Flurry of plans

Tonight Lotte and I registered for Goodnight Sweetheart in February and the London Lindy Exchange in March. Places tend to sell out of these things in the UK we've been told, so it was time to commit. Also I found out I've been picked to represent Australia in the 3rd annual World DJ Championships at GNSH, which is going to be huge fun. And just yesterday I got a casual invitation up to the International Centre for Research on Learning at the University of Dundee in Scotland. I might take them up on that offer to do a presentation of some sort. We've also planned our first side-trip to Holland, only 6 days after our arrival in the UK! The air fares are amazing -- for 100 GBP we get there and back, and that's including insurance. Handy.

We got the flat

We found out today that we got the flat we applied for, which is on the ground floor in the newly built West Cambridge university residencies, close to the Cavendish Laboratory. If the university map is to scale, it seems to be around a mile west of the city centre. The floor plan makes it look pretty small, but we actually measured up our current living room/kitchen and it's almost exactly the same size, which put our minds at ease a bit. The big difference will be that we'll have hardly any room for storage, and no spare room for visitors. Still, there are a couple of desk areas and we won't have to store years of stuff with us. It should be pretty good.

Beaming Up

Since getting over the initial shock of our impending trans-hemispheric move, we've started to notice our perspective shift. Before we were here in Melbourne and thinking about what it would be like to be overseas, and all the implications for family, friends, and work. Now, even though we're here in Melbourne in a physical sense, our minds are already on the way to England.

Not only are we dealing with the issues of setting up bank accounts, arranging visas, accommodation, and travel -- we're also slowly beginning to consider all the human connections that are important, both with people in Europe and people here. We're conscious of spending time with family and friends while we're still here. And we're in daily contact with friends and family in England and Holland respectively, talking about everything from airport pick-ups to who has some tea-towels and crockery we can "borrow".

All of this gives us this strange sensation of seeing our lives here as though we've suddenly jumped outside the goldfish bowl. We keep noting how cheap groceries are here (like it didn't occur to us before) and spending time in the sunshine like it's our last chance. Stupid, really, but we just can't escape the feeling that our cognitive epicentre has already started teleporting to the other side of the planet.