After almost a year of searching, one loss to forkjøpsrett, one loss to indecisive, greedy sellers, price peak after price peak, we finally have a new apartment. And despite the frustration and tension we have been through, I can honestly say I think we have found our dream apartment. It was renovated just last year, and it needs nothing done at all. It’s just perfect and I absolutely love it.

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Thanks to alert reader Julie, I was informed yesterday that my blog had been hacked. I have completely cleaned and reinstalled everything, and as far as I know it’s all fine again now. But if you have recently visited the site and gotten a warning from your virus software, make sure you run a full scan to make sure you weren’t attacked.

If you have a Wordpress site, I would strongly suggest you check it for signs of hacking and change your admin password.

Damn hackers.

In my usual fashion, I have not been very good at regular blogging, so it has been almost six months since our notorious trip to Turkey, and boy how things have changed. At the very least, my body has changed quite a bit. Here I am at about 14 weeks pregnant:

And now here I am at about 24 weeks:

Please ignore the goofy expression. Chris had just told me to picture someone we know dancing, in an attempt to make me smile for the photo.

With only a couple of weeks left of my second trimester, I’m guessing there will be a lot of growth happening soon. I’m still not quite as bumpy as other friends who are at about the same stage.

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Chris and I have done a lot of travelling together over the years; Australia, Norway, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Hong Kong, Latvia, Germany, Switzerland… but we realised when we started talking about what to do for our summer holiday this year that we have never had a relaxing, warm beach holiday together. The closest we’d gotten to that was taking Chris’ mum to the Gold Coast back in 2002. Not always the most romantic trip when someone’s mum is along for the ride.

So this year we started looking at resort holidays in places like Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Croatia and all the other warm European destinations. There were so many to choose from we just didn’t know where to start. Overall, Turkey seemed to offer the most for our money, so we chose that as a destination almost right away. But there are just SO many resorts and hotels, how does one choose? So we took the scientific approach; we went to the Ving website (a Scandinavian charter tour company), clicked on Turkey and the dates we wanted, and clicked on… well basically the first thing that had a nice looking photo. What did we find? The Barut Hemera Spa and Resort in Side, in the Alanya region. We booked pretty much right then and there.

Oh how little we knew about how lucky we were! I had read a few positive reviews on the Ving site, and we were happy to go ahead and book, but it was only after our booking that I started reading TripAdvisor reviews. “Glowing” doesn’t begin to describe!

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When we found out we weren’t getting the apartment we wanted (see http://www.zoeselina.com/?p=174), we decided to book a weekend shopping trip to London to cheer ourselves up. We booked for the first weekend in August, which would mean when we got back it was only two weeks until our summer vacation in Turkey. How was I to know it would be a cursed weekend from hell!

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There exists in Norwegian real estate legislation a law that allows members of exclusive, private organisations to steal winning bids on homes. This seems very strange to me in what is essentially an egalitarian, socialist society.

A while back Chris and I decided that our current apartment, though very nice and in a great location, is just feeling a bit too small these days, especially since the arrival of Mojo and Sushi. I also had concerns that in such a small space the cats wouldn’t get enough exercise or stimulation. So we decided to casually keep our eye on the real estate market, but we were only going to actually go to viewings of places that were really special.

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