A Matter of Choice

Checking though an old laptop recently I came across a folder of old photos and decided to pick one for a flashback post.  This one jumped out at me from 10 years ago and is perfect for the anniversary of our move to Cyprus. 2009 was a big year for us! I started the year 4 months pregnant after a very strange quiet sober Christmas and New Year.   We had sold our house in 2008 and were living with my parents while we waited for our apartment to be completed in Cyprus.   So the first few months of the year were a bit weird,   I took early maternity leave to avoid someone having to take voluntary redundancy, as I wasn't planning on going back after anyway, and spent a couple of months twiddling my thumbs,  meeting friends during their lunch breaks,  wandering round shops and watching tons of tv - sounds amazing looking back! It all changed of course with the arrival of Leo,  his due date was May 16th and naively I was convi...

This week is the anniversary of our move to Cyprus, 6 years ago we were in the process of saying our goodbyes in a endless stream of afternoon meetups with little Leo being dragged all over Kent, family lunches and leaving drinks. We were packing and sorting and re homing many of our possessions, selling loved items or giving them away to new homes, we said goodbye to our lovely dog as she went to her new home. We played 'real life Tetris' as we called it when we constantly tried to fit things into and around other things to save on shipping space, suitcase filling or packing up the car for our trips around the country to far away friends for a final meet up.  I remember filling our new fridge freezer with fragile items, wrapping the glass shelves with duvets and packing them into the Christmas tree box, and then fighting with cardboard, bubble wrap and packing tape in a small garage trying to wrap the fridge itself for shipping.  For weeks our conservatory g...

I first visited Cyprus in August 2007, just after we decided that it would be a good idea to move here! You can read Part One of our story here,  and Part Two here , if you missed them. I had the strangest feeling walking to the the old Larnaca airport for the first time. I can picture it now as clearly as if I was looking at a photo.  I strongly felt like I had been there before and had the feeling you get when you approach passport control off an inbound flight to Gatwick and I could clearly imagine 'coming home'  to it in the future.  We were met at the airport and driven to our accommodation with an apology about the standard of apartment we were to be staying in, along with an explanation that it was the only place left vacant on the biggest bank holiday of the summer.   We wondered if maybe they were not actually taking us seriously as potential buyers as it wasn't the best of first impressions.  As we opened the door to our dump of ...

The story of our move to Cyprus is like many things in our lives, fairly random, and it's taken me five years to get round to writing it down. I thought it was about time considering this was the reason I started a blog in the first place! You can read part one here - Let's Move to Cyprus The idea of moving was talked about more and more and it was starting to feel like was actually something we could do, although we were still yet to ever have set foot in the country. It does seem ridiculous, especially as I knew nothing about Cyprus and could only imagine it to be somewhere between Greece and Turkey (in appearance, not just geographically!)  Which makes it more strange as I'd been to Turkey and didn't much like it, and I'd been to Greece (Corfu) and stayed in a cheap and nasty apartment on a teenage drinking holiday  so my idea of a combination of the two countries didn't fill me with confidence! My Mum and Dad however had been to Cyprus many times a...

This month we will have lived in Cyprus 5 years, it's not that long in the scheme of things but it feels like a lifetime ago now that I was living in England and would have once dismissed the whole idea of moving here as just a ridiculous dream. I've been blogging only slightly longer than the time I've lived here, having started the blog with the idea of recording the move. Back in the early days I posted short posts and I've often regretted not elaborating on how it all came about.  I'd only written 2 posts before we actually left the UK and then was left without internet for 3 months while CYTA attempted to locate our apartment on the map. I'd never been to Cyprus before we thought about moving here, and I suppose that makes it a slightly strange thing to do. I touched on how it all came about in my very first blog post but I didn't consider myself a 'blogger' then and I don't feel like I really captured the story, so I thought I'd pl...