Tag Archives: relocation

Ping-Ponging? Nope! Happily Back To Australia!

Have you ever heard the term ‘Ping Pong Poms’ and do you know the origin? It refers to people from Great Britain, commonly referred to around the world as ‘Poms’, who move to Australia for a new life and ping-pong right back to the UK because they find that it’s too much of a change for them or that Australia isn’t British enough for their tastes. They usually return to the northern hemisphere within 12 months or less.

So, in our own case, if we moved whole-heartedly to Europe from Australia over 2 years ago and, in spite of that previous commitment to a European life, are now returning to Australia — does that make us Ping Pong Aussies? Actually no — it’s a very happy choice and we are getting more and more excited with each day at this point.

I consider myself to be a boots-on-the-ground documentarian of the places and social conditions where we are living. Although I sometimes report on the glossy travelogue version of Europe, at other times you will read my take on the current day-to-day facts about Europe.

The reasons we came to this side of the world and that we love it here are all still valid — the visual beauty, the greenness, the history, the architecture. But it’s quite clear that Europe, including the UK, is unravelling financially and unless you are in banking, medicine, or property sales — if there is no way to make a decent living, you’d be in trouble in no time. We just spoke to a building contractor here in Newcastle about an hour ago and he said that 8-10 years ago he made 3-1/2 times what he does now each month. If we ever DO want to retire, we have to be sensible and go back to a place where we can start building the accounts back up, not continue to deplete them. We actually feel very blessed to HAVE options when so many people are trying to LEAVE the UK and emigrate to Australia or New Zealand. There are several television shows over here about how to do that!

France would have been our happy-heart choice here in Europe, but the tax changes and pension changes just blew that out of the water for us. There is simply no work here in the UK and even the people with jobs all feel quite insecure.

I was relieved to leave Australia in 2010 — I won’t lie about that — but not because I didn’t love it there. I wouldn’t have bothered getting Australian citizenship if I hadn’t truly loved that country and I would have just carried on being a legal resident the way I was in France. The rural lifestyle just wore us both out. It was much too much in a way that neither of us could have anticipated before we tried it. But gosh — we did love all of the people we met out there in Central Victoria who are now life-long friends to know as we get older.

I am glad that I never-ever departed from Australia with negative feelings about it because, after having a bit of a think about it and getting our heads wrapped around it, we have both realised that neither of us is having ANY issues with moving back in the end. And isn’t THAT a nice surprise! It’s as if going away has given us a better appreciation for the country and made us understand that it’s still a darned good lifestyle in Australia compared the austerity of Europe and the UK and the dreadful financial mess that is ever-present in the USA.

The best part of Australia to me is the part that is the most European — Melbourne! So Mark has agreed that even if we live in a shoebox sized house, he’ll do city living (thank God because I had enough of snakes, bushfires, and heat in the countryside the last time!), join a city cycling club, and let us have the freedom of just walking out the door and catch a tram to the market, a club, a museum, a cafe. He always turned up his nose at the idea of a more centralised city lifestyle in Melbourne or even when we were visiting Sydney but thankfully that has changed. Maybe we’ll eventually have a weekend cottage in the country? Maybe not. We’ll see.

Once we were actually on this side of the world, Mark finally got into the groove of that urban lifestyle choice in places like Berlin and Amsterdam and London. Those two months in London in 2011 showed him that cycling in the city can be quite interesting and visually stimulating in a different way to the bleached brown rolling hills of Victoria, Australia. When we actually lived full time in St. Girons in the south of France, he finally had his eyes opened to how cool it was to have your own wee manageable space in your home, but then the greater world of entertainment was right on your doorstep — literally — instead of it being a long and boring DRIVE to get to anything.

Our life in St. Girons has set the template for what we want to go back and find in Melbourne. But we wouldn’t have know THAT either unless we had left Australia for awhile.

So to answer the questions that have trickled in about how I REALLY feel about moving back to Australia and are we both happy about it –it’s all good, we’re fine with our decision, and as much as it seems like a shockingly abrupt turn-around to some people, we will not only manage, we will thrive! Mark is quite calm about moving back, I am quite calm about it, and we will relish every minute of this little 2-1/2 year adventure and know that it was the right thing to do AT THE TIME that we did it. Now it is the right time to go back.

Next up? The list making, re-packing, staging, reservations-making, booking of moving companies, and then getting ON THE PLANE. Wheeee!!!

So Where Is Home After Years Of Travel? A Very Familiar Place!

You know that sensation of beating your head against a wall? Of believing utterly in manifesting the life that you want into reality — but none of the tried and true methods that have always worked in the past are now producing any results?

I’ve always known that no matter how much I might attempt to will something into being, if it was not meant to be, it would not appear. All of my efforts would be a complete waste of time if the Universe had other plans for me — for us. And being stubborn or petulant was utterly futile and a complete waste of time and energy.

In spite of being oh-so-ill this week, I have continued to pump out CVs and cover letters for Mark’s job search — 70 applications in less than 5 weeks. But some hard truths are now completely clear. There are far too many people looking for work in the UK and far too few jobs, so potential employers don’t even give you the courtesy of a form letter email to acknowledge that they have received your application. Even people as multi-talented as Mark are all competing for the same small number of jobs at simply shocking wages.

We’ve heard from friends here in Newcastle that this has only been the case in the last 10 years and previously tradesmen could make a very good living at wages that were comparable to those paid in Australia. That certainly is not the case now and the numbers of people that are living right on the edge of abject poverty is simply shocking. I’m not going to engage in any sort of lengthy statement about the wisdom or lack thereof of allowing hundreds of thousands of immigrants to come into this small island nation and drive the wages down-down-down to mimimum wage or LESS in a mere decade, but the situation is going to get even worse at the end of this year when another unrestricted flow will be allowed from two new Eastern European countries.

So why beat ourselves up about it? We haven’t failed in any way, our adventure in Europe for the past 2 & 1/2 years has been wonderful, and we feel blessed to have seen so many places and experienced so many countries. We aren’t 20-somethings and we have to be sensible about economics and long term plans, so after a major re-think on where to go next, we’ve made a surprisingly happy decision to go home to Australia.

You’re going to be getting an interesting mix of travel posts and photos and planning-staging-moving posts from this point onward. We have to get back to Norfolk in a few weeks to organise what to ship back to Australia. Then we’ll do a wee bit more travelling in countries outside the UK, we’ll sell our left-hand-drive car, and then there will be a series of journeys via plane (my least enjoyable kind of travel!) as we hop, skip, and jump our way back.

Look out, Australia — here we come!

Chaos and Crunch Time!

Here we are, 9 days away from our move out date, and last night we got an email from our mover stating that they were CANCELLING our job.

We were meant to have a 4 man, 2 truck move that was booked through AnyVan in the UK, and the sub-contractor company cancelled because ONE of the men is in the hospital thus leaving us totally in the lurch!

When I asked why the other 3 men couldn’t continue on and do the job that we had booked, we were informed that they had never worked in Europe before, only the man in the hospital had. What??? Why did they even accept the quote???

We have given notice on our apartment and our garage, set the cut-off date for the utilities, and we HAVE to be out of here on the 30th of the month. So much for being organised and orderly when someone ELSE can throw your whole life into chaos by cancelling a scheduled international move.

Can’t wait to hear from AnyVan on Monday since (a) they have our pre-paid deposit and (b) their feedback form is RIGGED to never allow negative feedback! Yes, I will certainly keep all of my readers posted.

I’m typing this in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep. (sigh!) Wonder why…

Send us some happy-shiny thoughts because we certainly need them right now whilst we try to find another mover to step in with 9 days notice.

Boxes, HEAT, & A Bit Of This & That

A bit of personal and non-travel related commentary today. And no, I didn’t drop off the face of the planet and all is well in our world. But we’re still wading through the boxes that were delivered from Australia via ship to England and then delivery truck here to France.

When we were ‘back home’ in Australia on our 7 and 1/2 acre rural property, we had a studio space/storage area in a separate building from our cottage. And that studio space was bigger than this entire small apartment in France!

Let’s just say we are a little challenged space-wise right now. So a second culling of our possessions is under way. And the apartment is a &*^%$£! disaster zone as a result. We sold off 99.99% of our furniture, donated or sold hundreds of books and movies, pared down the clothes, and then stored the rest (including Mark’s rather massive collection of tools!) for 20 months. 21 months later, they have all arrived and in spite of what we thought was a serious purge back in Oz, we have too much stuff.

I have thinned out the books and music cds and movies (again!) and am donating them to a Cancer Support France group here in the South of France that helps English speaking expats who have relocated to France deal with cancer issues. It’s probably a god-send for them to have such a group since I can honestly tell you that if French is not your native language, being ill in a foreign country can occasionally be a very unsettling experience. So this felt like just the right place to send all of these lovely books and media items.

Our other ‘challenge’ for the last few weeks has been the intense heat and staggering humidity — and it isn’t just here. Huge swathes of France have been on alert due to the high temperatures that soared upward and then stayed there. The last time that this kind of heat arrived in France was in the 2003 heatwave when almost 15,000 people died in France alone. This a country where fans are the norm for coping with summer, air conditioning is a rarity, and along with the many other French businesses that close down for a month, a large number of medical practitioners go on holiday for the month of August.

We’ve also been making a concerted effort to drink huge amounts of water every day to avoid dehydration or heat-exhaustion. Just walking those few blocks to the Saturday market this past weekend (with a hat on and smeared in sun block) saw me returning home dripping wet and weak at the knees from the heat. I was weak and nauseous for the entire rest of the day along with some other rather unpleasant symptoms.

And did I mention that I have been living in a sarong for most of the last 2 weeks? Other than unpacking and sorting, this has not been the most productive period I’ve had since arriving in St. Girons and it is all down to the nauseating heat which has left me, and tens of thousands of other people, feeling quite incapacitated.

I still have the last 2 slideshows to post from 2 weekends ago when the Autrefois was in St. Girons, but for now there may not be any new photo ops until I feel that it’s safe to walk around outside for more than half an hour without feeling like I am going to collapse. Don’t I wish for (and remember fondly!) the body-resiliency of my 20s and 30s — a physical state that I unfortunately no longer have.

Ah well — until the next time — stay cool wherever you are!

Where Did Deborah Go This Time???

It’s never intentional — these unexpected life events that keep me away from the computer and away from writing and editing. But life in all of its upsy-downsy messiness has just breezed on through this past 4 weeks. I’m out on the other side now and hoping for some smooth but interesting weeks ahead.

The strange and scary bit was a week in the local French hospital. Too boring to get into — but I’ll be doing a lot of back and forth with specialists for the next few months. However, let me assure you that I’m not going ‘over to the other side’ anytime soon — trust me on that very firm statement!

Right in the middle of that bit of unexpected strangeness, we moved from our tiny-tiny-tiny village of Engomer into a proper Midi-Pyrenees town — St. Girons. And no, that was not without hiccups either.

The new 1-bedroom apartment that I found is in the old town section. Yes, there is traffic outside during the day, but it tapers off dramatically after 5:30 each evening. It’s a lovely old building of probably very late 1800’s to early 1900’s vintage. The windows are double-glazed and there are electric roll-down shutters in addition to the old-fashioned fold-back wooden shutters so I don’t feel like I am sitting out in the street listening to the passing motor scooters (lots of those!), cars, and buses. We also have a small balcony overlooking a long green garden (more on that in another post) with the mountains rising up behind and that side of the apartment is cool and quiet.

Here are two interior ‘before’ shots so you’ll be able to see the transformation in later posts. It’s a compact living-in-town apartment and it really is just what we have wanted for quite awhile! And by the way, no — I could not cope with this teeny-tiny kitchen ‘as is’ and it will be changing quite a bit.

Livingroom of the new apartment in St. Girons

Kitchen (the unimproved version!) in the new apartment in St. Girons

Whilst still in Engomer, 15 minutes outside of St. Girons, I was having a staying-in-bed day after being discharged from the hospital. Sitting there amidst a nest of pillows with my computer, via Skype I ordered the electricity to be put into our name and EDF did that quite efficiently with no snags once they ‘found’ us. It turns out that our building is known by two different numbers. Seriously, I had to laugh about it because this was like walking into an episode of the Twilight Zone as I heard the woman on the line explain that almost all of the buildings in town are still officially registered with their pre-World-War-II addresses, even if they are now another number altogether!!!

I encountered the same issue with France Telecom (aka Orange) as I was choosing the Unlimited Internet & Unlimited Telephone package. The woman on the line kept insisting that there was no such apartment number in our building and no one had had landline service in that building since 1993. What??? Then I told her the EDF pre-World-War-II building numbers story — and I heard her say, “Ah, there you are!” She then informed me that it would take 18 days before I would have a working phone line and internet and I could be the President of France or offer her a million euros and they couldn’t do it any faster.

After making an appointment 2 weeks earlier for the installation on this past Wednesday between 8 and 10 AM, I arrived at 7:50 AM. Then I waited and waited. No one ever arrived and it was clear that I’d been stood up by the installer. Grrrrr!!!

Back to Engomer, more packing, and when I called Orange to inquire about the missing installation man, some snooty idiot told me that it hadn’t been necessary because the phone was already on. No — it was not! I had picked up the brand new phone that was plugged into the apartment wall and listened for a dial tone repeatedly as I waited there all morning and it was most certainly not on.

After lunch, I loaded my car with boxes and bags, went back to the apartment, listened in vain for a dial tone, and finally sat waiting, waiting, waiting on my mobile phone (using up €13.50 in credit along the way!) for an Orange tech department person who again told me that the phone was already on. I retorted that I was sitting right there and no it was not, he said he would call the house line to prove it. Then he was quiet for a second or two before saying, “It would seem that you have a fault on the line. They will fix it from outside and you should have your phone on in 2 days. Au revoir, Madame Harmes.” And he hung up. Grrrrr!!!

The following morning, Thursday, was the appliance-delivery debacle (see below) and a mere few minutes before those men arrived, the installer from Orange (who should have been there the previous morning!) arrived at 8:15, picked up my phone, told me there was no signal (no kidding!), and he input some kind of code into my phone from his phone and the line was activated. Voila! A live and working phone.

This also gave me the ‘ability’ to set up my internet connection with a book full of all-in-French instructions for my Livebox. But without the internet already connected, I had no access to Google Translate to decipher words that I didn’t have stored in my limited-French-vocabulary brain. From somewhere in the past, I managed to dredge up memories of being walked-through that process by the online techs in Australia and I actually did it all correctly. Woo-hoo!

We had to buy appliances since the apartment came with none, so instead of taking the ‘cheap & cheerful’ (and potentially problematic!) option of buying used appliances, we decided to order a new front-loader washing machine and new refrigerator and cooker (stove with 3 gas top rings, 1 electric ring, and all electric self-cleaning oven). Easy, time-saving, and they’d just deliver it all to the door and bring them up the one flight of stairs so Mark wouldn’t have to do the lifting. Right?

That was the ‘in theory’ part of the story. I ordered all of the appliances from the same company up the road in the very large and metropolitan city of Toulouse. The washing machine arrived in 2 days. Hooray! But the refrigerator and cooker didn’t arrive for another 8 days. They are supposed to call an hour ahead of time to let you know when they were arriving , but they just arrived at 8:30 AM with no advance phone call.

Something had urged me to spend the night in the apartment on that previous night. I raced down the spiral of our stairwell, opened the large front door, then listened to the sound of two sturdy young men hefting those appliances up the stairs. When they wrestled the large boxes into place, I asked them to unpack each appliance so I could inspect them for damage prior to signing that I accepted them. Cardboard and styrofoam went flying all through the room and there were the pristine new appliances. I was ever so glad that I had asked for the unpacking when I spied a large caved-in left side on the cooker — and then one of the young men pointed to a matching caved in side on the right. Forms had to be filled in and I had to write REFUSED on the form, sign it, and they had to carry that heavy appliance back down the stairs. (sigh!)

Day after day the apartment has been filling up with furniture and we now have comfy lounge chairs, a coffee table and end table, a tv console with a flat-screen television and new dvd player, and some bookshelves, a bed, and wardrobes. Lots of pictures will follow in the days ahead as we assemble, arrange, and decorate! But we’ve been sleeping and eating here for 3 days now and we’re temporarily cooking on a camping stove with a tiny gas bottle. Ah well — living in flow.

Gads — I didn’t mean for this post to be quite so long!

Gotta run — boxes and bags to unpack. More soon — really and truly.

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey

Tag Archives: relocation

So Where Is Home After Years Of Travel? A Very Familiar Place!

Chaos and Crunch Time!

Boxes, HEAT, & A Bit Of This & That

Where Did Deborah Go This Time???