Farewell, old life.

That's as good a title as any for a first post, I guess. At 39, I said farewell to the life I'd always known. I became a teacher at 23 and thought I'd be doing it till 65. I met my husband online when I was 28 and a year later we were married and living in our own little flat just 10 minutes from my parents and my workplace. Our lives revolved around family, close friends, and cats. And work, of course. We pampered ourselves with good food, new toys, and lots of travel. We thought we had it all planned out.

I've always had a certain admiration and envy for people who were crazy enough to pack their bags and start a new life overseas. How do they do it, I often wondered. I didn't think I was ever going to be one of those people. I couldn't imagine leaving everything behind. That was until April 2018, when Baba said, in one of our many conversations where he groused about the country's system, "You guys should get out of here while you still can..."

And I went, "Really? Ok." And as they say, the rest is history.

This was us in June 2019. We had just been granted our PR visa so we came to Perth to check out the vibes in the different neighbourhoods before deciding where we wanted to settle down and set up home.