A quick update on busy times!

A lot has happened since our last post about Legoland.

After just over two and a half years, we have finally been given our dates to return to Australia.  Both Kristine and my work asked if we could stay longer but my company in Australia needed us back for a new project. And, since they're paying the bills, their decision is final.

So, it's been a busy and fairly emotional time.  We've had to organise hand-overs at work and sort and pack all of our gear around the house and also to plan our final holiday before we leave.

While we are looking forward to seeing friends and family again and returning to our house, it is also really hard to say goodbye to all of our good friends over here. It is never easy to move to a new country where you don't know anyone (we were lucky in that we at least knew the other ex-pat families), but we made some great friends over here who really made us feel welcome into their lives and their homes.

From late-night wine trips, computer LANS, boardgame nights, coffee and fika breaks and play-dates for the kids we've met some amazing people and have always been made to feel really welcome.

And, I'm not going to continue to write more of the goodbyes in this post, as I want to keep the blog light and it's hard to type when the dust gets in your eyes...

As Alana quoted from online "Goodbye is only for when I will never see you again, so for now we will use see you later."

----------------

So what have we been up to?

Well, the weekend after Legoland we hosted two massive going-away parties. Since our going away party from Australia to Sweden featured Swedish food, we figured these parties needed Aussie food. We invited work friends over on Saturday. I cooked BBQ burgers and Kris made lamingtons and a pavalova.  We had about thirty people show up for the picnic lunch and it was great to spend the day with everyone.  My work got us all Swedish hats and football shirts with the numbers of all the projects the company works on, and Kristine got an awesome blue glass candleholder from her work group.

Sunday we hosted the kids friends and it was CRAZY!  I filled up over 300 water balloons and the kids used buckets and water pistols for an epic water fight. We had about twenty kids involved - Alana, Cameron and Tom's friends.  For lunch I BBQed up some sausages.

The next weekend was crazy packing weekend. We had to cram the belongings of 5 people over 2.5 years into three piles - keep, donate and throw away. We then needed to further sort into what would go sea freight, what would go air freight and what we would take as luggage. We had a visit from the packing company who informed us that we had 6 cubic meters of sea freight and 1m3 of air freight paid for by the company, any excess we needed to pay for. They visited and looked at our pile of things to ship and informed us that we had about 12m3 of stuff to send back.  We discussed and it was decided that we could trade the 1m3 of air freight for another 6m3 of sea freight (air is much more expensive than sea).  It would mean that we had to wait an extra 2 months or so to get our gear back, but we  could take back pretty much everything we wanted.  We did still need to trim a bit,  and this involved packing items into other cases - such as packing small toys under the cardboard inserts of boardgame boxes, vacuum sealing piles of clothes, and getting rid of items we really didn't need.
 

The pile

We ended up with a few car boot fulls of rubbish as well as multiple bags of items to donate. All the furniture was owned by my work, so that was also to be donated.

By the end of the weekend we had it all sorted, but we were exhausted.  We also had to sort out the items to declare to Australia's super strict customs - anything wooden, feather/leather/animal parts, anything with possible dirt contamination etc..

On Wednesday, Kris finished work for the year and I took a day off work to finalise the sorting.  We expected it to only take a few hours, but we ended up working from 8am to 2am.  Cameron also had a soccer camp this week from Monday-Thursday with Malmö City FC, so that kept him out of the way - he had a great time and learnt some new skills as well as picking up a set of football gear and a nice sunburn.

On Thursday the removalists came.  I expected them to take all day, but they were quick. They had our entire pile packed by lunch time (they started at 8am) as well as all our souvenirs. After a quick lunch break, they disassembled the furniture and were gone by 3pm.  After that, we ducked down to pick up Cameron from football and pick up the keys for the hotel where we'd be staying until we flew out.

Then we headed back home and started sorting and packing the remaining gear that we would take as luggage. It was a stressful time as, since the shipment had gone, everything left either needed to come with us as plane luggage or be thrown out. By 9pm we were exhausted and so we left the fridge and freezer to be done later and headed to hotel, where we grabbed a quick dinner and slept like logs.

This took us to Friday, which was Midsommarsdag (Midsummers Day) - which I'l write about in the next post.