To celebrate our hundredth post, we thought we’d share the lessons we’ve learned to date. Many of them are confirmations of things we more or less knew, but a few are surprises.
Location, Location, Location
- We really do care about being in the middle of it all. We’re happy to take public transportation, but it’s important to us to have lots of stuff within walking distance.
- We usually pick trendy or transitional ‘urban’ neighborhoods to live in, and so far this has been the right choice. At the same time, we like a quiet night’s sleep. Unfortunately, this is a balance impossible to judge in advance.
- We really like being near the water, ideally seeing it out the window. So we’ll be adding more beach time than we’d originally expected.
- Weather matters: we like sunshine and we don’t have real coats. We knew that, but it’s good to have it confirmed. We’ll continue to pick destinations based on seasonal weather patterns.
- We think of ourselves as big-city people, but we loved Oslo (population ca. half a million). Maybe we’re wrong?
People Lessons
- It’s hard to meet people, maybe because we’re introverts. Or because we have been in countries full of introverts? Stay tuned…
- We love having visitors!
- It’s fun to have a few contacts, either people we know, or friends of friends.
- But honestly, we’re also pretty happy to hang out by ourselves most of the time.
Stuff Lessons
- We have more stuff than we need, and more than we can reasonably carry. Before leaving Oslo, we got rid of some clothes, and we might shed more in the next month.
- Our smaller Oslo apartment was plenty big enough for us; we had way too much space in Oxford.
- But (see above on visitors) we’re going to try to always have a bed for friends to sleep in.
Time Lessons
- How quickly we feel at home varies more than we’d expected; we don’t yet know how or why. We felt right at home in Oslo, right away, though we’d never been there before.
- Two or three months per place seems about right.
- We’re also adding in some ‘vacation’ destinations for shorter periods of time.
- Now that we are retired, we can do stuff while the rest of you are working. So we take planes and do touristy things during the week. Also, some museums have free or discount days and we have the leisure to take advantage of those.
Food Lessons
- It turns out that even with very expensive food and drink, we eat out two or three times a week. Usually lunch.
- We’re doing even better than we’d expected in using up the food we buy. Pretty good in Oxford, excellent in Oslo. (The flat owners in Oslo left us some food, and are allowing us to leave some too, which meant we could buy things like mustard and not worry too much…)
Those are our lessons to date. We’ll update them for our two hundredth post!
