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Saturday 27 February 2016

A year down under


That's it, it's over. I was in Australia for a whole year and now I'm back in cold, miserable England (seriously I didn't see the sun after I landed for 11 days!)

How does it feel to be back? Have I changed? (and do I have an Australian accent?!) What am I going to do now? These are just some of the questions everyone asks you when you get back...like as soon as you get back from the airport having just been on a plane for 19 hours!



How does it feel to be back? 
This one is hard to describe, it almost feels like another life. A bit like Narnia or a dream. I know I was in Australia (I have thousands of pictures to remind me of this) but it somehow feels like none of it has happened. I have come back and everything is the same like I was never away.


Have I changed? (And do I have an Australian accent?!)
I don't think I have changed as a person. I still like the same things, enjoy doing the same things. I haven't had some kind of epiphany and come back living by a different set of beliefs. But I think being away and travelling on my own has shown me that I actually can do things I didn't think I could but I think I always could do this I just didn't believe it. For example, I have always thought I was quite an introvert and shy person. And whilst I am definitely not the most extrovert person you will ever meet I am not as introvert as I thought. I went out and made friends, both aussie's and fellow travellers, I didn't get the dread in the pit of my stomach about having to join in a group activity or ask strangers for directions or even to answer the phone. I realised how many friends I actually have and somebody with that many friends can't be completely introverted and socially inept right?!
I don't have an Australian accent (I can do some good impressions though!) but then I don't have a particularly good English accent either. People often wouldn't be able to tell I was from England and then the fellow English people couldn't place whereabouts I was from (for a small country we have pretty broad range of accents I think) a lot of Australians thought I was from Melbourne...


What am I going to do now?
This is the hardest question to answer. I don't know! I've never been one of those people who knows what they want to do in life or even which area they want to be in (I really envy those people). I started out wanting to find my 'career', my path in life. Something I would want to do until I retire. But I just don't think there is one thing I want to do for the next 40 years. I know I don't like working in retail so I wanted to steer clear of that. Office work is mega boring but does pay fairly well for not much effort. Then I started to panic that I had been home for 2 months and still didn't have a job and started applying for anything. Then I saw a poster in a local bakery window...and now I am a trainee baker! I have to be at work for 5am 6 days a week but the work is interesting enough at the moment to keep me entertained. Active enough that I don't feel sluggish and lazy like in an office and pays me enough to move out of my parents house (just!). It is the least stressful environment I have worked in. I seem to have enough time to do my work without running around like a headless chicken, they are not ridiculously understaffed (retail I'm looking at you!) there doesn't seem to be the annoying work dramas that go on in bigger places. It's just chilled , turn up do your work, go home and forget about it. I'm finished by lunchtime at the latest. Will I be doing it for the rest of my life? Probably not but for now it is exactly what I want from a job. I just don't think I'm a career person!

 
Seriously how cute are koalas?!

So what will I be blogging about in the future? There will be a few more Australia posts (sorry it gets boring I know but it's the most exciting thing I've done with my life!) then it's back onto the crafts and the baking and I think I want to share some of my money saving tips with you (people keep asking me for advice so maybe I am actually good at something!) so goodbye for now- I promise I am back into the regular blogging now rather than the yearly blogging I seem to have been doing recently!