John F. O'Sullivan

“Kathy Dorn has cancer.” My parents told me the bad news when we first met up on their European trip last year in Florence, Italy. While you may not know that name, Kathy Dorn has been a friend of my family’s for my entire life. She’s one of those acquaintances that is a great representation of small-town living: She’s someone you get to know incrementally through run-ins at the grocery store of high school football game. She’s even continued to read and occasionally comment on this blog (hi, Kathy!). She’s also in the process of writing one of the most beautiful end-of-life blogs I’ve read. You should probably read it, too.

“Uncle Malcolm is in the hospital.” Again my parents delivered bad news, this time over e-mail. If you’ve read this blog for long enough you’ll remember that Uncle Malcolm is my great uncle, the last living relative born in Ireland, and my father’s namesake. We’ve connected in the last five years and I got to chat with him on the phone his 88th birthday this year. He’s been recovering from a fall and has been in the hospital for quite some time now.

“Amie had a seizure,” my sister told me over Skype. Amie is our dog of nearly a decade who my dad found this week walking around the living room with symptoms of a stroke. Luckily, those symptoms seem to have gone away with time, but it was our first scare as the family dog entered her geriatric years.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have the dynamic part of my life be isolated in my travels. My home life has remained blessedly static over the past two and a half years. Every time I return home, everything is pretty much how I left it. I suppose that’s why these reminders of mortality have such such an effect on me.

If you’ll allow me to butcher one of science’s most famous equations, Einstein theorized that time spent traveling at great speed was experienced differently than time spent at home, so if you travel around at light speed for seven years you’ll return home to find hundreds of earth years have passed. As I get dispatches about family, friends and pets from home I become more aware that even though I’m out here living my own adventure, life and time continue to go on back home whether I like it or not. Damn you, Einstein.

1. Havas

A brand of sandles or “thongs,” as they’re called down here. You’ll have a hard time convincing an Australian to wear shoes to begin with, but if there is something on their feet, it’s almost always a pair or “Havaianas” as the rest of the world knows them.

2. Schooner/pot

It was enough of a challenge for me to adjust to the metric system after leaving The States, but now I’ve had to relearn how to order a beer. In the UK, you ask for a pint and you get a pint. A half-pint gets you half that. Here you have to learn that schooner equals 485 milliliters of beer — unless you’re in South Australia, where it equals 285mL. Long story short, unless you’re in South Australia a pot is a half-pint and a schooner is in between a half-pint and a pint. Oh, and “schooner” is pronounced “SKOON-er.”

3. Short black/long black/long mac/short mac/flat white

 I could write an entire entry on the incredibly specific terminology for coffee in this country, but here’s the breakdown:

If you’re American, a coffee is not what you think. They don’t do filter coffee here, so asking for a coffee gets you a latte by default. A short black is a shot of espresso. A short mac (or short macchiato) is a shot of espresso topped with a teaspoon of milk froth. A long mac is two shots of espresso topped with a teaspoon of milk froth. A long black is a close relative to an Americano. It’s a 50/50 mixture of hot water and two shots of espresso, poured so the crema is preserved on the top layer. A flat white is a latte minus the foam.

4. Iced coffee/Iced chocolate/Spider 

Coffee shops also offer some interesting desserts. All these drinks are what I used to know as root beer floats, minus the root beer. An iced coffee is a scoop of ice cream floating in a mixture of espresso, milk and a spoonful of sugar topped with whipped cream. An iced chocolate is ice cream floating in chocolate milk topped with whipped cream. A spider is ice cream floating in “lemonade” spiked with a flavored cordial. (Note: Aussie lemonade is what I would call Sprite. Americans are the only ones I know of who are purists when it comes to lemonade. Lemonade here is a carbonated, slightly lemon flavored sugary drink.) Depending on the cordial, you will have a lime/rasperry/lemon/etc spider.

5. “Old mate”

This one had me stumped for a long time. Calling someone “old mate” is just a replacement for “that guy.” A lot of cultures have an equivalent for informally identifying an unfamiliar person. In Ireland it’s “your man/your wan” for a passing man or woman, respectively. Acceptable use: “Is your man/wan over there in line before us?” In Australia, “old mate” is incredibly broad and can apply to just about anyone. “Watch out for old mate over there, he looks shady.” “Old mate let me in the club without making me pay the cover charge.” “Old mate tipped well.”

6. Lemon Lime Bitters

One of my favorite things in Australia — a delicious summery drink enjoyed by just about everyone down here. It’s a squeeze of lime and lemonade (see above lemonade definition) topped with a slice of lemon and a few squirts of bitters. Ideally, is should be stirred so as to be partially mixed, but still preserve the red bitters-tinted upper layer and clear lemonade layer of the bottom.

7. Boardies

Also known as board shorts, these are the only acceptable form of swimwear for men. They’re lightweight shorts that have no lining on the inside like the swim trunks I’m used to. No matter who I ask, I can’t seem to get a uniform answer from Aussies on if you’re supposed to wear anything under your boardies while swimming.

8. Footy/Soccer/American Football

Finally, a country that calls soccer “soccer.” The reason is Aussies have their only version of football called Aussie Rules Football or “footy” for short. The football I grew up with is reasonably popular to watch but needs the qualifier “American football” so as not to cause confusion.

9. Hook turns

Melbournians are fiercely proud of their tram system. It’s their trump card for anyone who claims Sydney is better than Melbourne. The problem with the trams is it complicates some busy intersections in central Melbourne. See, the trams share the road with the cars, so in the downtown area where things can get congested, a car waiting to turn right at a traffic signal would keep the trams waiting for ages (remember, traffic drives on the left side of the road in Australia). Since authorities don’t want cars waiting to cross the line of traffic to hold up the trams, they paint a parking space on the very far side of the intersection. In order to take a right, you have to pull into a painted box on the very left side of the intersection. You wait there until the light is juuuuust about to turn red, then perform your hook turn, scurrying across 4+ lanes of traffic in the few seconds before the light turns red and you’re hit by cars going in the other direction. It’s very confusing.

10. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha (Kookaburra call)

Okay, so this isn’t a word, but you can’t be in anywhere in rural Australia without hearing the constant white noise of the loudest bird call you’ll ever hear in your life.

I was walking home in the middle of a rough week, filled with thoughts of self-doubt that I’ve discussed many times here on Two Passports — what are my goals in this nomadic existence? Is this a respite before the next phase of my life, or is this my life now? How much longer can I do this travel/live/travel/live lifestyle? All existential questions my current lifestyle forces me to ask every few months. In the midst of it, I looked up to the sky and was greeted with a magnificent view of The Southern Cross.

The Southern Cross is the most recognizable constellation in the southern hemisphere. It makes up a large crucifix and points toward the south pole. If you trace a line from the top of the cross to the bottom, then extend that line 4.5 more times, you’ve got a basic reading for where the South Pole is in the sky. It’s easy to see, mainly because Australians reference their big constellation constantly. It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized that cluster of stars on the Australian flag actually represented The Southern Cross (it’s not unique. Wikipedia actually has a page listing dozens of flags worldwide that depict The Cross). Melbourne’s main regional train station is named “Southern Cross Station.” The second verse of Australia’s anthem, “Advance Australia Fair” starts, “Beneath our radiant southern cross/We’ll toil with hearts and hands…”

The point of all this is, the Southern Cross is inescapable here in Australia, but it was also utterly unrecognizable to me before just a few weeks ago. Yet, on this dark night it seemed to be particularly bright, reminding me of how far from home I was, and how much I’d accomplished. The Southern Cross didn’t answer all the questions I was asking myself, it just told me to calm down and appreciate where I was.

Living location independent means losing things. It’s a fact of life for the nomadic, but recently I’ve been hit with a particularly unlucky string of losses. In the course of a few months I’ve managed to misplace a rain jacket (Munich Wombats Hostel bar), a backpack containing an iPod, camera, GoPro video camera, book and dress shirt (London’s SouthWest Train service, Waterloo — Reading line) and another camera I bought to replace the first (Minnesota’s Rasmussen Woods while snowshoeing). Ouch.

But there’s one thing I’ve managed to hang on to for nearly two years: The Puppy Towel. It was my first trip to what would become one of my favorite places in the world, Valencia, Spain. At the wonderful Home Youth Hostel (highly recommended) I made a hostel friend who agreed to embark on an adventure with me. We were going to explore one of Valencia’s lesser-known beaches. It was out of town by about 20 minutes on the public bus, but the trip to the tiny village of El Saler was totally worth it. El Saler is a quaint, unassuming village only a few blocks long, but with one of the most pristine beaches I’ve ever been to. Before hitting the beach though, I needed to find a towel.

I assumed that any beach town would have a place to buy towels, but I overestimated El Saler’s size. The only thing they had available was a tiny general store that seemed to have picked up used towels from the beach, washed them, and resold them for outrageous prices. I was faced with paying close to €30 for the choice of a Loony Toons towel or one embossed with a picture of two puppies.

Hanging from a clothesline.

In a pair of overalls.

It was undeniably cheesy, and I embraced the towel with all the love you have to give such a ludicrously overpriced ugly thing. Since then I’ve taken this towel everywhere with me.

This past summer, while I was working as a tour guide and sleeping in a different hostel every night, I would often hang the towel up in the luggage compartment of the company bus I guided on. It got awfully hot down there, so the towel would emerge dry and my luggage wouldn’t get moldy. Unfortunately, it was also very easy to forget about. On more than one occasion I left the towel in the luggage compartment when I had a day off and the bus continued on. Me and The Puppy Towel would be separated for weeks at a time, and some of my coworkers started to have fun with me. They’d send me ransom notes via email of The Puppy Towel making its way through Europe without me, usually performing some task above and beyond the duty of a normal towel. One picture featured one of the bus drivers cleaning the hubcaps with the it, for example. Sometimes my coworkers (I’m looking mainly at you, Amy) demand goodies for the safe return of the towel.

Eventually, me and The Puppy Towel were reunited, and it’s still a much-loved part of my suitcase arsenal. I currently sits in my room in Melbourne, having made the trip from Europe and the USA to Australia with me. Technology can be a pain to lose, but it’s important for every traveler to have at least one sentimental item to keep by their side. For me, it just happens to be one very ugly piece of linen.

Yesterday marked the one-month anniversary of moving to Australia, but for me, it barely feels like it’s been one day. The past four weeks have been filled with a familiar challenge that I’ve become adept at accepting, the challenge of moving to a place with no job and no contacts and seeing if I can succeed. It’s a challenge that is, well, challenging.

Humbling, too. Going to a place where I know relatively few people means starting from nowhere. I sent out dozens upon dozens of resumes and heard nothing back. I submitted an online resume to an employment agency and, when I heard nothing back I gave them a call. I requested an interview and was told in the most professional polite terms to eff off. The “don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you” response is one of the maddening realities of having no professional network to build off of.

“Don’t you know who I AM?!” I’m tempted to say to the recruiter. “I’ve traveled the world in the past two and a half years! I’ve seen more internationally than you have in your own country! I’ve done real work producing video content for real companies! I don’t need your stinking 30-hour-a-week temp receptionist job. YOU need ME!”

…but for course, that’s not the case. I do need their job, and part of starting fresh is washing away that hubris that I start to carry with me simply because I’ve done this so many times before. That’s ultimately what’s so frustrating about this phase of moving to a new place, the phase I’ve started to call “The Hard Part.”

The Hard Part is like watching a bad movie where you already know the ending. I know I’m going to get a casual job and find an apartment somewhere in the city. I know it’s going to take living uncomfortably in hostels and on friends couches while I get settled. I know that I’m not going to particularly relish this period of my move — so can’t I just skip past it?

My desire to fast-forward through this phase of the process was reflected in my lack on contact with my family, my friends and on this blog. I simply didn’t want to be in touch with people I cared about until I could tell them with confidence what, exactly, I was doing here.

But on that note there’s good news. Four weeks into my stay in Melbourne, I’ve found myself with a job at a cafe in a trendy part of town (the neighborhood of Fitzroy). I’ve found a great, furnished flat with some cool flatmates just down the road from the train station (the suburb of Clifton Hill) and I’ve reconnected with a lot of friends in the area. Now that I can talk about The Hard Part in the past tense, I can start living the life I wanted to live in Melbourne. The most important part about getting through this though, is that I’ve learned something important about myself: I’m not sure how many more Hard Parts I can go through. This might be the last city I can do this up-and-move-with-no-plan thing in. Eventually, we grow out of going through The Hard Part. It’s just taking me a little while longer than most.

I’ve only been in Australia a week, but I’m soaking up information like a sponge. One of my favorite parts about moving to a new country is that things I’ve accepted as normal all my life are very suddenly not. Here’s, much in the same vein as a similar list I did for Ireland and for America, is a list of ten things that have caught me by surprise in my first week in Oz.

1 – When Aussies move apartments, they move their large appliances, too. I helped my friend move into her new flat and wheeled a big ol’ washing machine in through the hallway. It’s typical here in Oz for appliances to stay with the owner (even renters), including refrigerators, washers and dryers — although driers are hardly needed with the blistering heat and near-constant sunshine.

2 – Aussies are fashionable. Not since I was in France have I felt so underdressed. Last Monday, I took the train into Melbourne’s CBD, ducked into a bathroom, looked in a mirror and thought, “This won’t work.” One shop and $70 later, I was hopefully looking a little more fashionable to start the job hunt.

3 – They refer to their downtown as “CBD” (central business district) — a term I was only familiar with from my urban studies class prior to coming to Oz.

4 – Things are expensive. I’m currently sitting in a bar using wifi in mid-afternoon, drinking a $7.50 Corona. To get here I needed to buy an $11.90 day pass for Melbourne’s extensive tram and train network.

5 – They take their coffee oh-so-seriously. I suppose it should be refreshing having been in Germany and Czech Republic, the land of instant coffee, but I’m trying to claim that I have experience as a barista. I thought I had that experience, but many job postings advise applicants, “Must be able to make a rosetta and heart in the latte for consideration.” Sheesh.

6 – Melbourne is massive. It’s only double the size of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, but unlike the Twin Cities, the suburbs are not just a place you go to settle down and have a family. Suburbs an hour from the CBD can still have a hip, youthful vibe about them. This can make a commute from one fashionable area of town to another over an hour, longer if you rely on public transit.

7 – They will catch you for not having the correct metro ticket. Until yesterday, I was staying in Clayton, just one stop out of the cheaper Zone 1 area. There were no turnstiles, however, so I had been just buying a Zone 1 ticket at half the price, since my Zone 2 travel time accounted for five minutes of my nearly hour-long journey. Sure enough though, I was cornered at the gate by a transport enforcement officer and had to play my “Oh I’m just an American tourist I didn’t realize…” card in order to avoid at $180 fine. Luckily, the officer was feeling generous.

8 – There are no entry-level jobs. In the service industry, everyone wants to know if you have experience. No one will interview you for a job, they’ll just ask you to work for free in a “trial” then assess how you did afterward.

9 – People actually eat kangaroo. Australians love to explain, in a self-mocking tone, that they’re the only country that eats their national emblem (a kangaroo and an emu). I had my first ‘Roo Burger the other night. It was chewy, but good. Mmm, marsupial.

10 – K-Fed is a big deal down here. He’s got his own show and everything.

Airplane isn’t the right word for the thing that transported me across the Pacific. More like a building tipped on its side with wheels. It was one of those massive double-decker airplanes that took me from San Francisco to Sydney. Midflight I looked out the window at the endlessly long wing shaking with the slightest bit of turbulence and had to force that scene from Lost out of my head.

The contrast between my origin and destination were incredible. I left in -10C/15F temperatures, but arrived to a hot (35C/95F), sunny day. My body felt like it should be late at night when I arrived, but instead the sun was high in the sky. It felt like it should be January 26, but thanks to crossing the International Date Line, it was January 27.

But the starkest contrast wasn’t in the difference between the Minnesota I’d just left and the Australia I’d just arrived to, but in the two years since I first played this game of uprooting myself with no job or home in my new country. Approaching the Australian immigration desk, my mind flashed back to my Irish immegration experience, as well as to the endless hours of Border Security, an Austrlian reality show I spent endless hours watching In Ireland.

This time around, there was no fuss at all. She looked at the picture, looked at my face, and let me in without even searching my bag.

Last time around, I took the long bus ride alone from Dublin to Galway, lost in my thoughts of self-doubt as I entered a city where I knew nobody. This time, my friend Cate met me at the airport gate and brought me to her house for a shower, then to the mall (sorry, shopping centre in Australian parlance) to buy a mobile phone — a phone I could quickly fill with six contacts. That may not sound like much, but when I moved to Wales and had an issue with my mobile phone I called customer care.

“Can you tell me the the last three phone numbers you dialed?”
“Um,” I replied, “Well, I dialed my work, and then you.” I didn’t even have three contacts in my phone to have dialed.

These first few days in Oz have been a bit surreal — almost too normal. Cate, the friend who picked me up from the airport and is letting me crash her place, moved into a new flat the day after I arrived. So before you knew it, me and Cate’s family were helping her move her stuff into a moving van and driving across suburban Melbourne.

Last night I went to my friend Ola’s house, where her Polish parents entertained me and fed me.

This weekend some Melbourne friends took me though Chinatown during Chinese New Year parades.

What all this has amounted to is feeling very quickly like a Melbournian, more so than I ever felt like a citizen of Galway or Cardiff. So thanks for welcoming me in so quickly, Melbourne.

Next stop: Getting a job.

Twenty hours, sixteen minutes of flight time. Twenty-seven hours of travel time.

Ireland, Wales, mainland Europe and now Australia. Thanks for all your support. I’m off to the airport as we speak.

“You’re so brave,” they say to me
But bravery takes fear
The acceptance that one could fail,
Willfull risk-taking despite potential consequences

Open and empty suitcases lay strewn across my bedroom floor
Yet again, I leave the country for an uncertain future
Yet again, I haven’t done nearly enough preparation
I let others think this is my free-spiritedness

“Are you excited to leave?” my coworker asks me
Like clockwork, everyday he asks me
And like clockwork, I respond insincerely
“Sure am.” Truth is, I haven’t given it much thought

I lie wide awake in my bed. I glimpse my future
Penniless, in trouble, in an unfamiliar place
No one to turn to for help
My pulse quickens, I feel faint

I go to war with the anxiety
I push the negativity out of my mind
And replace it with my alternate future
I am happy, fulfilled, self-actualized

But the negativity remains
Whether I focus on it or not
“You’re so brave?” Hardly.
I’m just ignoring that which scares me most