Hello and Merry Christmas to Everyone,

Well, out of necessity, I'm becoming even more domesticated than I was.  Don't know if that's good or bad, but that's the way it is.

Today it is snowing and blowing, and I'm not walking anywhere in this!  Well at least until this evening when we have to go clean the church building.  So I've made 4 loaves of bread (the bread is the nastiest thing of all here) and baked a cake from scratch to take to the church for people who are cleaning.  I am ironing Fred's shirts myself and cooking totally from scratch all the time.  You can eat out here but all the restaurants are the same!  Yep you go from door to door and see the same thing in every place, except the malls where they even have some American food, well as close as they can get.  It all tastes different than at home but it's at least not Turkish.  Don't get me wrong the food is not bad(except the bread and deserts) just tiresome.
Many of you have asked about our Apartment and what it's like so I'm going to try to post some pictures of it here.  It's a very nice apartment by Turkish standards, just not my taste and not the modern conveniences of home.  Very WHITE!

View from the door, entry hall.

From the entry turn left and enter the kitchen.  Note the size of the kitchen table.

This is the whole "kitchen" part of the room except that the oven is behind me.

Going right from the front door is the room we are using as the "coat room"  Notice my grocery shopping "SUVs" at the right.

This is our "office area" in the living room.

This dining room is also in the living room.  

Sofa area and windows.

Entertainment Center

Bedroom

We have an Ikea closet system behind me in this pic.

We have another bedroom that is not set up as a bedroom, 2 bathrooms, one of which doubles as the laundry room.  I actually have a dryer too which is unusual.  You have to empty the water out of a catch pan after each load.

So there you have our apartment!

Like I said it is snowing today and the wind is blowing like crazy.  We have discovered that there is NO weather stripping around any of the windows and last night we slept with wind blowing on our heads.  Needless to say, I didn't sleep much!

I don't mean to be negative.  We are having quite the adventure and learning much.  It is nice to be able to focus on prayer and scripture study more than any other time of our lives.  Being with my sweetheart is worth the whole thing.  We are busily trying to find the items for our Iraqi Children.  We took a 2 hour each way commute yesterday to a store that we were told was a lot like Costco....NOT!  We are looking for a copier and audio visual system among other things and thought it might be cheaper there.  They hardly had anything, so back to square one.

It's time to get ready to go to clean the church.  The weather has nothing but get worse all day long.  We better bundle up to the mile walk to the subway ;-)

Love to all!  Please write.  Sometimes we don't have much time to write back quickly to everyone, so please be patient with us.

Nori