flexible holidays

One of the many perks of living overseas is that you get lots of flexibility with holidays. Like my friend Erin Ashley suggested we carve pumpkins.... for Thanksgiving! It was a blast. And, if you pay attention to the time zone difference and play your cards right, you can make your birthday last for 36 hours instead of the traditional 24 ("it's still my birthday in America, you know?")

So, in the spirit of holiday flexibility, I just posted some of our Christmas card photos on the kitchen wall. They were carefully bundled in our most recent package (thanks so much Luther for serving us in this way!) Matt and I had a great time reading all the letters. Julianna loves it. Now that she's an active member of the "I ask questions all day long club" the photo wall is right up her alley. She points and says, "who's that?" every time she catches me in the kitchen.

In the photo you can see our water "tong"... tap water is not drinkable, so all the water for cooking and drinking comes from this big jug. It's a 19 Liter jug of water, and we use one every two or three days, depending on how much I am cooking. When we need a refill, we call the "song shui shu shu" (bring the water uncle) and tell him to bring us a new jug. He brings us a new jug and takes the old jug away. We pay him with a ticket that we buy in sets - one ticket is good for one jug of water. Each ticket costs about 1 USD.

[sorry the photo quality is a bit poor. since I lost the camera, I am using Matt's phone to take photos and video. Matt has a Treo, it's really much more than a phone... it's more like an, well, everything.]