Half Marathon!

This weekend, we traveled to a southern city for the annual half marathon. I (Angela) ran with another friend, and Karl was our official stuff holder. This race was much more organized than the 5k race we ran about 2 months ago!



Here we are at about the half way mark.


The course was beautiful, with the lovely snow capped mountains!


I finished the race in just under 2 hours! We had our picture taken with these people from our city - Karl has coached the boy in the pic basketball! They gave us free t-shirts and hats, which was a nice gift, although I look super dorky with the hat on.

Bon Appetit!

Today we went with some friends to a local camel bucher (just a 20 minute walk from our house!). We picked the meat, and took it to a "restaurant" where they cooked it for us, and served mint tea, bread and veggies. It was actually really tasty!


The key to all of this was to not hang around too long in the meat section - hanging camel is not the most appetizing.




We were eating right next to a mosque, so we were watching the men pray. It was quite a cultural experience!

Its raining

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while! I just haven't taken any pictures. Its been raining a bunch, so I guess that's my excuse. I am including some pictures from the year that I never posted. I'll have some more updates later.

This cafe is close to where Karl coaches basketball. Good name, right!?

Beach town

Today my friend and I traveled to a beach town just south of here for the day. We walked around, and enjoyed the scenery.



A long time ago, this city was a Portugese fort. Now, people live within the walls.





As you can see, I was pretty disgusted! I think this is the first time a bird has ever pooped directly on my head. We didn't have any napkins, so I walked around like this until I could find a bathroom!

Merry Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas!! We hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas this year. We started the day off with some BACON, eggs and muffins, the Christmas story, and then gifts. We miss being with family this time of year, but we have enjoyed making up some traditions of our own.




Karl got this new jacket for me!


We have been searching for an apartment for a new couple arriving in a few weeks. This is near where we are looking, and at first glance I almost thought there would be a Domino's Pizza close by. Such wishful thinking... this is Domicle's Pizza, and I am pretty confident in saying the quality won't compare with the real thing. I don't think there are copy right laws here...

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?