I’ve been in a weird place lately.
My life is a little all over the place on the account that I have 24 days left in this country. I’m leaving Melbourne — the city I was born in and have lived in my entire life, for seven months. Fun fact about me, I’ve never moved, as in I’ve lived in this same room, this house, for my entire life. And yet, here I am packing up to move to Denmark.
Honestly, if you’d told me two years ago that I would be moving to Denmark, I probably would have laughed at you. London has always been my dream, but sometimes you just have to go where life takes you.
This is a weird thing for a number of reasons. Number one, I’ve never left the Southern Hemisphere — I’ve travelled all over Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific but this is my first time to Europe. Number two, I’ve never travelled by myself before. Before Book Expo Australia last year, I’d never travelled without my parents out of Victoria. So yes, scary times.
I’m lucky enough to have a lot of family over there. In fact, my two sets of grandparents and an aunt are the only family we have here. Everyone else lives in England, with a select few in America. My family have been so incredibly supportive and lovely so far, they’ve been planning things for my arrival and been messaging me almost every day with some new to say or more adorable pictures of my adorable little cousins to show. I’ve already been designated the role as ‘big sister’ by one of my gorgeous little girl cousins.
Of course, there are some not so great aspects to the trip, or rather things I’m sort of worried about. My love of Europe, and of travel in general, was something handed down to me by my mum. Some of you might know that my mum passed away last year, which is why it’s a little… difficult, sometimes.
I always expected to be able to share my plans with my mum. I’d always just expected that as a given. I was lucky enough to be told all the stories of the wild things my mum got up to when she lived in Europe for four years at my age, both from her and from her friends (who have been setting things up for me too).
My mum, the absolute sass monster.
At the same time, I’m excited because I know how jealous she would have been of this trip but also how proud and supportive. I plan to make this an absolutely ridiculously amazing seven months.
Finally, I just wanted to tell you all that I’m in the process of setting up a travel/study abroad blog. I’m planning to be blogging on there every couple of days, so I thought it’d be better not to clog up this blog with travel stuff. I’ve got a couple of book related travel posts planned that’ll be coming up within the coming months so look out for that, and I’ll tweet about the travel blog once I have it set up.
I hope you are all super well. Feel free to leave any travel tips below that you might have!
