One year ago today I arrived in Australia for the first time. James and I were visiting my sister and her boyfriend (now fiancé – he proposed while they were here) and planning to do a little reconnaissance in preparation for our move. We had arranged for our electronic travel authority (‘tourist visa’ to you and me) at $20 a pop when, two days before we flew out, we received an e-mail from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship telling us that our permanent residency had been approved and we had to enter Australia before 2 Jan 2009. Our tourist visas were automatically cancelled. (We never got our $40 back.)
We arrived in Australia at 6:30pm on a Sunday night. My sister met us at the airport and promptly burst into tears. The rest of the holiday party (including my parents, my sister’s in-laws and Jon, her fiancé) were drinking in Manly but we were too jetlagged to join them. We headed back to Kara’s flat in Bondi and had a few glasses of wine to celebrate our arrival and then went to bed.
Monday morning: my first full day in Australia. Thanks to the jetlag we were out and about fantastically early. We walked down to Bondi beach first thing and saw the surfers bobbing about waiting for a wave, then caught the bus into the city and met my parents. We spent the day walking around the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and Circular Quay. It was so exciting to be in Sydney, so far from home and yet so familiar. We were typical tourists; I walked around awestruck.
One year on and I see the Opera House every day on my way to work. My commute takes me over the Harbour Bridge twice a day. I run through Circular Quay to catch the ferry to rugby on a Thursday night and curse the tourists for getting in my way. I know which train carriage to get on so I can get out quicker at the other end. I seldom convert dollars into sterling when I am shopping any more and I’ve developed ataste for vegemite. I am a local.
Inevitably, some of the charm has worn off. Sydney drivers are dangerous and the roads are worse. Shoe shopping here is abysmal and you can’t buy decent shampoo for love nor money. Despite all that, I love it. Australia has been good to me. After all the ups and downs, how much better is my life here than it was a year ago? Would I have had the same chances in England? Why would I want to go back?
Every day I try to sit in the same place on the train so that I can look out the window on the Harbour Bridge and take in the view. The chance to see the Opera House, the harbour and the city skyline is still a thrill and every time I see it I have the same thought: I am the luckiest man alive.
This week I registered for my Facebook username and I had a really quandary: which name to use? Back when I started blogging in 2005 (eek, has it been that long) I decided that I wouldn’t use my real name. My friends call me Sven but it wasn’t my parents’ first choice. They got inventive when my sister came around but my name was a compromise between two questionable alternatives: Carl (which I hate) and Zachary (which I love for its “Saved by the bell” qualities). ‘Sveny’ came about at university and I liked it so it was a natural choice for a nom de blog. It’s not that my real identity is a secret, but I’d rather keep traffic between my blog life and my real life one way which is why, although you can find it, I’ll never actually type my real name into a post.
There are a couple of reasons for this. When I started blogging, I worked for a company that (a) I hated, and (b) would quite happily sack me for publicly announcing that I hated them. The last thing I wanted was to end up a cautionary tale for a generation of net users on how not to vent about your shitty work place. Secondly, I don’t want an internet stalker. Or identity theft. Or a dead cat turning up in my letterbox one day from an “admirer”. Keeping a bit of distance between the internet me and the real me seems to have kept the loonies at bay for now. But the main reason for creating an online alias at the time was that I was going on A LOT of dates and, without exception, all of them were awful. I felt a bit bad slagging them off if they could search for it but with a secret identity (and providing I didn’t use their real names) I felt much better about the Chef of Death, and the tale of two housemates.
Recently I was thinking about merging my identities and, I suppose, legitimising my blog as a part of my life. Now that I’m single again I have reconsidered. No doubt before long I shall be going on more disastrous dates and I’ll need somewhere to tell the world about it. It won’t be for a while but when it happens, you’ll know where to look.
Let me start with belated Easter wishes for you all, and the usual apology for taking so long to send you news of our adventures. As you will see, we have been extremely busy of late. I shall try not to bore you with too much detail, but there’s a lot to cram in so pull up a comfortable chair, a cup of tea and a biscuit, and when you’re comfortable, we’ll begin.
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Can you believe Christmas is nearly here? Where did the time go? It’s funny to think that this time last year I was explaining to Jeremy (a work colleague from New Zealand) the benefits of a wintry Christmas and this year James and I are on the other side of the world enjoying the beautiful weather and planning to spend Christmas Day on the beach. How things change! I’ll avoid the usual waffling intro rounding up birthday wishes and weddings and just get straight on to the news.
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