Welcome Home!

We are back in Turkey...finally! After several weeks of not knowing when we were leaving Texas it seemed to happen very quickly. We got back January 25 and immediately had 11 people over to hang out and help keep us awake until bedtime. We ordered pizza from Dominoes and had lots of fun. The top picture above shows the Dominoes sign in the trees under the Dostlar Manti sign. I was standing on my balcony, zoomed in, and took this picture to show how close it is. And they deliver too! I wish I had taken a picture of the pizza to show everyone what it looked like. The cheese and pepperoni pizzas look pretty much the same. There is very little sauce on them, but they are pretty good. We also got a pizza that had feta cheese on it. You can order pizza with corn kernels, square pieces of meat that are supposed to be ground meat, and something called garlic sausage that takes getting used to. They are round just like pepperoni, but often cut a little thicker. I am pretty sure there were some of these sausages on the pepperoni pizzas because I would occasionally get the garlic sausage flavor and some of the meat looked a little suspicious. Welcome home!

Some other things I have noticed since I have been back....everything seems really small. I remember thinking that things seemed huge in Texas when we first arrived back in June, but I guess I got used to it because things here are tiny! The toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, microwave ovens, cereal boxes, milk, sandwich bread, and various other things are a lot smaller than I remembered. Even the rooms in my apartment look smaller. Will thought his room shrunk while he was gone! Now things are looking a little more normal. Brian and I watched a TV show called Designed to Sell while we were in the states. The idea behind the show is to update your house a little so that you get more money for it when you sell it. One of the main things we heard over and over is that most people have too much furniture in their rooms. They overcrowd. Well that is how our house looked to us when we got back. Our furniture was too big for our small rooms. We don't have closets so we have to put wardrobes in the rooms for our clothes. A wardrobe, bed, table with a lamp, and a dresser take up a lot of space. We have walking paths and small play areas in the kids rooms, but the people on HGTV would cringe if they walked in here! Welcome home!

We have really enjoyed being back and getting to use our electric blanket, our space heaters, and wearing long johns! We don't even own these things in Texas but enjoy the rare occasion when we need the fireplace there. I wasn't happy about coming back to really cold weather for long lengths of time, but I was excited about being able to get warm when it is cold! Very strange I know. It snowed last night so this morning we walked to church in the snow. I think we will have many opportunities to use our blanket, heaters, and long johns in the next few weeks! See the pictures above for proof! Welcome home!