men's meeting

Every month the men in our neighborhood meet to discuss local politics and funds for maintenance projects. There is also a lot of smoking, chatting and snack eating going on.

Last week we were informed that it was our turn to host that meeting, so there was lots of stuff to do such as
- ordering snack boxes
- buying fruit and nuts
- borrowing glasses and mats and a big tea pot from our neighbor

all ready for the people to come - of course everybody came about half an hour to 45 minutes late, which is completely normal and exceptable here

making tea for everybody - they like it really really sweet (a big spoon of sugar for every small glas)

 all the furniture is carried out of the room because there would not be a seat for everybody otherwise. The mats are there so that people don't have to sit on the cold tiles.

the snack boxes (I did not choose the very un-manly design :-))

Oh and if you were wondering how we are doing with all the volcano ash... we got a lot of rain the last few days, so all of the ash is gone, but we almost had a little flood...

volcano erruption

Last night a volcano erupted quite far from us. This morning we woke up to an unusual darkness and when we looked out our window it looked as if it had snowed! Everyone is wearing masks and keeping their doors closed.

 those roofs are not usually grey

 this car is blue!

 Outside without a mask!!! living dangerous

our usually very green plants

Another "Not wrong, just different

Want to eat some fresh chicken feet?

a normal day

Sorry about the absence of new posts on this blog in a while, there were several reasons like lack of motivation, sickness and busyness to name a few.

I heard that from our blog people might gather that our lives consist only of trips and exciting events so I thought it would be a good idea to blog about what normal day, without any special culture events going on, looks like for us.

Here we go:
Between 6.00 and 6.30 Alia wakes (us) up and she has to put up with some morning snuggles until her parents are probably awake.

We get up, get dressed, feed Alia, maybe get ourselves some breakfast and leave for school.

 8.00 to 12.00 we are in language school or tutor sessions

We go home and eat lunch with Alia after which she takes a nap and we do our homework

I know looks boring - it often is

When Alia wakes up from her nap we usually go out and do things like

 go shopping

 go for a drive

and then around 4ish we go for walks around our neighborhood to "talk" to people. 

(It is very important in this culture that you care about your neighbor(hood)

This might sound like a lot of fun and it is starting to be that more and more, but when all you can do to communicate is smile, trust me, it gets really hard to "talk" to people.

Around 6 we eat dinner, and then it is play, shower, sing and drink her milk for Alia before she goes to bed.

If we haven't been able to finish our homework while Alia took her nap we continue to work on that now. 

There are several Bible studies a week that either one of us attends in the evenings or sometimes Erlend hangs out with friends or watches a football games with the guys from the neighborhood. 

I am usually so tired that I don't need much at the end of the day.

This all sounds a bit boring? Yes, and that is why I do not blog about it every day :-).

 But this hopefully shows you a bit more what we do everyday.