hey hi hello I arrived!!
Apparently it’s winter here and it’s been raining non-stop for the past few months.
Ha. For real though, some days it rains so hard I feel like I’m on the Arc, but then the sun shines and the light is so pure and air so warm. (Often it does both within the span of ten minutes). For the Europeans out there it sort of feels like September in Berlin or maybe March in Montpellier: could definitely be a lil warmer, days could definitely last a lil longer, but there’s that feeling of excitement and change in the air that you only really get after a lazy monotonous summer or a long dead winter.
I wanted to write something for me, as a keepsake of my time here, but also as a way of keeping in touch with you all and sharing updates from time to time. I’m so glad communicating with people abroad is such an easy thing to do nowadays, it’s crazy how much it’s changed since I first left home just ten or so years ago, or even since I forged my first transatlantic friendships (- remember?!). That said, I can find it difficult to try convey how things are actually going by text, and the time difference here makes real talk a bit of a mission to arrange. Having a space where I can document some of my thoughts and feelings seems like a more honest way of sharing this experience.
So if you’re interested in rambling thoughts peppered with pretty pictures you’re in the right place.
Auckland so far has been magical.
I arrived expecting a “city”, with all of the negative connotations that carries in my mind. Instead I’ve found somewhere that feels unnervingly like home, which is the last thing I would ever have imagined.
A big part of it is the landscape, which is exciting and exotic to me, but also strangely, personally familiar.
The palm trees, orange blossom, and gnarly garrigue-like oaks that I grew up among in France rise from dewy grass lawns straight outta the UK. Daffodils, magnolia trees, copper beeches, grow alongside strange jurassic-sized ferns and bushes with buds tight like peonies that burst into intense roses. The sky is deep blue and the sunlight strong like in Languedoc, but the evening air as damp and earthy as it always felt each summer when we drove up out of the Channel tunnel into Dover.
In Mangere where I work now the streets are wide and straight like in America, but the houses small and squat like a seaside town in Wales. I find myself stopping in the streets all the time just to take photos of the day-to-day – it’s all endlessly fascinating. Some houses (like the one I’ve moved into!) are wooden clad, enclosed within white wooden Tom Sawyer-like fences. Others are red brick, and could have been lifted from the UK, if it weren’t for the palm trees towering overhead, or the deck stretching out front. None look to me as though they were really built to last more than a few decades.
For the first couple of weeks I stayed in a little AirBnB out by the hospital. When I took the train into town I would ride through Newmarket and Parnell, districts which sprawl across a hillside just ten fifteen minutes from the innermost city, but where already there seem to be as many trees as there are houses. So un-city-like. On my second journey through I had already decided that was where I wanted to live.
Some of the guys who arrived here at the same time as me have moved into apartments in the actual city centre and wow, the views are amazing. I was looking for something a little less bustling though, and Newmarket is such a perfect fit.
Against everything I thought I knew about myself, I’m having so much fun actually living in a city. It’s such a novelty for me – coming from rural France and then small town England – to have so much choice so close by. There’s always something going on, so much to explore!
Another thing playing into the sense of feeling at home here, and that has taken me by surprise, is how interested I’ve been in clothes and shoes I’ve seen in shop windows. I usually hate clothes shopping, but I’m drawn to the colours and styles here in a way that I have literally never been in any other country. I feel like I found my tribe.
True to sterotype, everyone so far has been incredibly warm and welcoming, everything has been more chilled and laidback than I am used to. For sure it has made settling in a lot easier than it could have been. There’s a lot of admin involved in closing down your life in one country and starting afresh in another, but for someone who has cold dread about all such things, I feel pretty good about the way I’m handling it. A lot of places are closed over the weekend, but I’ve got a set of nightshifts coming up in a week or so, so hopefully I’ll be able to make use of some day time hours to tie the last few things up.
Can you believe it’s been almost a month now since I arrived?! I’ve had four weekends here already!! On the first one I went flat hunting and met up with some of the other British doctors who came out here to start at the same time as me (we went to an improv night and on a walking history tour of the old City – both amazing). On the second one I moved into my new flat, where my flatmates had managed to find, build and make me a bed, and strung a “welcome home” banner over it. Then I went on a lil roadtrip up North with my flatmate Katie and some of her friends. On the third one I worked (ward cover long days from 8 til 10.30 a whole new kind of exhaustion y’all). And that brings us up to today. Which so far I have spent FaceTiming and doing laundry. And yoga. And reading. And writing. And now I’m getting ready to go out for dinner and wherever the night takes us. The best kind of day.
What else?
I moved into a really lovely flat in a massive old bungalow villa with five lovely flatmates and a real fire that we light every evening. I don’t feel I should write about other people’s lives online so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but it’s the best, I was so lucky to find it.
Work is great.
I did have a moment, the evening before my first day, where I thought back to my last hospital job (acute medical admissions over winter in a stretched-to-breaking-point NHS), and worried that perhaps part of the reason I’ve been so happy over the last few months was because I was away from the stress of all that. I have loved all of the jobs I have had over the past two years as a doctor, but suddenly I was scared that actually I had just been happy enjoying my free time, enjoying the comparative ease of a GP foundation job, enjoying seeing all of my favourite people and doing all of my favourite things before I left, enjoying the novelty and excitement of a new place. I had that abrupt fear that makes your hands turn to ice and your stomach drop: what if I’ve come all this way and I hate it?
Thankfully that’s not the case.
The first week was hard. Jesus Christ the first week was hard. Mainly just in that horrible having to ask a question every five minutes and feeling anxious that you’re missing something/screwing something up (90% of the time you are) and embarrassed by the mistakes you make and exhausted by the effort of trying to remember so many new things and still stay calm and composed and polite kind of way. You know?
But from conversations I’ve had with some of the other new Brits it feels like we’re all kind of on the same page. (Bumbling along, feeling like we’re definitely fucking up at some level, and terrified of being asked to spell in the phonetic alphabet). So that’s nice. And to be honest I didn’t expect anything less: starting a new job is always rough for the first few days, starting in a new hospital is always hard, being in a completely new system is just the next step up. It’s gotten exponentially easier each day.
Best of all, being back in the hospital feels great. I love hospital medicine, I love being on my feet and running about getting jobs done and knowing the porters and chatting with the canteen staff and regrouping after a ward round with a plan of attack. It’s good to be back. The renal team is lovely, renal medicine is really interesting, and my co-house-officer is legit the greatest most patient guy you could meet. Seriously. Half the time I still feel like the most useless acopic idiot and he hasn’t once shown an ounce of frustration. He’s the best.
So all in all I’m doing pretty well!
I had a lot of conversations before I left about why I was doing this, mainly because I was trying to figure it out myself. Obviously it’s an awesome opportunity, but I was in such a good place, I was so happy with my lil life in the South West, why throw it all away? Why go so far? And alone? People gave me all sorts of different answers and interesting insights, but even so, I really struggled with trying to understand my motivation for doing. It was just constantly there, beneath the surface, niggling away at me. But the moment I came through security and officially “arrived” the question didn’t even seem an issue any more. Everything just felt right. I still don’t know exactly what my heart’s chasing, but now that I am here, on the other side, all I can say is that it feels right. So know that I’m doing good, and that I’m glad I came.
If you have a moment to write, a moment to chat – reach out. It makes my day.
Love to all. Always.
Z
Mad to Live 