From one empty house to another

Ay, ay, ay! We're finally in Hong Kong, though I wouldn't say we're settled yet at all. It does feel good not to be packing and sorting and disposing of personal effects, which has consumed most of the last three weeks. Moving is very definitely hell, and this one certainly lived up to that reputation. Oftentimes with moves you get to a point where you stuff things into garbage bags and move things willy-nilly from the old place to the new. When moving countries this clearly is not an option. Whatever you move has to be detailed obsessively for the purposes of customs, and moved at great expense even so, which tends to focus the mind about what really needs to be brought along. That said, this move, at least as far as we know now, is just for a couple of years, so we wanted to save the stuff that mattered to us if we do end up back in Australia.
This involved a whole lot more thinking than the normal move. We didn't want to store a whole lot of junk, only to return in a few year's time and feel depressed about what was there. So we tried to sort out in a clear-eyed way those things we liked enough to see again, from those that we needed to get rid of, to those very few things that we would actually bring with us to HK. This is all emotionally draining, having to let go of things that have had meaning in the past, but that you know you need to let go of right now.
Certainly moving countries helped us to focus our minds about some of these issues. M has been through this before, in her move from the States eight years ago, so she had some experience of this. The last time I moved countries was when I was twelve, and I am ashamed to say I did not do much of the work involved back then. So this felt like a first for me, and the hardest thing was definitely getting rid of paperwork, both sentimental (25 years of mail) and utilitarian (Do I really need this document? Will I ever need to refer to it again? Can I just find it online now anyway?)
The second hardest thing was definitely finding responsible ways to get rid of things that we no longer needed. As a passionate environmentalist, I know that waste is one of our biggest issues in the 'Western' world. Australians love to buy new things, and chuck out the old ones fairly thoughtlessly. So with every thing that we got rid of, we needed to work out whether someone we knew could use it, whether it was 'valuable' enough to give to an op shop, whether it could be realistically composted (I know some people compost old clothes, but having watched how fast things break down in my own compost, I know they don't do so quickly in a dry climate, and the new tenant doesn't need a whole bunch of old clothes masquerading as compost), or whether it needed to be thrown away, and even then, did it need to be thrown away correctly (recycled, 'detox your home', regular landfill). Phew! All very exhausting.
In my fantasies I had hoped to be able to spend half of my time packing, and the other half enjoying the company of all the relatives that were visiting (M's mom, my twin sister and her family). In reality, moving consumed nearly every available moment, except for when we specifically made an effort to spend good times with our niece and nephews, or had big family events on for Christmas. It even consumed many supposedly sleeping moments, as we woke in the night remembering yet another thing that needed to be added to the to-do list.
Like I said, 'hell'. M and I are both very organised people, AND we didn't have our own children to worry about, AND we had both finished work early to do this move, and it was still completely horrible. Now that we've moved we say we've got jetlag, but I think it is more like moving-lag.
It was quite a curious experience to spend the last night in an almost entirely empty house, aside from our suitcases, and now to find ourselves in an enormous apartment, that might as well be empty, because although it is furnished (imagine completely empty cupboards, aside from the dust bunnies), it feels empty. Is this an incitement to what Buddhists would call 'non-attachment'?

Home is where... (as at December 10th 2010)

Home is where the heart espresso machine is, apparently. Certainly my heart gave a little lurch of joy when I saw our little Rancilio Silvia set up at Rosebud, after a long week of finishing work and leaving the apartment in Melbourne behind.
M. had moved to Rosebud already to start the process of packing for Hong Kong, and she had brought the machine down with her. Who would have known that coffee was so important to my life? Yet that seemed to be what my reaction was telling me. This has probably been mostly a consequence of the last couple of years, which have involved a lot of moving around. At the beginning of 2009 we packed up our house in Brunswick so it could be rented out, and moved into the house at Rosebud for the first half of the year to help save up for M.'s sabbatical. In July we headed off, first to the UK, then for a month's holiday in Spain, then to an apartment in Bethnal Green, in London, for four months, then a month in the US (Washington DC & Dallas, TX) and then for most of 2010 in a rented apartment in the downtown area in Melbourne. And now we have packed up and moved for Hong Kong. Naturally it is not easy to lug the 25-odd kilograms of a Rancilio Silvia around all of those places, and so I think having the espresso machine around has come to represent a bit of permanence in this peripatetic (don't get to use that word very often) life, or at least a momentary stability. Hence the lurch of joy at seeing the machine - simple really.
Of course I do love coffee, and have enthusiastically recommended the Silvia to anyone who will listen. It takes a bit of attention to detail, but if you are up for that it prepares a great cup of espresso. Sadly though, this means that a cafe has to have really great barista staff to make a better coffee than I can make at home, and so inevitably I end up sounding like a coffee snob at times. Such is life! Now I wonder how you say that in Cantonese...

The greenest gift....

Here it is again. The season of goodwill rent-seeking behaviour by businesses of all stripe. I get that they need to turn a profit by selling things, but I certainly don't understand why each holiday season we need to see more than the last. It seems a unthinking acceptance of the growth model which sees the economy able to expand indefinitely (wow, infinite resources, who would have thought!).
I understand why conventional businesses might be big on this, but I find it tiring to go to some of my favourite green blog sites and find them overrun with 'Ten top green gifts for Christmas' articles, or other such nonsense.
Let's be real about this for a moment. The greenest gift of all is probably no gift at all. Very few citizens of OECD countries, even the poor, really need anything, except possible a fairer distribution of resources within our own countries, or beyond. Even most poor households have TVs, music systems, fridges, flushing toilets, and other accessories of a good life, by global standards.
So what can we do about all this? It is a tough issue for most people. We are caught in webs of relationships with family and friends where gift-giving is the norm. So we end up buying stuff that we know we shouldn't buy, for people who don't need it.
If you can't hang tough with the 'no gift at all' strategy, their are some lower-impact, more carbon-positive alternatives. How about up-cycling something (transforming something that would otherwise be junk into something more useful, with the sweat of your brow)? Perhaps you could donate some of your time, giving a gift of your assistance working in their garden, giving them a massage, or helping them get their old bike into road-ready condition? Perhaps you could simply throw a bit of a party for your nearest and dearest (hopefully without over-eating involved) that can stand in lieu of present-giving this year? Or the simplest (yet hardest) of all, tell people that you cannot ethically give any gifts this year, and would happily not receive anything either.
For my part I am mostly taking my own advice, though I tend to weaken when it comes to small people, figuring they still get some joy out of gift-receiving, and in a broader sense, child labour laws prevent them from working themselves to buy stuff, so perhaps it is a bit of income-redistribution on the side.
I'd love to hear from people, post-holiday season, how they found this year's blend of compromise, and conformity went for them...

Fare thee well

Moving to a new country is a big thing for anyone at anytime, no matter how similar the two places might be. In moving from Australia to Hong Kong to be with my partner I feel like I am throwing myself into the unknown, away from a city that I know well and love, Melbourne.
What will I feel, think and discover about this new city? How will it change me? Will I ever live permanently back in Melbourne again?
Amid all the craziness of finishing up at work (and as a kindergarten teacher this means disentangling myself from the many complicated and quite emotionally intense relationships that happen in early childhood) and of packing up our lives, there are still a few moments of time to appreciate all that I love about this place.
Walking up through Fitzroy the other day, I experienced a beautiful and bittersweet moment of Melbourne life - I was walking with M. through one of the smallest streets in Fitzroy, surrounded by old redbrick factories that have now almost all been turned into expensive housing. The sky was blue, the day was balmy, ivy was growing up walls, giving them a sense of age and dignity, while in the background the sounds of a saxophone playing jazz could be heard clearly over the quiet buzz of city life. A feeling of happiness washed over me, and a sense of the sweetness of life, even against the looming threat of human-induced climate change.
I will miss moments like this... what will I find instead?