First of all, we wish everyone a prosperous and wonderful new year! We haven’t reported much from ourselves in the past 4 months. The reason for this is that we wanted to take our time to settle down ourselves, and the enormous changes we went through last year. It took a while, but we can say that we feel completely grounded again and are recharged with energy and inspiration.
We currently live in a magical region in Australia called ”Tweed Heads”. To be precise, near a town called Murwillumbah, or as the locals also say ”Mur-bah”. It is a town along the enormous Tweed River (yes, sharks swim here too!) that flows into the ocean not far away from us. The area is surrounded by sugar cane fields and beautiful mountains. The humidity is high and it is no exception that tropical rain showers cause flooding in this area… (A problem that didn’t bother us in Portugal haha).
Enough about the geographical facts. Now that you have an idea of the area where we are located, we would like to invite you to our home… We live on the same property as where the farm where Jesse now works is located. After renting a room on the farm for about a month, we were able to move into one of the apartments. It is a very comfortable house and we realized once again how luxurious it is to have a bathroom, kitchen and bedroom under one roof!
Jesse, as we said before, works for a farm. It is an organic farm that mainly grows leafy vegetables, herbs, cucumber, chili’s, tomato and eggplant. They also run a busy market stall 3 times a week and an organic shop in the village. The locations of the markets are on average an hour’s drive away (close by Australian standards) and start early.
On Saturday mornings the alarm goes off just before 3:00 and Jesse leaves at 4:00 with a bus packed to the rafters for the coast. Here, he and the team set up the market stall, a big job as there is a lot of lifting and presenting involved. Previously he worked all 3 markets, but because working with the plants on the farm was closer to his heart, this was eventually reduced to 1 market day and 3 days on the farm.
Elin works in a café in the village as a barista, a skill she really wanted to learn. The café serves breakfast, lunch, delicacies, but above all makes a lot of great coffee for the coffee-loving Australians. The coffee culture here is huge, so this is the perfect place to be trained as a barista.
Since we also wanted to have free time to reflect and enjoy the place, we are currently not working full-time. In our spare time we mainly look for refreshment (it is the middle of summer here now and you can feel it!) and think about what we actually want…
We will go into more detail about our next steps in the following update and we think it would be great to see you again on our blog!
Lots of love and see you soon 🙂