It’s nearly four months since we arrived, shortly followed by every single thing we owned in the world, in our new home, in northern Istria. It’s been a whirlwind four months, filled with new places, new friends, bureaucracy, incredible weather, amazing food, new languages – and getting to grips with a stone farmhouse, parts of […]
We’ve got our first guests staying with us at the moment, friends from West Didsbury. It’s been brilliant to have people we know here and to be able to communicate, once again, without having to speak in Esperanto. In fact, being able to speak without thinking. Without having to compute in your head what might […]
I think my series of blogs about things which cause us confusion, will go on for some years to come. Because, at the moment, just about everything is causing us to be be confused 😉 We are muddling through, with the help of new found friends, the internet & just generally having to deal with […]
We’ve never had huge outdoor spaces anywhere that we’ve lived previously. In our last house in West Didsbury, we managed to create quite a funky little haven, out of scaffold planks. But it was still a bit of a tight squeeze and although we loved it, we never had a feeling of space. Well, we’re […]
The House, until we bought it, had been empty for quite a long time. It had been used as a family holiday home, but was in need of an immediate injection of warmth and a bit of TLC. Although we do have renovation plans, these are a bit further down the line as we work […]
Our last cause for confusion centred around the Croatian banking system, which admittedly is getting a little less confusing as we just keep returning to the bank. We’re sure that one day all will slot into place and we’ll be glad of the multiple bank accounts we seem to be acquiring. But banking has led […]
One of the things that we have discovered on our travels, is that flexibility can often mean being able to stay in places that would normally be otherwise a bit too pricey to justify an off-the-cuff trip. We’re very lucky that our circumstances allow us to be flexible and so we’re always on the look-out […]
Since being out in Istria, we have realised that we took so, so many things for granted in England. Of course, having lived in England for 50+ years, you do get used to things – and boy, did we often complain about how things worked. Or didn’t work. But, when you plunge yourself into a […]
You know when things go really smoothly and you get lulled into a false sense of security, that this is how it will always be? Well, that happened to us very recently… We had arranged with the people we’d bought the house from, that while everything else they had left in the house could be […]
After two days of drowning in boxes and bubblewrap, we finally carved out a tiny corner of normality in the living room – unpacking and putting together our sofa was a joy, as was having some cosy candlelight. This may look very lovely (above), but careful photographing did hide the scenes of utter chaos out […]
So, three months after we signed all of the legal documents for The House in the solictors’ office in Rijeka, we found ourselves, on 1st March 2017, heading from our stop-over in Zagreb, to the village of Zrenj in Istria. A very good friend of ours had helped us to organise the transportation of all […]
All of our wordly belongings were being transported from Didsbury to Istria and we knew that we’d have a couple of days, at least, in the house, with only what we could carry in our luggage. So, no bed, no bedding, no crockery, no kettle, no towels. And, no TEALIGHTS! There was only one thing […]