School, Squids and Sunsets

Because I haven't yet posted any pictures of my new home...here they are!

Phyllis' house at sunset

Mine and Brooke's room! My bed is the one on the left with the red headed doll. Brooke shares her bed with the giant teddy bear.

These are just some of the really cool plants in Phyllis' garden

Yes. She has a lemon tree in her backyard. (We even used some of the lemons the other day to make lemonade.)

Things have been moving along quite nicely. We started school on Thursday up at an LDS church building about fifteen minutes from our house. Phyllis gave us a ride on our first day and told us to give her a call if we couldn’t find our way back. Well, that was a bit of an adventure. Since we were just a tad unfamiliar with the bus system we ended up hopping onto a bus with some other girls who we thought that we lived close by. We figured we could just walk back home from there. It turned out that the bus ride was longer than we thought and we had no idea how to get from their house back to ours. Our plan backfired and we ended up having to get their homestay to drive us back to our house. Unfortunately, neither Brook nor I knew exactly where our street was aside from that it was close to Colwill Elementary School….so we had to stop at a member’s house and ask for directions. The member turned out to be our teacher and her daughter from our afternoon Literacy class! And they are both in our ward! We’re not exactly sure where we’re meeting yet or how we’re going to get there but we’ll have it figured out before Sunday.

Today was a success! Phyllis was a little worried that we’d end up getting lost again on our way home so she wrote down our destination stops on a little sticky note, along with her phone number and which bus we were supposed to ride. And we did it! We got to school on time. In fact we were early…the gate was still locked. We even had time to stop at a bakery on the way and buy a blueberry muffin. We shopped around a little after school too. Brooke is on a never-ending search for a hair straightener. They don’t seem to have one anywhere around here! We didn’t find a straightner but we did find some chocolate snacks at the grocery store. We also so a huge bin of raw fish…and get this…a bin of baby squids. Just in the middle of the store! Apparently you use the tongs to pick up however many you want and just put them in a plastic baggy.

School is just dandy. We start at 8 in the morning and end at 3:30 in the afternoon. Our classes are about 3.5 hours each…with a short lunch break in between. Let me tell you, it’s hard to sit still for 3 hours straight. I’ll make it though, don’t worry.

Here's our classroom. Our desks are arranged in a huge horseshoe shape.

The front of our room. Look at all the learning we had to do.

Tonight Phyllis asked if we wanted to watch a video with her. She popped in a DVD of a Andre Rieu concert in London. I have to admit that I wasn’t all that excited about watching it at first…but after the first song or two I had become completely entranced. It was so good! He and his orchestra were so fun to watch! The women were all wearing huge, puffy dresses and balloons fell from the ceiling and men started to play the bagpipes! I’d look him up if I were you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ia34kknFpk0

After the movie we looked out the window and noticed that the sky was completely purple! We ran outside and just managed to get a glimpse of the gorgeous sunset. Brooke and I ran inside to grab our cameras and managed to come back in time to snap a few pictures.