Welcome to our new place! (Part 1)

Welcome to our new home!  

Our family recently moved and we are setting up our new place.  We are quite excited as it is our first place, since having children, that is completely our own.  I am enjoying being able to decide exactly where I want to put my salt and where to put our shoes…organizing is oddly so fun and relaxing for me.  My husband is enjoying the benefits of hard work as he takes responsibility for various household things.  And our children are enjoying exploring the new house and neighborhood. 

One of the things I struggled with the most before moving overseas was the unknown about life and general living that are second nature in your own country.  My husband could tell me the structure and set up of the ministry.  He could predict his responsibilities and schedule.  And he could even give me details as to what classes he’d be most likely to teach.  But those weren’t my concerns.  My concerns were how do I shop for food?  What do kitchens look like?  What do people do for fun on their days off?  How do you raise kids so that they will create precious childhood memories?  Moving into our new place reminded me of many of my previous questions and it made me think perhaps you’d might be interested as well.  So follow me and I will show you some things about our home and life here.

Neighborhood

The usage of color here is so fun.  Colors are used in so many ways here, in contrast to the earth tones and natural colors that I am used to.  For instance in the simple block where our house sits you have almost all the colors of the rainbow! Red, orange, yellow, green, and blue!

With so much color in our neighborhood, do you wonder what color our house is?  Grey.  ha ha….

Its grey because they build from concrete here and it never got painted.  But if I had a say in what color I’d recommend it would be purple.  Why? Because that’s the only color house missing from our block to complete the rainbow.

Besides color, another thing that caught my eye about neighborhoods here is the way empty lots look.  I am born and raised from Southern California in the high desert.  Where everything is dry and brown and as a kid we found amusement playing with the stacks of tumbleweeds that built up in the corner of our property.  So empty lots overgrown with green catches my eye every time in amazement!  I can’t believe this is what “normal” looks like.  This lot is actually the empty lot next to our house.

And here are a couple others just around the corner....

Street Vendors

One thing we really like about this specific neighborhood is the easy access it has to public transportation.  Tricycles (aka “trikes”) are always close by and ready to take us to the local bakery, laundry, or market for a reasonable price.  Jakob loves riding the trike with Daddy.  Here is a picture of a trike in our neighborhood.  Its a motorcycle with a sidecar attached to the side. 

Another thing we like are all of the street vendors that walk down our street.  Every morning we can hear them through our windows, calling out their merchandise or ringing their bells to catch our attention.  They must have a regular route because we can estimate what time of day each vendor will pass by our house, tempting us to grab our coins and go running like school kids to catch their attention.

First comes the taho man.  A long wooden stick with two large metal buckets tied to each end, he balances the taho over his shoulders, calling out “tahhhhooooo!”  It is a custard/pudding like soy bean porridge, mixed with a brown syrup and sago pearls.  It is served warm and slides down your throat with ease.  It took us awhile to catch him since he has quite a quick pace and short yell.

Immediately after him comes the suman lady.  She has a great voice and you can hear her coming.  Usually by 9:30am each morning the taho man and suman lady will have already been pass our house.  Suman is sticky rice formed into dessert.  It is extremely sticky and almost gummy like.  But you often will dip it into sugar or have a sugary syrup to dip it into.  There are many varieties but here are a few we sampled.  It often is wrapped in a palm or banana leaf.

In the late morning and late afternoon you can usually catch the ice cream man.  There are two types of ice cream that comes around.  Both are announced by the ringing of a bell.  One type is a variety of prepackaged ice cream desserts.  The other type is called dirty ice cream.  There seems to be mixed thoughts as to how dirty ice cream got its name.  But most attribute it to the fact that it is peddled on the street.  It is ice cream made from water buffalo milk and/or coconut milk and mixed with a little flour to help keep it from melting in the tropical heat.  You can ask for an “ice cream sandwich” which is ice cream scooped into a hamburger like bun.

Well there is much more I would love to show you about our new house.  But this post is already long enough.... and my internet connection is slow.  So I will save the other pictures for another post.  Thanks for stopping by!  Come back soon!