Crazy Month

July was a crazy month and you can attribute my radio silence to this very absurdity.

To begin with things moved very fast since my work visa for Australia came through in late June. Booking tickets and getting all the work formalities done with employer took a big chunk of my time.

Then came The Flu. Not covid, but Swine Flu. It was like the world was determined to get me through the pandemic checklist in a hurry after dealing with Covid earlier this year. Thankfully my doctor Jehan Cooper was very quick to diagnose it and put me on the right medication which really helped me recover from this disease very fast.

Covid is still nastier IMO compared to Swine Flu. That said, it is still worth vaccinating against it because it took a toll on my health.

After all this came the confusion with the packers and movers. We had opted for this service from Aspiration Movers and Packers and their service was purely aspirational and non-existent in real. While they did a great job with the packing, the rest of the process left much to be desired. This meant we had to get our packages back from them in the last week and then we had to ask around for someone else who will help us ship it to Australia at a reasonable rate.

With a lot of help from family, we were able to find an agency Nanda Logistics who took over the ownership from us a day before we were set out to travel. Talk about close calls!

The travel itself was alright considering we had to first take a flight to Delhi and then fly to Sydney. The only part of the process I found painful was the transit from Delhi domestic at T3 to Delhi international at T3. I’m sure this could have been much simpler!

On reaching Australia we got a good taste of the labour shortage here and the resulting confusion. We waited for an hour for our bags and THAT was painful after nearly 20 hours of journey from Mumbai.

Immigration and the rest of the processes in Australia was such a breeze compared to US, which was a pleasant surprise.

I will write separately about my experience settling in and the feel of the place.

For now though, I’m just glad to be done with July and I’m truly looking forward to this new phase of my life. This process of shifting coupled with the pandemic had sucked over two years of our life and it feels like we are taking things on aggressively now to make up for all this lost time.