We're Home!

We’re finally home, we’ve been living with friends & in other people’s homes for the last year or so, but we finally have a place to call home! We moved in a week ago, after we had it painted & cleaned. Lynn’s loved setting up a home for us again, and all the fun that goes with it! We’ve been shopping a lot, both because we need to get things for our home as well as it’s a great way to meet people & practice our Turkish!

Moving day was pretty amazing! We had a group of local guys that we paid come to help us get all of our furniture & appliances up the stairs to our 5th floor apartment. Lynn was impressed! These guys would put the refrigerator, washing machine, wardrobe, couch (as seen below), and more just on their backs & haul it up 5 flights of stairs! And as you can see from these pictures these guys are NOT 20-something former Division 1 linebackers!

We don’t have pictures of all of the rooms but we thought we’d give you a little sampling. Here are photos of the kitchen & the living/dining room.
Another AMAZING feature of our place is that it has a wrap around balcony (like a wrap around porch, except it’s in an apartment building). Outside the kitchen on the balcony is a grill (pictured below). We tried it out this past weekend with some of our American friends – we had classic burgers, chips, watermelon, and brownies w/ ice cream! YUMMY!
Another benefit is that we have a grocery store across the street. It’s not the biggest in town but for most things it’s pretty easy to get too! We can see it from our balcony (as shown here, it's behind the while vehicle).
Even though there’s a grocery store across the street the first night we were here, we realized it was late & we still hadn’t gotten any food at the store. So what did we do? Well thanks to the great people who have sent us care packages we found a pasta dish that was “just add water” as well as some “just add water” muffins! And so we found dinner & breakfast in our American pantry! (Which by the way, just recently grew tremendously!)
So now we’re ready for visitors, we’ve got our guest room all set-up, so let us know if you want to come & visit!