Wherever chance takes you!

Purely by chance, we met Anna, Fabian and Tsai and had an intensive week making glass, with some highs and lows in Sydney.

All three of them are exchange students for one term. Anna had heard about us at the glass college in Zwiesel, where she started as an intern shortly after we had left. When she came to Sydney, she heard about these ‘journey-women from Germany’ and thought this must be us. Tsai is from Taiwan and has provided us with an introduction to Asian culture and politics. Funnily, she will be back in Taiwan, a day after we will have landed there.

Despite this lovely ‘Asian European’ mix, we have left earlier than planned. Due to the students’ end of year presentations in three weeks, there wouldn’t have been enough glass for all of us to work with. As the mood changed considerably last Wednesday, we took it as a sign for us to move on. It was all going so well that we were quite disappointed when our time at the furnace was cut to just three hours. We had enjoyed the process of getting really stuck in.

As a distraction on Thursday, we witnessed the dramatic change of colours due to the bush fires in the Blue Mountains. We spent the weekend camping north of Sydney with Anna, Fabian and Tsai and got to know some of Australia’s wildlife; wallabies, turkeys, monitor lizards, sting rays, lyrebirds and many other unidentifiable types of birds.

And so our week turned out to be a small glass making treat with a few compromises. Now we are all packed up again and ready to leave for Melbourne.