Coming up for Air

Hello!

Hello?

Crickets…

Well I suppose that’s what I should expect after having ceased to write as soon as I landed in the country around which I set up the entire blog.

I received the following e-mail from my aunt this morning:

Lauren - I went to your blog and you are still on the plane.  Is that right?  Love, RD 

As a child I was always fairly terrible at keeping a diary. I’d spend hours finding the perfect notebook, deciding on the proper greeting (should I address the notebook? or just begin to write?), and figuring out how I would end my posts (with love, Lauren? Or Goodnight, see you tomorrow?). I would write with fervor for the next couple of days, jotting down all manner of sights, sounds, and small details. And then days, weeks, months would go by, and each intermittent post was always apologetic, full of excuses and remorse. Inevitably, I gave up the diary altogether, or found a more interesting-looking notebook and started all over again, vowing that this time I’d commit myself fully to journaling.

I was swapping travel stories with Jess the other night over facebook, whose blog Mountains are Mountains is a beautiful and truly sensory chronicle of her ongoing adventures in India, when I expressed regret at having been unable to find time to write.

"You’ll sit down to write when you find time to sit down and write," she soothed. It was simple, but I felt better.

So here I am. Because the time is finally right. Because after two long weeks filled with boot camp-style house hunting (up at 8 am for free breakfast of rice crispies and peanut butter toast, a couple hours spent combing through Gumtree–Australia’s version of Craigslist–for apartments that didn’t say “no pets, no couples,” out for the rest of the day viewing places by appointment, and falling into our creaky hostel bed, exhausted at 10 pm, to do it all again the next day), we finally found an apartment!

I’ll write more on our place when I have proper pictures to post later (famous last words, right?) but for now, I’ll leave you with an idea of where we’ll be staying (I ♥ Google Maps).

The apartment may not be luxury (as you will soon see…), and it certainly needs a lot of little TLC, but it’s cheap and it’s RIGHT ON THE BEACH.

So, yesterday we did something wild, something we haven’t done in what seems like ages. (Oh, get your head out of the gutter!) We didn’t set the alarm to wake up.

And you know what? We got up at 11 in the morning, right on time for free Sunday pancakes…

Fondly yours (even in blog-failing-absense),

the traveling stahr…

P.S.  A more informative “what we’ve been doing” post coming next, with pictures!