Hello from Perth! I’m here until the weekend and very much in holiday mode (ahhhhhhh…) but I thought I’d kick off the new year with a short post every day between now and Friday about my time in Australia.

Met a friend for lunch the other day at Clancy’s, an… assertively nautical-themed pub-restaurant at City Beach. Think fishing nets draped from the walls and brightly-painted buoys hanging from the ceiling, and a seafood-heavy menu. Comes with an alright view, but:

Just before I took this photo, my friend and I looked at the view, looked at each other, and said, “We do live an enchanted life, don’t we?”

On the way there I thought, “Here I am, it’s summer, I’m going down the beach, listening to Triple J, I am so Australian.”

And then I thought, “When I lived in Australia, I never did this.” I’ve never owned a car. I’ve never been to the beach more than a handful of times in a year.

And then I thought, “Well, my internal monologue did just say ‘going down the beach’ for ‘driving to the beach’, so I must still be at least a bit Australian.”