I have now been at SMBC for a whole week – so here are some stories from my first week of my new life here in Sydney, Australia. I am amazed at how settled and content I feel just one week in. I do expect the weight of the transition to hit at some point, but I live on a lovely campus with lovely people and am enjoying the study so far.
I have thought a lot about what it was like to leave Australia for China. It is the only other transition of this magnitude that I’ve made in my life. I knew when I left for Beijing that it was a Real Move, a permanent change, that I would not be going back to where I was, or who I was, before. I feel the same way now – that this is a bigger change than I can articulate.
I leave Cambodia for Australia tomorrow morning, 11 years since I first moved to China. I have crammed a lot into those 11 years! My whole adult life, the whole span of time lived outside my parents’ house. My entire career. All the things I did on my own, as an independent adult, I did in those 11 years.
You might assume that as a language of pictograms, Chinese would have no acronyms. I always did. Turns out I was wrong. Chinese has a cleverly simple way to create standard abbreviations even with no phonetic alphabet.
I enjoy having an outlet for my thoughts and I am constantly surprised that many other people are interested in those thoughts. As this year comes to a close I’ve been looking back over this year’s overlap between what I find interesting and what you find interesting – the posts that received the most traffic in 2014.
This is the fourth country I’ve spent Christmas in, the tenth time I’ve spent the day outside Australia. Christmas is celebrated differently everywhere, so here are some decorations and some of my favourite Christmas videos – just for fun!
Christina and I went to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, for four days and it was lovely. This is the third country in which I’ve walked (and eaten) alongside the Mekong. I loved wandering around town.
I’ve heard people here refer to Phnom Penh as a “concrete jungle” but I find it refreshing. Buildings and gates painted in different colours, coloured corrugated iron rooves, trees dangling over walls and potted plants everywhere. I know these are small things, but they’re small things I enjoy.
Six weeks from today I will arrive in Australia and my life will be over. The life I lived in China is no more. I don’t have a life to go back to anywhere in the world, not even Australia.
The Singapore Botanic Gardens opened in 1859 and cover a huge space. I couldn’t possibly do everything but did get a taste of the different gardens – especially the incredible National Orchid Garden.
I’ve been studying Khmer – the ninth language I’ve studied in a classroom. These days both English and Chinese grammar feel natural to me – neither is awkward. But Khmer falls so in between that I get confused. The feeling that I’m mixing two individually comfortable but different grammars gets me all turned around!
For the first time since leaving China more than two months ago, I spent time with people who really KNOW me. I came back feeling refreshed, and more myself than I have in a long time. I also gained an extra measure of hope/reassurance about my imminent move to Australia.
Stories From Tanya 