personal

As you might have guessed by now, my favourite colour is GREEN. And when I say "favourite" I mean it, I'm really passionate about green. I'm not such a fan of non-greenish blues anymore, which used to be my favourite colour when I grew up. Now I like red better than blue. And grey is pretty cool too even though it's technically not a colour.

If you want to look at pictures, go to my (grey not green) personal website www.jettte.net. It basically exists just so I have somewhere to put my pictures and for my family and friends back home to be able to look at them. I started it when the last hotmail users among them were complaining that their inboxes got clogged up with my Australia pictures.

Thanks to my practically minded boyfriend I have started to do a bit of woodwork. Well, all I've done so far are two picture frames, but it was lots of fun and I want to do more. It's a bit hard in Sydney with all the other stuff I've got to do here (e.g. my PhD ;) and without my boyfriend's dad's massive shed with every tool and material I'd ever need. He also showed me how to weld, but that's even harder to practise when I'm in Sydney and have no time to join random pieces of scrap metal. But it's fun and maybe I'll get around to it again sometime soon.

sports and outdoor stuff

I am generally pretty lazy when it comes to sports. The only sports I really really like are rock climbing and snow skiing.
Rock climbing maybe because half of the time you get to belay or just sit around the base of a crag and simply enjoy being outdoors. I like camping too, but I don't like walking very much, so it's mainly car camping. I'm trying to go walking more though to have another reason to go outdoors and to get some aerobic exercise once in a while. Canyoning is a pretty exciting way of walking (and sliding and abseiling and jumping...), but I tend to get cold really easily and then there still are these horribly exhausting walk-ins and walk-outs. Since I've been in Sydney, I've been a member (and at some point the president) of the UNSW Outdoor Club.
I started snow skiing when I was three and my family goes on skiing holidays every winter, so I had a long time to learn it. I got the hang of it when I was bout 16 and have loved it since then. I even worked as a skiing instructor in the Alps for a little bit before I moved to Sydney, where snow sports are somehow less popular. I like water skiing though and would like to do some more of that.
I'd also like to do more SCUBA diving. I did a diving course in Cairns, in North Queensland when I came to Australia in 2003, and it was great. The first commandment of SCUBA diving: don't exert yourself! Now that's a good sport for a lazy person!
As a kid I used to play (European) handball but I find it hard to get motivated for a running sport without already being part of a team of friends. Also, handball is not very popular in Australia and there are hardly any women teams. I trained with the Sydney University Handball Club for a little while.
I passionately hate swimming, it's so boring! And too much running wrecks my knees and back.

why i am in australia

There are a lot of Germans in Australia, and particularly in Coogee, the suburb of Sydney where I live. So maybe I'm just one of many and shouldn't make a big deal of it. But Germans don't usually emigrate in whole families these days and we mostly follow the urinal rule (always keep as much distance between each other as possible) instead of congregating when we meet overseas. I have only a few "accidental" German friends in Sydney and certainly didn't try to meet them, although that's not to say that I mind having German friends (and getting to practise my decaying German).
The first Australians I met were the staff at the Australian Restaurant at the 1998 World Expo, where I spent many party nights while I was learning Portuguese in Lisbon after finishing high school. They seemed like a fun bunch and I thought I should try and get to Australia to study at some point. I'm not a huge fan of travelling, I much prefer either going to live somewhere (for a while) or just going on holiday without trying to see everything. So after spending a few months in London as an au-pair (and meeting more Aussies and Kiwis) and 3 years at uni in Hamburg, I packed up and moved to Sydney for a one-year Master program.
Towards the end of the year, I started looking for reasons to move back to somewhere in Germany. I couldn't really find any. My boyfriend in Hamburg had dumped me months ago, I now had a boyfriend in Sydney, and a nice flat and friends and the Outdoors club, was living near the beach, it was sunny, I didn't know where in Germany I should go - and most importantly I was happy (which I hadn't been for most of my time in Hamburg). I realised that the whole time since finishing high school until I moved to Sydney I had been carrying this big lump of fear and pressure around in my stomach, and it was gone. Germany is so serious, you need to have a career and love it and live for it and do lots of cool internships and then you still won't find a job. Things in Australia seem so much more relaxed, it seems ok to say, I work in a clothing shop or a cafe or a bar or an office doing something nondescript, but I love going outdoors or surfing or reading crazy history books and I actually have time for it. I have the impression that people get judged less on what they work and more on what they do for fun. I applied for permanent residence and got a job at an IT helpdesk fixing computer and network problems. I now have permanent residence, so I can stay.
After 4 years here it has come to the point where I think I would have to justify moving back more than staying here. When people at home say "But it's on the other side of the world!" I say "Exactly! Who'd want to move to the other side of the world and deal with all the hassle?" Leave my boyfriend, get rid of all my stuff here or ship it, find a new city and a new flat in Germany (and where exactly there?), new friends, new things to do... sounds like a lot of pain when I'm perfectly happy where I am.
Being the German that I am, I still ended up in a PhD degree in search of the perfect profession. Being an IT serf or an office chick wasn't going to work for me. I'll see where this will take me.

stuff that I miss: the seasons, dense bread, a bit of culture, Christmas (the way it is at home), bird song, snow and skiing, central heating and insulation, urban public transport and fast trains, lots of little stuff... but nothing really major.