Hi Marlis,
Another two
months gone in a flash! Happy new year and all the best for 2018 😊. Thank you for the card and handwritten note, I really appreciated how
you enlisted your daughter to help. A lot has happened in just two months,
never a dull moment with us, that’s for sure. It’s a big one this time, so let’s
get started
Trip to Queensland
The week
before Christmas we went on holiday to Far North Queensland and the Great
Barrier Reef (GBR), finally. Cairns was where our Australia adventure started
when we visited first in 2010 and we fell in love with Australia (took a few
days longer for Yumi), so we were happy to be back. The town sure has grown
thanks to tourism from Asia and it is busy, but in a nice sort of way. I think
the town centre has doubled in size and there are so many more restaurants,
shops activities and facilities than when we last visited. Most of it touristy
stuff, but still good to see the town prosper. We stayed at two B&B’s
because we also went on a 3-day diving trip to the GBR and made a day trip to
Port Douglas to do some more diving, visited the rainforest and went on a
crocodile tour. The diving in Port Douglas was more to get our gear wet and see
if we still knew how to do things and get used to being on a boat. It was
ridiculously expensive, but we got to see lot of fun things and overall had a
good experience, including seeing heaps of kangaroos along the way and seeing the
sugar cane country side. Soon after, our trip to the GBR was good fun. We
sorted the logistics of handing in the car the day before and then departed the
B&B at 5.30am!) and dropping off our luggage at the dive shop. The reef is
very badly bleached in places, but still spectacular in others and a great
place to have dived. Over the three days we managed to squeeze in 11 dives,
50km out on the reefs. We saw a few sharks, turtles, big groupers, barracudas,
many different types of smaller fish and other animals. We also did two night
dives which was a good but slightly disorienting experience as we couldn’t see
a lot more than the light of torches and the reflection of the eyes of sharks
on the hunt. There were 32 people on the boat and it was remarkably
well-behaved and friendly, be it a bit cramped and the crew seemed a bit
disinterested. I am not sure we’ll do it again in this way, perhaps next time
we’ll go on a boat with less novices, so it’s just the diving and not a lot of
people figuring stuff out. We thought we’d be a bit rusty, me not having dived
in almost 3 years but it’s like riding a bike, once you know how, it’s hard to
forget. We also went on a crocodile tour and until that time I hadn’t realised
the real danger of these magnificent animals just being in rivers and minding
their own business, very much like big sharks, who then get hunted because they
eat people who get in their territory. We saw two big ones and a tiny one,
learned about birds, snakes and the forest, lots of fun. The day in the
rainforest was also worthwhile. We went up by cable cart and got spectacular
views of the forest on one end and the ocean on the other as we climbed. There’s
also a village up in the rainforest, which is a massive tourist trap, but we
just focused on the nature walks and sights to see, leaving the stores and gift
shops to the real tourists. Yumi did take the opportunity to eat a bratwurst in
a very German café (including schlager music) run by a German lady and her
daughter and we ran into a German couple who we’d also spent time with on the
dive boat, small world. The trip back down we did by train (historic railroad
they said, it would be fun they said) and that was a mistake in 30+ Queensland
heat at 5km/hour down a mountain through 15 (I counted) tunnels. Took forever
and even Yumi lost her patience. We were very happy to be back in town, but
some of the views were very much worth it. Finally we visited the botanical gardens of
Cairns and they are still very beautiful and worth a visit. They really made
good use of the space and with the tropical climate, there’s not a lot they
cannot grow so the plant variety was amazing. As you can see, we had a holiday,
but were very busy. On the way back home, Yumi caught food poisoning from some
bad sushi (normally that would be me) and spent the whole flight sick as a dog ☹. We arrived back home in the early hours of 25 December, but didn’t do
much for the
Next few days
as Yumi was still unwell and we needed to rest from the holiday activities,
haha.
Holidays in
Altona
The Christmas
break gave us a good opportunity to ground ourselves in the area and get to
know our surroundings. The neighbourhood is very quiet, the train passes by
every 20 minutes or so but it’s really not that annoying, our windows are
double glazed on that end and it lasts all of 20 seconds anyway. No horrible or
loud and drunk neighbours, actually, NO neighbours. Our gardener (yes, we have a
gardener, he came with the lease and drops by for odd jobs and garden
maintenance) tells us the neighbours only use the house as a holiday home and
some car storage, good for them and good for us 😊. It’s great to be able to walk to the beach every day and see the
ocean (well, the bay…) every day. Sun, clouds or rain, it’s a sight I never
grow tired of and it always clears my head and the few worries I have. We’ve
started getting our groceries delivered again because I am a Woolies person and
we only have a Coles, Foodworks and IGA and it’ just not working for me. I go
to Coles, but the store makes me sad just walking there and I ain’t no beauty
myself but the people are just so ugly and grumpy! I know that’s terrible to
say but they really are. I guess I just miss the Brunswick Woolies. And that’s
about the only thing I miss from Brunswick, some of the shops and the good
restaurants, not much else!
Back in with CMI
I think I
mentioned last time that I was looking to get back into the Change Management
Institute (CMI) and would have been happy to be the idea-person, but as it
often goes, I ended up being in charge, but just locally, of the Victorian committee. It was one of
those strange situations where I wasn’t looking to be in the lead, but the lady
in charge was looking to step down and I had been there before and had some
useful ideas last year, so it kind of made sense. We had a vote and now I am
the boss, go figure! There’s some networking to be done and a bit of team
structure to provide, but everything else seems to work fine, I just have to
hold down the fort and recruit a few new volunteers. I’ve started reaching out
to some people I know and there appears to be some interest. The agenda for the
year is basically full, so it’s really up to us how crazy we want it to be,
keeping in mind that we’re all volunteers.
Starting at
SES
Coming Monday I’ll be joining the Hobson Bay SES team for the first time. Summer is a slow period for that sort of thing and they generally shut down until after Australia Day. I could have started last week, but I had another event going on, so this Monday it is. I look forward to it, after the initial awkwardness of meeting all these new people has passed I am sure it will be fun again. Especially now my training is done, I don’t have to be there all the time every time, so that’s more relaxed. Once autumn kicks off we’ll be seeing some more branches and a flood or two, good fun! 😊
Coming Monday I’ll be joining the Hobson Bay SES team for the first time. Summer is a slow period for that sort of thing and they generally shut down until after Australia Day. I could have started last week, but I had another event going on, so this Monday it is. I look forward to it, after the initial awkwardness of meeting all these new people has passed I am sure it will be fun again. Especially now my training is done, I don’t have to be there all the time every time, so that’s more relaxed. Once autumn kicks off we’ll be seeing some more branches and a flood or two, good fun! 😊
Small Poppy
Project
I started this
book project last year and left it for a while near the end of the year because
I wasn’t very organised around it, but two weeks ago I started getting back
into it and this week I did my first 2-hour interview and I ended up giving
this director some advice on his succession planning and how to go about it,
how funny is that?! I have a few more interview options lined up and think I
will learn a lot about positive change initiatives across Australia and New
Zealand. I will also make many new valuable connections for the future, but
it’s mostly about the stories. Once I have 25 I will launch a website and then
grow it until have 100. I am aiming for end of this year, but if it takes
longer, that’s okay, I am not getting paid anyway, but it’s a great feeling to
create something with others that might inspire many of my change colleagues.
Design course
This week I
did a 2-day visual facilitation course, it’s basically learning to draw to make
meetings/trainings/workshops and that sort of thin more entertaining for the
audience and myself. I always wanted to learn how to draw better and it’s quite
amazing how much you can accomplish in just a few days. There’s a whole science
to it of course, I won’t bore you with the details, but at some point, I might
send you some of my art (priceless, no doubt 100 years from now) to show what I
have learnt, for now I am practicing in my sketch book and that is great fun
already. My hope is that if a picture can say 1,000 words and I use 40,000
words a day (or so it seems), I can draw more, speak less and listen more to
what people are saying. Sometimes I get so tired of listening to myself talk,
there seems to be no end to the ideas in my mind, but it can be exhausting to
just keep talking, talking and talking and never run out of words. The
deliberate method behind this drawing method will hopefully calm my mind and
let the hamster of the wheel for a while 😊.
I’ve got my
starter kit and will see if I can find some icons, the company that came up
with it is called Bi-Ka-Blo and you guessed it, it’s German and means
Bild-Karte-Block. They’ve teamed up with a writing utensil manufacturer called
Neuland and they make really cool stuff. Anyway, once my skill has improved, I
might just start illustrating these letters 😊
Perth
Yumi has to be
in Perth for a while at the end of February and I am not working right now, so
I am going along, and we’ll make it into a mini-holiday, traveling to the
south-end of the West Coast and maybe also to the North. I’ll be by myself
during the day for 3 of the 8 days we’re there, but I am meeting some change
management people, a friend from a training last year and perhaps some people
for the book and CMI events, I’ll keep myself occupied and out of trouble for
sure. It’s my first time on the West Coast, getting a little excited already.
Beach cleaning
Yumi found
this great initiative called beach patrol, where once a month, a group of
volunteers gathers to clean up their local beach and surrounding area. We don’t
have uniforms or get to write tickets (probably good with my authority complex)
but we get to feel morally superior while we’re walking around with our fancy
bags, picking up cigarette butts and all sorts of cans, bottles, bags and
whatnot. We did our first run on Australia day and a group of 25 people
collected 50kg of rubbish and 2,000 cigarette butts. That’s a pretty good haul
if you ask me. Obviously, I would get it much more organised than they are now,
but there’s something very relaxing about just doing the work and making people
aware that what they throw on the ground actually ends up somewhere on the
beach or in the water. Most are just lazy/unaware, some just don’t care. A side initiative, I started bringing plastic
bags with me when I go on walks around a lake nearby. The council does clean up
in the area, but on most walks, I get 1-2 plastic shopping bags of rubbish and
tissues, lots of tissues for some reason. I am under no illusion that it will
make a ground-breaking difference but for me it’s more about doing something
instead of just walking past it every time and complain. This morning I collected 3 bags and was
followed by some bird for 500 meters. First, I thought he/she was defending its
territory, but it probably just wanted something to snack on from me 😊. I’ve got the next area scoped already, it’ at the back end of a
sports field where there’s probably two bin bags worth of rubbish along a fence
line. Something to look forward to, haha.
Books
Because I had
so much time on my hands I started to read ‘smart’ books once more and gained
so much new insights. Read a great book on Everyday ethics, that really made me
think about choices I make and how I am pretty much on the right track so far.
Also read “God is not great” (I think you’ll understand the author is not a fan
of religion) to understand more about the problems people have with religion
and not only was it a lot of fun because the author, it was also incredibly
smart and gave a much better understanding of why religion is potentially the
worst things we ever did to ourselves. Then I read “Switch” a classic on Change
Management and that book reminded me of all the good professional lessons I had
learned in the past 5 years. Followed by another change management book that is
called Hacking for Agile change. I’ll not bore you with the details, it was
smart and practical and written by someone I meet with and will do an online
presentation (web-seminar) with in March. Still not done I read the Feminist
Fight Club, which is exactly what it sounds like, a very funny and at the same
time totally disturbing book about casual discrimination of women in society
and the workplace. I care about inequality in any sense and felt I needed to
understand this whole concept of modern feminism a lot better and now I do. I
needed to go to Sydney to get my passport done, not much to say about that,
it’s Sydney and I am still not a fan, but I read “what is a Googly” a book
about cricket on the flight in, which means that now I have at least a basic
understanding of the game and don’t have to look on in bemused confusion at
what’s happening. Not that I will watch it, it’s almost as boring as tennis!
Just yesterday I finished a book called ‘Seeing what others don’t” which is
about how to get insights and be better at picking up cues from people and the
environment. Another great read that explains the science between how we make
sense of things. Now that that’s done, I
can get back to Homo Deus, a brilliant book about the future of humanity by a
writer I read another book (Sapiens) from that really changed my perspective on
how society has evolved over time since the last ice age, it’s so beautifully
written I felt sad when I finished it.
VR-goggles
VR stands for
Virtual Reality and it’s basically a really big pair of glasses with tv screens
in them that you wear like a helmet and makes you experience games as if you
are inside them. The technology is quite new still but much advanced from what
it was 5 years ago. It takes a while to get used to it, sometimes you get a
little vertigo on the side but even Yumi had great fun pretending to be a
dragon, bonking things with ‘her’ head while I was the other player running for
my life as she chased me through a cartoon city. She got so into it that she
kicked the table and broke her nail (ouch!) and almost headbutted the table a
few times. It was hilarious and terrifying to watch at the same time. I haven’t
put much time in it yet, but will give it a few months, perhaps it’s not for
me, but I just wanted to try the new technology. If nothing else, we can use it
as a second TV because one can watch a tv series or movie via the game console,
while the other can watch TV, not that we had much issues about that, but now I
can game and Yumi can watch what she wants on TV too, so that’s very convenient
as well. I’ve got a racing game and some trial games, will probably buy a few
games to test what works and what doesn’t. It’s very exciting technology and I
predict that in 5-10 years from now it will have found it’s way to mainstream
business and we’ll all be using them.
Family and
friends
Not much going
on as far as we know. My parents are the same, Yumi’s parents got their first
iPhone, so that’s very exciting for them and very funny to us to see how they
make sense of this new technology. All our friends are doing family and life
things as they would while their kids grow up and life takes its course. Yumi’s
friend Hester is doing a reno on her house, quite curious to see how that will
end up, the pictures look pretty good. My friend Alex is thinking of coming our
way with the whole family this time, but that depends somewhat on if we will go
to the Netherlands ourselves mid-2018. Yumi had this brilliant plan that would
really benefit the disability sector but her organisation (NDS) just lacks the
vision and courage to go that way and Yumi is not confident she can make it
work with the Dutch organisation in Australia. I think it can really work and
also think she needs to start looking for a new challenge, but she just signed
a contract until June 2019, so we’ll see how that goes. There are some life
events going on in the Netherlands with my
father turning 65, Yumi’s mom turning 70 and me turning 40 and probably
some other stuff that I forget, so we could go, I am just not that keen,
because 69 and 39 and 64 were equally special to me, it’s probably just my
contrary nature and dislike of convention so I’ll take my cues from Yumi on
this (as I do in most things anyway). We’ll see.
Work and jobs
Since the last
letter I started a project at Deakin University and finished it too, for now. I
made really good money and when I did a bit of an overview of the past three
years we found that we had made very stable incomes and that the money had been
very good each year. I might get back once again at Deakin, there’s still 40%
of the budget left, but I was not going to sit there and cost money to make
them feel confident and safe and after a fashion they appreciated that. I
greatly enjoy working with them, they are all so smart and good at what they do
and I can fully support the idea that a great education is the best way to have
a better chance at the life you want. I have started looking for jobs, but it
ever gets easier and most job adds are just so soul-crushing bad it makes me
not want to apply. You’d think that organisations would get better at it but
nothing is further from the truth. My network is getting stronger and I am
building the start of a reputation but for now I will just have to be patient
and see who wants to work with a weirdo like me.
Social media
change
I’ve decided
to be much less active on social media, you know, that thing you are totally
not on, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? I felt much better already after
a week and now I just check it once every few days and if there’s something
really worthwhile I post it, but otherwise I just leave it. I use LinkedIn
(Facebook for business) for work and am trying not to focus on like or reaching
as many people as possible but instead writing what I want to write. It’s just
so weird sometimes. I pour my heart and soul and hours of writing into a 2-page
article about change management, get 120 views (pretty good and great
feedback). I post a picture of my bad drawing skills and training certificate,
gets 1,200 views! How does that even work?! I’ve decided that I will just do
what I want, that the technology is there for me, to help me and not the other
way around. I do see the benefits though, just this week I made new connections
in New York, France, India, Hong Kong and Perth, they are not friends, but
people who like what I do and perhaps somewhere down the line we can help each
other out, who knows?
Also,
sometimes it’s a great way to be found. In April I will be speaking about Fake
Change at what’s looking to be a very cool Conference here in Melbourne, thanks
to social media. I’ve also gotten involved in some volunteering with year 9
students for their professional development (no joke, it’s what they want
nowadays) and will be guest lecturing at Deakin in March, also thanks to social
media. It has its good and bad sides, I
guess.
This Tuesday
Yumi and I celebrated 4 years in Australia and I made the below overview for
friend and family on my blog earlier this week:
Today
is a special day. I thought about this day for four years. What it would be
like, where we would be, what we’d be doing and how special it would be to
finally become eligible to be an Australian citizen. And now we can. But
we probably won’t just yet because I would lose my Dutch citizenship and while
I don’t care that much for a country that still hasn’t decided to evacuate and
carpet bomb 020 (Amsterdam) and then make it into a parking lot for Rotterdam
(the REAL capital), there are some implications to consider. So we’ll wait and
probably have Yumi go first (ain’t nobody got no beef with Luxembourg) and then
by marriage to an Australian, I will become a dual citizen of Australia, but
not the Netherlands. Ha, take that you bunch of bureaucrats!
Anyway,
it’s still a special day and something to celebrate and a great opportunity to
reflect back on the good, the bad and the ‘meh’. We always knew we were going
to have a great time, but ‘blue sky, blue sea’ has turned into something a bit
more detailed now.
In
no particular order, here’s what we feel we gained:
Diving
We
wanted to dive more when we moved here and at first that happened, we got our
Rescue Diver ticket (I will never drag Yumi back up a beach in full gear ever
again. Ever!) then we lost interest for a bit and now we’re back at it. Having
seen the Great Barrier Reef, gotten our nitrox badges and having dived parts of
the East and South Coast too by now, it’s about as good as you imagine. Yes,
the GBR is not what it used to be and yes, the bay of Melbourne can be a bit
‘refreshing’ but there’s still so much life and things to see, totally worth
it.
Beautiful
and extreme nature
From
the ‘mountains’ to the rainforest to the flatlands and everything in between,
this country is so diverse and every new twist and turn has a view worth
stopping for to take it all in, unless you live in Brunswick, then you
can keep driving…I think our most used phrase (probably mine as I do most of
the talking) is “Wat leven we toch in een mooi land!” (How beautiful is this
country?!). Tasmania is probably still my favourite place to visit, but
everything else are close seconds and thirds
Work
and non-work friends
Australians
are great people (when they are not driving a car) and we have met so many
friendly lovely people and got to call some of them friend. Either through
work, volunteering or just shared interests forced us to go out there and meet
new folks and if you HAVE to make new friends, there’s really not much better
than the fun loving and good natured Aussies.
Tax
haven
It’s
quite amazing how much more money we get to keep after taxes. Income wise it’s
been a really good choice to move to Australia. We get to help others, live the
life we want, buy what we want and still have money left for booze and drugs for
the whole street! Well, it’s mostly Dan and Ethel, they party like it’s 1899
and they would know as they were alive back then.
Work
experience (all cool jobs)
Yumi’s
been kicking goals for years now with NDS and has no plans to go anywhere until
she’s officially crowned Miss Sector Innovation 2019 and I could not be prouder
of her dedication to a sector and organisation that needs all the help it can
ask but is either too busy, distracted or confused to make real progress work.
Good things she has some very good co-workers. Funny thing is that of the two
of us, she is the real change manager, I am the Magpie (bird) that gets
distracted by shiny new stuff and starts causing trouble when it gets bored.
But the places I’ve been and the people I’ve worked with are nothing short of
amazing and while I generally don’t stick around long enough to get a meeting
room named after me, I like to believe that people are not lying when they tell
me I made difference for the better.
Travel
options
There’s
so many places you can go and just see. In the Netherlands we wouldn’t go to a
cemetery, shopping mall or farm to just SEE, but here we do and we shamelessly
behave like tourists where Yumi has the most endearing quirk of pointing
completely obvious things out to me as novelties. It’s a left-over thing from
her Tour guide Barbie days where she would plan all our trips and I would just
tag along as a simple-minded oaf. Now I actually make an effort to inform myself,
so she can enjoy things a bit more. If you know our sightseeing schedules or
ever been subjected to one, you know the pressure, so we’re both happy to not
do that and enjoy thing a bit more (Look at that tree, Gil!). We still have to
go to the NT and the real desert of WA, but according to a lot of nationals we
meet, we’ve seen more of their country than they have, which is kind of cool.
Cultural
insights
It’s
one thing to read about living abroad, it’s another thing to do it and
experience it for yourself with so many other cultures. It’s not the same as
living in your home country and welcoming foreigners in, here, we are the
foreigners even though we look the same (well, I do, but Yumi’s Asian
appearance isn’t exactly a shocker in Pacific ASIA (!). We’ve gained so much
perspective on what it means to really be part of a culture and slowly but
steadily you feel yourself becoming more Australian than Dutch, it’s not
something we pursue, it just happens gradually, and we welcome it as there’s
worse things to turn into.
Education
and training
This
one only worked for me, as Yumi already is too smart for my own good, I have to
keep training and educating myself. It’s great to live in a city so big that
there’s always something going on or to involved with, or you hop on a
plane/train and go and do it somewhere else. I got my change certification,
then got another, then started improving on myself (I know, it’s work in
progress) and I am doing a change visualisation facilitation workshop this week
which hopefully improves my drawing skills considerably.
Kendo
We’re
still a bit sad that it didn’t work out because most of the people were lovely
and we might still be doing it if we had stayed in the ACT, but that next level
sh*t of Kenshikan was just not for us. A pity as we have all the gear, but we
might come back to it at some point, it’s a skill you can’t unlearn, just get
better at once you know the basics, or so we tell ourselves
Left
side of everything living
It
seems that the more I understand about where to be on the road, pathways,
escalators and hallways, the more people start messing with me. How hard can it
really be? Cars on the left, people on the left. So not cars sort of on the
left, people everywhere else, in my way, middle of the road, standing around in
door opening. For goodness sake, some situational awareness would be great.
Appreciation
for shorts
After
3 years and a winter I finally succumbed and bought new shorts. And actually
wear them outside. It still feels wrong, but jeans get a bit uncomfortable in
35 degrees plus heat. I must be getting old. Still not wearing them to the
workplace though, not that integrated just yet perhaps.
Fan
of sunscreen
Living
in this beautiful sun-drenched country (outside of Melbourne) you develop a
healthy appreciation for sunscreen, the more SPF, the better. The sun here is
not the sun in Europe and it is not your friend. Ever. You can easily tell why,
looking at all the lobster red people (white tourists) moving around the city
and beaches. See a covered person on the beach? Not a tourist. See a person
waiting in the shade? Not a tourist. People eating inside in summer? Not
tourists. Walking around in 40 degrees with a silly hat (yeah, that’s me).
State
Emergency Services
Even
without the chain sawing and breaking stuff it’s by far the most rewarding
volunteering I can think of. People have a problem, you fix problem, people
happy. Trees getting feisty, bring out chainsaw, tree calms down. A few hours a
week to keep the skills going, meet people from all walks of life. Love it! Did
I mention the chainsaw?
Passion for
homelessness
It’s
not often I stay with a cause or anything all that long but the more people I
see living on the streets, the angrier I get. It’s not an out-of-control sort
of anger that makes you want to break (or chainsaw) stuff, it’s a deep and slow
burning anger that I feel will stay with me until I find a way to make a dent
in the number of people living rough in Victoria and then the country. It’s a
problem with a solution, we just need to find enough people to give a damn.
Living
near the beach
Four
years ago if you’d asked if could see myself living near the beach, I’d
probably laughed and thought it would be Queensland or Perth, surely not
Melbourne and definitely not Altona. I didn’t even know it existed. But here we
are and we’re loving it!
Of
course there’s also things that we lost along the way:
Some
of my hair and a lot of skin
Not
much we can do about getting older, well, of course there are options, but most
of those are irreversible, so we’ll probably not go for those just yet. Yumi
gets the occasional white hair, I just turned nearly completely grey and got
more lines in my face, Yumi’s Asian vampire genes are kicking in and she
basically looks like she did 5 years ago. Not sure how that’s fair, as she also
has the looks and the smarts of the two of us, but I had plastic surgery and
have abs, so that’s something.
Spike
and Pluis
We
came here with our two weapons of mass deconstruction and knew they were
getting on in age but had a few years in them. Overall, they had a really good
run to the finish line and got to see more of the world then just Rotterdam
(enough for most cats). They got to board an aeroplane twice and eat all sorts
of foreign bugs, sleep in the garden forever and never be cold. Also, together
they financed at least two $10,000 holidays for our vets in Casey and
Brunswick, I think there’s still a picture of them on the ‘our main
benefactors’ wall of fame somewhere.
Dreams
(fulfilled)
The
dreams we had did not go away or get lost, they got fulfilled. A very first
world problem to have is that we now have to keep coming up with new goals in
life as this country and all its opportunities just keep helping us achieve
them. Perhaps it’s time to come up with some really crazy stuff and see how far
Australia will go to help us out.
Trying
to find what I don't like about Oz, it's been 4 years…
This
one is simple, if I can’t find it after looking for it for 4 years it probably
just doesn’t exist. Sorted!
Life
moments of friends and families
This
is probably the biggest concern we had when moving here. It’s still quite
amazing how a few Skype dates a month and social media keep us connected much
more than we had anticipated. Of course, the visits of family and friends
definitely made a big difference and we don’t know what we don’t know, but
overall it worked much better than expected.
