We've arrived!

Picture 1: view of the mountains from our apartment
Picture 2: View of the street from our apartment

Hello all! As most of you have heard via our emails, we have arrived in our new home and are doing well! We just got internet set up in the apartment so have just begun answering emails and this marks the beginning of us updating our blog on a more regular basis.

Our apartment, though dilapidated looking on the outside, is quite nice and spacious on the inside. It is furnished and we're shocked that we even have a dishwasher. The best part of the apartment is that about twice a day the haze in the city lifts and we have a view of the mountains from our living room, a welcome sight in a city where most everything is grey and dirty. I am hoping for a better perspective on the dreariness of the city once spring comes!

Most of our days right now are filled with language study. We are trying to get our mouths used to trying to say so many consonants in a row. We're starting to get the new alphabet down (Bulgarian uses Cyrillic which has 30 letter in its alphabet.) Because of the different alphabet, note that anything we write to you in Bulgarian will be spelled phonetically in roman letters as we don't expect all of you to learn Cyrillic! :-) Here are just a few of the many words we've covered in the last couple weeks- priyaten den: Have a nice day, jeveesh: we live, jeveeya: I live, momche: boy, zdreveyte: hello, hlyab: bread.

We are excited that we will have our first truly Bulgarian experience (meaning we won't have another person who speaks English to hold our hand) on Sunday! We happened to meet a taxi driver who drove us to our Bulgarian classes who speaks a tiny bit of English. On our fist ride with him we struggled through a bit of conversation with our almost non-existent grasp of Bulgarian and his small knowledge of English. It was funny because we made no reference to why we were in Bulgaria, but halfway through our taxi ride he held up the Bible that was in his passenger seat and declared, "Christiani." At the end of our fist ride with him we took down his cell number(called a gsm number in Bulgaria,) and continued to have him drive us to our classes. On Thursday, we asked him about his church and thought we would write down the address to go and try to visit sometime, but he immediately got excited and asked to pick us up on Sunday. We'll let you know how it goes!

Today we had one of my favorite experiences thus far, we found our local Bakery! Wow, you have not had bread this good! The bakery is only 3 blocks away so we walked there as a family today. The bread was still steaming as we left the bakery. Drew loved that we broke it open on the way home and gave him some. He was like a little bird chirping bread, bread bread, as we couldn't feed it to him fast enough! I will not buy bread from the grocery store again! Also, you can't beat the price, for a hot loaf of bread and some rolls with chocolate on them (excellent as well) we paid 1 leva which is equivalent to 60 cents US. It may be habit forming!

We love and miss you all!

Lisa