Merry Christmas!!!

We will be out of blog-o-sphere for the next two weeks traveling in Europe. Tune back in next year for pictures of the sheep sacrifice, vacation with fam, and retreat in Spain. To all our BFF's and fam so sorry we can't call you on Christmas, we'll talk when we get back! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!

A Chronological Look at our 4th Anniversary

On December 13th we celebrated 4 happy years together. Because we just went to Barcelona last month for business and spent a lot of money we decided to count that as our anniversary trip and not travel this time. This is our third time to spend our anniversary here in this country. (I really keep trying to spell it "anniversery" this is NOT right and very annoying). Anyway, our day started out with some Classical Arabic class at 9:00 a.m. It was as romantic as it sounds. Nothing says "I love you" like perfecting your guttural stops.


Next we moved on to our school holiday party. We were celebrating Christmas and Eid Al Adha which is the festival of sacrifice in Islam and everyone who can afford to will a buy a sheep and sacrifice it. They are remembering when Abraham was going to sacrifice his son (the other one, not the one we believe) but God instead provided a sheep in his place. We are going to a friends house to watch the sacrificing of their sheep this week (more on that later). It was the joining of many cultures (we have least 12 represented in our school) to share food and stories of our holiday's.


Next, we did a little apartment hunting work. While waiting for the concierge I had a lovely chat with this adorable girl. I love talking to kids because I always understand their Arabic. She was telling me about these really hot peppers where she is from and you have to drink lots of water or milk because your mouth is on fire. I wonder if she'll be my language partner?


Next we had a light lunch because of all the food we ate at the party. This place is normally filled with hookah smoke in the evening but it's not too bad if you get there first for lunch. We had delicious falafel and hummus and fresh OJ. I didn't get photos of this, but in the afternoon we went to a Korean art show to support some friends from church.


For our evening out we went to a steak place. We had the best fried garlic calamari of our lives! It was very nice and the waiters had remembered us from when we were there once back in April! All in all, we had good anniversary (just misspelled it again!) and what a strange thought that next year we will be celebrating in America...weird!


On a completely different side note, the next day, Cody highlighted my hair and I am showing off my new spectacles. When choosing my glasses, I was going for something funky, not sure what they wear in terms of eyeglasses in America but people are pretty European with their choice of eye-wear here. Cody is such a good hair dyer. Every since we moved away from my usual hair dying girlfriends, Cody as taken over the role. He's very meticulous in everything he does so he's really good at it. He was little nervous b/c this was his first time to do highlights. Being that the instructions were in French I forgot to wet my hair first, but it still came out pretty good! I also spent the most I have every spent on a haircut here this week. Normally I spend about $5 but this time I spent over $20! Since I am growing my hair out I decided to add some bangs and layers to the front. Anyway that was super-girly explanation so sorry for any of you male readers...if you made this far!

Where have ya'll been?

Well two weeks have passed since our last post and I haven't taken that many great photos. Here is a lil bit of randomness from our lives.

First of all...meet Ghetto Claus. The Americans put on a Christmas bazaar and of course it wouldn't be Christmas without a skinny 5'5'' man handing out candy canes. This guy couldn't keep his beard or hat on to save his life and his dark hair and black 5 o'clock shadow kept showing.  At least he was a tri-lingual Santa right? I tried to get my photo taken with him, but you know how kids are. Besides, the guy was probably my age and it would have been weird to sit on his lap.


Next comes, Mexican Night! The food that is. I found these taco shells this week and upon closer inspection I see they are product of the USA, and not only is everything written in English it's also from El Paso, Texas, 45 minutes from where I am from! It was crazy! I paid no attention to the Arabic sticker on it, hoping it wouldn't be a warning of sorts. Have you guys heard of Casa Fiesta brand in America?


I also bought the beans. I love refried beans and these are quite tasty. Also from El Paso, TX. Now, if only we could start getting tortillas here!

The last couple of days we have had really low water pressure making it difficult to take warm showers because there isn't enough pressure to turn on the bhuta gas heater. Well today it was cut off altogether so we got a buzz from our concierge informing us we need to bring our buckets to fill up with water. Here is everyone frantically filling up their buckets as if we are in some sort of drought and there won't be enough water to go around. I wasn't sure if they knew something I didn't so I got our buckets and went downstairs too.

Cody carrying our water upstairs. Mostly, we wanted to be able to flush the toilets because, ewww, can't let that back up.

In other apartment news, this is the store that has opened since we moved in here. See the "Residence" sign, that's our door where we go in. As if a huge orange store wasn't enough they added this balloon too. Pretty huh?

Thanksgiving, North African Style

Our Thanksgiving started out like any other...except only our foreigner friends knew we were celebrating anything at all. My doorman told us "Congratulations on your holiday" after explaining to him what today was. About 4 hours of our day was spent getting to and from our destination. We took a train to be with some friends about an hour way but it was raining and hard to get a taxi once we got there. Here are our wet bags of food we are carrying to the party.

There were about 40 Americans celebrating at this one small house. Our side dish we brought was (Hatch) green chili cream cheese corn (woot woot NM) and a six layer cookie bar desert. (Almost) Everything was so delicious. My favorite thing was the sweet potato casserole. The only thing we were missing was pumpkin pie (really difficult to make here). But that's okay maybe at Christmas.


Here we our at about 9:30 p.m. on the train back to our city.  We spent Saturday decorating our house. I love to have my house decorated b/c there is not many places that feel christmasy here. My version of Thanksgiving shopping weekend was a little different, but no less intense. There was a bizarre with all the embassies from around the world selling stuff at tables from their countries. After the King's wife made her way down the red carpet (I was in the front, 15 feet from her!) and looked around there was mad dash and stampede of hundreds of people to get in. Things I bought at the USA table include a Butterfinger and Reese's Peanut Butter cup.

Putting the final touches on our tree.


Hanging our chile lights, I am going to take these home with me so each year I hang them it will remind me of our three Christmas' here.

The finished product. I am really pleased how the decorations turned out this year. We did our outside door too. I love the holiday season! (it also includes my birthday and anniversary so that helps :)

Beautiful Barcelona

Last week we went to Barcelona, Spain.  We found a great hostal for only 36 euros a night and it was super nice and it was in a great location.  The weather was perfect and all the tourist spots were not packed at all.  

When we arrived we thought we were in Scotland because the streets were packed with Scots chanting, drinking, and singing.  The next day they were playing the Barcelona team in soccer so everyone was getting ready for the big game.  20,000 Brits and Scots came down and they were super drunk all day, starting at 9:00 a.m. when we left our hostal!  They wore their jersey's for three days in row and every other word that came out of their mouth was the "f" bomb!

This a building by the famous 19th Century architect Gaudi.  His works are the most famous attractions in Barcelona.  


Enjoying some time at a lovely park.  

We went into several Cathedrals (the free ones :)
Here is Cody admiring the view from the top of this park that is on a mountain that overlooks the whole city.  


This is the Gaudi park.  He has a crazy style and this lizard is super famous and everyone was taking photos of it, so I had to also.
Posing on the mosaic benches.  

Cody is crazy good at reading maps and getting us around new cities.  He remembers a new route after taking it just one time (I still got lost on N. Main in Las Cruces!)  He did such a good job finding the right metros and walking us the through the city.  

Every city has to have their version Arc de Triomf and here is theirs.  

This is Gaudi's crazy masterpiece that isn't finished.  He started it in 1882 and they don't expect completion for at least another 25 years.  The lighter part on the left is the newer portion of the building.  It's gonna be crazy when it's finished!

So blogger, has a new format (for Macs its new I guess) and let you do more stuff with font, colors, paragraph, and video now.  So I am pretty excited about the possibilities.  Although with the naked eye it may seem as though this post looks like every other one...it's different OKAY!  :)

The Rest of the Story

Well as you will read in my next post my blogger hasn't been working but all of the sudden it did and I was on a roll so I went ahead and decided to do two posts today to finish our time with Cody's parents.

Shopping in the market

Have to hold the snakes in this desert city!

Cody's love this breakfast dish. It's eggs with this meat (beef jerky-ish) stored in lard and then scooped out of a tub and cooked in a tagine dish. Personally, I find it offensive but some people really like it. Oh, and you eat it with bread with your hands like a normal tagine.

Here is Jan trying the McArabia at McDonald's. Ron went with the Big Mac :)

Communal cous cous bowl

We had some friends stop in for the night and they are super cool. Greg, Clinton and us hanging out on the roof

Don't know what we are doing here

Enjoying some coffee and the corner shop. (On the bottom of our building we have two coffee shops, furniture store, car dealerships, etc, note to self...blog about this later)

Last day. Posing on my new rug. Thanks guys for a great time!

Travelin' With the Folks

Okay, after SOOO much hassle I finally got these pics uploaded. Blogger has been driving me crazy and not letting me upload photos. Anyone else experiencing this problem? So we traveled for a week and here some pics from our time. We went to the village where my friend lives way down south and Jan I stayed at her house while Cody and Ron stayed with some American friends.

This is the Kasbah we have been to each time we make the trek to the village.

Of course they had to get us dressed up. Here is Jan as a Berber bride. I am posing with my North African serious pose (hard to get these people to smile)

This is my new rug!!! Click on the photos to enlarge, it's so colorful and a new style the Berber women are making. It's really cheap to buy rugs down south. I would never buy in the cities now, you pay triple the cost! (thanks for the Christmas present, Jan ;)

A beautiful women cooking some bread for the day. This is a shared oven, people just take turns cooking their bread and hanging out while they wait.

On the road to the village, this is an old gas station from a movie set. Tons of movies are filmed here. Anyone recognize this from a movie?

An old Berber women's hands dyed with henna.

Cute!!!

Me and my friend headed out to pick palm fronds to feed the goats.

Here is the next stop on our tour. A fishing town of the coast. It's very peaceful and chill and we really like this place. This is hooks attached to the side of boat.

Working the boats

Camel ride on the beach. I had to bargain for 20 minutes to get this dude to give us a little five minute ride to take our pics

I love this pic that Jan took and you can see my fresh henna work from the village