Moving to Melbourne: from bedbugs and tears to building a career

My move to Australia had an inauspicious beginning. My parents would be selling my childhood home and moving to another country a few months after I left the northern hemisphere for the south, so my possessions faced an ultimatum. Everything must go – to Australia, or into the bin. There was no third option.

Determined to outfox the 23-kilogram limit imposed by the airline, I figured out what I thought was the perfect way to game the system: Just wear everything onto the plane. Then I’d have the weight allowance to bring my collection of original Broadway cast CDs and an ugly bathrobe to which I had an unreasonable attachment. I was clad in tights, leggings, track pants and loose jeans, and several singlets, long-sleeved T-shirts, a few jackets and a winter coat.

Sadly, this was seven years before the all-female Ghostbusters movie, because I would have made an absolutely perfect Stay Puft Marshmallow. If you think a 26-hour journey is uncomfortable, well, you probably haven’t done it wearing everything you own. It levels up a miserable experience to one that is truly hellish. Going through security in Dublin and Dubai were their own particular tortures.

It was February, which meant I was a little too warmly dressed for the 6 degrees it was when I boarded the plane in Dublin. If anyone else had forced me to wear that many clothes in the 40-degree Melbourne heat on the other end, they probably would have gone to prison.

As I’d done it to myself, I had to go to an un-airconditioned youth hostel in St Kilda, the accommodation my partner and I had booked because it was very cheap and in the only suburb anyone in Ireland had ever heard of.

Were we slightly leery when we read online reviews that the place was infested with bedbugs? “That was several months ago,” we said with the callous disregard for personal comfort common in 23-year-olds. “Surely they will have dealt with them by now.”

If you are wiser than I was (which is almost certain), you know that they absolutely had not. The overnight 35-degree increase in temperature was not kind to a body that, although raised in New York, had become used to Irish winters. Hydration was not the absolute cultural obsession it is now, and I was ill-prepared for the heatwave.

I spent a lot of those first few days throwing up into the hostel toilet while bedbugs and fleas raised lines of welts on my bare legs. I could actually see them jumping on my skin as I lay in a bed that hundreds or thousands of backpackers had slept in before me.