Hey everybody, welcome back to our weekly gathering at happy hour!  It’s been a busy/awesome week for us, and we have lots of news and info to share with everyone.

• First, we bought a car!  We’ve spent the last 2 months getting the appropriate drivers license, researching cars, then doing all of the paperwork etc. to finalize the deal.  We bought a used Dodge Durango from an expat from Austria.  We’ve only had it a few days, but have totally enjoyed the freedom it has brought us.  We no longer feel tied down, or in constant search of taxis every time we want to go somewhere.  We’ve been out exploring a couple of times and it is so nice to just go on our own schedule.  It was quite the process to purchase the vehicle, which I’ll explain in more detail in a future post. In the meantime, here is a picture of our new wheels:

You are probably wondering . . . . “what the heck is that big thing on the back?”  Leave your guess in the comments section below, and the first person who guesses correctly AND the person with the most “creative” guess will win a mega-high-5 from me the next time we hang out!

• This week, we celebrated our first major holiday since moving to Kuwait: Thanksgiving.  It was sad not spending the holiday with our families back home, but we still made the most of it, spending it with our close friends here in Kuwait (our new family!)  We were super fortunate that we were invited by one of my student’s families to have a Thanksgiving dinner with them at their home.  So after a day of work, we headed over for an outstanding meal featuring turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, cranberries, green bean casserole, and all of the other typical dishes featured at an American Thanksgiving dinner.  They were super hospitable, and we were so thankful for their generous offering and kind invitation.  Over the weekend, we had another Thanksgiving potluck with a bunch of our co-workers here at our apartment complex. I couldn’t make it to that meal, but Rachel said the food and company were great!

• With our new wheels, I finally made my first trip to Ace Hardware last weekend!  The store here is about half the size of a Home Depot from back home . . . way bigger than any Ace Hardware I’ve ever been to.  Based on the items you can buy there, it’s like they literally picked up a store in the midwest, and transplanted it in Kuwait.  The craziest part was the huge selection of lawnmowers they had, including riding lawnmowers!  Since we’ve been here, i’ve yet to see a house with a yard that includes anything close to grass (everything is either concrete or sand).  I could’ve spent hours in there and about a million dollars in goodies.  However I refrained so that I have a reason to go back there every weekend when I’m bored.

That’s a quick recap of a few of our weekly highlights. I hope all is well, we’ll be seeing you next week!

Hey everyone, welcome to our 2nd Happy Hour!  Here’s a few quick tidbits on what’s going on in our lives this week:

• We bought a crockpot (woohoo)!  We’ve been looking for one for the last couple of weeks, but couldn’t really find one that we were interested in at any stores.  However, just when we were ready to give up our search . . . . we found out one of our co-workers was selling hers!  For just a couple of bucks, we got a huge “like-new” one.  As soon as we got it, we got all of the ingredients we needed to make a batch of homemade chicken noodle soup.  Without a doubt, the best part of using a crockpot for dinner is the smell in your apartment when you get home from work!  We are looking forward to using it lots this winter.

• With American Thanksgiving coming up next week, we’ve started putting some plans together with friends to spend the holiday together.  In order to save both time & effort on preparing the turkey, I decided to look into the possibility of ordering one precooked.  I heard you could buy one at the BBQ restaurant down the street from us.  I gave them a call to check on pricing, and it was like $100 for a turkey (Yikes!)  However right across the street, you can buy a rotisserie chicken for like $2.  Needless to say, we might be eating chicken instead of turkey this year for Thanksgiving!
• Last Friday night one of our friends invited us over for dinner and a presentation about a non-profit organization that he helped create called Empowering Learners.  This non-profit group helps support schools, teachers, and the students of schools in Namibia, Africa.  They have provided everything from books, technology, and now their working on building a new schools too!  It was great learning so much about an organization that is providing and empowering so many people to succeed.  For more information on Empowering Learners or to find out how you can get involved, check out their website: www.empoweringlearnersnamibia.org
• We had a Kuwaiti happy hour with some friends last week after work to kick off our weekend.  Of course you will remember that the happy hours here are a bit different, and don’t include any booze.  Instead, we find a nice sheesha bar along the beach, and just eat food and smoke out of a hookah pipe until it gives us a headache. It’s still a great way to spend time with our friends!

Well that’s our week in a nutshell, hope to see everyone again next Monday!

Greetings All,

You’ve probably noticed that our blog posting has slowed down a bit the last couple of weeks. For our diehard readers, who check for new posts everyday, we apologize to you!  Now that we have been in Kuwait for a couple of months, we have started to settle into our routines and have been super busy with work and life.  As a result, we have struggled to find free time to keep in touch with everyone on our blog. We are definitely going to try harder to add a couple of new posts every week.

To keep everyone in the loop of our daily happenings, I’ve decided to dabble into a new segment I’ll call: “Mitch’s Monday Happy Hour.”  I want to kind of spin it as if we were getting together with you on a Monday evening for a Happy Hour. A great way to catch up with friends and to touch base with what’s going on in life.  So without further a due, I present to you . . . . our first segment of  . . . . . . Mitch’s Monday Happy Hour!

• We’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking for a car!  We are looking to purchase a used SUV and have found a couple that we were interested in. There were two of them that we were ready to buy, however after a final check on the background of the vehicle, we found out that the odometer had been turned back over 100,000 km on both of them! We are still continuing our search, and putting an even stronger emphasis on doing our research before buying.

• My favorite food in Kuwait is called a shawarma. It is a wrap, with shaved chicken (or you can get beef) served inside of a flatbread with vegetables and a garlic dressing. Each vendor prepares them differently, and the vegetables could be cucumber, onion, tomato, pickles, egg plant, or even french fries. They are sooooo good, and less than $1.00 each.  I found an awesome little food stand, about a 10 minute walk from our apartment, that has the BEST shawarma yet!  This week,  I went there 3 days in-a-row for dinner!  The owner speaks about 5 words of english, so we just speak through hand signals. When he sees me walking toward him, he greets me with a huge smile and holds up 2 fingers. I confirm with a slight head nod, and within minutes, I’m devouring two shawarma. He’s a Syrian guy named Khalil, and I’ll definitely be keeping him in business while we live here!

• Rachel has been adding a few things to our apartment to make it feel like “home.”  She bought a few picture frames and had some photos printed for them. We got them hung up this weekend, which is an awesome addition to our place. She has started a short “honey-do-list” with various other tasks she wants to do, so we’ll slowly chip away at that.

• We’ve also been busy planning our Christmas trip to Sri Lanka and the Maldives.  We bought our plane tickets a couple of months ago, but just started booking our accommodations this week. We booked this awesome house for our first few nights, in a jungle of Sri Lanka, only about 4 minutes from the beach.  It looks so peaceful and a great place for us to unwind over the holidays. We can’t wait to share photos of our trip with everyone once we return.

Well that wraps up our first Monday Happy Hour together! Let’s do it again next week, cheers!