It's been a busy week

Since Wednesday, life has been rather a whirl of unpacking boxes, buying extra bits and pieces, tidying up the old house, and generally getting used to being here. I suppose house moving has its own culture shock in a way, and right now we're in the initial holiday/vacation period that happens in any new place - it all feels exciting, and interesting. Finding homes for our stuff is enjoyable, in a strange sort of way, but part of me feels as if it might as well stay in boxes for a while longer. The neighbourhood is unfamiliar - it takes me ages to find my way around a new place anyway, and although I can walk where I want to get to, map in hand, I have no clue when we're in the car. Richard takes a different route every time we go anywhere, since he's getting to know all the different streets and working out the best ways to get places. But that doesn't help me! When the weather gets cooler - October, probably - I shall explore a bit more. There are plenty of little shops within about five minutes' walk, including a small supermarket, an excellent greengrocer, and a bakery.

Since the living room is also the entry to the main part of the house, we've made that reasonably sane, unpacking boxes and sorting books into bookcases. Here's how it looked shortly after we moved in:



We found a TV unit we like, and yesterday Richard and Tim set up the new television. So here's how it looks now:


Tomorrow we're going to order some curtains. It's not possible to buy ready-made curtains here, other than a few plain colours in huge sizes. However it's very inexpensive to have them made, so that's what we'll do rather than make them ourselves. On Friday we managed to find a warehouse that was recommended by two different people, with loads of material on rolls. None of it really leapt out at us, but we did find some we thought would go well in the living room, and some for our bedroom. We wanted to check measurements and think a bit more about it, so we didn't order at the time, but will probably do so tomorrow.

This warehouse also sells carpet-like rugs, at good prices and in quite nice patterns. We may well consider one for the living room once the weather gets cooler. At present, though, we'll just use the tile floor - it's not hard like the marble we had at the other house, and we found that carpets or rugs made the place a lot more humid. Cypriots often take up their rugs during the summer and only use them in the cooler weather.

Richard has installed the four ceiling fans we bought from some friends who are leaving Cyprus, and today he plumbed in the adaptor that was necessary for our washing machine - very useful!

We've started letting the cats out - we couldn't keep them in forever. At first they were surprisingly nervous, not going more than a metre or two outside the doors. Today they've done more exploring, including going into some of the neighbouring yards. Each time they've rushed back and up the outside stairs, so it does seem as if they're beginning to feel that this is 'home'. There are several dogs in the street, and a white cat over the road, so we hope our cats will soon learn which is their territory, and respect their boundaries.