The Move

For those of you who have not heard, we just recently moved.  We were living in a small town/city of about 100,000 people in the South of our current country.  A little over a week ago, we moved up to a big city (almost 3 million people).  The main reason for our move was language.  For the past year we have been studying Arabic with tutors who may or may not be reliable to show up and who may or may not be well educated in Arabic themselves.  Because of these and a few other reasons, our Arabic was just not progressing as it should be, so we made the decision to move to the big city where we will now be able to attend an actual language school.  Our hopes are high that our Arabic will get a jump-start and we will be able to quickly progress.  Our language school doesn't begin their new semester till the end of January, so in the meantime, we are getting some tutoring from a tutoring center in hopes of bringing our grammar skills up so we will be able to test into the next semester at the language school.

The move and transition to the big city was fairly smooth.  We got settled in and unpacked fairly quickly. We are still getting to know our neighborhood.  We are not used to having everything we need right outside our door, and we are also not used to taxi rides taking thirty minutes or more (did I fail to mention that it is also extremely cold here right now).  Even though we have just moved cities, it feels like we have moved to a different country in a way.  I (Sarah) have a lot more freedom and independence in the big city than I did in our small one.  Because it is a big city, there is a lot more western influence and sometimes I feel like I am actually in Europe or the States.  I just recently read that our city is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, and sometimes looking out our window at the buildings surrounding us, I can see that it is true.

Welcome!

View from the entry of our place

Maybe the smallest kitchen in the world, but since it's open it doesn't feel as small

Our Bedroom....ignore the mess, it was a last minute decision to take pictures

Guest bedroom

View from our Bedroom

Bath

Washing Machine that will get it's own blog at a later date :)

Wheat Family Visit

Sorry it has been so long since my last post.  Things have been so busy here, so I'll be posting several posts over the next few days to catch everything up.  The first of the posts will be the Wheat Family Visit.

Andrew's parents were able to come visit us for a couple of weeks.  We got to enjoy Thanksgiving with them, as well as travel around this area of the world.  Here are a few photos from our journeys:

Andrew's Family Arriving

Our Thanksgiving Feast! (Completely GF)

Overlooking the Sea of Galilee

Boat ride on the Sea of Galilee

Having to say "Good-Bye" to Andrew's family.  We are so glad that ya'll got to come out!  Had a great time and can't wait to see ya'll again!

Next up: The Move

City by the River

Okay, I am just going to go ahead and warn you, this is going to be a long blog with a lot of pictures!  So, I've been delaying writing a blog about our recent travels because I wanted to make a video and just post it, but quite frankly, I have felt overwhelmed by the task of making a video so I thought to just write a post.  Unfortunately, when I went to my photos to narrow them down and figure out which ones to blog, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of photos I had to sort through.  The result, I am going to write two blogs and both will have a tremendous amount of photos and information :)  I have decided to start from the back and work my way forwards, so we're starting with the last leg of our trip, our possible future city (because lets be honest, that's what you want to hear about the most anyway right?).

We stayed for three nights in this city.  We were all by ourselves so we didn't have anyone to show us around or explain the currency or how things work in this city/country, so we really did just get an initial first impression of things, so when we go back for another visit, we'll have a better grasp on things and be able to explore the city better.

We were on foot, so most of the things we got to see where right around our hotel, but to be perfectly honest, we didn't do a whole lot of walking either because the moment you step foot outside your hotel men storm you wanting to know if you want to take a taxi or a carriage ride or a boat ride or buy something from their store.  And they do not just let you go when you tell them no, they walk next to you for five minutes or more telling you why you should take the ride and don't you want to know how much it cost and if you ride with them you won't have anyone hassling you (hello, we're not going to get in your carriage now that you've been hassling us for 10 minutes!).  It was definitely a testing and trying experience especially since these people are from our pg.

On the positive side though, once we got out of the carriage/taxi area, the local people didn't hassle us at all!  No one stared at me or hooted and hollered (quite the change of pace from our current city) and everyone was extremely friendly (granted a lot of times they just wanted a tip, but they were friendly none the less).  In our city now, I get lots of "wow," "oh my god," and comments like that, but in this city, Andrew got "you are a lucky man," and I got "my Queen."  I'll take a lucky man and my queen any day over the stuff I get here :)

Okay, without further ado, the pictures:

Andrew and I at 4:30 in the morning getting ready for our Hot Air Balloon ride!

Fire them up!

I'm not sure how much you can see in these two pictures (above), but these men are from our pg

Sunrise

Because there is a river in the middle of the city, there is a distinct line of irrigation

The bridge to cross the river is I think 15 to 20 minutes up river, so you have to take a boat or ferry to get across.  I think the more populous side is the other side, what do you think?

There's a city, but there are all these small groupings of houses in all directions up and down the river.

From the top of our hotel

On the river, these are the little boats people take across.

Well, that's all.  Hopefully you enjoyed and stuck around for all of it :)  Next time we go back we're going to get a rental car and that will help us explore even more!

Glamping

I'll write an extended post later on all of our travels, but here is just a sneak peak of our accommodations on Safari.  For my great friend Sandra who loves glamping.

Mothers and Olives

Well, since my last post about how much I look like my mother, I have accumulated a few more photos as proof.

This is my Mom, my Grandma and my Aunt Sharon

I look exactly like my Mom and my cousin Laura looks exactly like my Aunt Sharon!  What do you guys think?

On a different note:  I visited Andrew's friend's mom tonight.  We usually get together once a week.  I learned tonight that even though I have been here for almost a year and have gone on many visits in that time, I am still surprised by some of the things that happen on those visits.  This is my surprise from tonight:

That's right, a jinormous jar of olives!  I don't know how I end up bringing things like this home with me, but I do know that Andrew and I will be eating olives everyday for the next month :)

Infinity Scarf

This past week I have been working on some product samples for the co-op here that I lead a sewing training for during Ramadan.  There is a company in the States that is interested in buying large quantities of their sewing line, but they needed to send them some samples.  So, this week I have been busy making some samples for them.  I have found it rather challenging to make cute things out of old clothes.  The guy in charge of the co-op, really likes for the products to still look like clothes, which I am not a huge fan of.  But somehow I made due and I am pretty pleased with the results.  This is not everything, but just a couple of things that I liked.

A headband for a little girl.  Ruffles made from old T-shirts

An owl made from old cashmere sweaters

With all this sewing that I wasn't too big a fan of, I needed to make something I thought was cute.  I have seen a lot online about infinity scarves.  It's hard to find cute fabric here, and it's definitely hard to find long pieces of cute fabric.  So, I decided a patchwork infinity scarf made from pieces of fabric I already had from the States would  be cute.  Finished it up yesterday and I think it turned out pretty cute.

And, here's a bonus picture that needed to be posted because I think I look exactly like my mother in this picture.

Kinda freaky huh?  Like mother like daughter...

Next week, (this Friday) Andrew and I are heading to Kenya!  I'm pretty excited about going, it's going to be a lot cooler there, so my new scarf will be great :)  Also we'll have some good pictures to show when we get back.  We're heading to Kenya on a retreat and then on our way back we're stopping off in another country where we hope to move to next year.  We're going to scout the place out, so keep us in your "thoughts" over the next couple of weeks and keep checking back for new pictures and updates on how things went :)