A Quy Nhon Christmas

All smiles.

So it's not quite Christmas yet, but we thought we'd post this video Christmas card for those of you who keep up with us.  Last Friday, Steven and Will (the other foreign teacher at Quy Nhon University) had a party (or actually a series of parties) for all 200+ of their students at our house.  We invited each class of over 50 students to come, one per hour, throughout the afternoon and we had different activities for them to try--games, songs, card making, snowflake making, cookie decorating.  In all, about 120 of the 200 showed up and we had a blast.  An exhausting blast, to be sure, but a blast nonetheless.  You'll get to see some of the party, along with just some pictures of our family getting ready for Christmas.  Maybe post-Christmas we'll post a follow-up video as well.  In the meantime, Merry Christmas and enjoy!

(I apologize for the "squished" look of the video.  Apparently my video editing program is having some problems distinguishing between widescreen and not-widescreen.  We'll see if we can get that fixed.)

The Grand Tour

Here we sit one week from Christmas already!  Where have the last three months gone? We realize we have done a poor job of keeping you up to date on the last months events in our lives - but after we take you on a house tour and get you reaquainted with Quy Nhon, I am sure we will get more regular with updates!

Our first 3 and one half months of renting a house and living in a comunity has proved to be great for us!  

I (Joelle) had some hesitations for sure, but I have loved it.  Now please join Micah as we take you through the house we have come to know as home.

To start with, our house stands like most Vietnamese houses - narrow and tall.

You can see Steven's arm placing our internet wires in the right place. I don't know if he's ever had to hook up his own internet before, but in living here we often find ourselves doing tasks we have not done before.

I have really loved having space for a real kitchen! (If you remember, the "kitchen" in our old apartment was basically just the corner of a room).

We hosted Thanksgiving here and plan to have a group for Christmas as well.  It's been great having a kitchen to do all the prep in for those events.

Excited to go upstairs I guess!!

Here's Micah in his very own bedroom! It's actually the first time we've had the space for him to be in his own room and he's been doing well with it.  We do have a real crib set up for him now, but we keep the travel tent up and ready for when our 7 month-old teammate, Ezra, comes over and needs to have a nap.

Bath time in our beautiful bathroom! This is the more...hmmm...decorated of the two bathrooms we have, and we use it pretty much just for Micah's baths.

The third room in the house we use for storage and Steven's office. It's nice (for me maybe more than for Steven) to have him be able to have a space in the house to work. Nice because he can come anytime I need him!

The rooftop of our house is open-air but covered.  It's nice and breezy and is a good place to hang out on days when the house gets too warm.  It also has a kind of ridiculously over-the-top fish pond (complete with little figurines from the popular Monkey King legend) that Micah is fascinated with.  He can sit for quite a while and make fishy faces at the goldfish.

And finally:  the view from our rooftop.  Mountains dropping into the South China Sea.  Not bad.

Well, thanks for joining us for this brief tour.  Take care and do check back now and then.  We'll try to keep this thing updated a bit more frequently now that we're settled in and going strong.