Marhaba,
Today was pretty awesome. Benjamin slept until almost 8am, which is waaaay better than 7. I got him up and eating breakfast, Thomas rode to work with the neighbors, and I got ready in time for Emy to show up at 9am. She played with Ben and they had a good time, I started some laundry and showed her the cleaning supplies and what to feed him for lunch. I left about 9:35 and caught a cab pretty quickly. Getting to the embassy takes about 5 minutes so it was a quick ride, about .60JD, which is a dollar.
My "class" is really just me and one other woman, who is very nice and we talked a bit after the class. The teacher is a nice Jordanian woman who is friendly and hopefully will be a good instructor. We got worksheets with conversations, and just went through how to say hello and other little things. I need to review at home and find some online pronunciation tools. There are a couple sounds in Arabic that English just doesn't have, and my mouth and throat are uncooperative. But it was good to start practicing and meet a new friend.
Thomas met me for lunch at 11:30, it was fun to hang out just the two of us during the day. Although he enjoys getting to see Benjamin for lunch sometimes, maybe on a class-free day I can swing by. Because, drumroll please: we got the van! Our residency cards came in and the dude dropped the van off tonight. It still has his plates, and we don't have a parking pass for the embassy until our plates come in, but still. I'll drop Thomas off at work tomorrow and hopefully make it home without incident. We drove around a teeny bit tonight just to celebrate. It's definitely an old van, 1999, and has 130K on it. I'm a little sketched out, the check engine light is always on because the dirty fuel here messes with the catalytic converter (not that I understand). So I'm hoping Thomas might let me drive the Cruiser if I'm still not 100% confident in the van. We'll see...
In other exciting news, we got two packages from Target, one was two tubes of face scrub and the other were my two new pairs of sunglasses. Yay! I will definitely be wearing my contacts more now. It's suuuuuper sunny here, all the time. Hardly ever cloudy. Which is great, except for pale people like me. We've got a couple more packages to wait on, some things needed to go through the pouch which takes longer than the DPO. Certain things can't be shipped to a DPO. It's always fun to get stuff in the mail. I remember studying abroad in college and it was the best thing ever to open up the mailbox and see a letter from home. Ahhh the good old days. I have to say, living overseas this time is still hard with all the differences and language and general craziness, but it's so great having Thomas here and the support network the embassy provides. (This is a whole three weeks worth of wisdom for ya.)
Oh and I think Benjamin was okay for Emy, he took a little nap in the morning so she was able to clean a couple bathrooms (awesome) and straighten some things. I think she'll work out, she's very sweet. I hope that Benjamin will grow to really like her a lot, and look forward to hanging out with her. She's no Alison (sniff) but she'll do. It was really nice to take a break for a couple hours, do the class and lunch and get a couple things at the co-op. Tomorrow I'm going to attempt a playgroup with Kristin and her boys. I'm not nearly ready to try and drive anywhere outside of the embassy and home, so I'm grateful for a ride. I can't believe it's already August. Time is already flying.
Hope y'all have a great week,
Rachel
Today was pretty awesome. Benjamin slept until almost 8am, which is waaaay better than 7. I got him up and eating breakfast, Thomas rode to work with the neighbors, and I got ready in time for Emy to show up at 9am. She played with Ben and they had a good time, I started some laundry and showed her the cleaning supplies and what to feed him for lunch. I left about 9:35 and caught a cab pretty quickly. Getting to the embassy takes about 5 minutes so it was a quick ride, about .60JD, which is a dollar.
My "class" is really just me and one other woman, who is very nice and we talked a bit after the class. The teacher is a nice Jordanian woman who is friendly and hopefully will be a good instructor. We got worksheets with conversations, and just went through how to say hello and other little things. I need to review at home and find some online pronunciation tools. There are a couple sounds in Arabic that English just doesn't have, and my mouth and throat are uncooperative. But it was good to start practicing and meet a new friend.
Thomas met me for lunch at 11:30, it was fun to hang out just the two of us during the day. Although he enjoys getting to see Benjamin for lunch sometimes, maybe on a class-free day I can swing by. Because, drumroll please: we got the van! Our residency cards came in and the dude dropped the van off tonight. It still has his plates, and we don't have a parking pass for the embassy until our plates come in, but still. I'll drop Thomas off at work tomorrow and hopefully make it home without incident. We drove around a teeny bit tonight just to celebrate. It's definitely an old van, 1999, and has 130K on it. I'm a little sketched out, the check engine light is always on because the dirty fuel here messes with the catalytic converter (not that I understand). So I'm hoping Thomas might let me drive the Cruiser if I'm still not 100% confident in the van. We'll see...
In other exciting news, we got two packages from Target, one was two tubes of face scrub and the other were my two new pairs of sunglasses. Yay! I will definitely be wearing my contacts more now. It's suuuuuper sunny here, all the time. Hardly ever cloudy. Which is great, except for pale people like me. We've got a couple more packages to wait on, some things needed to go through the pouch which takes longer than the DPO. Certain things can't be shipped to a DPO. It's always fun to get stuff in the mail. I remember studying abroad in college and it was the best thing ever to open up the mailbox and see a letter from home. Ahhh the good old days. I have to say, living overseas this time is still hard with all the differences and language and general craziness, but it's so great having Thomas here and the support network the embassy provides. (This is a whole three weeks worth of wisdom for ya.)
Oh and I think Benjamin was okay for Emy, he took a little nap in the morning so she was able to clean a couple bathrooms (awesome) and straighten some things. I think she'll work out, she's very sweet. I hope that Benjamin will grow to really like her a lot, and look forward to hanging out with her. She's no Alison (sniff) but she'll do. It was really nice to take a break for a couple hours, do the class and lunch and get a couple things at the co-op. Tomorrow I'm going to attempt a playgroup with Kristin and her boys. I'm not nearly ready to try and drive anywhere outside of the embassy and home, so I'm grateful for a ride. I can't believe it's already August. Time is already flying.
Hope y'all have a great week,
Rachel
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