Nicole's Adventures

OOPS! It has been sooo long since I have posted, and there are lots of very exciting things to catch up on! October was a really exciting month. We unexpectedly... well maybe not unexpectedly but many many months earlier than planned rescued a sweet puppy. Well actually sweet might be a little bit of a lie, she is sweet filled with wild on the side. Mel, which means honey in Portuguese and short for Melbourne for  us was found tied up outside of a grocery store in Lisbon by a friend of Joel's co worker. They searched a week for an owner and were just about to take her to the shelter when Joel and I agreed to adopt her on a Monday. We anxiously waited until Saturday to head to Lisbon and pick her up. We really had no idea how big she was going to be, because we only had photos to go by but nothing in the photos besides her to scale. We didn't know if the collar we bought would fit, etc. They weren't sure of the breed, but for sure large amounts of Black Labrador. The fa...

Hey Guys, I thought I would just create a little blog post here for some of my friends thinking about VIPkid and how it all works. VIPKid is a company based out of the US and China which teaches one on one English classes to students in China. It is a huge company with more than 20,000 teachers and over 200,000 students and continually growing! I am paid with direct deposit through my US bank account monthly. Your base wage is determined in your initial interview. I believe the base pays range from $7-9 USD per class. In addition to that, if you are on time to every class you teach during the month, you get an extra dollar per class. Then another $1 per class if you teach more than 45 classes a month! A class lasts for 25 minutes. If a class is booked within 24 hours, you get an extra $2 on top of all the others. If a student who is enrolled in the program doesn't show up you still get your full pay. If the student is a trial, or someone just seeing what VIPkid is like, you ear...

I just had to use my google maps timeline to help me remember what we did in September because it seems like it was soo long ago already! But it was a super busy month without any time to breathe and catch up! At the house, the kitchen was being renovated! The white and blue flowery wall tiles were being taken down, the floor tiles, and a new hole in the wall was created and the water heater moved into the pantry. Originally the idea was to put a door in the hole to make it open or closed depending on the occasion, but we haven't quite gotten to that point yet. For now, the hole remains a beautiful arch. After the new wall tiles, and on one wall a new finish and some paint, and floor tiles were done, Joel moved the assembled Ikea furniture from the dining room to the kitchen. While putting the furniture in place, we had a little mishap and drilled through a water pipe which put us back another week. The pipe was replaced along with ten or so tiles that we had to take back off...

This past weekend we had all of Joel's immediate family stay with us for the weekend. It was a lot of fun together. We put them to work and they took down the asbestos patio cover. Now we just have to break up the cement and we can have a little garden area. How we will break up that cement remains a great question. We had a great time spending time with them. Joel's parents prepared delicious BBQ dinner on Saturday night and I prepared some Butter Chicken for them on Sunday. Very different to their usual Portuguese cuisine. Monday Joel had a flex day off because the electricity was cut at Bosch for the day, so we visited the government offices to start preparing everything needed for my visa. It seems like we are on the right track with some papers getting certified in the US Embassy in San Fransisco. In the mean time while we wait, I can still apply for another 90 day extension to my tourist visa which allows me to stay until Dec 7th.  I was super impressed w...

Joel took off 8 hours after me, but landed 4 hours before me, as I took the cheapest flights I could get my hands on. One way tickets from Australia to Europe are quite expensive and even with the assistance of my friend who works for a travel agency, she couldn't get me much of a deal either.   My flights were fine, nothing too special. I did however get to fly on Cathay Pacific new A350, a plane that Joel has never flown on. For those who don't know, he loves planes and remembers all of the ones he has flown on, and knows all about the engines, etc. I think if something ever goes astray with Bosch, we have to get him into Aerospace engineering instead. :P I had long layers on Beijing where I slept on the airport benches, and Zurich. I fly Melbs to Hong Kong, HK Beijing, Beijing to Zurich, and Zurich to Porto. As usual, I watched lots of movies, eat and slept lots on the flights. When I landed I didn't feel too jet lagged and Joel and his parents were there to greet me ...

The last month in Melbourne was both a blur of busy but sometimes for me felt as we were moving in slow motion. Joel got extremely busy with his colleagues realizing all of a sudden that he was leaving, so he had some last minute business trips of course. They could never let him sit still in Melbs longer than a week or so without a trip somewhere.  Meanwhile I tried to organize all of the elements of the move which became quite time consuming and difficult at times. My last day of work at the school was May 31st. I was not expecting anything from the school because I was only there a few months, but I wanted to bring something to share with them, so brought some Raspberry slices to share with them.. however when I entered the staff room to put it out for morning tea, I saw a massive spread of things on the table... Sooo I added mine. Then, the principal came over to tell me that I didn't have to go out for my morning playground duty.. Then my coworkers brought me to the staff roo...