Happy New Year!

It's 2016! In 2015 we completely failed on the blogging front so one of our New Year's resolutions is to make sure we remember to write on here regularly (that makes it sound like we have a whole list of resolutions, which we don't really!).

Anyway, here is a quick round-up of what we did in the past few weeks...


We have been on quite a few trips recently, each of which I will write more about individually soon as January is going to be a bit of a quieter month. Not long after we took a trip to KL for my birthday (and enjoyed a stay in a very luxurious hotel!) we spent a long weekend in Borneo. We have some great pictures to show and stories to tell, but my favourite parts were spending the morning on a deserted beach and meeting orangutans at the conservation centre.  




We also spent a lovely couple of weeks with my parents visiting - again. They stayed with us in JB for a while and then we visited Penang for a few days which has a fantastic mix of beaches, culture, history and good food. It was great to have them here and lovely to spend (a somewhat warmer than usual) Christmas with them. I will post more pictures in the near future, but for now here is one of us showing off our shiny new campus!

Thanks to the University being closed over the Christmas and New Year period (hooray for air conditioning maintenance work!), we then had a few spare days in which to squeeze one more trip before going back to work. We are currently under some quite strict rules from the tax man here to ensure that we get our tax residency status for 2016, which means that we can only spend a limited number of days outside the country. Luckily for us Malaysia has many beautiful places to visit so we decided to have a little adventure and take the sleeper train to the island of Langkawi. Again, I will write more about this in the future, but suffice to say that we made the most of our beach time and managed to top up our tans a fair bit!

This is where we said goodbye to 2015 and hello to 2016:

Not a bad way to begin 2016. 

2015 was a year of many changes for us - we got married, got new jobs (and new names!), moved to a new and very different country and were fortunate enough to travel to lots of amazing places. We are both very thankful for everything that we have experienced and are looking forward to more adventures this year. It has also been difficult at times because we of course miss our family and friends an awful lot and are sad that we can't see them more often and when we miss important events like friends' weddings (I'm looking at you, Abby and Luke, and Kate and Ant! *sobs*). 

Therefore my biggest wish for 2016 is that you all have a wonderful year filled with love, laughs, good luck, good food and good health. 

xxxxx