Due to popular demand!

Christmas time at 'home' in country Australia



Well, one person missed it actually, so I am biting the bullet and starting up again.

It's been pretty close to a year since my last riveting post and quite a bit has happened. Not all interesting. Apart from managing to survive that dreadful year - still haven't forgiven global greedy financiers of all sorts and nationalities but particularly certain American ones - but not completely scarless. Lots of people I know lost their jobs, not just here in Denmark but all over. This year has proved slightly - so far - less dramatic.

I went back to the Antipodes for Christmas and a month's 'holiday'. A term as an expat I can now see why others use it loosely. There's no such thing as a holiday when you go back to where you came from. It was busier than work and, while great catching up with people, very, very frantic. Weird too. If you've never been an expat, I can tell you such a trip is a surprisingly strange experience. You're in the place you've known a gazillion years. You see the people you love, eat at your favourite restaurants, can pretty much find places while driving blindfolded, again in an odd way, you don't really feel like your belong - the other part of your life is thousands of kilometres away. It puts you in a challenging position. You like where you grew up but you also like where you live now.

The reaction probably depends much on where you go. I've known people who've been posted to places they hate (and not everyone likes Denmark btw either). When that's the case, the going home for Christmas is probably trying in another way, knowing you have to return to a place you're not mad about. But for someone like me, who pretty much needs Prozac to get me on the plane on holiday over day, I was surprised how good I felt walking through to no man's land at Melbourne Airport.

I read a book called - strangely enough - Almost French by Sarah Turnbull. She's an Australian who ends up marrying a Frenchman and they live in Paris. But in the story, she talks about a trip prior to that, to Greece. She meets a older Greek Australian who says that he is torn between two places. She doesn't understand what he means until she finds herself, eventually, established in Paris. And that painted a very clear picture to me.

Wine, the consummate diplomat

Up until this week ago, the only Australian I’ve spoken to in Copenhagen is…NQDII. Seriously, I hadn’t met any. So when an American friend of NQDII invited us to an Australian wine tasting night at some fellow-American friends of hers, I was rather excited.

And then yesterday morning (before 2pm, of course!) I went to buy some new glasses at an optical shop near here.

This place sells frames that are much cheaper than anywhere else I’ve found here in KBH. I was served by a Danish woman, ordered the glasses and then the very tall man who ran the shop walked up to me with some machine and said something in Danish. He was an older guy and I had no idea what he’s asked me. He repeated it in English in what I thought was an Australian accent. It transpired he’s been here for 30 years! Imagine that. Up until then I’d met no other Aussies here I suspected there weren’t many around, let alone one who’d been here that long.

Then last night we cycled off to the mainly American expat party and were told about the wines produced by the Portet family in the Yarra Valley. The vineyard is named after the father, Dominique Portet and one of his sons sells the wine over here in Copenhagen. In another coincidence the winery is only half an hour away from my family’s farm and I’d been there a couple of times to buy wine.

The chef of the night was also Australian and amongst other Australian-themed food we tucked into crocodile (really does taste like chicken) and kangaroo, which I should add, I’m not to keen on. What was interesting was hearing the accent again after such a long time. It felt quite weird – but nice.

The interesting titbits about wine sales in Denmark are that Danes are very conservative about how a bottle is sealed and tend to hold up the crucifix to screw tops, although, I was not surprised to hear that 97% of the wine sold in Denmark is consumed on the same day! ☺

Things you miss

I share an office with three others. We all get along really well and have lots of fun. The one who is intent on improving my Danish, by speaking to me in Danish, said yesterday that she really is surprised how I and NQDII have settled into life in Denmark. Her husband has a job where they can always be posted away too, so she knows very well what it’s like to be an ex-pat. Then I happened to say I really missed our house sometimes and she said, “Finally! You miss something.” It made me think I must be all sunshine and light, which really isn’t the case and I’m sure a couple of my blogger mates must think the same.

There are lots of things I miss about Australia, but I know they’re not here and Denmark has it’s own plusses that Australia doesn’t have. I don’t expect my life in Denmark to mirror my life in Australia. It’s impossible. I guess how I approached the move was to literally just jump into it and let fate steer the course.

But, straight after that talk with my workmate, I received an email MMS from a friend in Australia who’d just driven past my family farm and stopped to take a photograph of the driveway. I haven’t seen that view of the place for almost a year and I must say it did make me a bit melancholy. It’s winter there now and I could see the wet ground, the gum trees with all the fallen summer bark around them and I could almost feel the frigid air and smell the eucalyptus and yet, it is all literally on the other side of the world.

The farm

So, here’s a list of things I think about almost every day.

1. My brother, his wife and kids – who live in Singapore anyway
2. My father who I dread something happening to while I’m here
3. My best friend Steve
4. My other best friend Salome, who lives in Texas and has also developed an admitted email-writing phobia
5. My dear friend Carolyn who died before I came here but I bought her photograph because I knew she would have enjoyed the trip
6. Other friends, Bruce, Joe and Francesca, Joy and Peter, Jan and Cameron, Yvonna
7. My crazy aunts and cousins
8. My house – it’s nothing really special but it’s bigger than this flat and has its own tiny front and back gardens.
9. Saigon Rose – Vietnamese restaurants in Prahran and Richmond, and the family who run them
10. The huge selection of vegetables and foods we have in Australia (plant variety, not idiots)
11. Melbourne water that requires no de-calcing to run the dishwasher or washing machine and tastes delicious. The only trouble is, there's hardly any left...
12. Cheap, great restaurants
13. Being only 5mins away from the beach

And here’s a list of things I don’t miss

1. Bogans
2. Excessive heat and all the dramas that go with it
3. Sport taking up two thirds of the nightly news
4. Aggro on the streets
5. Yuppies
6. Listening to Australian politicians
7. Driving – this has surprised me

Et voila! See, I am human.

News from home

Finally, Australia has a female Governor General.

I can only say it’s about time. That, of course, is not to say there have not been some excellent people in the job. I really like Major General Michael Cosgrove , the out-going Governor General but I truly, madly, deeply feel the time was overdue for a woman to represent the Queen. It would never have occurred under the terms of the last Prime Minister, who made Margaret Thatcher seem like Leonid Brezhnev by his immovable conservatism.

Certainly there are a lot of Australians who would prefer a president to a Governor General, but I’m not so sure myself. I find some relief knowing the top job in the country is not another politician who is so indoctrinated by his or her life in their chosen political party they are unable to think outside that square. I feel it’s better having someone impartial whose first concern is looking out for the tribe, rather than ‘the party’.

Quentin Bryce has some big shoes to fill but she looks fit and healthy and knows the ropes after being Governor of Queensland.