arrival

Landing in a new place, knowing its now home is always a surreal feeling. This arrival was especially so, staring out the taxi window at impossibly tall blocks of apartments, kind of amazed that everything had worked out and we were actually here.

Two years earlier on a stopover trip, we had innocently commented that “we could imagine ourselves living here”, and as soon as the job opened up we jumped at the chance. Things moved rather quickly after that so I don’t think we had really realised what was happening until we got here!

Our taxi driver was lovely, asked us where we were going to be living, offered us to use her moving van if we needed it later on and opened our eyes to the variations in rent prices… she told us of an “expensive” apartment she had to rent in a certain area in order to be allowed to drive a taxi in that region (they have different coloured taxis for different areas here, still working out which colour means what!). The apartment she was telling us about was $7000 a month, everything we had been looking at was $20,000 - $30,000 a month!

The hotel seems very fancy, there is some sort of summer theme going on, staff in Hawaiian shirts, beach scenes in the lobby and the most fantastic floor mural…is it a mural if it's on the floor? … anyway - check it out below, what more could you want!