4th Old Blog

I had been to Cyprus a month earlier to sort out accommodation for us, so when we
arrived here we moved into a nice 2 bed villa with it’s own pool and sea views.
Hales thought it was great because she had thought we would end up on an
apartment somewhere, so a private villa was more than we had hoped for.
3 days after arriving in Cyprus I received a call from the estate agent to tell us that
the buyers had pulled out at the last minute! We were devastated, we had only
managed to scrape enough money together to last us about 3 weeks as we had
expected the sale to be all done and dusted within 2 weeks of getting here. I told
the estate agent to put the house straight back on the market and see what
happened. We didn’t really know what to do, stay and try to sort it out or go back
to the UK.
Hales had managed to persuade the company she worked for in the UK to take her
on as a remote worker, but had told them she would have a month off before she
started while we got sorted in Cyprus. We had no Internet at the villa as the road
had not been finished so no telephone lines were laid yet.
Emil came to our rescue by offering for us to stay at his house in Nicosia during
the week so Hales could use his Internet to work. He also said he would take us
back and forth to the villa at weekends so we could have the time to ourselves. We
gratefully took him up on his offer as we really didn’t want to go back to the UK!
This is one of the reasons I regard him more as a brother than a friend.
We struck really lucky with the house as well, and within 3 days of it going back
on the market we had new buyers in place! It just meant we would have to survive
in Cyprus for 3 months while everything went through.
Hales went straight to work and we started spending the week days with Emil and
his wife in Nicosia. I even managed to find myself a part-time job delivering
pizza’s for Pizza Hut in Nicosia. That was actually a fun job, bombing around
Nicosia on a little moped with a pizza box on the back! Pay was rubbish but it was
more to give me something to do than anything.
I had decided not to look for a permanent job till we were living full time at the
villa, so we made do with the little Hales earned and a bit of spending money I
earned. We obviously had to still pay the rent for the villa and we also had our 2
cats in a cattery in the UK waiting for us to have the money to fly them over, so
that was an added expense too.
Everything went smoothly with the house sale this time, and almost 3 months after
arriving in Cyprus it was all done and dusted. We paid off the mortgage, the rather
large loan secured on the house and I think I cleared my overdraft as well. That left