Tuesday

Our internet has been down for the last day so I couldn't post anything but hopefully I'll get caught up here soon.  Maybe.  We'll see.

Tuesday the 26th was Matt's day helping in the kitchen and my day helping in housekeeping.

The sister I worked with has just recently come here from the district work.  Myanmar has just one district and so they travel far and wide.  By bus, plane, train and on foot.  I really enjoyed talking to her as we worked.  Also on tea break.:)  We had biscuits (aka cookies) on tea break and they look like this:

They taste like Ritz crackers with chocolate on them.  I don't actually care for Ritz crackers, however I will tolerate a lot for some chocolate!

From the floor I was on you can see the one of the windows in our room:

In the building with the red roof we are the last window on the right hand side.

As you can see our house is quite close.  It takes like a minute to walk from our room to the outside dining room which is located in the building in the front of the picture where the roof is obscured by the tree.  You can also see the construction of the new building on the right.

Here is a picture in the hallway at bethel that I love.

Tuesday was also our first day of experiencing rain in Asia.  I had a whole blog post in my mind about the shocking lack of rain here.  I mean, I was promised Monsoons and the weather had just been beautiful ever since we landed.  For 5 whole days we did not witness one drop of rain! Not ONE!  Aren't you sorry that you missed out on that tirade?  However, on Tuesday we found out that it does rain here. And on Wednesday.  And Thursday. And Friday. So.  That satisfied me.  Also I have been told that June is just the beginning and in July and August it will rain harder and oftener.  So I'm sure I will get my fill of it.  Quickly.  The rain here is really amazing.  All the sudden the heavens are just pouring rain.  Like the faucet was turned on. Then the next minute it might be dry.  Just like that.  I took a video of it but I can't load it.  Maybe another time.  It's quite gripping.  Well, that depends on if you like videos of rain or not.

Tuesday night we went to meeting.  It also happens to be the week of the C.O. Visit.  In a year and a half Matt and I have been a part of 8 C.O. Visits.  Which is quite a lot really.  It has just worked out with our moving and traveling that we happen to be there for the C.O. wherever we are!  We have heard many talks more than once, but it's wonderful to see how they information fits the area you are in at the time.

We thoroughly enjoy the meetings here.

Here we are with Brian and Allison, a couple here from California. (This picture is for Rod and Virginia.  I do not have their email address so if you are in a position to tell them that this picture is here and tell them how to find it, I would appreciate it.  Or send me their email and I will send it to them:)

You may notice that Matt and I are matching.  We didn't even realize til Allison pointed it out to us. Wow. Too cute:D

 No matter where we go, we find friends in common!  On the ride to and from the Kingdom Hall we take a truck and squish as many people in the back as we can. I want to take a picture of it to show you all but it will have to wait since every time it has been so humid that my camera fogs up.  Yes, I did try wiping it off, but the moisture is so intense here that it gets INSIDE the lens.  Crazy.

More later!

Thank You

Wasn't the illustration in this week's bible study beautiful?  That picture and the accompanying paragraph with the experience from the sister in England touches our hearts. I almost cried when they were reading it at meeting, I'm such a sap:). We are so appreciative to have such loving and supportive families and friends as we travel.  We want you to know it is not easy for us to leave you our dear loved ones and we think of you all the time.  Thank you for the wonderful encouragement you provide for us and for your faithful examples.  We are loving all the emails, they brighten our days even more!  We love you!

First Monday

Monday we woke up bright and early and found our places for breakfast.  We eat in the "Cafe"  aka the construction dining room.  Which translates to outside screened in dining.  Which basically leads us to the point of "not air conditioned".

View from my seat.

However, it only gets really hot when it is about to rain.  Relatively speaking.  More on that later.  It honestly isn't uncomfortable in the mornings and when it does rain (which we will talk about later) it is so cool because there is a metal roof and it sounds neat! We had some meetings in the morning and got our picture taken for the board of those who have made themselves available to come here so far.

Looking on with anticipation!

 We got a little tour:

The Inside Dining Room

One of the 2 guard dogs. We had to meet them so they will be friendly to us.

Tree on property.

Cool gate in neighborhood.

 Here we are with the newly established Myanmar Sign Language Translation Team!

So exciting to meet them!

Lunchtime was a new experience.

See that shriveled up stuff at the front?  That was fish at some point.  Which I thought I would be brave and try.  That went well.  I couldn't figure out what to do with it and so instead of eating like a cave woman with my hands I tried a knife and fork.  Which led to the fish leaping off the plate (my knife made a nice loud metallic on ceramic noise to draw EVERYONE'S attention to this fact) and diving underneath my chair.  Where it stayed til I scraped my chair (hey, I am nothing if not discreet) back and retrieved it.  That fish was not worth the effort.  Never again. Did I mention we were in the INSIDE dining room?  The fancy one?....The soup looking stuff though?  Curry.  Which we love.  Matt had 2 helpings, yes 2. He thoroughly enjoyed it.  Only later did we find out that the potato looking stuff was actually eggplant.  OH  yes.  Matt ate eggplant and loved it. (Patti, I put that in for you, remember when you were trying to help him like it?  Now you can serve it to him any time.  You have my blessing.)

And in the afternoon we learned how to do some Laundry.

 In the evening is Watchtower study.  There is an English one and a Myanmar one. Afterwards we had a nice chat with our housemates and went to bed.

First Sunday

Sunday the 24th we were able to have a lazy morning.  We are sharing a house that is rented with 3 other couples.  One brother made us some exotic food for breakfast.  Here is Matt with our first Myanmar meal:

Yes,pancakes.  Amazing ones.

Ok. While this may not be your admittedly "traditional Myanmar" cuisine, we sure enjoyed it!  Oh, by the way, the food here has been amazing overall.  So that whole diet idea we had...you know the we can eat whatever we want because we will lose weight in Myanmar thing?  Ya. Not so sure that is going to work out.

Anyways, our meeting is on Sunday at 1 pm.  So another couple that lives in our house showed us where to go to get the taxi to take and gave us some fare negotiation pointers.  The taxi drops you off at the end of a street. (Newly paved, thank goodness because we heard some interesting stories about the unpaved street.  One story involved a big fat rat.  Something about huge and unafraid.) So, we are happy about the paved! 

You walk down and go in this door:

Up these stairs:

View from the top.

Isn't the banister pretty?  And at the top on the left is this door:   

      

Inside you will find beautiful people from different countries who gather together to worship the same God using material that is the same no matter what country you may be in.  So amazing.  Someone here told us that the Kingdom Hall was used as the branch office many years before.  Here we are:

We clean up good!

After we walked back to the main street to catch another taxi.  Along the way we saw some picturesque things:

Back out on the main street we saw this while waiting for a taxi:

Notice the traditional clothing? Most people wear it here. So cool.  Our taxi ride back to our house was interesting, the taxi's are very well used if you catch my drift.  However it is possible to have nice conversations with your taxi driver if he speaks English.  Which this one did.  After we got home all the ladies of the house crowded in the kitchen to get dinner.  Since it was crowded it took awhile to get everything done.  Although a good time was had, and we wouldn't change it a bit!  We were tired by the time we were done and we fell asleep to a movie pretty early.   Monday was our first day of orientation here so more on that later!

 

 

 

Our Room

We love our room here.  It is spacious and we have plenty of storage.  It's hard to take it in from every angle so I'm sorry about the volume of pictures you are about to see.

The cabinet is for our shoes and we are on the door to the left.

As you enter.(We have our own air conditioner!)

The door opens to the wall on the right.  On the left is Matt's new messenger bag.:)

These chairs are next to the bathroom on the left and the desk on the right.

View from the doorway to the bathroom.

Cute critters!

View from the corner of our bedroom nook.

Our OWN bathroom!!!!

Our shower is open to the rest of the bathroom.  No shower pan or curtain.

I has been so nice to unpack and make ourselves at home.  We had been living out of various suitcases and boxes for several weeks so to be able to settle in and be organized feels amazing.

Last Day of Traveling. For Now.

Saturday the 23rd we slept in and had a lazy morning.  I talked to my family on Skype and then we left for the airport early afternoon.  On the way to the airport we saw something we had never seen before:

We were going highway speeds too!

We gained insight into electronics:

SO cool.  I want one!

 And we said farewell to Tex. 

 Farewell for now anyway.  We had some lunch at the airport, I went to a real ramen noodle place, it was awesome.  Matt had a burger.  Which was not as awesome as my authentic ramen.  Our flight was short and a little bumpy.  But we landed safely and were whisked away to our new home for the next 3 months where we unpacked and got settled in.  Pictures of our room to come! 

Just a Quick Note

We have made it safely to our destination.  We don't have time to write much but we wanted to share a reference with you and we encourage all of you, especially the young ones, to look it up.  If you have the actual bound volumes you could also look at the pictures. w10 12/1 26-29.  Enjoy!

Visa Day

First thing Friday we walked to the main road to hail a cab:

And took a looooooooong cab ride to the Embassy (it was rush hour).  It literally took 2 hours. I'm not even joking.  However, it gave us a chance to take in lots of new sights.

Notice the sign in the lower left corner?

There are 7 Elevens everywhere. Not attached to a gas station, just the convenience store part.

Thai schoolgirls doing an anti-drug march and parade.

I thought this was so pretty.

 We arrived at the Embassy and there was a lovely couple there to meet us from Yangon branch who were there for their visa renewal too.They helped us with our visa paperwork and then they took us around a little bit.  Showed us how to use the rail system and some good malls.  At the first mall which is called the Siam Paragon we ate breakfast at a french restaurant.  Here was what we ate:

Almond Croissant

Quiche, one of the best in my life, if not THE best.

We love french bakeries!

 Then we walked  to a different mall and on the way saw this:

Had to take a picture for my office.

The mall was named MBK which was  like a huge version of one of the malls we went to in Moldova.  Lots of little shops selling everything you can imagine.

I found the Thai version of Sephora:

 Matt bought a messenger bag at a shop here and we were able to get the guy to come down in price by using a trick Kelsey whom we met in the DR showed us.  Tell them your price and if they will not come down, open your wallet and show them that the price you named is all the money you have.  (Hint, only use if it really is all the money you have or else have your spouse have the extra money and the one in charge of haggling only has the amount you are willing to spend on a certain item.)

We went and picked up our Visas and so it's official.  We can get into the country now! Yay!   We took a taxi ride back to the branch which was much shorter than the one in the morning.  One thing we  noticed about cars here is this:

No heat.  Which totally makes sense.  Oh by the way, when I say WE noticed the A/C only thing, I mean Matt noticed.  I'm oblivious to important details like that.  We got back to the branch and crashed in our room.  We didn't even go out for the evening meal we were just too tired and our hunger schedule is all messed up with the time change.  However, we have snacks if we need em:)  We fell asleep watching a movie and that was it for this day!  Well, that's all for this one folks.  Hope you enjoyed!