Holiday season

The holidays came earlier here, as today the people celebrated "Aid Kabeer," which translates as the big holiday. Each family buys, slaughters and eats a sheep on this day. They will continue to eat the meat for the next few days. Karl and I witnessed this from our window today. Needless to say, it was a smelly!


Our neighbors bought two sheep, and put them in our "shared" space, which happens to be right behind our kitchen door. Our kitchen smelled like a sheep barn for about 3 days! The smell is starting to go away (the sheep met their end this morning), but a stench of dead sheep is in the air, and probably will be for the next few days.


If you look closely, you can see the sheep sitting against the door. You can also see plastic bags around our door - this was our attempt to keep the smell out, but it really didn't do anything.


This was the view from our office window.


This is our street. The man below was going around collecting the sheep skins. I'm not sure if he was begging for them so that he could sell them for a bit of money, or taking them to fix for people. Some people like to display the sheep skins in their homes.


I went to a wedding on Sunday, and wore this traditional dress called a "tqsheda." The dress was nice, but was really long, which made walking challenging.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Karl and I have both been a little sick lately, but that didn't keep us from enjoying Thanksgiving! We had two Thanksgiving meals, and enjoyed every bite. We traveled to a different city for one of the meals, and enjoyed being with lots of other Americans.



This was the city we traveled to - see the beautiful mountains?!


Right after Thanksgiving, we put our tree up. Karl had the lovely job of putting it together. I went to a French store today to look at their Christmas decorations, but nothing was there! Come on people, its December 3rd!! For now, we just have a tree and stocking.


Karl loves it when I tune into Q99fm.com because they are playing endless Christmas music right now! We enjoyed the music as we decorated the tree.



Last week my friend and I decided to run this free "5k" for women. It was a run for breast cancer, which we were both pumped about. After waiting for about 2 hours for the race to start (we got there early to register, then the race stared 55 minutes late!), the gun finally went off. There were probably about 1,000 ladies running in this race, half of whom had never run a day before in their lives! They started the race sprinting until they made it about 1km, then they would just stop in the middle of the road. I almost ran over a few of them! We finished the race in 19 minutes, which means either, A. I am an awesome runner, and had the best race of my life, or B. it was really a 3.5 or 4 K. I'm thinking that B is the better option. I plan to run a half marathon in January, hopefully that race will be more organized! I mean, how hard is it to measure 5 km?

Family Visit - Round Two

My mom and step dad (Randy) came to visit last week, and we had a great time showing them around!

Mom and I cooked this beef, prunes and almonds dish together. It turned out delicious, and they really enjoyed it!




We visited these Roman Ruins with mom and Randy as well - the weather was perfect, and we all enjoyed walking through the old city.



We took a horse carriage tour through a different city. We visited an old prison underground and an old grain storage building.

Family Visit - Round One

Last week my (Angela's) family came to visit. It was great to see them! We traveled to some other cities, and ate delicious food.


We spent one day on the beach. It was nice and quiet, and the beach was empty! When the camel owners heard that there were foreigners on the beach, they brought the camel out for us to ride. Too bad for them that we were not interested, but we did get some good pictures!


We kept our distance from the snake charmers


Walking through the market - it was raining, so there weren't that many people there.




We also visited some Roman ruins. We spent an entire afternoon walking through an old Roman city.



My mom and step dad, Randy, are here visiting now! I'll post round two after they leave.

Back in the groove

We're back into the swing of things over here, and enjoying our time with basketball, language learning and eating!

Karl has been working really hard on learning stories in Arabic to tell the basketball players after each practice. He memorizes two stories a week, and is doing great!



Most of these kids started playing basketball last year. They have improved so much, and are doing very well this year.


We spent last Saturday in a neighboring city, and walked through this market. It was super crowded, but always a good experience.

Switzerland... Part III

Here are the last of our pictures from Switzerland. We finished the week off with some more hiking, checking out some Roman Ruins and walking around Lyon, France for about 3 hours.


There were vineyards on the bottoms of most of the mountains in this part of Swizterland.


This was the view from our window at a B&B that we stayed at. Pretty nice! We sat outside on the terrace, drinking milk and eating chocolate a cheese.


This was an old Roman Amphitheater, and there is a castle in the background.

More Ruins:




In Geneva - it was another big city, but we enjoyed walking around.

Switzerland... Part II

So, from Interlaken we went to Vevey, Switzerland which is on the southern side of Lake Geneva. The train ride there was beautiful! In Vevey, we spent most of our time hiking in the surrounding areas, riding trains, drinking milk and eating chocolate/cheese.



Everything was so green!


Here we are in one of the many trains.


Our first adventure was in some farmland - the smell of manure was actually refreshing. This was Karl's favorite day!


There were radishes everywhere - we think they must use them for feed.


One day, we hiked from one town to another in the mountains. This was probably my (Angela's) favorite day. It ended up being about 13 miles, and we were tired at the end, but it was completely worth it. The fall colors were starting to come out, which was a great blessing for us since we don't see them here in N. Africa.




More cows!





I still have more pictures of the end of our trip. I will post them in a few days!