Earlier in April, I went on TDY (temporary duty) from U.S. Embassy Canberra to U.S. Consulate Sydney to cover a short staffing gap. Although I was only in Sydney for a week and a half, it was a fantastic opportunity to help out the mission while learning how to do a different job. And of course, I was able to spend time in one of my most beloved former home cities – and visit old haunts, old friends, and even my postgraduate alma mater, Macquarie University. It was rewarding, it was fun, and it was even a little bittersweet.
Month: April 2018
Easter and Bushfires
Australians take a four day weekend for the Easter holiday, which I didn’t pay much attention to until it was nearly upon us. But a chance to go out of town for more than one night was too good to pass up, so I searched for romantic getaway places on AirBnB. I found and booked an inexpensive but nice-looking one with excellent reviews on the Sapphire Coast of New South Wales, a couple hours south of Canberra where we hadn’t yet been. After a day or so, I realized the reason that property had still been open when everything else – as is so typical during school holidays – was already booked solid: our AirBnB was in the coastal town of Tathra, which had headlined national news a couple weeks earlier while being ravaged by bushfires.
Four Years in Blogging
It was on this day in 2014 that I published my first post on the Collecting Postcards blog. I started the blog because I wanted to talk about my journey to the Foreign Service; little could I have known that only 22 days later I would receive the invitation to my dream job for which I’d tried so hard and waited so long. Collecting Postcards has been there through it all, and with 25,000 visitors from 165 different countries and 76,000+ unique page views to date, the blog is just getting started.
Bucket List: Hot Air Ballooning
During my childhood, on my nana’s refrigerator hung a postcard featuring colorful hot air balloons floating over rolling green meadows. I would gaze at the balloons from my chair at her 1950s formica kitchen table, drinking orange juice and eating raisin toast, and think about how much I wanted to see hot air balloons. (That postcard might actually even still be there, come to think of it.) Somehow over the years, that fascination with the balloons’ appearance turned into a wish to ride in one. So in 2006 when she came with my mom to see me in Australia and we took a side trip to New Zealand, we made about five attempts to hot air balloon in Christchurch. Sadly, each try was rained out by unlucky southern hemisphere autumn weather. To add insult to injury, the day of our departure dawned bright and sunny. We groaned about it the whole way to the airport to catch our flight back to Sydney. My nana had hot air ballooned previously though, so she was mostly just disappointed for me. For twelve years, it remained on my bucket list. Until last month when I finally – on about my seventh attempt – flew for the first time in a hot air balloon.
Collecting Postcards 