How we met

This will be the first blog entry to our blog with two perspectives. My boyfriend and I will write about the same events or the same days or the same themes and post it on this blog. This post will about how we met each other. His blog posts will be posted here shortly. I am a Dutch girl and my boyfriend is an Australian guy and we live together.

For me it all started in 2008-2009 in Japan where I had an amazing year as a high school exchange student. I met many people and made many friends. One of the people I met was an Australian girl who came from Perth. I didn't know her very well, I met her a few times but she went to a different school and lived at least an hour away from me. We met often enough to add each other on Facebook though. After Japan a couple of years passed without much communication with the Australian girl and I went on with my life. I was only seventeen when I left for Japan and it took me two more years to finally finish high school in 2011. By this time I still hadn't figured out what to do with my life so I decided to travel. I wasn't sure where I wanted to go but I knew I wanted to take a year off and travel around.

One year before I left for my travels I read a particular comment on a status from my female Australian friend. It made me laugh and being the Facebook stalker that I am - oh don't look at me like that we all do it - I checked out the profile of the person who posted the hilarious comment. I read the biography of a guy who seemed to be in University in Australia at the time and it made me laugh even more. I decided to send him a short message saying that his profile made me laugh - I know, what was I thinking? He responded by making smalltalk and so an intercontinental friendship was born. We had lots of things to talk about and as it turned out a lot of things in common. I also found out that the girl I met in Japan was in fact his cousin. We messaged back and forth through the internet and even had a few Skype calls. I always looked forward to a message from my pen-pal and of course wondered what he would be like in real life.

Now jumping back to 2011, I had made up my mind about going to either the United States or Australia for a few months before starting my studies - I already spoke English and I wanted to make things a bit easier for me to adjust compared to the massive culture shock I got in Japan. The United States seemed difficult in terms of visas and it was even more difficult to legally work there so I decided to go to the land down under. Besides Australia has lots of dangerous animals and what's life without a little risk?

Ten facts about Australia:

1 – Australia is the world's sixth largest country. 

2 – Australia had been inhabited for at least 40.000 years before the Dutch discovered it in 1606.

3 – Voting is mandatory in Australia and you'll get fined if you don't.
4 – One of the most dangerous animals in Australia is a snail.
5 – Of the ten most venomous snakes five of them can be found in Australia.

6 – Burger King is called Hungry Jack's because of copyright issues.

7 – Only four to six people die each year from snake bites in Australia.

8 – No deaths from spider bites have occurred in Australia since 1981, since the anti-venoms were made available, despite having several dangerous spiders.
9 – Australia is the only country that has herds of wild camels.

10 – One of the Australian marsupials called wombats have excrement shaped like a cube. 

I met another Australian person while I was in Japan and he has been like a brother to me ever since. Since I knew only a few people in Australia I decided to start in Melbourne and stay with my good friend for the start of the trip. My Australian pen-pal and I decided to meet each other on the same day I sent him my first message the year before. We had the most awkward first encounter. We simply didn't know how to be around each other. Meeting someone in real life is very different than reading someone's messages and speaking a bit over the phone. I had only just arrived the day before and I was still suffering from a jet-lag so I had lost my capability to hold a proper conversation and apparently my pen-pal took it as a sign that I didn't like him at all. It took a few more messages before we decided to try to meet again. Here is a flowchart which somewhat describes the beginning stages of our relationship.

This time I went to his place for a whole weekend – it was far away and I didn't want to pay for a hotel. We watched movies pretty much the entire time and no I'm not trying to be subtle we watched at least five movies while I was there. But the movies took away the awkwardness since we didn't have to talk while we watched them which in turn gave us time to think about what to say and it obviously worked since we finally overcame our awkwardness and realised we enjoyed each other's company more than just as pen-pals. So I moved in with him.