Me At Port Stephens While Dolphin Watching
It’s now hard to believe that neither of us had ever even considered traveling to Australia for vacation let alone moving here. Not surprisingly, when we told friends and family about our decision to move to Sydney they had one of two responses: either they didn’t believe us or they thought we were crazy.
Granted, it does sound a bit crazy now when I think about it but I’m quite certain that if we were moving to Zurich or Brussels, we would have gotten very different responses. The truth is Australia is unknown to most people in the States and what we think we know usually comes from movies like Crocodile Dundee, Australia or from the Oprah Show during her trip down under.
There were a few people we knew in Seattle who had been to Australia and they had nothing but praise for it: the beautiful Sydney Harbour, wonderful sunshine, gorgeous beaches and untouched tropical landscapes.
When we asked if they would move to Australia, the usual answer was “in a heartbeat”. To be honest, they had us at sunshine.
Seattle has an average of 58 sunny days a year compared to Sydney’s average of 240. A bit of sun after living in Seattle for 15 years sounded pretty good.
Website photos by Emmett Anderson
The move came about through my husband’s work as a computer programmer at a clinical laboratory in Seattle.
One of his coworkers told him of a recruiting company that had positions to fill abroad (http://www.henrye.com/index.html). Both of us entertained the idea of living outside the United States for some time. The recruiter got back to us with two positions, one in Basel, Switzerland and the other in Sydney, Australia.
The position in Sydney was with an American company looking for people with the same skill set and experience programming for hospitals and medical clinics as he had. In the end it turned out to be the better match.
In a few months we will have lived in Sydney for four years, though that’s not a very long period of time, it is just enough for Sydney to feel like…home.
