Winter Sports this Week; Summer Sports Next!

We are still surviving the winter and making the most of it! Other than harsh cold wind, there are some good things that winter brings. For example, this is what we awoke to see our bedroom window to look like. Don't worry, the ice was on the outside window this time. Beautiful, right?

Below is Dana struggling to dodge the piercing wind in front of a random performance. See the guy with the funny hat conducting the people in yellow banging on cymbals? Weird!

Dana and her friend got to go ice skating and catch a movie, completely in a foreign language with foreign language subtitles. We're used to only getting the gist of things by now!

We even went skiing/snowboarding this week! They have a hill on the outside of town that they blow snow on. Not quite Colorado, but this will have to do for now.

Our next blog will be much different because we are migrating south these next 2 weeks. We have to leave the country to get a "workers visa" because we want to teach at the medical college this year. Then, we're going to do some defrosting and relaxing in the hot sun!

Winter Break is Here!

We hope your Christmas and New Years were well. We wish we could have celebrated with you, but we had some fun here too.


Any guesses what this is? Fried chicken wings... with cheerios on top. Only here would you see this! Dana met a girl in the gym that has excellent English last week. She invited us to go to a coffee shop and watch her play the violin. Very talented girl. It was her, an amazing piano player, quiet, coffee, and little cigarette smoke in the air(compared to the normal choking amount) . Had there been no stale cheerios, it would have been perfect!

For Christmas, our local friends gave us a ton of delicious fruit. The citrus here is unbelievable. The large yellow fruit is called a pomelo, or asian grapefruit. The one in the center is about the size of 2 oranges. And the little one is adorable. They are like chips - can't eat just one!

The other picture is the adorable little slice and a huge pomelo slice. Cool huh?

Here we are in front of our Christmas tree in our house on Christmas Eve. We just got done hanging out with some local friends. One friend told me (Dana), "This is the first time to do this - hold little plates with little snacks on them and talk while standing at a party!" That's what a party consists of in America! Crazy cultural differences. Along with our New year came some snow. Enough to stick. It's VERY dry here, but it's snowed maybe 4 days this last week. What a blessing. Although, it really makes biking really hard and scary because now most of the bike lanes are frozen. Even walking you'll more than likely pull something because this country has a plethora of marble. So much marble they don't know what to do with it all, so they use it as sidewalks. Pretty, but extremely unpractical when there is wetness or ice. Here's the park across the street from our house. We love how the snow quiets even the noisiest city.