My Big Fat Greek Vacation

One of the nice things about teaching in Bahrain, is that there are many week long Muslim holidays which translate into school closing for a week which translates into us traveling! Not a bad deal! We are slowly but surely hitting all our destinations. We recently returned from an 8-day trip to Greece. We spent 3-days in Athens and 5-days on the island of Crete. The most special part of the trip was seeing my family & introducing them all to Scott. We had a great adventure, as usual. The weather was perfect! We had highs in the low 80's and lows in the high 60's. It was like being back home in LA for a week. We hit all the main tourist spots in Athens. Although it was the middle of September, there were quite a few tourists, more than we expected to see. I would say 99% of them were German. We came across a few Americans. They are never hard to spot. They are usually loud, overweight, and wearing baseball caps. We ate like pigs the entire trip. Whatever we felt like trying, we tried. We loved every minute of that trip and feel very fortunate to be able to travel now. Our next joint trip will hopefully be to Cairo. Scotty needs to meet that side of the family as well. I hope to travel alone to Lebanon & Dubai to visit more relatives. Scott is restricted from traveling to those locations, unfortunately.

I'm starting my second month of teaching 3rd grade again this year. I have to say that I am not thrilled so far. I have 32 students and no help whatsoever. There are 19 boys and 13 girls. I think the best way to describe them is as a bunch of wild animals. I have never seen kids like this before. They are wild. I even threatened to quit. They shaped up when I made the threat. I may go through with it though. I also have a group of mothers who are driving me absolutely crazy! They hover around before and after school and just drive me nuts. I guess this is what I get since last year was a breeze. Who knew?!

We're dealing with the day to day realities of living in a borderline 3rd world country. Two weeks ago our air conditioner broke and we were miserable until it was repaired. Last week we had no water for about 10-days! That was horrible. The electricity stops when it feels like it and now our satellite dish is not working properly. Even with all these issues, we are enjoying our time here. There is one exception.....the heat. I don't want to complain too much because it has actually cooled off a bit, but we're still in the triple digits and will be for at least another month to month & a half. I've been knitting 2 scarves and hope to have them done by December/January when it cools down enough.

Locally, there are elections taking place later this month. For the first time ever they are encouraging women to run for office. We have seen candidate signs go up all over town. We can't read the signs since they are in Arabic, but you can imagine it's the usual stuff. There is also a big picture of the candidate. I wonder how the women will be recognized on these posters. How do you know who is who when all you can see are their eyes? It's easy with the men. There they are in all their glory. The women, it's another story. I often ask myself this question everyday at school. How do these kids recognize their mothers when they come to pick them up? For many of them all they see are the eyes. The black hijabs all look the same. Yet, these kids go running to the right mother each day. It amazes me!

Scott is doing well. He is working a lot and is very busy. He is riding his bike to and from work everyday now, since the weather has cooled off. We laugh because we think 110 is cool now. He's also keeping busy around this house as usual. There's always a project to keep him busy. Of course, he always has Benny boy right next to him trying to help, but usually getting in the way. Benny's up to his usual antics. He's as energetic & dramatic as ever. Nothing slows this guy down. When we picked him up from boarding after we returned from Greece, we figured he'd sleep all day since he had a week of non-stop playing & attention. No such luck! He was ready to play from the moment he stepped in the door.

This week we will celebrate our one-year anniversary of living in Bahrain. I'm amazed at how quickly the time has flown, while at the same time I feel like we've been here forever. We are grateful for every day we've had together & hope year 2 will be just as memorable. With that said, we are ready to get back home! The other day I realized that I haven't heard a lawn mower in a year. That horrible noise used to be part of my normal everyday. I used to hate the sound of lawnmowers. Now it's gone. It's these little things which remind us that we're not in Kansas anymore.