The Final Countdown

The Homecoming.

And that's it.

That's a wrap.

What was supposed to only ever be 2 years at the absolute maximum (and I was convinced I would never make it that far), has stretched to almost 4, and will be even longer since I left Australian soil by the time I return to it.

What a crazy journey it has been.

So this Saturday, 31 March, Dan and I will be jumping on a plane to Turkey.

Wait, did you just say Turkey?

Yes. Just because I will be leaving Germany doesn't mean I will be heading straight home!

Where will we end up

I always said I wouldn't return to Adelaide. It's too small and there's not enough job opportunities. And all of this remains true, however due to personal and family reasons Dan and I will relocate to Adelaide at the conclusion of our adventure, for a short while. Give him a preview of the Australian sun (and spiders…and snakes…) - if he can survive that, he can survive anything! 

The journey

For those playing at home, I thought I'd make a list of what we're doing and where we are travelling to. I'll probably still compulsively Facebook check-in at every available opportunity, but here's the full list:

• Turkey (Istanbul, Goreme, Pamakkule, Selcuk, Troy, Gallipoli)
• Albania (Tirana)
• Greece (Athens, Olympia, Santorini, Paros, Meteora, Thessaloniki)
• Macedonia (Skopje)
• Serbia (Belgrade)
• Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo, Mostar)
• Croatia (Krka National Park)
• Slovenia (Ljubljana, Lake Bled)
• Italy (Venice, Pompeii, Amalfi Coast, Rome, Florence, Cinque Terre)
• France (Nice)
• Monaco (Monte Carlo)
• United Kingdom (London, Liverpool, Manchester, Isle of Man, Snowdonia, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Isle of Skye, Southampton)

That's just the beginning!

On 24 June, we are catching the cruise liner Queen Mary 2 from Southampton, UK to New York, USA. 8 days of tuxedos, ball gowns and definitely being the poorest people on board! (We will both be Jack, basically.) 

We will then make our way across America before arriving back in the Southern Hemisphere on 9 August. 




The whole thing will look like this:

During that time, I will attempt to keep up this blog as a diary - it will be poorly written and poorly formatted but I am going to try to get something up every day or two to help me keep a record! Make sure you give me some likes and comments so that I feel encouraged to keep going.

Highlights

As we have over 4 months of upcoming adventures, it's pretty safe to say that there will be some highlights in the future too! However, here are some of my favourite memories from the last few years:

• Falling in love, which was completely and totally unexpected, and has blessed me with the most amazing adventure buddy and partner in [not literal] crime.
• Seeing the Northern Lights, camped out knee high in -22C snow on a frozen lake, watching it dance above.
• Eurovision, because who does that? It was so much fun, as was everything we did in the Ukraine. I can't recommend this country enough.
• All of my employer acceptance letters, from Imperial College London, The Elders, and E.ON in  Germany.
• Tulip season in Amsterdam.
• Basking in the thermal baths in Budapest.
• The friends I've made along the way, there's too many to list, but know you'll always have a place to crash wherever I am in the world.
• Oktoberfest, to the point that we visited three times! So much for not being a beer drinker.
• Dimension Jump x 2 - I can't believe I made it to two DJs, meeting the cast of my favourite TV show and making so many friends for life.

And so so so many more, I can't possibly list them all.

Can you name all the countries?

The tally

The full country tally total to date is 36 new countries visited in the last 4 years (including New Zealand). After our 4 months travelling home, it will be 45 (including the Americas). I'm pretty damn impressed with that effort. That's an average of about 10 different countries a year.

Reminiscing about Germany

Getting set up in Berlin was by far one of the toughest experiences of my life, and I absolutely would not have been able to do it without Dan. If I had known just how hard it was going to be, I might have had second thoughts, but I went in brazenly on the confidence of how easy it was to make a life in the UK.

I am so thankful for the opportunity to have been able to live in Germany. There have been many good times, there have also been a fair few pretty damn awful times. I am glad to be leaving - it is time, and I never felt at home in Germany. It has been a tough almost-2 years and I'm looking forward to being in the Southern Hemisphere again.

There are many things I will miss, of course. Making friends in Berlin was incredibly difficult, but I am going to miss the wonderful friends I did make, and my colleagues who welcomed me even though I'm undeniably weird. You will all remain friends for life and never hesitate to contact me if you're heading Downunder!

I'll miss the cheap beer. There, I said it. I have become a beer drinker (and fatter because of it!), and I'm going to be sad to go back to low alcohol percentages and expensive bottles and brews. For that matter, I'm also going to miss the stupidly cheap wine that you can get in Europe - I literally never go above €2 (about AU$3) and that is an excellent drop. You can't get that in Australia, that's for sure. I'll also miss just walking down the street with a weg-bier, or as we would call it, a roadie, because you can happily drink in public basically anywhere. I took advantage of this fact many times.

I'll miss the carefree mentality of Berlin - anything goes here. And that people just seem to enjoy the moment - one of my favourite things to do was find a place to sit and just chill. You would never be alone, many people around you have also found a spot to sit and are just relaxing, watching the world go by. This was especially prevalent when the weather was lovely which encourages almost all of Berlin to leave their apartments and just be.

I'm not going to miss apartment living. Neighbours suck, as does sub-letting, so I'll be thankful to return to living in a little house with a proper real-estate agent, and neighbours much further away than they currently are.

I'm not going to miss the weather, although I do still enjoy watching the snow fall while I'm sitting all cozy inside.

I definitely won't miss German bureaucracy and red tape, but to be honest I think every country has its own foibles in this regard, so it'll be from the pan in to the fire!

I slightly regret never really getting into the party scene here, considering Berlin is renown for its mega clubs. I'm just not that into it anymore, and would prefer a few tasty beers and a good chat instead of listening to electro music, or possibly not even being let in in the first place because the bouncer "doesn't like the look of me".

My biggest regret is not learning the language properly. However, I don't feel so bad after talking to many other expats who have lived in Berlin for 3+ years and are still on their way to learning it. In Berlin, you simply don't need it. While it would be helpful, you can obviously get by just fine without it. The majority of Berliners also speak English, and if not there's usually a way around it (Google translate, for instance). However, I would have liked to learn a little bit more, so I'm taking all my language books home to hopefully continue my education one day.

I also regret never learning more about my family history, but it is such a tangled web of conflicting information, lies, fabrications and just confusion that I really didn't know where to start.

Being considered male due to my name has been a never-ending source of amusement. It's never made me mad, and I only occasionally correct someone, but I will say I will enjoy just being "Sasha" again, and not being "Mr O."

Some of my amazing memories from Berlin and Germany.

Looking to settle

Part of me feels like I can have adventures forever, another part of me feels it is ready to sit down for a while. I have a fair amount of pain when I am travelling, with fairly constant knee, foot/ankle, hip, back and neck pain, as well as a problematic left shoulder - actually the only part of me that doesn't hurt is my right shoulder, and I think that might be on the brink too. I have my bad belly, which inflicts on me crippling pain and embarrassing situations seemingly at will. I need to settle to have my health seen to as I have definitely neglected this over the last few years.

But I am going to miss it all - dreadfully. When I get home, I will try my hardest not to be that friend who constantly refers to that time in Paris or when I did that in Kiev but … I will be. It's been my life for the last four years. While my beautiful friends in Australia became proper adults, I galavanted around hostels and ate tinned soup to save money because I didn't ever want to grow up, and wanted to adventurise forever. It's going to take me some adjustment to not have constantly itchy feet, but I also look forward to exploring Australia and New Zealand now, too.

And so my dear friends, follow along for our journey home, and I will either be seeing you again soon, or will see you one day, when we are older but hopefully not any wiser!

Til next time,

x

A picture for every country I visited.