Friday, September 15, 2017

How our days go

A view from our balcony
We have begun to fall into a predictable daily routine and rhythm of life. The first two days of school, the kids were still jet lagged and extremely unhappy about being woken up. So after that they were much more motivated to go to bed early and we've been doing much better. Usually we wake up around 6:00 when it starts to get light, and read Calvin & Hobbes (or something, but that's the current favorite) until breakfast - cereal, fruit, and scrambled eggs. There is tons of amazing fruit all around, especially stone fruits are ripe and in season just now.

Pazari i Ri, recently renovated - yellow building at right is Stephen Center, where we stayed one summer

We leave the house around 7:20 for the 1-mile walk to school. It's a gentle downhill to the canal/river, then a few more blocks uphill, and our best time so far has been 28 minutes! The time passes faster with stories, questions, or verbal games. The kids are complaining a lot less now than they did last week!

After I drop them at school (Terry usually walks with us too), Terry and I grab a quick coffee before he heads to his office and head back home. It's a nice time to catch up with each other. On the way home I usually do the grocery shopping, then at the house putter around with whatever I have on my to-do list for the day.

Our hosts' grapevine
At 3:00 or so I head out to pick up the kids again. The walk home is leisurely and can take almost an hour, with stops for a snack or if we need to use a bathroom at a coffeeshop on the way.

Pazari i Ri, on the way home
Eventually they'll be wearing uniforms with the school colors and logo, but at the moment they just wear their own clothes. Shorts on the days they have P.E.

Close to the school
They are fascinated by the few stray dogs we see around, which all have ear tags and look pretty well-fed. We speculated that people at the restaurants give them scraps of food and water. I told them about stray dogs I've seen in other places that are skinny and dirty, and Gabe asked me why I never took them to a vet, because wouldn't that be a good thing to do? Too true...

He also asked about an elderly man we've seen sitting and begging near the new mosque, and wanted to know how much food the man could buy if we gave him five bucks. We looked at posted menus nearby and saw that he could buy 10 pieces of pizza, or five loaves of bread. G also wondered if the man could maybe collect scrap metal and make it into things that he could sell. We haven't seen him for a few days now though so I'm not sure if the $5 plan will go into effect or not.

Val loves being in school, even though it seems like she gets hit on the head with a basketball just about every day at recess, but she reports that she's getting lots of education and can't WAIT to be given homework! These first 2 weeks have been mostly getting settled in and learning about each other, some assessment (testing) and figuring out the routines of the school.

Today our host downstairs was harvesting the very ripe grapes from his vine, and I wonder if he's planning to make raki (grape brandy)? It's very traditional here. It's been a bit torturous walking past those grapes multiple times a day, not so much because of the wasps that hang around them all the time, but because they look so delicious! Our hosts gave us two bunches on the first day and they were so good.

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