Leaving Australia: Why moving away from the Netherlands is the reason I’m coming back
It’s 2012 and I’m about to graduate from my degree in Media Design in a tiny town called Boxtel. My only thought; building a career in the United States.
I already knew how I was going to achieve it, I applied for the Digital Media course at Hyper Island in Stockholm and from there on I would conquer the United States through an internship in San Francisco.
During my first year, everything already went according to plan.
But of course I flew home around 5 times during those 18 months, to still be able to attend to Carnaval, visit festivals in Summer and spend Christmas with my family.
Still determined with my international plans, the internship period of my studies was getting closer. I send tons of emails to the best agencies in Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the end it got down to 3 internship choices in L.A., Shanghai & Sydney and I felt on top of the world!
Finally, I made a choice. Feeling tired and stressed from the intense experience that is called Hyper Island, I decided to join 4 classmates on a challenge at M&C Saatchi in Sydney. Suddenly I had two weeks to pack up the life that I had built up in Stockholm (including the 60+ kilo’s of clothes) and gave my friends and family back home a big fat hug while I was packing up to move my life ‘down under’.
But, Australia is a bit further away than Sweden and there’s a time difference of 10 hours. This means, in order to have Christmas dinner with your parents you have to get up at 6:00 in the morning, it means you have to wish your friends a Happy New Year when you’re sitting on the couch with a hangover & it means that you have to sing Carnaval songs at breakfast through FaceTime, while your friends are still drunk.
So, here I’m sitting, still in Sydney and just got offered a job at the company that made me move here. A dream come true. But, here’s the catch:
There is no way in the world that I’m going to stay.
There is only one thing I want to do right now, and that is moving back to the Netherlands and live my whole life there.
Why? Because in the 2 years I was away, I discovered so many things about my culture and the people that live in the Netherlands that I was never able to see before I left. For example; I love the way we say things as they are, how we go all out on a National day like Kingsday and how we put chocolate sprinkles on our breakfast sandwich. And there is so much more.
On June 15th, I’ll be arriving back to the country that I was born in, and I have never been so excited in my life. What’s that saying again? Oh yes..
“You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
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