The following transcript was generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Carlie Bonavia: It’s the Expat Focus Podcast. I’m your host, Carlie. Today we’re talking about slow living: how and why to stop racing through life abroad and start savouring it. My guest is travel writer and fellow Aussie, Carly Hulls. Carly moved to Vienna in Austria in 2012. After some time living back in Australia, she and her family returned to Austria to enjoy a slower pace of life in the historical Alpine region of Tyrol.
Before we start, I have to address the double Carlie going on here. It’s lovely to chat to another Carly, and I think it could be the very first time on this podcast. So welcome, Carly.
Carly Hulls: Thank you very much, Carlie. Likewise, very excited to have another Carlie to talk to.
Carlie Bonavia: Now tell me about how you ended up relocating your whole life from Australia to Vienna.
Carly Hulls: Wow. Initially Vienna. Initially, it was for work, and then it ended up being for love in the long run. I was working as a travel agent in Australia selling Contiki tours, Busabout tours, Topdeck tours, and all sorts of 18 to 35 products. Eventually I thought, what if I actually worked for one of these companies that ran the tours?
So I applied, along with thousands of others, to be a tour guide in Europe for a season. It’s an incredibly intensive process, with thousands of applications, but I got through and got myself a job with Topdeck Travel for the summer of 2011. Then in the winter, I decided I’d been on the road long enough. You’re on an 18 to 35 trip, so there was a lot of “work hard, play hard” dynamic happening.
Carlie Bonavia: Lots of energy needed.
Carly Hulls: Yes, that’s a very polite way to put it! So I said, “Okay, for the winter I just want to stay in one spot. I just want to unpack my bag once.” I applied for a job to be a ski rep, which looking back was pretty ballsy, because I didn’t really know what a ski rep did.
I’d never stayed in a ski resort. I’d skied in Australia, but not in resorts where they have hosts like they do here in Europe. I ended up landing a job in a random village in Austria just outside of Innsbruck, and met a boy in an après-ski bar here…
Carlie Bonavia: Oh, so cliché!
Carly Hulls: I know. Every time I tell the story, I think, “That does sound ridiculous.” But it can happen. It can happen to you guys! Or at least it could in 2011, right before Tinder and everything else entered our lives.
We met in the January, and in order for me to get a visa and have the legal right to stay in Austria, we were married by the September.
Carlie Bonavia: Oh, wow.
Carly Hulls: The definition of a whirlwind romance, with a lot of logistics folded in, and big surprises for my family and friends. But sure enough, 14 years later, I’m back in the village where we first met. We have our five-year-old son here, and we’re building a life in Austria.
For the initial stages, though, and I’m very glad it panned out this way, I was in Vienna for eight years. I think that was a very gentle, soft landing place in Austria to start my overseas adventure.
Carlie Bonavia: It’s fun that you mention Topdeck Travel, because in 2012 I did a Busabout trip by myself through Europe. I can understand why, after doing a trip like that, you’d think, “Yes, I want to be one of those tour guides on the bus telling everyone about the next destination,” upselling you on the next tours with their little handheld pad.
When we stopped in Vienna, I did a bike ride through vineyards, and it was on one of those “top things you need to do before you die” lists. That’s how it was sold to me, anyway. Maybe it was because it was on that list that I took on the marketing speak and went, “Oh, this is incredible.” But it was a very fun day.
Carly Hulls: It’s marketing speak, but it’s also true. Cycling the Wachau outside of Vienna is gorgeous, and even when I lived there, I loved doing that. It was legit. You weren’t swindled.
Carlie Bonavia: What can you tell me about those first months in Vienna? What do you remember?
Carly Hulls: Oh, man. With the disclaimer that it was 2012, so we’re a good few years out of it, I think it was at once super exciting and terrifying, because we didn’t know if I was going to get a visa. I’d made this crazy, rash decision to marry a boy I met in a bar, but it also felt like the most sensible, straightforward path.
In my heart, I was like, “No, this will work out. We can make this work.” It was incredibly exciting to almost rebuild your sense of self, or push up against the definition of who you think you are, in a completely new environment. No friends, no language, and I couldn’t work because I didn’t have a visa yet.
I was completely starting from scratch, but with the love of my life. So it was a really good exercise in what I actually believe in and where I stand on things. One topic I remember really strongly is money.
I’d grown up as a huge feminist, with girl boss energy, always extremely independent and stubborn. Because I couldn’t work, I had to learn to be reliant on another person for money, for rent, for everything else. That was just one instance of confronting my own bias and the little bubble I’d been living in, and that happened about 100 times within the first couple of months of expat life.
I was very fortunate that it happened when I was 26 or 27. It’s the perfect age: no dependants, no responsibility. I could embrace the experience, with all the terrifying lows and exhilarating highs. And you do find a way. For better or worse, you find a way to navigate through it. But at the time, it was simultaneously super exciting and super terrifying.
Carlie Bonavia: And what, in your opinion, makes Vienna such a great city?
Carly Hulls: Oh, man, I could talk for days about Vienna. This is going to sound like a burn, but it’s a compliment: it’s very civilised. When I say civilised, I mean that when you get on the U-Bahn, their equivalent of the Tube, or a tram or anything else, it’s quiet.
Everyone is respectful. If a kid jumps on playing loud music on his phone, a terrifying old Viennese lady will tell him off. You can go out and have Aperols from 5pm, but there aren’t people getting lairy drunk on the streets. It’s this very civilised feeling of, “Okay, we’re just having a wine with lunch.” What I would call typically European energy.
Vienna is also home to the United Nations. They have a headquarters there, along with a number of other international organisations, so the city is a blend of different cultures and languages. And it’s in Central Europe, so you can jump on a train and be in Amsterdam, Italy, Budapest or Prague. For an Australian, that’s mind-blowing, to be in a different country within a couple of hours.
It was a really beautiful way to land in Europe. Very biased opinion, but I think Vienna’s a perfect city to be in between the ages of about 25 and 35. It’s got a good nightclub scene if you want it, and a good outdoor and activity scene if you want it.
There are quite a few startups there. You can get by on bad German, let’s put it like that. You can find work in English, and as long as you’re doing German courses and trying to speak German, you’re generally well received. And it’s been voted the most liveable city in the world for years and years.
Carlie Bonavia: I saw this, and as a Melburnian… I’m not sure where you’re from in Australia, Carly?
Carly Hulls: I am from Melbourne, and my mum tells me every year, “Well, Melbourne was number two, you know. You could come back to Melbourne.”
Carlie Bonavia: I was going to say, I had a very similar reaction. Hang on a second! Vienna and Melbourne are going head-to-head? I don’t know how I feel about this.
Carly Hulls: If you’re from Melbourne, you know. It’s an established city, and it’s easy to navigate. What I particularly found culturally was that Vienna was very welcoming to a more balanced lifestyle.
It wasn’t all about work the whole time. They really embrace things like stores being closed on a Sunday, which is Austria-wide. I initially found it ludicrous, but it gets baked into your weekly habits, and you learn to appreciate that it’s part of the culture, part of slowing down, part of enjoying your life outside of work.
That still informs a large part of why I appreciate living in Austria. So yes, all my love and respect to Melbourne. I’m a Melbourne girl at heart. I will always go down a dodgy alley to find an underground bar and sit on a milk crate.
Carlie Bonavia: Yep. I’m there with you.
Carly Hulls: And they do have a little bit of that in Vienna. It was a really great way to land in Europe, and it felt different to landing in London or somewhere where there’s a huge Aussie contingent you can fall back on and you’re still speaking English. It was different and confronting, but in a gentle way. I wasn’t thrown too far into the deep end.
Carlie Bonavia: Did Vienna inspire you to embrace slow living, or did you bring it with you, or did you discover it after you’d been there a while?
Carly Hulls: Good question. I think the city definitely forced me to slow down. If you’d asked me in 2013, “Are you embracing slow living?” I’d have said, “What are you talking about?”
I probably wouldn’t have had the label for it, but it definitely did. In Vienna, your standard office worker will go for an hour or hour-and-a-half lunch, maybe to a restaurant to have a wine with their lunch, or to the canteen in their office, where they get a full three-course meal and everyone sits down and eats together.
It’s not a performance, but it’s a ritual where they respect the time to sit down and eat your lunch. I’d been having salad at my desk for years. So even small things like that encourage you to slow down, along with Therme (thermal spa) culture, sauna culture, and the wineries that you mentioned.
Vienna has the largest number of wineries within city boundaries in all of Europe. That means when you knock off work, in summer in particular, or during wine season in October, most people are hiking up to what they call Heurigers, these wine taverns, on the weekends to enjoy the views across the city, the wine, the culture and the lifestyle.
It’s really baked into the city. You can try to push hustle culture and move at that pace, but the city doesn’t move at that pace, so you’re an outlier. It is changing a bit now, as the city’s got more and more populated. But if we’re asking whether it was chicken or egg, I think Vienna started me on the pathway to slow living.
Carlie Bonavia: Do you remember a specific point in your time in Vienna when you consciously decided to slow down?
Carly Hulls: There are probably two junctures in the last 10 years that I would pinpoint. For my first six or seven years, I had a job with a travel startup that I got when I first landed in Vienna because of my blog, because of writing online, which is the most millennial shit ever. But I’m very grateful.
Carlie Bonavia: I was there, yeah.
Carly Hulls: So I was deep in startup, “we’re all family” hustle culture, leading global teams, and I loved it. I thrived in it until I didn’t. Six years in, I hit a wall and had burnout in about 2018, I think. I negotiated down to a part-time role to begin with.
That was the first crunch moment. I’d been throwing myself into this work life where I’d be in the office at 7:30 or 8 o’clock in the morning and wouldn’t leave before 6pm, and I’d host events at night and all that sort of stuff. My body just told me it was time out.
That was the start of it. Then in 2019 I was part-time, and in 2020, because I’m an optimistic person, I was planning to go full-time freelance, hosting my own tours and writing retreats, going all out self-employed in Vienna as a local expert. And then it was 2020, and that was no longer an option.
Carlie Bonavia: That put a spanner in the works.
Carly Hulls: It definitely threw us. We moved back to Australia during the pandemic, and I had my son there. The second pivot point, where I realised I needed to look at my lifestyle differently, wasn’t just having my son. Everyone says having kids changes things, yada yada. We know that story.
It was that I noticed how much more time I was spending outside. It sounds really simple, but I was going on walks with the pram. At the time I was living in Newcastle, so we were often down at the beach in the early morning, or in a park in the afternoon. I remember noticing that I hadn’t spent this much time outside during the day, during the week, in years.
That was a real light bulb moment. I thought, “I’ve ploughed 10 or 15 years of my life into office work, sitting in a dark room.” Right now I’m still sitting in a dark home office, but I get a lot more time outside now.
That realisation really stuck with me. I could choose to go into an office and spend eight, 10 or 12 hours a day sitting under terrible lighting without much movement, or I could find a different approach that gets me outside. Not even exercising, just sitting outside a bit more, which sounds really simple. But those were the two big ones for me.
Carlie Bonavia: Was there a reason why you wanted to do that back in Austria and not in Australia? I ask because in my years stalking expat groups and forums, there seems to be a turning point for Australians in Europe where they’re chasing a slower, more outdoorsy lifestyle, and many of them decide Australia is the place to do that, not where they are.
So after the pandemic, what was the motivation for you and your family to move back from Australia to Austria?
Carly Hulls: Great question. I will say upfront, both are excellent options. It’s not like I was choosing between a bad option and a good option. We were choosing between two incredibly privileged options.
For us, it was partly pure employment logistics. My husband worked for a software company that had been very happy for him to move to Australia and open up the market there for two or three years. Then it got sold to a US private equity company, and they laid off 30% of their staff within two weeks of buying the company. He was one of them.
At the time, I was still only part-time with the company I was working for. Our son was about two and a half, and we had relocated to Sydney by then. And Sydney is a whole different ballgame financially.
Carlie Bonavia: Oh, yeah.
Carly Hulls: So it was primarily economic. We also had the opportunity, through family, to have a secure housing situation back in countryside Tyrol, where we are now.
A lot of our conversations were about what childhood we wanted to give our son. I knew from talking with my partner that he grew up in a fairytale. This village is a proper fairytale. The neighbours wave to you from their doorways, and you’re out in the woods and skiing all the time.
I saw it as a really good opportunity for our family to have a very different lifestyle that’s hard to recreate in a city, and I knew I didn’t have it in the suburbs of Melbourne either. So it was a combination of economic factors and the availability of employment options.
The employment options for my partner were much, much stronger back in Austria. His whole network was there. And we couldn’t afford Sydney, man. Rent was bananas.
Carlie Bonavia: I don’t think I can afford Melbourne, man!
Carly Hulls: That’s exactly it.
Carlie Bonavia: That’s the reality.
Carly Hulls: Childcare in Australia, while great, was unaffordable. It was the equivalent of €800 for three days a week, which meant I may as well not bother going back to work. The maths didn’t math. And we knew we would have much more support moving back to Austria.
We had to make a crunch call on a pretty short timeline, because the runway was running out fast.
Carlie Bonavia: Yeah, especially in the case of a redundancy.
Carly Hulls: Exactly. A redundancy with a young kid. Thankfully, the company I was with, and I’m still with them, transferred my contract over to Europe, which was fantastic, so we could keep that security. And sure enough, within two weeks of being back in Austria, my partner found a really great position.
We’ve now renovated the house here, and it’s all manageable. But oh my God, we both still dream of the seafood. We both still dream of being in Sydney, going for dumplings and riding the ferry. In a perfect world, we’d spend three months a year back in Australia and give my kid the whole beach lifestyle, being raised near the water.
But it’s just not feasible. Even this year we wanted to go back and visit, and we couldn’t because of the flights and the Iran crisis. So we took all the signs from the universe and said, “All right, we’ll go back to Austria.”
Carlie Bonavia: This is where we go. So now you’re in Tyrol, is that right?
Carly Hulls: Correct. Just outside of…
Carlie Bonavia: I know nothing about Tyrol, but I’m very curious about how slow living shows up for you in what I imagine is a naturally slower, smaller, quieter place to live.
Carly Hulls: It is. Where we are is a very tourism-heavy region. We’re about an hour outside of Munich, 45 minutes from Innsbruck, and about an hour and a half from Salzburg. We get a lot of tourism for the mountains, in particular skiing in winter and Alpine holidays in summer. So it’s slower, but the village has its own rhythm that’s dictated a lot by travellers, which has been super interesting.
For me, slow living is baked into things like the stores being closed on Sunday. Otherwise, I have to consciously structure it into my day and week, to plan it without over-planning it. What I mean by that is I’ll aim to wake up at 6am and go for a 20-minute jog.
Definitely not a run, just forcing my body out of the house to see a bit of the sunrise or get the fresh morning air when it’s cooler. Or instead of driving to get the groceries, which would be a four-minute drive, I try to cycle into the village, just to be in nature, be in the village.
From a community perspective, even more so than in Vienna, they have a lot of annual rituals here. There are festivals like Summerfest or Midsummerfest, and in October or November you have a lantern festival where the kids make their own lanterns and walk through the woods.
Some of these are based in pagan traditions, some are much more Catholic. But they have a lot of traditions baked into the calendar year that force you to slow down, to stop and to appreciate the season you’re in. I’m sure you have this where you are as well, but even things like, one month of the year the asparagus is growing, and all you can get in the supermarket is asparagus.
Or if I want pumpkin, I’d better get it in October, because I’m not going to be able to eat it the rest of the year. That stuff sounds tiny, but again, it’s not how it was growing up.
Carlie Bonavia: It literally takes over. My supermarket will have the beignet weeks, where there’s a guy piping the jam into the doughnuts right there in the supermarket. Then you have the asparagus machine set up to peel the asparagus before you buy it. And we even have a sauerkraut festival in a nearby village, which apparently is really hard to get tickets to.
Carly Hulls: Rock and roll, baby!
Carlie Bonavia: Can you imagine that in Australia?
Carly Hulls: No. And this is the thing. I find a lot of those seasonal things really ground me in being slow and intentional. This is going to sound stupid to people who grew up with proper seasons, but even having a proper autumn or a proper spring that’s very differentiated from winter or summer…
When we lived in Sydney, it didn’t drop much below 22 or 25 degrees. Melbourne’s a bit different, you get a few more dips. But here the seasons are very distinct, so you feel okay to slow down in autumn because everything around you is slowing down. In winter, it’s okay to chill out at home because it’s snowing outside and you can’t do anything else.
So the environment definitely helps, alongside my own efforts. My philosophy these days is that I want my job to be the least interesting thing about me. I want it to be just a small slice of all the other things I do in building a life here, whether that’s gardening, or relearning how to play the saxophone. I’ve joined the local brass band.
Carlie Bonavia: Amazing!
Carly Hulls: Super nerdy. Or going outside with my kid on a bike ride for an hour on a Monday afternoon, because I can, and because school finishes at 12 o’clock here. So it’s a combination of intentional things from my side, and environmental pieces on top of that that help facilitate it.
We went back to Australia after being in Austria for eight years, and I know that changing the environment changed my mentality as well. I slipped straight back into fast-paced culture in Australia, because that’s what’s all around you, right?
Carlie Bonavia: So is it working for you and your family in Tyrol? Are you all embracing this life that you’ve carved out for yourselves? Or are there still moments where you crave a trip into Vienna?
Carly Hulls: Definitely still craving it. But overall, I would say yes. This is kids’ paradise. When I mentioned the Alpine holidays, basically every mountain and gondola here has a kids’ adventure playground at the top that you can spend days at.
My kid loves bike riding and being outside. He’s a ski freak and skis faster than me at five years old, which is terrifying. All of that, plus being in a small village, feels very different. I don’t know what “working” looks like or what the definition is, but for now, it’s working for us.
We’re slowly embedding ourselves in the community. But that’s because I still do things like go for a girls’ weekend in Vienna. I went and got my hair cut in Vienna! I like to do a bit of shopping when I go to Innsbruck or Vienna or Munich.
Every now and then I need a fix: let’s get out of the countryside and do my little hipster, bougie things that I curated over a lifetime of growing up in Melbourne and living in Vienna. That definitely helps.
Carlie Bonavia: I’m curious to know, what is an element of slow living that sounds dreamy but might be a little more difficult in practice? We talked about everything closing on Sundays. That’s very true here in France as well, and it’s something that took me years to be okay with.
I’d tell my husband I wanted to go to the hardware store, but nothing’s open on a Sunday. He’d say, “But why should they be open for you when they can be at home with their families?” And I’d say, “But what about the university and high school kids who need weekend jobs?”
And he’d say, “But why should they have to work when they’re focusing on their studies?” It was a completely different mentality, and it took me a long time to internally relax about that.
Carly Hulls: Great question, because I was the same. I was just frustrated until I had to concede.
Carlie Bonavia: You’re not going to change a culture.
Carly Hulls: Yeah. I would have those exact same conversations, and I’d think, “Oh God, I’m the asshole. I’m the asshole who wants people to work on a Sunday.” Am I the baddie? Am I fighting the bad fight here? But I also loved working double pay on a Sunday in a pub.
Carlie Bonavia: Wasn’t it great? Double time, and double time and a half on public holidays. Come on.
Carly Hulls: Exactly. But here, working on a public holiday would be an infringement on my rights. It’s a very interesting dynamic.
I don’t know if this is necessarily slow living, but one of the friction points I’ve observed since we came back is this. It’s all very beautiful and nice to move into an old home and renovate it in this cute village that people come to for holidays. But we’re living in a dynamic of, not quite overtourism, but our region has a real problem with holiday homes.
On the street where we live, there’s us and our five-year-old kid, and there are three full-size homes around me that are empty 90% of the year. They’re owned by people who live about an hour away and use them as holiday homes, but they’re not maintained, and it means we don’t have community around us.
I can see these empty rooms out my window, and I know other families in the village are looking for bigger homes for their growing families, and they’re not accessible. So the picturesque idea of “Oh, we’ll just move to the countryside and build our whole lives here” is increasingly difficult.
The only reason we could pull this off is literally that my husband was born in this house. Otherwise, it’s really not that accessible, because of the creep of the housing investment mentality. It’s a very real and very hot political topic in the region that they’re looking to address.
So that hasn’t been like the fairytales. It’s not making our lives hideous, but I notice the difference in parts of the village where lots of families live and it’s affordable. Kids are running around and can go out on the street and play. We’re not even a 15-minute bike ride away, and here it’s empty unless it’s the weekend.
Carlie Bonavia: Ghost town.
Carly Hulls: Yeah. And I see that it’s less and less accessible for people to come here. If my friends want to come and stay for a weekend, we can now fit them in the spare rooms in our house. But if they want to book accommodation, it’s around €250 a night, which is insane. “Come and visit me, it’ll cost you 500 bucks.” “Hmm, I don’t like you that much. We’ll figure out something else.”
So that’s the reality confronting this slow living fairytale of life in the Alpine countryside. Another one I’m still on the learning curve with is that we’ve just started, not quite homesteading, I’ll say gardening, but growing our own vegetables and produce.
It’s all very nice in theory. “Oh, I’ve got my first tomato of the season, gorgeous, take a photo of it.” But it is constant, and you’re at the whim of the weather gods, and the weather gods are very unpredictable right now. So that has been a journey. I’m a girl from the suburbs. I have no idea how to grow fruit and vegetables.
Carlie Bonavia: And figuring out what to do with too many tomatoes when you’re a family of two or three. Then the next month you have too many cornichons, and you’re like, “Okay, I need to learn how to pickle pickles, because I don’t need so many baby cucumbers.”
Carly Hulls: Yeah. What do I do with about 40 lettuce heads? I don’t need this much lettuce. And lettuce doesn’t freeze.
Carlie Bonavia: I am very guilty of that. Putting in way too many plants.
Carly Hulls: It’s still really picturesque and really beautiful. I know it’s a bit of an online trend now, all this homesteading and getting chickens and going back to traditional… not trad-wifing.
Carlie Bonavia: No.
Carly Hulls: Going off the deep end.
Carlie Bonavia: You need to learn how to can and preserve everything, and then you’ll be set for the apocalypse. It’ll be great.
Carly Hulls: That scares the shit out of me! I’m just going to buy some more freezers for now, I think. I can’t quite go as far as canning. That seems a step too far.
It’s very picturesque in theory: “We’re just going to grow our own food.” Then you’re like, “Oh, shoot, now I actually have to deal with all this food we’ve grown,” or, “I lost this food because the weather went over 40 degrees for two days in a row.”
Carlie Bonavia: On the subject of chickens, my parents get too many eggs for the two of them. But then I saw a woman online who was preserving her eggs in a jar, and I thought, “Wow, I didn’t know you could do that.” Pickling eggs, essentially. Maybe it’s an acquired taste.
Carly Hulls: Ooh. I don’t even know if I’d want to eat them. I would have to try some before…
Carlie Bonavia: Committing.
Carly Hulls: Committing! That’s the extreme. I think that’s over my line. That’s on the canning side of the line.
Carlie Bonavia: This is where you need to give them to the people coming to the holiday homes. Free eggs on arrival!
Carly Hulls: Correct.
Carlie Bonavia: Carly, for someone who’s just arriving in Austria in 2026, still settling in, based on your experience and the way you’ve seen the country, the cities and the regions change, what do you think they should be prioritising?
Carly Hulls: This one’s a real gimme, but you’re going to have to do a Deutsch course. You’re going to have to learn German, even if it’s just to smooth over the awkwardness. You don’t have to be fluent in a month. You don’t have to conquer the language straight away. But you get a lot more leeway, and a much better reaction, if you even attempt to speak German.
They will 100% answer you in English, because they’ll hear immediately that you’re not a native speaker. But you’ve got to try. You’ve got to take a step in that direction, and it’ll smooth the pathways.
The other thing, which I’ve recommended to a few people I do support calls with, people who are moving abroad or to Austria in particular, is the Verein. They’re very strong in countryside regions, but I think you can find them in Vienna too. A Verein is basically a club, and it can be for any interest.
If you play badminton, tennis, football, sports definitely, but also, here in the countryside we have the music Verein, which I’m now part of with the brass band. There’s cycling, a shooting club, a bowls club for retirees. There are all these clubs you can join, and you don’t have to be a sports master or king of everything.
It’s just a really good way to connect with locals. Particularly in cities like Vienna, it’s very easy to get stuck in the expat bubble. Going to expat events is a nice landing place initially, but it really makes a difference if you can connect with people who are from the area, or at least from the country.
These clubs are very casual, with a small joining fee of something like €8 a year.
Carlie Bonavia: €8 a year? That’s brilliant. My clubs are still a few hundred a year.
Carly Hulls: Yikes! Yeah, these are not gym membership prices. They’re properly just community organisations: ski club, reading club. There are clubs for every sort of hobby. It’s a good way to connect outside of the expat bubble.
That’s been really helpful for me, and I’ve suggested it to a few support call clients who didn’t know it existed. It’s not necessarily something you can Google. You have to look around a bit, or know they exist, to go down to the tennis club and find out, and then you’ll see listings.
Austria’s a bit like that. A lot of Austrian websites are still from the ’90s, so you have to dig a bit further.
Carlie Bonavia: I know the ones.
Carly Hulls: They’re very awkward. The only other thing I normally tell friends or people relocating is to give yourself a minimum of 18 months from arrival before making any decision about whether you stay or go.
In my experience, that’s how long you need to actually arrive, settle and give it a try. It’s still going to be challenging and exciting for probably five years, until you have an established community. But don’t bail within the first six or 12 months unless it’s a very dramatic scenario.
Give yourself grace for at least 18 months to get established, and then reconsider any drastic decisions, because it takes time to get used to things and to try with a bunch of different people to find your place.
Carlie Bonavia: I’ve heard people say, “Don’t go home within the first year,” and strategies like that, and I think that’s so important.
Carly Hulls: Yeah, so that it doesn’t just feel like a holiday. It’s very easy to think, “Ooh, this is lovely. I’ll go to the palace and eat strudel every day.”
Carlie Bonavia: And when I’m sick of it, I can leave.
Carly Hulls: Exactly. You can probably skate on that for the first six months, and then you’re like, “Oh, okay, I need to actually live here.”
Carlie Bonavia: Oh, and you have that famous cake too, don’t you?
Carly Hulls: Yes, the Sachertorte, the chocolate cake. You can still enjoy that and do the tourist things. I did almost every day in Vienna. Every morning my tram went past Schönbrunn Palace, and I’d be like, “Hee hee, there’s a palace on the way to work.” But it settles after the first six months. You’ve got to give yourself time to actually live there.
Carlie Bonavia: A lot of people say to me, “Oh, I don’t know how you do it in France. I’d just be eating baguettes and croissants every day.” And I’m like, “Well, when you live here, you just don’t.”
Carly Hulls: I still need to have a salad sometimes, guys!
Carlie Bonavia: That’s a lot of butter.
Carly Hulls: It’s a lot of carbs. Yeah, 100%.
Carlie Bonavia: Finally, Carly, you’ve created a digital guide to discovering Vienna. Where can people get a copy?
Carly Hulls: It’s available on my website, carlyhulls.com. If you go to the tab that says “Store”, you’ll find it there.
It’s downloadable and currently on sale. Inside, there are curated recommendations of where to eat and what to see, your standard guidebook stuff. But I’ve also put my eight years of heart and soul, loving and living in Vienna, into it.
It has guides to the different districts, how they vary, and how you can go on your own discovery walks without being too structured about it. It has a guide to the annual events and where to go in certain seasons. In summer, like right now, I’d definitely recommend the Heurigers, and I can tell you where to go for things like zip lining.
You can go down to the Alte Donau, where there are all these bars, places to swim, wakeboarding areas and cool stuff to do. Then there are guides for different parts of the year that are hard to sniff out by yourself, all in one place.
It also has a downloadable Google Map. You get sent the link separately, so if you’re wandering around the city independently, you can pull up the map and say, “Okay, this café’s over here,” or, “I can get a drink over here,” or, “I can go into this district.”
It’s very much a labour of love, and it’s on sale now on the website, carlyhulls.com.
Carlie Bonavia: That’s it for today. Are you prioritising a slower pace of life? Let us know what that looks like for you in the comments on our YouTube channel. Just search for Expat Focus. Don’t forget to like, subscribe or follow, however you like to listen to the show.
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