admin We are here, so now what. It certainly doesn’t end when you get there. The fact that my husband already had a job promised (as soon as we get the visa) dictated quite a lot on where we would be living so we decided we would look for houses around that area which was Caboolture, QLD. Small little suburb about 60 km North from Brisbane.
Once you find a place to live it’s time to look for the school for the kids. At this point only one of them was going to school, my eldest who was five. He did not know a single word in English. That didn’t matter though. We had been told that people over there are quite welcoming and kids will eventually learn the language and they were very true in saying that.
So many things depended though on the Visa. Since we didn’t have the Visa yet we could not rent a house so we didn’t have a permanent address and we couldn’t enrol our son to school or apply for a job so the Visa dictates everything. All we could really do is wait for it so in the meantime we bought a car which we were allowed to do and drove to Sydney for a few days.
Sydney
It was a big city. We stayed there for two nights and one night on the way there and back for one night also. With small kids it was kind of necessary. They simply did not have enough patience to travel 1000 k’s in one day understandably. We got lost on the underground motorways, visited Bondi beach and took photos by the Opera House, but it was in the end a really quick visit and more like getting to know the country in general.
Everything was so new, roads, food, driving on the left side, people. People were so nice and the general vibe was so welcoming. So first two weeks were more and less just meeting Finnish people we had talked to online in advance getting some great advice and looking around places where we could stay once the visa arrives and travelling around. It was indeed a little bit like a holiday.
The magical email
When the magic email arrived, that our visa is close to being granted we needed to leave the country since we were there with a tourist visa. We had already earlier planned to go to New Zealand for two weeks when the time comes.
It was around three weeks since we arrived when the email came. Just like they predicted and we had planned. Our plywood box was almost half way too most likely getting close to Singapore at that time when we hopped on the place to New Zealand for a week.
New Zealand was an amazing place. One of the most beautiful countries I have ever been to so my next post will concentrate on NZ.
