A new beginning
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Calgary,
Alberta,
Canada
Sunday, August 24, 2008
I have been ready to move on from Calgary for awhile now. It doesn't help that most of my awesome friends here have moved on to bigger and better. Thankfully I do still have a few left here! I started thinking about what to do next in life and have been playing with the idea of a year long travel experience. So I put my house up for sale and waited for something to happen. The market dropped just before I listed and has continued to sag so I haven't had much luck with that, but hopefully an offer comes in soon.
I figured a good backup plan was to apply for jobs in Europe. It's nice and central to a lot of places I would like to travel to, and most European countries have excellent employment standards. If my house doesn't sell I can still move on and suffer only slightly while paying rent and a mortgage.
I was hoping to find a nice 3 or 6 month contract, or something along those lines, to get me started on my new life. Unfortunately all the jobs I could find were permanent. A lot of them were in Dublin and I just couldn't make a commitment to living there "permanently". That means years, not months! I figured I needed a drastic change to my lifestyle so moving to another city and having a job in the same industry just wasn't going to cut it, even if it was in a fantastic city like Dublin.
But then I got a call from a recruiter in Switzerland and my entire outlook on working changed! The recruiter set up a phone interview for me with a consulting company and I really liked the people I spoke with, even if I couldn't meet them in person. The company also sounded great and it is hard not to fall in love with the idea of life in Switzerland. I would get lots of vacation time and would be able to travel around Europe on weekends, one city at a time. So now I am going there in person in just a couple of weeks to meet everyone and make sure this is the right move for me.
In the meantime I had applied for volunteer work doing turtle conservation in Ghana and got accepted. I volunteered for the entire month of November. So I paid for that and am so excited about my upcoming first ever African experience.
So now I am just waiting for it to all fall together. I have never traveled on someone else's dime so the trip to Switzerland is even more exciting! But I am really interested in working there now and the great thing is they don't want me to start for a few months so if I do end up taking the position I will have some time to travel beforehand, including the volunteer work in Ghana (which I am doing no matter what happens).
I am also lucky enough to have the best, most supportive manager at my current job. I told him about the meeting in Switzerland and he was so excited for me (and maybe a little sorry for himself, being as he may have to go through a potentially painful interview process to find my replacement). I also told him that of course this happened at the same time my volunteer application went through and he chuckled because that seems to be how life works.
So while I impatiently wait for the Swiss folks to approve my travel dates and flights I am preparing for my trip to Ghana. I have been fairly well vaccinated as I ran to the travel clinic the moment I started considering the year-long journey, and since I wasn't entirely sure where I was going, I got a jab of pretty much everything. Then when I had a last minute invite on a trip to Thailand in February, I went back to get a few more jabs.
The only things I was missing for Ghana was meningitis (required) and rabies (recommended). So once my Ghana trip was paid for, I dashed back to the clinic and got my meningitis. I talked to my regular travel advisor at the travel clinic about rabies and whether it was really necessary, as it is quite an expensive vaccine and you need three injections. She said I would be lucky to find it, even if I did decide to get it, as there is a worldwide shortage. So instead of trying to hunt down the rabies vaccine, I am going to make sure my travel insurance covers emergency evacuation. Problem solved - though here's hoping I never need to use that coverage.
Next comes the shopping for trip supplies and sorting out the other details of my life, and hopefully an approval from Switzerland soon. Like, today, please.
So much to do, so little time!
