Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Four weeks since we left the US

Cribbed from an e-mail to my folks:

Terry has gone to Kosovo overnight for an event there honoring Mother Teresa. It's the anniversary of her beatification and a national holiday in Albania. Anyway, the president of Kosovo wanted to recognize World Vision (their Kosovo program is administered under WV Albania) as part of the event but the WV director wasn't able to go, so he asked Terry to go instead as an interchangeable foreigner :-) Terry even bought a suit in the local market here because he didn't bring any suits from the US... (Rosanne and Vern are now looking smug...)! The funny thing is that the president of Kosovo recently resigned so a stand-in for him is going to be presenting the award as well :-) Terry will be back tomorrow.

I asked Shpresa to come over this afternoon just so it wouldn't be such a long day without Terry home in the evening. She is such a big help. Yesterday she did a lot of cleaning so this afternoon I just asked her to help me study Albanian. Valerie even let Shpresa feed her some yoghurt so that was encouraging too. I felt kind of bad after I realized that I'd asked her to work on a holiday, but she seemed happy to come.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to meet a friend of a friend who lives in Tirana, we'll see if it all works out. Thursday I'm supposed to meet Terry's boss's wife who is Swiss, to go to the Botanical gardens. Friday I have no social plans.

Oh, and we discovered that we have earwigs in the apartment. Not a huge problem but they are really ugly! We didn't know what they were and a little internet research helped us identify them. I googled "common household pests" and looked around til I saw a picture that matched the bugs we have. So that's what an earwig is, I always wondered.

1 comment:

tara said...

you're missing the stink bug invasion- apparently they're very bad all over the mid-atlantic. last week there were 5 that rode in my clean laundry... maybe it's time to use the dryer :)
sounds like you'll be having some fun! Was Terry able to find a suit with cargo pants? ;)