A Place to Call Home

As I've mentioned, Martin's company put us up in a serviced apartment for 2 weeks while we found a place of our own. Alas, his expat contract isn't an expat contract at all, but rather a local contract with a few expat perks thrown in.

Because of our diligent apartment searching we moved in to our own permanent apartment 2 days before our 2-week freebie limit was up. We saved the company money! Where is my fruit basket?

The building we are in is actually still being built. The top floors (ahem, penthouses) are still being built but we on the ghetto 13th floor can't hear anything or really even notice. I won't give too many specifics on the building since I like to delude myself into thinking that this blog will one day be so popular that I will have "professional crazed fans" (a.k.a. stalkers). I will say this, though, it is the tallest building in Brisbane, which I find downright fancy.

This works out really, really well for me because I am quite possibly the worst navigator ever. Until I had my drivers license (age 14, holla!) I literally could not find my way anywhere outside of my hometown. Even today when I travel I rely entirely on others to get me around, which means I still know virtually nothing about the layout of Brisbane. Living in the tallest building in town, all I have to do is look up and head in that direction. WIN!

Here are the much anticipated photos that people have been asking for. The pictures are pretty crappy, I must warn you, but I hope the awesomeivity of the place shines through:

Living room (with a view of kitchen table at bottom right):

Bedroom:

Bathroom:

I don't know why Martin deemed it necessary to take a picture of the toilet and sink, rather than the sink and shower, but there you have it, a view of my crapper.

The kitchen:

I like this place a lot. It's quiet, it's shiny and new, and this is our view (albeit a little bit more obstructed than this):

However I do have one complaint. A "furnished apartment" to me means furnished with stuff I will actually use, not furnished with decorative bowls of plastic fruit - which is exactly what we got. This resulted in our recent epic journey to Ikea where obscene amounts of cash was dropped.

Instead of 10 decorative pillows on the bed, how about some actual bedding? Despite the appearance of the bed in the picture, it's bare and unusable underneath. Instead of not one but two decorative bowls of plastic fruit in the kitchen, how about a pot and pan? Furnished means move-in ready, yo. Not plastic fricking fruit.

I have a chip on my shoulder about that damn fruit. It's just so unnecessary.

Of course it ain't all bad, though, otherwise we wouldn't have locked ourselves into this place for a year. It does have a garbage chute which I am very much jazzed about. I've never seen one before! Exciting stuff for a small town girl! It's actually quite fun to use. The bed is the most awesome bed I have ever owned - not that I've ever owned a bed in the adult sense that you go to a store, buy a bed, bring it home and use it.

Now before you jump all over me, I've never claimed to be an adult. My name is Heidi, I'm almost 30 and I've never had a new mattress.

So this is our humble abode! It ain't cheap, but no places in Brisbane are. We pay by the week, which may sound like a system reserved for seedy motels but in reality it's just how things are done here. Every place we looked at listed the price per week. It has no parking space or balcony, which other places we looked at did. The location could not be better, right at the tip between the 3 districts of town we plan to spend the most time. It's all about priorities.

And our priority was frantically saying yes to the first suckers who would take us.