How I stay healthy

We want for very little here!  Those grapes are truly enormous and so tasty.  Bruce does most of the shopping and cooking.  He's so wonderful to me.   x  x  x

This is all I have time to do now work has begun.

This is the corner where I have my classroom 'office'.  I end up here for hours after school, marking and planning.  Yes, it's still hot enough for a fan.

On tour in Jordan

The Dead Sea was a highlight, I think - or Petra.  It's the weirdest sensation trying to get under the water.. you just can't!  The mud is full of minerals and is kinda oily but your skin feels great fr days.

Petra is one of the seven wonders of the world.  It is surely an amazing achievement.  The Nabateans created these buildings hewn out of the rock.  Later the Bedouins lived here.  Now the tourists have taken over - Jordan uses it to pay the national debt @ $nz66 per head.

Whitman Academy

So this is where I'll be working for the next 2 years.  The 4th grade class is second floor on the left.  I've got some of the materials I'll be teaching but the rooms are being painted so can't actually get in and sort out the room yet. 
Not much went on this week to show but you just wait until next week....
Make sure you check back!!!

Gold souk and Bruce begins work!

This is the gold souk we visited on Thursday. It turns out Thursday is the very worst time to go visit this area because there is so much traffic on the streets it's awkward for taxis to get to. The first taxi driver just pretended he didn't know what we were talking about - except we rang an Arab speaker and it's also in the most popular part of town so we now realise he just didn't want to be bothered getting through the traffic jams. Ha!
I didn't buy anything although there were a few nice pieces. I tried on a couple of rings $NZ200-$NZ400 and that was just with zirconias.
Bruce was really blessed with a free load of timber from the construction site across the road. He's making shelves and doing some building renovations at 'Holy Land Designs'.

Amman City

Across the road from the apartment we are temporarily staying is this huge building still under construction. There has been a few holdups - the crane fell over, a floor collapsed - killing a/some workers. Whew.. hope we're safe!

This was part of the old city siq / little shops we walked around this week. No shortage of fresh fruit and veges and a little cheaper than in NZ. We had lunch in a restaurant - at the table next to ours the people were munching away on half a goat's head each. I WASN'T tempted.

We walked around City Mall for 6-7 hours one day. At one end of a floor about 1/3 of it was a children's playground with bumper cars, merry go rounds, video games, roller coaster, whizzy things etc. We couldn't believe how amazing this place was! The Mall was 6 floors high but the prices were 6 times the prices I would pay!!!!

Nablus in the West Bank

Nablus is a city set in a valley between Mt Gerizim and Mt Ebal. God told Joshua to send some tribes to each mountain and pronounce blessings and curses to remind the people of these things.

It is famous for olive oil soap (top pic) and for a delicious sweet called Kunafa (bottom pic) which is goat cheese under a sweet biscuit/cake topping liberally dripping with honey or something sweet like that. It was delicious. Finding the shop was interesting because we had to wend our way through narrow alleys in a souk.