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I’ve always wanted to travel, for as long as I can remember.
Still, it wasn’t enough for me to really give it my all in overcoming some pretty significant barriers.
When I was in high school, my parents offered to send me on a foreign exchange trip over the school holidays. This was how many kids my age managed to get a taste of the big wide world without their parents hovering over their every move, while still being taken care of. I don’t doubt that it would have been an incredibly enriching and eye-opening experience at that age, and I should have said yes. But I didn’t. I wanted to spend my holiday with my friends, and I figured my time for travelling the world would come. I guess it just didn’t feel like a priority at that point in my life.
When I was in my final year of school, my parents fell on financial hard times. I took up a waitressing job, determined to fund my travels on my own. I ended up working that job for four years, and there were times when I probably had enough saved up to do a trip somewhere. And I tried. To my friends and family, it must have seemed as though I had a different plan every week: one day it was trip to Croatia with some friends, the next it was a tour around the Baltic countries, and the next it was a year at a Kibbutz in Israel. Every plan fell through for reasons both legitimate and designed in my own mind.
You see, by this point, the idea of travelling was built up so much that I think I started to fear it. I spent so much time wondering what abroad smelt like, felt like, sounded like, tasted like. And I was so afraid it would be anticlimactic; unable to possibly live up to the standards that twenty years of dreaming had set. Additionally, the idea of being situated on another part of the globe gave me a strange kind of existential dread. Up until now, I had been able to avoid confronting how large and diverse and intimidating the world really was. To me, South Africa was the world. And that offered me a sense of small-mindedness that made me feel boring, but comfortable.
I think I also subconsciously allowed each trip to fall through because, every time I tried to plan one and it didn’t materialize, I lost hope that I would ever leave South African soil. It started to feel like some unattainable dream that I was silly to even entertain.
To give context, Africa is not like Europe – travelling is not simply a matter of hopping on a train or a two-hour flight and being in a different country. It’s not only a much larger continent, but the infrastructure doesn’t allow for easy, affordable travel between countries. Pair that with much weaker currencies and passports that hold the same value as toilet paper by international standards, and you’ll find that travel is actually quite a feat. That being said, my self-constructed mental barriers were making it harder than it really was.
So I put it off, for several years. After I completed my degree, I decided to focus on my career and tuck my dream of seeing the world into my back pocket.
In the year 2021, I turned twenty-four. Having never left the country was no longer a cute ‘kid’ thing – it made me stand out. In most of the rooms I found myself in, I was the only individual who had never been to a foreign country. It was still on my list of things to do, creeping slowly but surely higher and higher up said list…
And then I met a boy. How I wish something as trivial and insignificant as a boy wasn’t the catalyst for my drastic life change, but sadly, it was a contribution. I have always been, after all, a hopeless romantic.
I must say now, emphatically, that I did not move because of a boy.
However, I stood alongside and witnessed this individual pack up his life to pursue a long-running dream of moving to the UK and, although I had no plans to accompany him, seeing him take the leap gave me the courage I previously lacked to do the same for myself. Seeing him make that jump gave me the nudge I needed to kickstart my fate, and I began actively looking for roles in my field overseas.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of advertising agencies anywhere in the world. I knew I wanted to be in Europe as this would be the easiest place to travel from, but other than that, I was pretty open-minded. Job boards were perused. Companies were researched. CVs were sent. Cover letters were written. Rejection letters were received, but most emails went unanswered.
When I saw an opening for a Fluent English Speaking Copywriter at a global marketing and communications organization based in Budapest, Hungary, I applied half in jest. So far I hadn’t had any luck, and I didn’t think this would be any different. I sent off my application with an attitude of “at least I can say I tried everything”.
And I didn’t hear anything back, for about two weeks.
But one afternoon, while driving home from work, I got a call from an unknown number. The only information I could see about the caller was a line below the sequence of digits that read “Based in Hungary”. I froze, and then laughed.
There was no way.
I arrived home and found an email in my inbox from a recruiter, informing me that she had tried to call regarding my job application for the Fluent English Speaking Copywriter role at the agency in Budapest. Would I be free to hop on a call the following day to discuss it?
I didn’t tell my parents anything until I had completed the first interview, which I felt went well. I stammered, through nervous laughter, that I might be expecting a job offer in Budapest. The next few weeks saw me complete an at-home assignment, another interview, and finally, in December of 2021…I got a 'yes'. The 'yes' I needed, and the 'yes' that would become my one-way ticket halfway across the world.
The company wanted to hire and relocate me to Budapest, Hungary. Their relocation company assisted me in compiling documents, applying for residency permits, getting address documents, and reading long letters written in Hungarian that I didn't totally understand, but signed anyway.
There were moments when I wondered if I truly, honestly, was doing the right thing. The sign I needed came late on a Monday afternoon at the office of my previous job.
The relocation company was meant to be sending me a large package of documents by mail that would be delivered to the front reception desk, and I needed these documents in order to apply for my visa at the Hungarian Embassy in Pretoria, about an hour outside of Johannesburg.
I had been advised to wait until I actually received this package of documents to schedule the visa appointment at the embassy, but getting an appointment took time and I, high on blind faith and my own dumb luck, had already booked the embassy appointment while I waited for the documents. I just had to pray that they arrived on time. The day before the appointment was scheduled to take place, I was at work, and the documents still hadn't arrived. My appointment was at 10AM on a Tuesday, and I sat on Monday afternoon with the documents still in transit. Defeated, I started to accept that I was probably going to have to cancel the appointment and just wait.
But, at exactly 17:10 and just as I was about to leave the office for the day, the front desk messaged me. There was a package for me at reception. That was it. In my mind, this was my sign from god or the universe or honestly anything or anyone wiser than me that this was meant to happen.
Needless to say, the first few months of 2022 were a blur of final working days, packing, moving, picking up visas, sorting, goodbye-ing, crying, gifting, journaling and preparing. And then leaving.
And then arriving.
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