So, we have been here for a little less than a week.  We still haven’t gotten to our final location, but we will be by tomorrow night!  I have however noticed a few things in the interim.

1.  My children are completely unconcerned about everyone else speaking a different language than us.  Maybe this is normal for children, but most adults I know get freaked out and are constantly asking what others are saying.  There seems to be a ingrained part of humans that makes us think everyone else is talking about us.  I got over this a long time ago because on any given day there are about 5 languages going simultaneously.  Obviously I don’t speak all of them.  However, my children just bop around and are fine that everyone is speaking in Hebrew or Arabic and not English.  The drawback to that is that they think that it is fine for them to speak in English at the same volume and no one else should care.  We had to have a sit-down about drawing attention after ANOTHER taxi driver offered to carry us somewhere.
2. Despite our loud American children, we blend decently well.
3. The kids are eating fine.  They really enjoyed kabobs, shawarma, fresh pita bread and the lemonade is FANTASTIC.  They also have had cheese pizza twice and a full bag of pretzels.  We also let them have Twix Trix (edit: apparently I don’t eat enough sugar in general).  The general public won’t know this about me, but I don’t allow my kids to eat sugar cereals.  They can have Cheerios, Chex and Raisin Bran.  But they don’t like Chex and Raisin Bran, so they pretty much have Cheerios.  They can have sugar cereals at Nana’s and on vacation for snacks.  They are thrilled that I let have Twix Trix for breakfast.
4. Everything is going to change fast when we get in our apartment tomorrow.  We will need to actually start learning language, grocery shopping, etc.  We did get a phone today so that was an adventure.  We are using Whatsapp to communicate back home, but need to be able to call people here, too.

All in all, I’m very happy with our chance to slide into this experience a little.  However, I’m ready to get started!