Perth and the tension of whether one can really go home.

Dear family, dear friends,

hard to believe, but by now I have been back in Germany for a month. When I think back to how I was still playing golf in Perth on March 16th, we are now living in a completely different world and who knows what kind of world we will be living in a month from now. I hope you are all healthy and coping well with this crisis!

In my last blog, I ended with the fact that I had a few more days in Brisbane before heading to Perth. In Brisbane itself, I hardly did anything anymore, as I already knew the city very well and I was also busy keeping track of the daily news about the coronavirus and flight cancellations. In short, over the past two weeks, I have checked multiple times a day which flights Emirates is canceling and what else is happening in the world.

Nevertheless, Brisbane also has beautiful places, such as the casino. I also attended a football game at the stadium one last time, which will probably be the last time for some time.

Then, a week later, I flew to Perth at night. After a 6-hour flight across the entire width of Australia, I arrived there at midnight and was picked up by the hotel shuttle after a brief call. Yes, you heard right: hotel! For the first time in about 1.5 months, I had a room all to myself 💪.

From the hotel, I took a bus and train to Fremantle the next morning, which is a small suburb of Perth and has become quite well known as many cruise ships had to evacuate their passengers there in recent weeks. In this place, the topic of Corona was not present at all and there was a peaceful, healthy world. I stayed in a hostel there, which was built in a deactivated, historic prison.

But Fremantle also has a nice shopping street with many restaurants besides the prison. I spent two nice days here before heading back to Perth.

When I left Fremantle in the morning and took the train back to Perth, the Queen Mary 2 was in the harbor, which I had already seen in Airlie Beach on the east coast about two and a half weeks earlier.

When I arrived in Perth, I treated myself to another night at the hotel and explored the city. Perth is the largest city on the west coast and nice to look at, even though it cannot compete visually with Sydney or Melbourne. In Perth, there was no toilet paper left in supermarkets and there were also Corona notices and disinfectants on every corner in the hotel.

When I arrived at the airport, I was cautiously optimistic after checking in that I would at least get to Dubai. I sat next to two Brits on the flight there, who had just been evacuated from the Queen Mary 2, as the ship was no longer allowed to dock at any port. Upon arriving in Dubai, I immediately received a notification on my phone that France wanted to close its airspace from noon the next day. That would have been about an hour before my landing. Nevertheless, the boarding went according to plan and 6.5 hours later, I landed in Hamburg and was greeted by my family.