Dear Valued Customer,
Please kindly be informed that you do not use your reservation on Garuda Indonesia flight.
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from Garuda Indonesia entitled “No Show” for our return flights to Australia. I was fully expecting that but still the email came as a surprise. It served as a reminder that 6 months have passed since we left Melbourne to find home in the City of Students and Cultural City, Yogyakarta. Time flew.
Originally from Indonesia, this move is more like coming home to me. Although I’ve never lived in Jogja (shorten name for Yogyakarta) before nor has my husband, David. In fact he’s never lived outside of Australia before. So it is a new adventure for both of us, together.
We’re no novice in packing boxes and moving houses. We’ve moved apartments twice in Melbourne. We loved each home that we moved into but each time felt like temporary. So the last time the lease was up I suggested we pack the boxes, store them in a bigger box and move to another country.
Maybe we’ll find home in Indonesia, maybe we’ll find home somewhere else, or maybe we’ll come to realise that Australia is home all along. This is our way to find out.
We told our family and friends we’ll be gone 6-12 months. It sounded like a decent enough time back then, but now 6 months has passed and it feels like we only just begun. From sorting out bureaucracy to sorting out our digestive systems, it took us about 5 months to finally feel like we’re settling in.
Jogja is a very interesting city to explore with a mixture of tourism, universities, arts, crafts, royal histories and traditional Javanese cultures. It reminds me a bit like Melbourne with its creative vibrant and many festivals. It’s actually not a very big city with the royal palace in the heart of it. Famous for its sweet rolls, bakpia, and sweet cuisine, gudeg, with the 1,200-year-old largest Buddhist temple, Borobudur, and the most active volcano in Indonesia, Mt. Merapi, just around the corner.
When we started living in Jogja, we started noticing the sounds too. For instance, there’s the calls to prayer from the mosque only two doors down from the first house that we stayed in. It was kinda hard not to notice especially at 3.30 in the morning… every morning. Then there’s the school bells, the uniquely different sounds that the food sellers produce as they push their carts around the blocks, the motorbikes, construction, door to door buskers, music from a stereo, neighbours chatters, children playing, crying and screaming, the roosters, occasional goats, airplanes passing by, nearby telecommunication tower buzzing all night…
Fascinating as they may sound, it’s not quite the serene home that we see ourselves in for the long run. So just as we’re settling in, we’re already dreaming of our next home.
“Some nomads are at home everywhere. Others are at home nowhere, and I was one of those.”
~ Robyn Davidson
So where is home? When we have the whole world to choose from, it makes it more difficult to settle on a home when we’ve tried a few and travelled quite a bit, but still feel like we’ve not yet seen nearly enough of the world.
If home is where my heart is, I suppose it doesn’t matter where we live as long as we’re together. But we still have to live somewhere. Worst, now we have to find a home where both our hearts desire.
One of the reasons I opted to go back to Indonesia was because I longed for the year round warm weather. Well, I’ve got my wish, but there’s a catch… I don’t have as much freedom to flaunt my summer dresses here as I was in Australia and the closest beach, which is about an hour away, is too dangerous to swim in. After 6 months without a drop of rain, as dust settled in the air and the sun grew harsher, David longed for the cold Melbourne winter.
But our search for a place to call home is not over yet. Somewhere where the sun is soft on our skins, the scenery is soft on our eyes, the sound is soft on our ears, where we are free to express ourselves, where there’s high speed internet and good friends to have a drink with.
When we say good bye to 2015, we’ll also, once again, packed our suitcases and move to another city, another island, another adventure.
Till then,
xox Nadia
I was recently being interviewed by Dhe Naidoo from InspireHER about our moving experience so far, which in turns inspired me to write this blog post. Read the interview here.