Post by Gerrit Goedecke

Sunday has no push-ups in The Push-Up Challenge. Lucky, because airport floors are not ideal for public exercise. I’m on my way back from Perth to Berlin and have a few hours between flights. That is usually the strange part of a trip. You are no longer really in one place, but not yet in the next one either. Just sitting around with a coffee, a backpack, and a body that has stopped pretending it knows what time it is. The last two weeks were meant to be a bit of vacation and family time. They were. But I also ended up seeing a lot of familiar faces from my decade in Australia. Some planned, some not. And after enough conversations, you start noticing what people are talking about. Australia and Germany are very different. That is not exactly breaking news. But some of the discussions sounded surprisingly familiar. Housing that is getting too expensive for too many people. Energy supply and the difficult question of how to move to cleaner energy without pretending the old system can disappear overnight. And whenever people feel something is not working properly, immigration somehow ends up near the top of the pile. Trust me, I have opinions on all of this. Probably too many for an airport post. But it was interesting to hear the same broad worries through a different accent on the other side of the world. Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up in Berlin, and work at VKS – Association of the Potash and Salt Industry will be waiting. So for now I’m slowly trying to move my head out of Perth mode and back into Germany mode. The body will follow at some point. By the way, I’m very proud that my son decided to join The Push-Up Challenge as well to support mental health. So instead of asking you to support my push-ups, I’ll put the link to his donation page in the comments. If you would like to support the cause, I’m sure he would be very happy about every donation. #MentalHealth #Australia #Germany #Perth