Leaving my room

This is a farewell picture: Michael D., Peggy, Lochy, and me. Alas, the time has come for me to leave my room in Sydney, permanently. :(

I don't feel good at all doing so, but I have to save the cost of the rent. I sold as much as I could of my furniture and things (Gumtree was my friend again). As I'm writing this, I'm disassembling the bed to transport it to the buyer this afternoon.

I divided the remainder into things that I will take in my car and things I will leave in Sydney in storage. It was a hard decision-making with every little thing since I will leave Sydney in May and don't plan to come back for several months, unless I have to. But I just don't nearly have the space in my van to take everything with me.

From now on it's only "the bare necessities", life on the minimum. Pray that at least the car will give me no more major trouble.

I want to go up north to Queensland in May, to where the weather is warmer. But before, I will spend a week in Adelaide because Cori has invited me to come. I decided to take a flight, the distance would be quite a long drive and there is a car waiting for me in Adelaide. Keep your fingers crossed that everything will be okay. And then after that, I plan to spend a week at Evelyn's and Richard's B&B and make myself useful there. And then, Queensland.

I may now be (mostly) offline from the Internet until the end of next week.

PS: I just spoke to my dad and there is bad news: he has suffered a blast trauma from a kitchen blender that exploded while he tried to repair it. Looks like he will have a permanent hearing impairment. :(

Govindas

Last night I honoured I my Christmas present from my sister Monika. A visit to Govindas, which is an Indian vegetarian restaurant with a cinema above and has a combined "dinner and movie" offer. The food was a buffet, and was excellent. The movie was not bad either, Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino". But the thing I liked best were the cinema seats. They are not normal seats but giant mattresses with big cushions. You can take your shoes off, stretch your legs and make yourself perfectly comfortable. Why don't they build more cinemas like this?

I had invited Xiabing to join me. She's a Chinese student here in Sydney and I came to know her through her friend and former study mate of Nicola, who became a friend of my parents when she visited Augsburg 2 years ago. We've been in chat contact since last year, but somehow we couldn't catch up before. So it's good we finally met, just in time before I'm leaving Sydney.

Thank you Moni, this was a great present! :)

Garage sale

We had a big garage sale today, on my initiation. I was joined by Michael, Treska and Adele from next door, so together we had a lot of things to sell. We had great luck with the weather and the sale went good. Everybody is happy. We also celebrated Lulu's 14th birthday with cake and all (Lulu is Michael's daughter).

I needed to get rid of some stuff because I will be moving out of my room next week. And you wouldn't believe how much stuff I actually had to sell: I was actually surprised myself. Well, most of these things I had not bought but they had come with the van, or from the side of the road.

One thing I never understood is why there are no garage sales in Germany. Does anyone have an answer? Please comment.

Today is a national holiday here, BTW, called Anzac Day. Australia and New Zealand together commemorate their war heroes (Kriegshelden) from World War I, with great pathos as every year. You can probably guess my thoughts on that if you read my older blog postings. I think all nations worldwide should commemorate the victims of the wars, above all. And not so much those men who had fired the guns and dropped the bombs (and in doing so risked their lives, of course, but that's what you get when you become a trained killer -- for a good cause, of course, such as defending your country or stopping an already raging war). It won't enter my head how nations in 2009 can still uphold this old black-and-white thinking of "our boys are heroes, the enemy's boys are bastards".

So instead of showing pictures of the Anzac Day dawn church services (Morgengottesdienste), the speeches, marches, medal awards (Medaillenverleihungen) or military parades, I'll show you a picture of a cool guy who is a new friend of mine. :)

German film festival

There is a German film festival in Sydney this week, organized by the Goethe-Institut Australia. They show German films in German language with English subtitles (in two normal Sydney cinemas).

Last night I watched one film, Wolke 9. It's the one where two elderly people fall in love. I had seen the trailer of it last year, so I knew what to expect, and was not disappointed. I would give the film a five star rating. Extremely authentic, inartificial (ungekünstelt) and believable, as if it all had been real. But I know that some people found the film disturbing, and it does touch a taboo topic (sex at old age).

Videos!

Now that I have a better Internet connection again, I can share some of the videos I took in the last 2 months. I had to encode the videos to make the files smaller, so please excuse the low image quality.

I took this one to give you an impression of Tasmanian rainforest, with the sounds of birds and these giant tree ferns. This was on the west coast. Follow me on a little walk -- playing time 27 seconds.


This is the echidna. I uploaded this particularly for you, Brigitte and Michi! :)


Here I'm in the picture (Cori took the video) at Gordon dam. Listen to the fabulous echo!


At the beautiful beach on Bruny Island!


And here you can see me surfing. Well okay, it's not me. Anyway...


Now we're back on the mainland, on Easter Saturday at Tilba festival. This guy was an amazing flutist. I should have asked him what this double flute is called. Actually he was so good and special, I should have asked him for his name and business card to keep contact.


Still at Tilba festival, this shows you how "toss the boot" is played. It is more difficult than you think -- and of course great fun to watch! Everyone who wants to give it a try can play. The master of ceremonies (the guy with the balloons on his hat) asks their name and marks the distance on the ground with chalk. At the end, the winner gets a prize. Something for your next summer party or street festival?


And this is on my "hat and shoes only" nature walk at the nudist resort "River Island".

Strange Maps

If you have nothing to do on a rainy day, check out this website: Strange Maps. Good food for thought and amusement.

Resting

After a few days in an emotional low I'm gradually feeling better again.

The resting does me good. It gives me the time I need to make up my mind where to go and what to do next. So far I have not made a decision, but I'm thinking about the various options I've got. Such as:
- keep renting the room a bit longer
- give up the room but stay in Sydney a bit longer, in my van
- spend some time at Evelyn's and Richard's B&B place
- make a trip by flight to Perth or Adelaide for a week or two
- make a trip to New Zealand or Bali or Malaysia
- go to Europe for June -- maybe Iceland? -- and come back to Oz in July
- look for a working visa sponsor (bad timing for that with the current recession though)

I must admit that I do enjoy the comfort of living in a house and having my own room. To have a car is really good, and one you can live in is even better. But to have a desk, a chair and a computer with a fair Internet connection is quality of life too.

Autumn has officially started in April and you can begin to feel it. Until mid-May the climate should be pretty okay here in Sydney, then it will get noticeably colder.

My finances are still okay, but I now begin to regret some of the expenses I've spent here. My feeling is that I should live as frugal (sparsam) as possible, while still enjoying my holidays for a bit longer before going back to the treadmill of a full-time office job. I'm making a start today by selling some of the stuff I no longer need, and I found a storage space in Sydney in someone's private house where I can put some of my stuff (via LETS).

Based on my feeling that I could, possibly, have a better long-term life here than in Germany, I started to research other visa options that would allow me to start up an own small business, but that seems to be hopeless. I would have to have my own overseas business running for years before I can apply for a business owner visa in Australia. To apply for an investor visa, I'd need to have $1,500,000 to invest.

So it seems that I still only have the three options of a) sponsored working visa, b) skilled migration visa, c) partner visa. Each of these has their disadvantages... for c) I'd have to marry an Australian girl, so as of now this is just theoretically speaking!