Language School

I don't have too much to write, but I wanted to update my blog.  Today we had the first day of our second week at language school.  Andrew and I are loving every minute of it so far!  We were able to test into the second semester and so our whole class is made up of students who all tested into the second semester.  Sometimes we know more than they do, and sometimes they know more than we do, but regardless, we are all trying to get the hang of this new school.  Just in the first week of school Andrew and I have already learned so much grammar and we are looking forward to the months ahead and all that we will learn and progress in Arabic we will make.

Rearranging

Well, we have been living in this apartment for a few weeks now and we have had a few troubles, but in spite of it all, we still like it alright :)  When we returned from Christmas (we went back to our original city) we had a bit of a mold problem.  We have since been trying to treat it.  It's been slow going with the mold, but it is getting better day by day.  On New Years evening, we had a pipe "fall off the wall" in the bathroom.  It was truly just like the movies where water is spraying out everywhere.  Andrew was trying desperately to get the pipe back on, and all I could do was laugh uncontrollably at the situation.  There was so much water it was flooding the bathroom and beginning to come out into the rest of the apartment.  Fortunately I could hold it together long enough to keep squeegeeing the water into the drainage hole in the bathroom (remember the one from the laundry).  Andrew ran down to get our landlord.  A few minutes later the two of them come running through the door frantically and they get the water turned off. Our landlord told us 5 minutes and a plumber would be up to fix it.  The first thought I had was, "An Arab 5 minutes?"  Arabs tend to be more free with their time, not using clocks and things of that nature.  Their day runs mostly off the sun and moon.  Incredibly though, about 5 minutes later a plumber and the building manager showed up and probably within 20 minutes had the thing fixed!  We were a little late for our NYE plans, but things turned out okay and we had a great story to tell when we got there :)

Here are a couple of pictures.  We have recently rearranged our little apartment.  We were able to acquire a small dinning table.  The place is beginning to feel like home.

Here is a little section of our mold.  It's along the bottom of the walls in the entry way and a little behind the big sofa in our living area.  This is not mold in the picture.  We have scraped off a lot of the paint to try to get to the mold's roots.  We had been spraying chemicals on it, but recently we have been washing it with baking soda water and then Andrew smears a baking soda paste on and leaves it, that's what you're seeing here.  Baking soda is not only supposed to kill the fungi, but also helps keep away moisture.  It's been working the best so far.

Washing Wednesdays

Now for the long awaited post about our washing machine!  Since we have moved to the big city, we now have to deal with limited water.  In our old town, we lived right on the sea and an aquifer so we had unlimited water.  Now that we are in the city and miles and miles from the nearest source of water with millions of people to water, we are limited.  Unfortunately, our first full week here we found out just how much this limited water affects us when we ran out on a Monday night and found out our tanks wouldn't be refilled until Wednesday.  Wednesday is when the water comes to our area of the city, so we can use as much water as we want on Wednesdays and it won't affect the rest of our week on the tank.  With that in mind, Wednesdays is when I try to get all the laundry and cleaning done.  So, without further ado, here's the procedure for laundry these days :)

Here's my washing machine (in the bathroom)

First things first, I have to plug in the washer.  Yes, that's right, I plug in the washer outside of the bathroom.

Load the big cylinder up with laundry.  You get to join us for towels :)

Next I have to fill up the cylinder with water.  There are two tubes I am supposed to hook together and connect to the sink in the bathroom to fill up the cylinder with, but it's too difficult and leaks a lot, so I just take the "shatafa" (kinda like a water hose for the toilet), turn it on and rig it up so it will be filling while I walk around and do stuff around the house instead of standing there holding it the whole time.

Add some detergent, put the lid back on and set the cycle for anything up to 15 minutes.  I was doing everything for 15 minutes, but I am noticing it is really rough on our clothes, so I've been putting it on for less time.

When it's done (no beep or anything I just notice I don't hear it anymore) it looks like this, sometimes more sometimes less suds.

Now for the draining.  This is a hole in the floor of our bathroom.  We also have one in the kitchen.  It's actually quite nice when you're mopping.

So I have to take hose from the washer and put it to this hole.  The water comes out too fast/strong, so I have to kneel here the whole time it's draining and hold the hose to the hole so water doesn't get all over the bathroom floor.

Here's a good view of the gauges on the washer.  Once I drain the water, I basically repeat all the previous steps except for the detergent to rinse the clothes/towels.

Once I have rinsed and drained, I then move all the clothes over to the second cylinder.  If I do a full load on the left side, I will not be able to fit them all in on the right, so I'll have to take several turns to get them all done.

There's this weird lid thing I put on top of the spinner cylinder.  I guess it keeps the clothes from flying out?

Close all the lids and set it to spin for 5 minutes.

They look kinda like this when they're done.  All smashed up against the sides.

I drain everything again and set to hanging up the wet stuff to dry.  Here's our drying rack.  I did another load of laundry after this pic so I was saving room on the rack for more clothes to come.

For big towels and jeans, I hang them on Andrew's pull up bars :)

Since our new apartment is so cold and it's quite wet in the city right now, it takes several days for clothes to dry and can take up to a week for jeans and big towels.

Well, that's just a brief summary of how we get our clothes done :)  If you're ever doing some cleaning on a Wednesday, think about us, we're probably cleaning too!

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!