From East to West (leaving China for Oz)

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Few times in my life has an event been so anticipated and yet still completely unexpected as leaving China for Australia. But that is the way life in China has often seemed. Life there is so completely devoid of routine and yet so involved that you find yourself charging ahead day by day with the tenacity and narrow focus of your average Chinese driver. Before you know it, months have gone by. In Chengdu, this is particularly true. In the city where its all about “enjoying life”, things move slower but time moves quicker. Its a paradox that you can lose yourself in, and many do.

So even though I had been planning my escape from China and from Asia since the first day I arrived back in Chengdu, I was still amused by a dizzying sense of disorientation and disbelief while talking to the taxi driver in broken Chinese on the way to airport for my one-way flight to OZ

We often talk about our lives in terms of “chapters”; as if our lives were like a book being written and each phase has clearly defined starts and stops, with minimal overlap. Usually this is not actually the case, but in Chengdu... this was the case. In Chengdu there was almost no connection to my normal life. I had a different kind of job the experience of which has no application whatsoever on my engineering career. I worked with Chinese colleagues I will likely never hear from again, with students that will likely remain only in my memory. I had different friends, some of which I hope to see again, but most of which will also fade away with time. And of course: the language was different, the place was different, the food was different, the mentality of the people was different. I can't even write it off as part of my travels, because it was a far thing from travel in my mind. Essentially, if I wanted to, I could compartmentalise the seven months I spent in “the 'DU”, organise it all in my mind, wrap it up, put a bow on the top... and then promptly forget it as if it never happened. The only exception to this is Kjersti.

The last week in the DU was stressful physically, emotionally, and logistically. In that week I had my last days with Kjersti, goodbyes to everyone, packing up our apartment, sending stuffing to Norway, packing up Kjersti, sending her off to Norway, I was working full-time to the end, I had to move the last of my stuff over to Andy's and get it all dealt with, shirts had to be tailored, interviews in Australia still had to be organised, etc... The result being that when it came time to leave I realised that I hadn't actually given any real thought towards the place I was going...

So I got to the airport and what happened next was pretty predictable, waiting for hours, flying for 4 hours to KL, arriving in the middle of the night, waiting in KL's LCCT terminal in McDonald's for 13 hours, Flying for 9 hours to Melbourne, arriving in the middle of the night. I left Andy and Heather's place at 5pm on Sunday and checked into the hostel in Melbourne at 3am on Tuesday. Travelling is fun.

My first day in Oz was surreal. Melbourne is a western, modern, clean, city. Everything was so NORMAL! Everything was so EASY! I can communicate in ENGLISH! The sky is BLUE! The air is CLEAN! No more stares, no more giggles, no more “HELLO!”s, no more “laowai!”s, no more painful broken english/chinese conversations on the bus, no more repeats of the top 20 questions, no more crowds of people milling about here there and everywhere, no more people rushing to the counter and ignoring the queue, no more packed bus rides to work, no more spitting in the streets, no more crazy drivers, no more getting run down by electric scooters with no lights on, no more massive speakers advertising some sale on the street at max volume, no more repetitive conversations with other foreigners about China this and china that, no more blocked internet sites, no more celebrity status, no more bad haircuts, no more buying shoes that are 2 sizes to small, no buying shirts with sleeves that are too short, no more paying way too much for english books, no more! no more! no more! no more!

Even after a week in Melbourne I was still adjusting and feeling disorientated. It was weird being in a place again where not everybody was the same homogeneous race, where traffic stops for you and pedestrians don't, where there are no Chinese characters and you can understand all the signs again, where the beer tastes good and they don't bother to ask you if you want it cold, where people prefer wine to tea and they like to get drunk, where the 22 year-olds don't act like 16 year-olds and the 16 year-olds try to act 22, etc... The list goes on endlessly. Also I found it very hard to grasp my geographical location globally, which added to the disorientation. Having traveled from the “West” to the “East” and now returned to the “West” I felt as if I had completed a circuit around the globe and was therefore back where I started. Instead I had kept going south east and was now sitting in the middle of nowhere at the bottom of the globe. What?! Before this trip the only time I had ever been in the southern hemisphere was a short trip to Fiji, it was confusing. It was like this strange parallel universe... where England suddenly had good weather, great food, a decent economy and happy people!

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