, and after the preceding extremely stressful months I was happy enough to pass two weeks with nothing to decide, no meals to procure, and not much I had to do.
Yesterday we went for a walk in the nearby Royal National Park. This is my first springtime in Australia, and I’m fascinated with the native plants. One species of tree looks like it sheds its skin at this time of year – all of them are bursting out of their outer layer of bark. Many of the flowers are strange, complicated things that appear to have inspired some of Chihuly‘s works. Time for a trip to the Botanical Garden and/or to buy a book – I want to know more!
When I was a small child living as an expat in Thailand, a lot of my cultural inputs were American, especially around July 4th (the annual party at the American club featured fireworks, which terrified me) and Christmas. We had a few vinyl records of Christmas carols. I loved the music, but the context confused me: In tropical Thailand, we never had snow or even cold weather. I didn’t know what a chestnut or a holly was, had never seen a reindeer, and Santa’s furry red suit would have been stifling in Bangkok temperatures. Though I longed to experience a “white Christmas” and was excited about decorations and presents, I felt disconnected from the “holiday spirit” that seemed so important to others. This continued to be true even when I later lived in places that did have cold and snow (both overrated, in my opinion).
The weather in Thailand was always different from what I read about in English-language books or saw in movies: we had a hot season and a wet season (also hot). The idea of four seasons was strange. I was never cold in my life (not that I remembered, anyway) until we went through Europe in the winter of 1969 on our way back to the US for home leave.
This is not the first time I’ve used this title on a post – and far from the first time I have put together a new home. It’s enjoyable, but also tiring.
Moving in (two weeks ago) was stressful, even though all we were actually moving was our suitcases and a few other items we’d bought since arriving in Australia (such as a printer/scanner, which we’d needed to get essential paperwork done). We had booked a wagon type car on the premise that this would give us enough cargo space for what we most urgently needed to buy, but would not be too big to park in our new garage.
The car rental place texted me that morning: “The wagon won’t be back in time, so we’re giving you a van.” This turned out to be a huge Toyota Hiace which, had we had a crew of six, would have been ideal – we could have bought everything we could possibly need and brought it home in one day. But there were only the two of us, so the van was mostly just a huge headache to drive and park. Brendan had driven something even bigger than this before, but not often, and Sydney’s streets are not as easy to drive in as American suburbia. (Turns out that the smaller roundabouts are designed for semi trucks to just drive right over – no way they’d be able to negotiate those turns otherwise.)
We knew we’d have to hit the ground running on finding a home to rent. Before we left quarantine, we had already engaged a relocation specialist (Marcelle of Sydney Rental Search – whom I warmly recommend), who gave us abundant advice and insider information on the Sydney rental market. Long story short: it isn’t easy. Over the course of 10 days we visited about 10 places, in a wide variety of styles and locations. It was exhausting work, and we were under time pressure: the new school year started Jan 29th, and we wanted Mitchell back in school ASAP. (One of our non-negotiable criteria was that the school district needed to be good, which ruled out some neighborhoods that would otherwise have been interesting.)
