120

I recently went online investigating what the feasibility would be to live in Australia. After reading entry after entry of my friend Dave's online journal and his year-long travels and experiences around New Zealand, I realized that I will not be personally satisfied until I (at least) make every attempt I can to fulfill my dream of living in that part of the world. So I went online and found, purely by chance, this site which rates my likelihood of being awarded a visa for Andrea and I. Collectively, we scored 120 and apparently, if I pay the $299 fee, I can find out within the next six to twelve months if the visa can be awarded to us to live and work there. Now neither she nor I are ready to move there within that time period because I'd really like for her to get her permanent (non-conditional) residency visa for the states which is a two-year process after she first arrived.

Personally, I have yet to find a place where I feel like I'm home; a place to live where I could live in financial comfort with the job I have, a place where it is easily accessible by car or plane without costing a fortune; a place that has friendly and open-minded neighbors, a good mix of different cultures and languages, and offers plenty of activities to meet my interests. Maybe I've found the place, lived there and left because it wasn't the right time for me to be there. The San Francisco Bay area comes to mind. I'd like to live there again, just not as a teacher. In fact, of the places I would like for us to live in the U.S., I don't see how we could live on a teacher's salary.

Something that just occurred to me as I finished watching An Inconvenient Truth for the umpteenth time (Did you know Al Gore was recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize?), I can predict that many of the domestic issues that have been largely ignored by the powers-that-be will be depicted and brought back into the forefront of people's lives through movies and documentaries made in Hollywood. Education, poverty, homelessness, corruption, disease... I can almost guarantee that a documentary will be made of one of these domestic problems and something will be done about it. Why wait for it, maybe I'll make my own documentary about the educational system in the US.