It took me forty years and half a handful of countries to get from my birthplace, Sydney Nova Scotia, to where I am now in Sydney, Australia.
Twenty (plus) years ago, before wife and I were married (living in Dartmouth and thoroughly sick of the winters) she tried to call information in Sydney (Australia) to get a Sunday copy of the local paper mailed to us. This was so far before the internet I was still using punch cards in my university computer classes. She skipped a couple of lines in the phonebook though and used the wrong country code. Argentina had no idea what she was talking about.
We escaped the snow to Florida, but Australia was still in the back of my mind. Preggers with our first brought the inevitable homesickness and we returned to Nova Scotia, but the first snow cured us of that and we were soon back in warmer climes, first to Virginia where I hired on with a consulting company who advertised for engineers to go to – Australia.
By the time I got on board, though, they had all they needed for Oz, and we ended up (after a time) in Malaysia. Loved that place and would go back in a heart beat. Didn’t much like the company (American) that I worked for, though and I quit and went to work for a new mobile phone operator in Taiwan for a year. Great people, smelly country. We spent a couple of years in the US after that (Atlanta, US Virgin Islands), always itching for a chance to get back to Asia.
And that came in the form of Singapore, the scrubbed clean, claustrophobic home of the best Night Zoo in the world. Claustrophobic because if you wanted to go for more than a two-hour trip you needed to take your passport with you. It was a comfortable life, generally, but the last year there I spent the weekends in Singapore and the work week in airports, Singapore Airlines airplanes and one (or more) of Japan, Australia or New Zealand.
It soon became apparent that is was cheaper for the company to move us to Australia, which they did, five years ago and twenty years after we first started looking to come here. After the close quarters of Singapore we landed on seven acres in North Western Sydney, but the lure of the beaches won us over and we’ve recently relocated to walking distance from the beach. Heaven.
Just a side note, I haven’t been on an airplane since I landed here with the kids, over five years ago. And I’d like to keep it that way, thanks.
You can connect with Tony at his website 2 Kids and a (Dead) Dog and on twitter.