The story of the visa

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It's really cool when Rene goes surfing with Sofia before school or when I go for a run on the smooth, kilometer-long sandy beach right outside the door in the morning, like it happened the day before yesterday. Or like today, when we accompanied the children to school and then strolled through Fremantle, the laid-back suburb of Perth, until early afternoon. But I don't intend to just show you the highlights of Australia with a few nice vacation photos, but rather to let you participate a little in our everyday life Down Under. Now I want to commemorate the hardships of the visa application process ;o)

In retrospect, the absolute low point of the visa odyssey was on that evening in Bali, when the visa agent assigned us once again to send some confirmations from the schools in Graz for our children. You have to know that we had sent several container ships full of translated and certified documents to the immigration authorities in Australia in the last six months. Rene lovingly called this job of creating completely unnecessary letters that no officer would ever read his half-day job. Unfortunately, there was no Wi-Fi in our Balinese accommodation that day, no power in general, which would later put Rene in a rather uncomfortable situation in the evening.

So, we were stranded in Bali because our promised visa before Christmas still hadn't arrived on January 9th, after our sightseeing in Berlin. Bali sounds like lush blooming, fragrant tropical flowers, bathtub warm seas, and smiling people - and it's not just a sound, it's true. But we had much less reason to smile or laugh! Because this unplanned layover stressed us out, made us unsure, and drove us to the brink of despair several times a day. As a spoiled Westerner in paradise, you should of course just shut up and thank fate for being born with the right passport, but since humans are always looking out for themselves, we felt very sorry for ourselves that we had to go through this exhausting waiting and uncertainty.

With the time pressure of the Australian school start in our minds, we managed to organize these stupid, unnecessary documents within a few hours after making some phone calls to dear and helpful people back home. Now they just had to be emailed to the visa agent... if there was Wi-Fi...

It was shortly before midnight when Rene went in search of a place with FREE WI-FI. As nice as Bali's streets are during the day, it's not fun to wander through the alleys besieged by wild dogs after dark, where hardly anyone is to be seen except for a few shady characters. Finally, a lit room with the reassuring message on the entrance door that the place was still open until midnight and that it offered its customers Wi-Fi. So we went straight into the wine shop, bought a bottle of red wine, and sent the email to the visa agent!

Two more very, very long days later, in which we had thoroughly considered all possible alternatives to the Australia project ('Italy is nice too, and it's also in the EU!' - 'Look, I found a cool school in Thailand, right near the beach!'), finally the relieving email arrived, stating that our 3-month bridging work visa had been approved and that we could finally enter Australia! Of course, we immediately toasted with the terribly sour Balinese red wine!

As you can probably guess from the term 3-month bridging work visa, the visa story is not yet over at this point of the journey. The ultimate cheer will only happen a good 4 weeks later in the changing room of a surf shop, where I buy my first wetsuit for surfing and Rene suddenly shows me an email congratulating us on our long-term work visa. The funny thing about it is that our visa was processed in Berlin, where we had spent two enjoyable days as tourists at the beginning of our exit. If we had been aware of that back then, Rene might have been able to cheat with the German-Australian official and the visa odyssey would have gone completely differently, who knows?! In any case, all the to-do lists for the visa application at home are ceremoniously torn into a thousand pieces (the children help willingly) and when an Australian asks me at the beach if I'm on vacation here, I say: 'No, we live here' and feel like a newlywed who says 'my husband' for the first time instead of 'my life partner'!

A dear friend summarized the positive side of the layover in Bali in an encouraging WhatsApp message: Detours increase local knowledge! You could get philosophical about that... A second positive side effect: After the children had had enough of Nasi goreng, they were finally looking forward to Australia! You just have to approach the whole thing dramatically!