February 14, 2004
Happy Valentine's Day
Happy Valentine's DayWhat a week!
On Wednesday, Tiffany and Tyler felt the apartment building sway from side to side (we are on the 14th floor). Our apartment building feels pretty solid, so it was very unexpected. Tyler said, "What WAS that mommy?" We had an earthquake. It was about 5 on the Richter scale and centered about 100 miles away from us at the northern edge of the Dead Sea. Scott was in a basement of Intel, so he just felt some vibrations. Tiffany's mother made us promise that we wouldn't have any more earthquakes. We will try our best not to.
On Friday, we had a Branch activity. We went to the church building and had a lesson, played games, had dinner, and the children danced. You can see in the pictures that Tyler was a hit with the girls.
Tyler and Eliana
Tyler dancing with UliyaAlso on Friday we learned that our shipment from the U.S. arrived in Israel. The shipping company called and apologized because some miscommunications had delayed the shipment significantly. They even offered to reimburse us for expenses that we had due to the late arrival of the shipment. Now we just have to wait for customs to process our shipment which could take 5 to 14 days.
We wondered why we hadn't received any mail forwarded from Portland, so Scott contacted the mail forwarder. The bank had declined our credit card (that is a whole other story) and so the mail forwarder was just waiting for us to call them. Hopefully we don't have any important bills coming. Don't worry our credit is fine, our bank just assumed that our card must have been stolen since there were numerous charges in Israel.
We were driving in the car the other day and Brooke was babbling. Tyler said, "Brooke is talking to me in Hebrew." We thought that was pretty funny. We wish it were true, our Hebrew vocabulary is pretty small. We are taking lessons, so that should improve soon.
On Saturday morning we got up and discovered water all over the family room floor. Scott looked out the sliding glass door and saw 2-3 inches of water on our balcony. The drain had gotten clogged, not a good thing during the rainy season. Scott had to open the door to go out and clean the drain, letting in even more water. Thank goodness for tile floors.
We are having lots of fun (we opened a bank account, Tiffany started driving in Israel and we have been to the mall), eating lots of good food (pita, hummus, schnitzel, and shawarma) and enjoying the sites (Sea of Galilee, Haifa and the view from our apartment).
This way to Nazareth (note also the Israeli stop sign)
Tugboat tugging a container ship