A six months ago yesterday I was sitting in a forest, next to a lake just outside of Kaunas in Lithuania celebrating the summer solstice and last night I celebrated my second summer solstice of the year, albeit with the guise that the world could end.
And keeping with the Lithuania thread, yesterday morning I woke up to watch Lithuania pick their Eurovision song. While the song I liked most did not win, I got to have a good chat with my friend Ieva about Eurovision, life and the departure of Antoine Rousseau. Just before she went to bed she asked me what I had been upto since leaving Europe, so I thought maybe I should share with everyone.
On the 10th of July 2012 I said farewell to my good friend Jan-Hendrik who had accompanied me to Schippol International Airport and helped me get more check in luggage than I was technically entitled to through the airport.
Upon arriving back home in Australia, I was in a bit of a daze. It was the same feeling I got when I came back from China, namely that everything was exactly the same. I was walking around the city of Melbourne less than 8 hours after arriving back in the country and I was still able to auto-pilot through the city to find the nearest starbucks or get to the mobile phone shop.
There was no real time to rest on my laurels though, I needed to sort out work (or at least sort out getting money from the government), get re-enrolled into university and move into a new house all within about a week.
And with the same ferocity that saw me tear around Europe, I managed to get all of that done with minimum fuss, that is with the exception of my job. Despite being told I would be resuming my position at Bunnings Hawthorn, actions were not followed through and I didn't end up going back.
Several months down the track, I am now working at Bunnings in Port Melbourne, once again as a paint expert. I suppose in some ways this is better than going back to Hawthorn. It seems so much has changed at my old store and so many people have left that starting fresh at a new place is a good pace. Plus my team is really nice and I think I've fit in there quite well.
In terms of University, I went back to Uni a few days after getting back in the country and enrolled in three Linguistics subjects (History of Language, Language in Society and Semantics) and did reasonably well in each of them. I did surprisingly bad in some tests which made me feel pretty worthless, but at the same time I did very well on all my assignments so in the end I ended up with two Cs and a B. Not my most successful semester, but given that I was suffering from Estonia withdrawals it wasn't bad. I am doing a summer subject right now on Latin American history and as a result I only have three subjects left to complete next year, two in first semester (Introduction to Musical Theatre & Cross Cultural Communication) and one in second semester (Syntax). And just to rub it in to my European friends, I am currently on summer holidays which began in October and ends in March. That's right everyone, four months off.
As my leisure time can no longer be filled up with travelling outside the country every second weekend, immediately once I was back at university I rekindled another past time I partook in whilst on exchange, and joined La Trobe University's Ultimate Frisbee team. I think this single handedly stopped me from going mad and getting depressed from being home. Excitingly I ended up making the team that got selected to represent La Trobe at the Australian University Games and have played in a few tournaments and a season of Albert Park League. LaTuuf (La Trobe University Ultimate Frisbee) have proven to be an amazing group of people and I am proud to call them my friends and teammates. While I am a bit crap at the game, I am less crap than I was and I'm honestly probably in the best shape I have ever been in my life. It's at this point I would like to thank my Mum (who will only hear about this if my Aunt reads this and tells her) for helping support my dreams once more by paying for me to go to the Uni games in Adelaide when I only had centrelink to support myself.
The other thing taking up my leisure time is of course Eurovision. Sadly I will not be going to Malmö next year for the big deal, but it happens. I will do my reporting from home this year and will soon begin organising interviews with singers from Finland and Estonia like I did back in the old days (old days = 2011).
I am also living in a new house, in a much smaller room with awesome new housemates Kathryn and Angus who let me move in despite only meeting me once while we were drunk a year before, and while I was still living in Europe. It's a great place that is a little closer to uni and a little further from public transport so I've been riding my bike a lot more which is possibly helping contribute to the fitness. There has recently been a vacancy and my friend Elise from the Frisbee team who is also one of the people partially responsible for me picking La Trobe has just moved in. We celebrated at last night's end of the world party and when the world failed to end we came home and played video games until the sun came up. I see good things in this house's future.
So that's about it from me, but I guess I'll leave you with a 12 point review of this year's highlights.
January: Big Europe trip and visiting friends all across the continent.
February: Playing in my first Ultimate tournament and then spending the next few weeks going to the national finals of Belarus, Latvia and Finland.
March: Eesti Laul- Estonia + Eurovision = big win for me!
April: Amsterdam Preview Concert & Teaching a class in Estonia
May: Eurovision 2012, and my 25th Birthday
June: Final farewell tour
July: Joining LaTuuf
August: Qualifying for the Uni games team
September: Going to the Australian University Games
October: The weather finally getting nice and the warm weather I love returning to me.
November: Going back to work and having money again.
December: Eurovision season back on the go.
I will leave you with one final thing, yes once more it's my video project just incase you forgot how I feel about Europe.
