Moving again…
My niece Rocket can watch hours of homemade Littlest Pet Shop videos on Youtube – do a search and be amazed. This is my new temporary room/office until I move back down south in a couple of weeks. It’s been fantastic spending time with family and generally hanging about in Sydney but I admit I am pining for my own home again and a more peaceful environment. And I’m very happy with the deal I’m getting on the new flat – it’s a part-house in an excellent spot right on the cliffs and will cost less than half my previous rent. Although it’s a bit run down it has plenty of “character” which I always prefer to tidy but bland shoeboxes.
Another slight adjustment comes with something vaguely approaching a commitment to stay in Australia for at least the next year or two. Since coming back from NZ in early 2010 I have been in this maybe/maybe-not mindset about where I want to live, but recently I’ve decided it would be bloody nice to settle in to a place for a change. And so symbolically I went out and got myself a new iPhone4 on a 24 month contract :) Of course none of this precludes me from totally changing my mind and nicking off again; it just means that I won’t do it unless I have a really good reason to.
In other slightly beach-related news, I’m visiting Bali in a month or so, to attend a friend’s wedding. The trip is one of those things I would probably never do myself because I am such a self-hating-western-tourist, but it’s great to have an excuse to go and lounge around drinking coconut rum on floating chairs in giant flower shaped swimming pools (or whatever it is that pasty white people tend to do in Bali).
Wish I could go back to Bali. Going on long walks around Ubud was fantastic. We hired a driver on a couple of days and snorkelled around the Japanese wreck off the east coast near Amed, and around the coral reef to the northwest, near Pemuteran.
Didn’t go near Kuta/Denpasar.
Learn to count in Indonesian, and haggle like your life depended on it. The Balinese we met fully appreciated that tourism drives their economy, so there’s no point being a SHWT.