settling in

its hard to believe that we’ve been here for almost two weeks. life has started to take on a rhythm again which is nice, especially now that we have settled into our new apartment. all three of us feel very comfortable here – its a two minute walk from work, a five minute walk from the beach and a ten minute walk from all the important places of interest. i’ve got a video tour ready to go but bandwith is a precious commodity here so i will have to figure out a way to get it uploaded without chewing through our prepaid cap 🙂

we’ve were blessed with a full week of gorgeous days. when the sun is out, we mostly find ourselves close to the playground. its right across from the beach which is perfect.

mmm seaweed necklace! nayou ate a pretty big chunk of it…. and lived to tell the tale!

this weekend we got some speakers and a blender. the essentials. now not only do we have tunes, brenda can work her smoothie magic in the mornings as well. it is way harder being a vegetarian out here (i’m already sick of greek salads) and harder still to get organic stuff. we lugged about 15kgs of spirulina, coconut oil, apple cider vinegar and other goodies over from sydney and its turning out to have been a very good decision. the restaurant fare is heavy on meat, cheese and bread in that distinctly german sort of way. at least they have kikkoman soy sauce!

nayou sniffed out the toy shop within the first ten minutes of our first expedition out into town.

dmo (pronounced, dee-moh, short for david morris-oliveros) is the hardware wizard on our team. he builds all kinds of crazy machines and flies all of our drones and octocopters and stuff. it was his birthday on the 5th so we all went out to the mexican restaurant for a celebration. yes, they have a mexican joint in swakopmund. and the food isn’t half bad either!

nayou soldiered on until ~9pm and then passed out cold.

speaking of team members, i should mention bodie. bodie is nayou’s best friend. nayou *loves* bodie and bodie loves him back. he is actually amazing with kids and its a riot watching the two of them interact. you will be seeing a lot more of him on this blog 🙂

this morning we went out into the bay for a dolphin cruise. it was a short three hour jaunt around walvis bay to check out the sea animals that live in the region. we were treated to pelicans, a ton of seals and some dolphins!

a few of the smarter seals have figured out that they get fed if they can work the crowd. they come right up onto the boat and are not afraid of humans at all!

here is our band of merry pirates, minus aj (the visual effects supervisor) and alex (the vfx producer). from left to right its: dmo (on-set systems dude), nayou (child model), kaeko (dmo’s wife), jess (coordinator), bodie (cg artist), dan (on-set supervisor), brenda (plain awesome) and me (the pipeline guy).

and the obligatory silly shot:

around 5.30pm on weekdays i usually get a text message from brenda saying how gorgeous the sunsets are from our apartment. today was the first time i got to see it firsthand and it did not disappoint.

happy mothers day to all you amazing women out there! and a big big extra humungous hug to my mum who also turned 60! xoxoxox