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En Route to London

Never have I felt such a relief to be coming home from a holiday.

I was excited to come back to my life in England after my adventure in Australia, but Malaysia really has made me want to come home even more. When the check-in gate for London opened, I was the first in and the first to get to the gate.

An hour and a half until I'll be stuck on an aeroplane for the next 14 hours with bad food, reconditioned air and a random person plonked next to me while I cross the world to get home to everything I have. A small price to pay in my opinion.

In 15 hours time I'll be in London and in 18 hours I'll be in my favourite City in the world.

See you all soon!

Malaysia

In my last blog I said that in the countries I go to I like some things and dislike others.

Well Malaysia has proven me wrong.

I like nothing about this place.

The weather is horrid, the people are miserable and unhelpful and the City of Kuala Lumpur looks like a Thai suburb in the middle of nowhere with a few illuminated billboards and a couple of tall buildings.

I checked in to a 'Hotel' which was next door to another that could be rented by the hour, dropped my belongings off and ventured out into the heart of KL.

The streets were lined with teenage kids, sitting on the ground, all wearing the latest fake gear and making a nuisance of themselves. The main streets connecting KL's main tourist attractions are lined with 'Massage' shops with old men and young girls stood outside promising 'good massage'. A great way to encourage tourism I'm sure...

The Perona's Towers are great and really are a miracle of engineering. However the KL Tower looks like a doughnut dropped on a spike and everything else is of equal disappointment. Beer is expensive, the streets are polluted and lined with poor street vendors and everyone looks as dirty and worn out as the other. This is definitely one place I will not come to again.

I regret not staying in the hotel opposite the airport and saving myself the £70 it cost me for a day and night here.

Bradley's top tip when travelling: Don't go to KL. It really is a waste of time.

Australia

So apparently eight months of life have passed since I landed in Australia and I'm on my way home. Never has time passed so quickly!

From the day I landed here to my last night, I have to say, Australia is one of the best places I have been to. Every country I go to I seem to enjoy parts of of it but couldn't see myself living there indefinitely. However, I love everything Australia has. The reason for leaving is different for Australia though.

Other places I have been to have their good and bad points, but for me, I can't think of anything I dislike about the place. It is however the things that Australia doesn't have that make me want to come home.

While in Oz I worked continuously from a few weeks of landing to the week before I left. Dan just so happened to be in Brisbane, as that's where his flight from New Zealand landed. I headed there in hope of finding a job, earning some money and then traveling around. What I
actually did was quite different.

After a short holiday in Byron Bay we headed back to Brisbane to get jobs and get some cash. Well that's exactly what I did, however I skipped the traveling around part of the plan.

I secured a position at Rio Tinto within a week and spent 5 months working for Australia's 3rd largest company. Whilst there the friends I made and experience I gained will be with me forever and this shaped my Oz adventure.

There were many occasions when I had thousands of dollars in the bank and could have relocated to Melbourne or Sydney or anywhere else, but I didn't. This may be considered a waste of my visa, but in my opinion it was the best choice I made. People dream of moving to Australia, getting a decent job, live life in the sun with amazing beaches down the road and everything else it offers. Well I wanted that indefinitely during my first 5-6 months of living there. I figure, if I want a holiday to 'see' Australia, then I'll go on holiday there and
go see. For me, I loved Brisbane. I didn't want to leave for another City and I'm glad I didn't. I lived the life of an Australian. However after 5 months of flirting with Australian life the realisation began to set in that it wasn't home. It didn't have all of the best things I enjoy from England and I knew I wouldn't stay permanently.

I found that as time passed I missed home more and more. The things I thought I disliked about England became things I missed and wanted. The people, the density of the popullation and the English lifestyle.

Living the Australian life was great, but the constant heat, the slower pace of life and having to stay up until 4am to see the football are things I won't miss.

To give some perspective on Oz; there are more people in London than the whole of Australia. Because of this, things are pretty different. Things are a lot cleaner, shops close early and people seem to become complacent with life. The majority of Australians that I met had not
left their own country and some had no intention of doing so. Living in England I found that wanting to see what it's like to be in Asia or in hot weather and all of the things most people desire gave me the motivation to get up and see the rest of the world, but in the end
there really is no place like home.

I intend to come back to Australia next year and see all of the places I didn't this time. Maybe even Tasmania and NZ, but would I change anything about the way I spent my time in Oz? Not a chance.

I had considered a permanent move here and with the job I had at the Government, there was a very real chance of me doing so. I imagine if I had have been travelling around, spending just weeks in cities and going to all of the landmarks I'd have thought it was the best idea in
the world to move there. However, living life in 'real' Oz, where people work and have weekends and holidays to get away, enlightened me on the reality of permanently living here and it's not for me.

Don't get me wrong, Brisbane aka. Brisvegas is awesome. It has a great nightlife, a super casino, real bars and pubs and Queenslander's are some of the best people I've met. Australians love to drink (even if they can't handle it) and the approach that people take to life made
my time spent in this city better than I could have asked for. The Gold Coast has some of the best beaches in the world. I love it there. If only it had the missing pieces from home...

I used to doubt if I would always live in England, and after being to the second best country i've ever been to, England really is the best place to live.

The last year of travelling has made me want to continue to see new places and try new things. There are a million places I want to go to and some places I want to go back to, but I also want to do more in our own, great country. I have the motivation to get around England
and see our cities and famous places that seem like things from a fairy-tale to people who live so far away from them.

No doubt I'll moan when I get back, but it's that moaning that provided the motivation for me to go places and see that we live in the greatest place in the World.

As for the remainder of my trip, well at present I'm on a flight to Kuala Lumpur, where I'm spending a night to see what it has to offer before flying from KL to Stansted Airport, followed by a coach home.

To resolve any doubts I had about the Air Asia airline: It's great! It's cheap, really really cheap and the plane is almost as good as any other I've been on. Of course the BA 747 was the best, but this isn't too shabby at all.

I'll post details of Malaysia once I'm done, but for now, I'm all Ozzed out and need a Sunday Roast, a pint of Carling and to yell abuse at Premiership football players seeing as Blues got promoted!

See you all soon!

Brad

Excelling at Work

So I was pretty dissapointed with my drop in 'Solved on First Contact' metric at work.

I felt as though at Rio Tinto I had developed some great skills. To then have my SOFC metric drop from 97% to 70% was pretty disappointing.

Well disappointed I shall no longer be.

Todays Metrics for last week came out today:

Calls Taken - 178

Solved on First Contact - 172

97% Solved on First Contact

That means only 6 of my Service Calls had to be escalated to a Resolver Group where I could not resolve the problem.

Check out the big brain on Brad!

Brisbane, Australia to Birmingham, England

So things are booked and I actually have my schedule for returning home. As promised...

Itinerary:

8th May:

20:00 (GMT+10)

Train from Brisbane to Cooloongata Airport, Gold Coast

9th May:

8:40 (GMT+10) - 15:10 (GMT+6)

Flight from Cooloongata Airport, Gold Coast to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

15:10 (GMT+6) - 10th May

Stay in Kuala Lumpur for the evening

To Do:

• Petronas Twin Towers
  
• Kuala Lumpur Tower
  
• Petaling Street
• Temples and Mosques if I get time
• Times Square

10th May:

17:00 (GMT+6) - 23:59 (GMT)

Flight from Kuala Lumpur to Stansted Airport, London

11th May:

01:00 (GMT) - 04:00 (GMT)

Coach from Stansted Airport, London to , Birmingham

In the meantime I'm attempting to find a job for when I arrive back home. Things seem to be pretty desperate in Birmingham at the moment so any advice is appreciated.

See you all soon!

Hangover (Vol. 84939201)

So Danny, Jon, Nikko, Pascal, Henryk and I went out last night.

Eleven hours worth of drinking later, I'm dying in my room with the worst hangover ever.

Quotes of the night:

Random Girl: So are you all from England?

Me: Nope! We're English, he's Irish, he's Swiss, he's German and I have no idea where he's from...