House Hunting

In the last week, we've visited 13 houses.... The baseline was set on Tuesday -- the elegant 4 bedroom home that sounded so nice on paper was falling apart in real life, and there was an actual cockroach wandering across the front hall when we let ourselves in. Ugh. Owen & Georgie joined us for 9 of the houses, and did great -- Owen kept rushing in and saying "there's no furniture in this house EITHER!", like it was some amazing coincidence. And then he would busy himself opening and closing cupboards and chatting with the realtor. In any case, we have an application in now on a place we all like, so let's hope it comes through. If not, more house-hunting for us...

The other logistical task was trying to get ourselves cell phones (or as they're called here, "mobiles"). We wandered into the first shop like total innocents, not realizing that our simple question about plans would be met with a flood of totally incomprehensible information in a language we couldn't understand. Turns out, it's all different here -- rather than buying minutes, you buy dollars, which are then eaten up at a variable rate depending on the company, the phone, the time of day, the phases of the moon, etc. Five days later, we're still confused.

It's been warm this past week -- it got to 110 degrees on Thursday as we visited open houses. But it's not too humid, so we all made it through OK. We parents had dinner on the beach on Thursday night, which was a nice perk. And this week, we'll be leaving the kids behind as we go to the Australian Open tennis. Updates as events warrant!