“How about to go travel across New Zealand?” said my husband Radito to me one day. “It’s far enough to say at the end of the world, and rebellious enough to outrage average minds.” He, as an artist, with his romantic ideals used to think about forgetting and leaving everything behind and escape to distant places.
“What? New Zealand? Eh, why New Zealand?” that was surprisingly my answer that day. The only thing I knew about NZ whatsoever was that it lies somewhere faraway, close to Australia and it is on the other side of the world. Also it didn’t seem to be attractive so much for me to have it in my list of interests due to lack of information about this paradise on earth. However, as soon as Radito started to tell me stories and showed me some pictures, articles, I was into it. It was time to get out of here anyway!
Lucky. Luckier. The Luckiest vs Nifty. Niftier. The Niftiest.
You think you are free, you can go anywhere and do anything…?
Well it’s not so easy sometimes….Especially not from Slovakia.
In this case I am very thankful to my husband for his persistence and determination to manage everything on his own without any help of tricking travel agencies.
Understandably if you are going to spend a longer time overseas means you need a visa, work permit, etc., right? What I have found is that it requires some level of English, intelligence and patience to get out of the maze of information and requirements.
So it was part of his nifty temper and cleverness and part of a luck that we have been quick enough to enter our applications for visa on time and got it!
There are some things and complications involved in the process which some people might not imply. These complication are mainly caused from the fact that we are not from English-speaking country, and most people here even in offices are not speaking English ,which delays international dealing.
And money of course, you need a solid budget to start realizing this dream.
The funniest part of it was that nobody believed us we are actually going away.
How about support?
We´ve got our visas approved. We also had flight tickets already. But every time we’ve been talking about it to our family, they waved with hand and thought we will change our mind at last.
No wonder, it requires a dose of braveness, and despite many people are telling us how they would travel if they could afford it, it is actually not true. They could not. It is just the general chit-chat thing which is quite common when people are trying to fight with the thing that someone is really stepping out of the crowd and is brave enough to do it.
So even though we expected and needed support from our family and friends, we often got the opposite. As soon as many people heard what we are planning to do, everyone had full mouth of advises, alerts and doubts about our decision. The best hint was that some of them were convinced we´ll be back in 1 month desperate for our “sweet safe home”.
However, there is no apologize for blaming other people for things you wanted to do but never did, because you didn’t have enough support.
If you have a dream and want to do something, you do it no matter what other people say. You can do anything.
This is one of the most important things I have learnt from my husband.
The end.
Barbara
© 2015 Independent Couple
