A sunset from the balcony of our apartment in Chennai.
Time to start updating our information on here!
The last 12 months didn't quite turn out how we had anticipated (isn't that the case for everybody at the moment!). We left India in April 2020 with two days notice on a charter flight to Australia. We had to just lock the door to our apartment in Chennai and leave, because there was no way to be able to pack up properly at that point in India. When we left the entire country was under a strict lockdown. We had only been able to leave our apartment to buy groceries and this had to be within a small radius. Children were banned from leaving their homes.
From there we were in Adelaide for a little more than two weeks doing quarantine, getting medical tests (tb testing etc), submitting our visa documents to hopefully get us to Korea, and trying to figure out where we should go next.
After that we flew to Sydney, where we awaited the only flight we could take that would reliably enable us to fly directly to Seoul. We were really lucky there. The airline only put on 4 or 5 flights for just May to help people who needed to get to Korea. We were able to get onto one of them.
From there we went into quarantine in Seoul for two weeks (with a couple of hours break because we were allowed to walk to and from the testing centre where we had our Covid tests). We were then moved into another apartment in the same building as our quarantine for a further two weeks.
From there we moved into a hotel on the other side of Seoul while we looked for a new apartment. By this stage we had almost been able to get all of our belongings shipped out of India (more on that another time).
In July we moved into an apartment in Seoul. A few months later after having just unpacked our shipment from India we received a notice from our landlord indicating that they had sold the building and it was now going to be redeveloped!
In December we moved into another apartment, and and hope to stay here for the rest of our time in Seoul. In 12 months we lived in 8 different hotels/apartments/houses across three different countries!
Due to all of this moving around, packing and re-packing, I put the updates on this blog to the side. I am now going to attempt a bit of a catch up. Everything will be uploaded in a chronological way, rather than by theme/child.
Prior to India going into lockdown, and before we new what the year was going to bring, I took some videos of our drive along the ECR in Chennai one evening. We used to drive this road regularly and I thought that one day the kids might like to look back at their near-daily commute. Here are links to a couple of the videos..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXHFAW7vZF8
Some more pictures from around Chennai that I snapped in the couple of months before the country went into lockdown.
Comments