Forty-eight hours in our home for the next 4 months, we have finally settled in.  As Dan said, we walked through the apartment and it looked fine, but when we got in and started looking at everything, it has only been superficially cleaned.  It was apparently a disaster before so I’m glad we didn’t see it that way!  The next morning, we headed first to register the kids at school (more later) and then dug in cleaning.  Stripped the beds, bleached every surface in the bathroom, tackled the stove (which I cleaned to every inch of its life and now only 1 burner lights!), and started washing all the dishes in the cabinet.  We didn’t know which things had been cleaned so we just cleaned everything.  Dan cleaned out all the traps, floor drains and did all the things that require actual handyman knowledge.  I just bleached. 🙂

We now have a beautiful apartment and I feel SO much better.  There are a lot of things that we don’t have.  Like full size plates, for instance!  We are currently eating off saucers.  Which is effective, if somewhat strange.  I’m not sure what the people that were in here before did for eating, but my guess is that they ate everything out of the carton with a spoon.  There are at least 30 spoons!  None of this is a big deal and all easily solved with an adventure to city center and a shopping trip!  The tricky part is that without a car, we have to “take what we can carry.”

Behind our apartment building is a fantastic grocery.  It is a little crowded (always good because that means there is a lot of stuff!).  It is maybe 1/3 the size of the Sunflower in Raymond, but has about 1/2 the number of products. (Never been to Raymond, MS?  I highly recommend a visit!)  Some American brands, some international and some local.  It is a big mix.  We are figuring out what things are expensive and what are cheap.  Not all of the products have a price on them.  However, we checked today and it looks like green apples are 12 shekels a kilo.  The conversion is 4 shekels to a dollar so that is about $2 a pound.  If you know my son, you know how fantastic this is.  He can eat his little heart content in green apples now!  I think he has had 3 today.

Everything is going smoothly right now.  Of course, we haven’t even hit our culture shock stride yet!  Time will tell.