... 3 months later

As many - probably most - of you know, I arrived back in Belgium after my New Zealand adventure in one piece but with a broken heart. I had a pretty rough time in the following months. But as they say - life goes on and the world doesn't stop turning.
I have known for a long time now that I can't go straight back to work in Belgium. I don't know which mysterious forces are working inside me so that I don't feel completely comfortable here, but it is what it is and there's no other option than to listen to myself, so I couldn't bring myself to look for a job here. I set myself to finding a job abroad, which isn't the easiest thing to do. I was also out of the working routine for over a year, so that only added to the problem.

The most difficult part was the 'where' of my search. As you know I am interested in pretty much every part of the world, and I have high ambitions in 'seeing everywhere, everything and everyone'. But this is not the moment to be indecisive, so I had to rule some things out.
I had already told myself since long that I wanted to live in London for a while, some time in my life. But somehow this didn't seem to fit the bill at this point, for some inexplicable reason.
I would have loved to go back to New Zealand, but for obvious reasons I figured it was too early and therefore too painful to do that. Then what? Australia is a country that I want to explore better, further and longer, and I would love to experience Sydney properly. But my working holiday visa has expired and it proved a tad too hard to find a job straight away, which is what I need at the moment.
I started to make a little sum of my needs and wants. I set myself a deadline for finding a job abroad; if I didn't find one by then I would start looking in Ghent and Brussels. I sent over a hundred emails to London, Sydney and - astonishingly - Zurich in Switzerland. I figured that if I couldn't live in the NZ mountains, I might as well try the European ones, who are at least equally spectacular, if not more. Switzerland is very clean, snowy in winters, hot in summers, and has good architect offices. So that plan started to unfold itself. Just before my own deadline, I got myself some interviews with an office in Sion, one in Zurich and one in ... oh yeah, drum rolls... Vaduz, Liechtenstein. I didn't get any positive news back from London or Sydney yet ... Bummer.

I set off towards Switzerland with my mum for a week to do the 3 meetings. They were all very positive, but the only one who had an immediate job for me was the one in Vaduz ... no one less than Baumschlager-Eberle. If anyone of you is interested in who they are and what they do, you can click on this link: Baumschlager-Eberle. The job was offered to me on Monday, 12 December.

From the start of January, I will go back to Switzerland, more especially Chur (which is about half an hour driving from Vaduz) with my sister and brother on a little trip to find an apartment, and - how can I not mention this - to enjoy the snow that has recently been falling in heaps over there :-). After that I will make the move and plunge back into the work life of an architect. I will see how that goes for me.

Since I enjoyed writing about my adventures so much, and since it is an easy way for me to let all of you know what is going on with me, I have set up a new blog again. It might be slightly different than the other 2, as in this one will be more about daily / weekly (work) life, whereas the other 2 were true travel blogs. I might add more personal reflections or experiences, or I could add links that interest me, or movies that I have seen ... I don't know yet how it will unfold. Your guess is as good as mine ;-).
In any case - it is a new big step in the life of Marie-Anne Grillet and if you are interested to follow it, here is the place to be :-).