Dear Reader, My adventures with the Australian healthcare system started almost from the day we set foot in the country. The UK and Australia at the time of writing have a reciprocal healthcare agreement. This means as I understand it, any emergency or critical medical care that I may need whilst in Australia. Anything outside of these bounds like a GP appointment would be something I’d have to pay for myself.
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As the year comes to a close … I’d like to take a moment to reflect. Many people have struggled this year, whether through the cost of living crisis that is happening globally, or through war, or illness or any number of reasons that I could not possibly list or begin to imagine. For the last five months of the year, for reasons I am not comfortable disclosing beyond immediate family and very close friends life has not been….
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As digital cobwebs begin to form on my blog, I know time has come to pick up my digital pen and start writing again. Now, there is a reason for my rather long hiatus from writing. The question is where to begin and how much of this am I willing to share online? Lots of things seemed to happen at once. Someone once told me that things happen in threes. I am not entirely convinced this is true.
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The idea for us to move down to Melbourne didn’t come out of nowhere. However, I can’t quite put my finger on when we started thinking it might be a good idea. What I can recall however, is that we decided to go and visit a few weeks before Christmas. We went to Melbourne the first time on an inter-state flight. Melbourne is quite different to Sydney. In my opinion it has much more interesting things to do and see than Sydney does, for my taste at least.
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My first year abroad - how is it going? As I write this blog post it has not long passed the one year mark from when I left home and the last time I saw British soil. Truth be told, when we left I had no idea what to expect really. I had very little expectation on what life would be like once we moved. Let me set the scene of the climate of the UK when we were leaving.
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This year it was quite simple for me to think of the goals that I want to work towards. If I do nothing else this year I will be happy if I focus mostly on wellbeing and what that means for me. Healthier Eating Something that I was trying to do last year was to decrease the amount of meat that I was eating. This year I plan to take this more seriously and aim to eat five days a week for my lunches to be vegan.
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What a whirlwind of a year it has been. Some very big highs and lows, we have at the time of writing managed to somehow avoid catching covid. Unlike lots of people I know. Today is 31st December, and although I have not yet been in Australia a year yet I thought I’d go back and look at the goals that I set myself this year. Above is a picture of some of the carrots I harvested earlier this year from the garden
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There is a problem with trying to recreate the foods you grew up with on the other side of the world. Even though the number of times I have made jam at home from scratch had been limited, I had to have a large jam pan. I thought that I would be spending hours cooking jam as part of my local CWA group. There was no persuading me otherwise. I went to the extent of choosing a locally made, Australian branded pan.
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How did I get here? Attempting to find a job in Sydney was far more challenging than I ever envisioned. I’m not sure whether it was arrogance, or ignorance but I thought it would not take me four months to find work. The pandemic has fundamentally changed how lots of people think about their jobs. They began to question what they were doing with their lives. Lots of people quit jobs that they had hated and began their own businesses.
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Being judgemental is part of human nature, but making assumptions shouldn’t be. Why should we base someone’s value on what they do or don’t do as a job? What gives us the right to judge someone’s worth on what they spend time doing? When meeting a new person and making small talk one might ask what the other person does for a living. The individual that you are talking to might not feel comfortable in telling you what they do or don’t do for a job.
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