Filed under: Stories | Tags: london, cape town, SA, australia, move, girlfriend, shipping, boxes, jobs, salary, kruger park, weather, discovery health, medical insurance
So it’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote here, and what a couple of weeks it’s been! My Australian girlfriend has decided to join me in SA after she moved back to Melbourne and realised that she had made the wrong decision. She’s going to try SA which is great!
Another thing that’s happened is that I’ve packed all my possessions in boxes and got them collected. 1st Contact is doing the shipping. My 7 boxes have items valued at around £5,000 (which I was shocked by as the high-valued items only contribute around £1,500 – the rest is made up of low-value items). Total shipping came to £770 – ouch! Anyway, it still makes sense rather than trying to sell stuff here for a pittance and then having to buy it new in SA again.
But it’s a big relief having got it out the way!
I’ve also started looking for jobs. So far in Cape Town only. I’m neither disappointed nor amazed by the number of jobs that are being advertised. It’s currently not the limiting factor, rather my time is, as I have to write a cover letter for each of these positions.
It’s still difficult to gauge what salary I will be able to get. Only time will tell.
I’m not yet sure when Elizabeth will be joining me from Oz — probably later in August after I’ve been home about a month. My brother Marc and I have booked 4 nights in the Kruger Park for the beginning of August which I’m really looking forward to. I’ve just bought a new Nikon D90 SLR camera and am looking forward to using it!
The weather’s been really nice here in London for a change. The last nice summer was in 2006. No, the last summer was in 2006. There wasn’t one in 2007. Nor last year! So it’s really nice to enjoy the long evenings, although I’ve been working like a maniac.
On Friday (it’s Sunday today) I faxed through my application form for Discovery Health. I think this is an area that is ignored by a lot of people moving back to SA. There is no mention of it on the Homecoming Revolution site, but the fact is that unless you manage to find suitable travel insurance (which would be very difficult as you’re not going for a defined period), you will have no medical insurance. The NHS doesn’t pay for medical stuff outside of the UK (and to a limited extent in the EU if you have an EHIC card).
Filed under: Stories | Tags: cape town, experience, family, guidance, job, joburg, london, moving back, problem, relationship, south africa, sunny sa
2009 is the year that I will return to my home country after three-and-a-half years in London. It was meant to be six months initially, but then life happened. I’m going to write down my experiences here, post resources and links, guidance and so on for others who are moving back to Sunny SA.
Let me just give you a bit of a background to my stint overseas, so that you can see the rest of my posts in context. Firstly, I came to London at the age of 24 after my first job at Dimension Data in PE. My DiData contract had expired and I needed to look for something new. I thought I’d need to go to either Cape Town or Joburg to find a job, but thought that I might as well go overseas and do some travel while I’m young and independent.
So I wasn’t running away from the problems in South Africa and was attracted to London rather for a temporary period rather than repelled from South Africa. I should also say that I had lived abroad before — 2 years in Germany with my family when I was about 16, so this was not an entirely new experience. What was new was the fact that I would also be leaving home for the first time. Coming from an extremely close family, this was something I had always thought would be the most difficult thing.
I ended up moving to London on 1 March 2006. Found a software development job in a month at the bottom of my acceptable salary band (£30k). I was made redundant after 6 months when the company started running into difficulties. Although it screwed up my plans, it did prove to be great career-wise, as after 3 weeks I had 3 job offers to choose from and moved to a big-four accounting firm with a salary of £35k in the position of senior technical analyst.
Ranked as one of the top companies to work for in the UK, I have worked there to this day, with a promotion and two fairly measly salary increases. But nonetheless, it’s been the best place I’ve worked so far.
The biggest spanner that’s been thrown in the works is the fact that I met an Australian girl at work, whose father is a South African expat, and had brainwashed them with negative South African news their whole lives about everything that’s wrong, or could potentially be wrong with SA. To the extent that Elizabeth’s sister was too scared to even visit South Africa on holiday. I did state upfront in the relationship that it was very important for me to return to SA, and we kind of left it at that until it became crunch time.
Elizabeth visited South Africa over the past Christmas holidays. I have been to SA at least once a year since being in London. She enjoyed the holiday, but was understandably shocked at the presence of electric fences around private residences. But she still appeared to have an open mind and be willing to try it.
But it was after a holiday to Cyprus that Elizabeth said she could not fathom living in SA. This hit me right between the eyes. I was totally shocked, as I saw Elizabeth as the person I would marry. To cut a long story short, she didn’t want to go to SA and I didn’t want to go to Australia. My reason being that my heart would always be in SA, and there’s no point living, albeit generally happy, but constantly wishing you were somewhere else. So after much discussion, arguments and tears, we decided to go our own ways, and just under a week ago, Elizabeth flew back to Melbourne, to see what kind of a life she can make there for herself.
I’ve never been very happy here in the UK. My stay was meant to be six months and by stepping from one comfort zone to another has left me where I am today. For 3,5 years, I’ve postponed buying the bigger things that would be too difficult to move back. I have not settled, it’s been 3,5 years of being in a lull. A transient state.
So that’s basically where we are at the start of this blog. My decision to move back was made a long time ago, it was really just the timing that kept getting pushed back due to one thing or another. I have now managed to save a fair amount and have sent money back regularly (I do own a house back home which is being rented out).
