Living the good life for four years today

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. Hhaving 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 Ausies.

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 Tourguide 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 degree 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 chainsawing 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 finih 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 (fullfilled)

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.