Hi, it's ten days until the boy and I (and my mum, for a bit) jump on a plane and go to Europe and perhaps some other places. And so this morning we went to the post office and stood in an exceedingly slow queue to pick up our UK working holiday visas. We are relieved to have got them in time to actually travel, since we were warned at the time of application that it might take 4+ weeks. It ended up taking not much more than one week. Kristian was so excited to extract his passport from the parcelpak that he used his teeth and ended up with a jawful of toughened plastic that wouldn't come loose. He panicked and made me put me perform dental surgery to try and dislodge it. I called him a goose several times in frustration but we eventually fixed him up. This kind of dampened the excitement of having visas. So here I say yay to make up. The UK WHV is our ticket to staying overseas longer than our current bank balance will allow, so I'm very happy to have it, despite the fact that I've never particularly desired to live in the UK. We will probably (nothing is set in stone) settle in Scotland, where at least I have some living relatives. My English and Irish ancestors I know little about (except that I probably have a shared ancestry with Geri Halliwell, which is not exactly the same as having a proud English heritage).
Most people reading this probably already know us, but in case you don't, in case you stumbled in somehow on this shambolic travel site, my name is Frances and my hitherto silent partner is Kristian. We're a couple of Australian kids who've been going out together for some three and a half years now, and living together for three, and we're about to do some big travelling before we're too old and settled to do so. I've been to Europe a couple of times before, once when I was twelve with my parents, who took us around the UK in canalboats and motorhomes. The other time was one summer in the middle of university, when I went by myself to Amsterdam, the Czech Republic, Budapest, Vienna, and then back to the Czech Republic, basically the former Austro-Hungarian Empire +. Kristian went to America by himself for a month last year, but before that he'd never been overseas. When he caught the travel bug, I was very pleased, because it's always been my dream to go travelling for the long haul, and I didn't really want to have to go it alone, having found someone so fun to share things with. We've done a bit of travelling in Australia in the meantime, taking random road trips and day trips to places with big skies and rocks to climb on. Here is a picture of us on one of our trips:
So the plan is, after we travel around Europe (France, Spain, Italia, Croatia, Slovenia and Czechia), Kristian and I will stay in Prague for a while after my mum heads home to Oz. It might be obvious that I'm a bit of a Czechophile. I wrote my honours thesis (in Politics and International Relations) on totalitarian regimes and cultural production (i.e. arts and literature) with reference to communist-era Czechoslovakia, and I'm a fan of other Czech things, like Czech cinema (especially Jan Svankmajer), and Czechia's sometimes bizarre history, and its disparate architectural styles. So that's why we're going to stay in the Czech Republic for something like 2 and a half months, between the end of May and mid-August. Beyond that, we'll see what happens. I speak very little Czech, but I've picked up bits and pieces, and I'm okay with the pronunciation. Prague is (now) a place that is much easier for an English-speaker to negotiate than many other places in Central Europe, because of all the American expats and so forth, so although that's not an excuse to be lazy and/or rude, I think we'll manage okay. I'm nervous about going back because Prague has a special mythical place in my imagination, I imagine there's some giant metaphysical magnet somewhere in the old town dragging me back there. When I was there in 2003 I felt like there was some kind of gravitational pull that kept me close to its centre, and then tried to prevent me from leaving. It's a feeling that's stayed with me ever since, even though I sometimes wonder if I've made it all up - it's just a city, right? Like any other city, and in parts it even reminded me of central Sydney, a place which seems almost the epitome of unremarkable. I wonder if, because I'll be going in summertime this time (last time I went, it was a very cold early January) it won't seem nearly so special or spooky or alchemical.
After Prague, if we're not stuck to it with magic magnets (or gainfully employed), we'll head north-West through Germany to the UK, where we'll probably settle in Edinburgh or anywhere else that takes our fancy and has a big enough economy to provide us with an income.
So that's the plan.
