I liked our bright green taxi:) Interesting enough the taxi driver asked what language we speak in Canada- he guessed we speak Spanish!

The writing on the hills is in Tibetan script because of the Tibetan Buddhism that is here.

A Hike in the Hills

Today we got a taxi to drop us off across the river up on the hills so that we could get a good view of the city and enjoy the nice weather (by the end of our hike we were down to our t-shirts). We got dropped off up by a buddhist temple kind of thing and then walked the whole way home- yes it is pretty far.... You can see where we live in the last picture..(across the river and quite a bit left of the bridge. Growing up with no car makes kids good walkers! It was great for them to be able to run and run in all that open space. Can you see Emma and Josiah in the second picture?
I really love it up there- it is so strange and barren and desert-like. The ground is sooo dry, if you step on some of the grass? (don't know what to call it) it cracks and disintegrates. We had one steep climb down (David got us all down safely:) where it was so tricky because everything you touched crumbled down the hill- the rocks and vegetation just sit on top of the dirt. Anyway- it was sooooo fun and good to be out there, definitely worth the walk. I'll put some more pics of the hills later.

No market for fruit or flowery shampoos here- Beer Scented Shampoo! It smells really good I think.

Some more pictures of Emma and the friends she made at the place where we stayed during our first few weeks (before moving into our prisonside apartment).

Emma is pretty good at making friends- even though she had no idea what the girls were saying or playing she would just join in with them anyway...the other girls liked having Emmachka around.

still have so many pics to get on here- you can tell they are a little old because we don't have our mittens on:) The apartment we lived in when we first got here had so many little kids playing everywhere. Emma just had to go outside our window and she would have lots of kids to spend time with. Strange seeing little girls bring out their barbies and play in the dirt. We miss those kids:( Maybe we should take a taxi there to play sometime. Where we live now there are not many kids- at least not younger ones but it looks like our kids will be starting school on Monday so they will have friends again!

Emma enjoying our river. The kids spend a lot of time down there throwing the big rocks into the water- good thing there are endless rocks. Tomorrow morning we are taking the kids to get medical checks. Hopefully it all goes well so that they can start school on Monday. I'm sure they are healthy we just aren't sure that they will approve of all our foreign paperwork and immunizations etc.

across the river from us....there is also another prison over there.

I took this picture yesterday. You can see that the leaves are starting to change- I think they only turn yellow here..haven't seen any red yet. A little bit cooler now, I think we can say goodbye to our shorts. Our apartment building is the big grey one on the right. Nice place to live eh!

I'm pretty sure I won't be eating the horsemeat. Does stir the emotions a little:) I think it will stay in our cupboard until we hit real real desperate times... David might try it- he has had horse twice before so he might be interested how canned horse compares to the real thing.

This may be the most interesting food item david has ever brought home from the grocery store. What do you do with canned horse meat? horse salad sandwiches?

Just some pics from our walks in the last two days. It is still nice weather- actually we love the weather here so far. It is a little cool but when it is sunny it is sooo nice. Fresh? Hard to describe. yesterday was 9 C? The leaves are starting to change colour and fall- I'll have to find somewhere with trees so I can show you:)

Just a couple of buildings downtown. I love that from where we live we can easily walk downtown. The top building with the interesting woodwork is the theatre where they have ballets and they also have conventions/shows there. The bottom one is a parliament building.

School Update: We love it. All of us! Even Mommy and Huddy! We are thinking of sending all three kids. It was very clean and bright and cheery. The classes are very small (6-7 kids) and the teachers seem nice and proper (good discipline methods) and all the kids are tuvan so hopefully they will not only learn some russian but tuvinian as well. The kids are anxious to go, even Hudson asked to go back to school when we got back home. The next step is to go to the hospital and get medical checkups and then we can officially sign up. It will only cost $95 for all three to attend per month. (including breakfast and lunch) We are just going to have them go in the mornings as Emma needs to do her homeschooling still and the boys have naps in the afternoon- plus I would be very lonely sending them off from 7-7 everyday! Anyway, it was a great meeting and we are pretty excited about getting involved at the little school.

sending Josiah off to school...

In the morning we are all going to go to the little kids school to get a tour and see if it is somewhere that Josiah and maybe Huddy would like to go to play everyday. We have always wondered if we should have had Emma go in Moscow so that she could have met some kids and learned some language:). Josiah is pretty excited about going to his own school... I'm a little nervous, scary enough when it is in your own country/language and you know how things work to send off your little ones... but especially here when we have heard some not so positive things about schooling here and you just don't know what they do. David has met with the director and says it seems like a pretty clean school. The director is really excited about having a foreigner come to their school as they have never had one before. So excited that she is letting Josiah bypass the long waiting list to get in. There is a monthly fee of course but it is sooooo cheap. Only about $65 a month for care from 7am-7pm including 3 meals.... good deal eh... We only want him to go for the mornings though as we want time with little Josiah too! Some kids live at the school if they have sick parents (TB) but they are kept separate once it is sure the kids have been infected with the tuberculosis. 30% of the population here have TB so we know there is no way we can hide from it. Best prevention is to stay healthy right?

The school is also a place that we may provide some help through our org- we will see. The director has strongly hinted that she would appreciate some help with $ and medical equipment etc after letting jo in. We are just hoping that it will be fun for Josiah and be a place that we can meet some people (more naturally than just on the street:). We would love for Hudson to go to (he isn't too young, any age from 6 months to 7 years is ok) but we think he won't be so willing.. Maybe Emma would want to go though we would have to fit in her homeschooling too.The teachers and students seem to be mostly Tuvan so maybe Josiah will come home speaking Tuvan too.

Anyway, please keep this in your thoughts as it is heavy on ours. We'll see what we think when we all visit the school tomorrow...

Emma is in the middle of week three of Grade One at Prisonside Elementary. She loves homeschooling and is getting pretty good at reading and writing and math etc. but she still would rather spend the day drawing. I liked this one...she said the waitress and cook were falling in love. Anyway...you can see how big our window sills are- perfect place for Emma to climb up into and work away.

a house

this little house is in much better condition than some around us- pretty rough but kinda cute. We were walking through the area with the houses tonight and you can sure smell all the wood/coal fires going...I bet these houses get pretty chilly in the winter.

Joan asked about the writing on the hills so I thought I'd put these closer shots on. The top picture shows the one that you notice in almost every picture of the hills. It must be in old script or something- we don't know what it says yet. The other one which is furthur to the right is written in Tuvan but we still don't know what it means- I think it must be initials for something. If you walk over the hill Kyzyl is written too but you can't see it from this side of the city. We should do the hike up there soon before the snow comes...

Our apartment building

Just thought these would give you a better idea where we live. Our building is the one in the middle on the top and our apartment is the one (3 windows) to the left of the entrance. The blue gate leads down to the basement which seems to be some sort of community center that you can rent out or something like that. There is a sign that says it is for those 60+ but most nights it is a younger tipsier group. Almost everynight this week there has been a rowdy party down there, you can really hear the Karaoke machine and hear the sheep going baaa baaaa. Most of the parties end in wild drunken fights outside. It is a great place to live...we get a lot of culture study in without trying to.

In the top picture you can see some of the houses that are around our area. Poor people live in houses it seems, the richer get to live in apartments. The houses are in such bad condition. They are heated with coal or wood and have no indoor plumbing. Some of them do look kinda cute (not these ones:) but I know that it wouldn't be what we are used to as far as houses go. I will put on some pictures of the houses sometime too.