It’s much harder to think of blog ideas when you’ve settled into a sense of normalcy. It feels as if at this point I’m blogging about regular life, which I doubt any of you were interested in when we lived in Arlington! Anyhoo, you’re here, so we might as well keep you entertained.

We’ve been keeping fairly busy since we got back from Hawaii. We spent a weekend up in the Yarra Valley (about 1.5 hours from Melbourne) and went on a winery tour and explored the town of Healesville.

We went to a show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.  We saw an Australian comedian and were able to understand most of his jokes – at this point last year, we would have been lost!

We made a 2nd annual appearance at the Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular, a beer festival where you can try all sort of wondrous beers that are hard to come by on a day-to-day basis here in Australia.  They even took a photo for us!

It was briefly mentioned in a previous post, but right before we went to Hawaii, we moved house.  We moved to South Yarra, which is a neighborhood about 3km away from our old place and it is closer to the city.  As our previous place was furnished and this one was not, we had to buy quite a bit of furniture.  Luckily IKEA is in Australia and we made good use of it. We’ve been trying to explore things nearby and get ourselves out of the house during these dark, damp winter months by re-implementing our weekly “Handel Happy Hour” on Wednesday nights.  We’ve found a few places we really like.

We have so much more space now and it is actually a detached single family home so it’s very quiet.  We live on a narrow one way street and now I’ve added parallel parking to my wrong-side driving skills. I’m walking 15 minutes to work every day through a park. We’re also closer to a train station – just 2 stops into the city – which is convenient for Sara when she’s actually working in the city.

Our first visitors are coming at the end of this month! We are super excited to share all we know about Melbourne with them. We’ll be really jealous of their US dollars basically getting a 30% discount on everything.  Free lodging and 30% discounts, why wouldn’t you come visit us? I mean, look at your room:

Now that the Australian winter has descended on us, we’re trying to figure out where to go for a warm holiday. There are a few spots in Australia we have on our short list, but then again, its only a 4.5 hour flight to get to Fiji.  Due to limited in-country competition, a lot of international flights are cheaper than some of the domestic options.  So, nothing is planned yet, but we will be heading somewhere warm.