Settling In

I am sitting here today, thinking about how our little apartment on the top floor of this building resembles a one-room school house. 11 year old Isabel is at her desk in her room doing work on vocabulary words, 4 year old Sophia is outlining and coloring pictures in the living room, and I am running back and forth between them. Sophia is home from school for the third day in a row (fever Friday, diarrhea Monday and today), but will most likely go back tomorrow. She keeps asking, "Can we go back to our yellow house in Maine, right now?"

It's no fun being sick in the best of circumstances, and it's really no fun being sick in a place that is literally quite foreign to you. Thankfully, Isabel and Krista remain healthy, but Sophia and I were both suffering with a little bug in our guts. I, in my state of constant culture shock, had visions of Sophia pooping herself into severe dehydration, but she has been able to keep liquids down and appears to be on the mend.

We located both a ballet school and a music school for Isabel today and they both seem great. The music school also has programs for Sophia which made her very excited (but she still wants to go back to our yellow house, right now!). The folks who told us about these extra-curricular opportunities are a missionary family from Texas. I walked over to their apartment to get directions to the violin school. They live on the fourth floor of an apartment building and instead of walking down the stairs to open the door for us, they dropped a key attached to a long white line, and then hauled it back up once we were in. Too funny. Old school intercom service.

I am planning to go for a mountain bike ride tomorrow which I am SO looking forward to. I haven't touched a bike in three weeks and I'm getting a little twitchy. Dougie is a Scot who runs an operation down here called Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking. He and I will get a ride up some mountain in a truck, and then bomb down on a couple of his full suspension bikes. Fun.

It's time for a nice cup of anise tea and immersion in my warm sleeping bag. It is cold here. A heater of some sort is in our future.