First Sabbath

19 January – First Sabbath

It snowed overnight. In the blue morning light (8am) everything was covered with white. People have been busy sweeping nearby streets with long grass brooms for the past few hours. I watched two cars spin around 360 in the square below our window – leaving tyre marks in the clean whiteness of the road. Another car was doing the same thing at midnight the other night, so I guess it is a form of entertainment for young drivers in every city that gets snow. I did see one car nearly smash into another when it lost control on the corner though, so I guess that is why they sweep the streets. If there is an accident here the police can decide on the spot who is to blame. The other day we were driving back to the office from the state department store (it takes less than 10 minutes to walk this distance, and usually about 15 minutes to drive it!). The road was blocked and horns were blaring. You have to be aggressive on the car horn hen you drive here, though I am yet to see what good it does. Ahead of us we could see two cars close together and a few police officers with their “light sabers” (really, they do look like light sabers). Some kind of bingle had happened and we watched the police talk to each driver, write something down and then instruct each driver to move on. Then the rest of us could move and we made it back to the office. Dealing with the local police is something that scares us about driving here as they can take your licence on the spot and make it very hard to get it back again.

Back to the morning snow....The small tree at the entrance to our stairwell is loaded with small birds this morning. Alesia and I sat on the window sill (our window sills are wide enough to be window seats) and watched the birds gather and chatter. I can’t imagine what they eat and how they stay warm. We saw a stray cat slinking around once in the snow and I wondered how effective its fur was. We see dogs about, but keep our distance as rabies is here and a doctor in Australia told us it takes only one lick to an open wound for rabies to be a risk. At the moment we have no exposed skin for licking when we are outside, but still we keep clear of the dogs.

We get some morning sun in the kitchen. Depending on how polluted the air is in the morning we can get sun that feels like morning sun or sun that is the red colour of afternoon sun. The picture above is of the girl's sitting next to the heater in the kitchen. We have heating like this in every room. I just watched Chris and Alesia walk to church. We can see the church building from our bedroom window – I am still working out if this is handy or not. I did think that Alesia was the pinkest thing on the streets, but in a few days I have seen many little girls with pink hats, scarves and coats, so Alesia fits in well with girly fashion here.

Keira is asleep. I rinsed my hair in scalding hot water (still have a hot water surplus) and sat to write while listening to music. For the first time a wave of sadness came over me. Maybe it is the music, which is not sad (Hillsong!), but is just something that is from home.

20 January

I found the baby barometer thing Chris gave me a while ago. Not sure how it got into our luggage but I can report that it is currently 19.4 degrees Celsius with 44% humidity in our apartment. I have no idea of the temperature outside, but it is snowing lightly with a cold wind. I am starting to assess how cold it is (relative to really cold) by how people out the window are dressed. The key is the hood on the coat. If people have their hoods up and scarves wrapped around their faces it is really, really cold. If it is a sunny day of about -16 or so with no wind chill then people may push their hoods back, light a cigarette and chat on their mobile phone while walking. Pictured is how Keira and I get kitted up to go out. For longer walks she gets to wear a balaclava, so just shows her beady eyes to the world. She does not mind it all when we are outside, but hates having it all put on inside as we all get really hot.

We had some embarrassment today. We went to go out to the shops and managed to lock ourselves out of our apartment. It took two hours of work by an ADRA staffer to try to get us in, and then he gave up and climbed up the balconies on the outside of the building and broke in through one of our balcony windows. Nice to see what good security we have…While waiting for someone to break into our home we took the girls to an indoor playhouse – just like a soft play centre in Australia. It is next door to the church, so also within sight of our bedroom window. This is definitely handy. It cost about $2 for each child to play for an hour.

Alesia is finding it hard to adjust. She has picked up a cold, won’t eat food that looks remotely different and is being generally difficult. Keira is her usual cheerful self, eats anything given to her and smiles at everyone. She has developed a fetish for tiny Chinese mandarins that we can buy by the bag here. They are less than a mouthful in size, and tedious to peel at times, but she loves eating each tiny segment. So we have to hide the bag from her or she demands them all the time.

Meals made so far:

Scrambled eggs

Pasta with lentils and coriander

Tostada’s with all the trimmings

I don’t think food will be a problem – we found that Mongolian sour cream is very nice. Low fat? What is that?