95%

Today I write about where we spend 95% of our time: at home and at school. The pictures show a bit of our neighborhood and home from the outside. A very, very, very quiet and small neighborhood located right next to the school. It's a 5-minute walk from doorstep to "sign in". I included a picture of how we sign in each day with our James Bond fingerprint system. Kinda weird and techy.

As you can see, homes are close to one another with very little yard space. Comparatively, we have quite a bit. Since we have one of the older neighborhoods, we enjoy lots of trees which keeps the temperature down in the houses. Our little neighborhoood street enters onto the boulevard which you also see pictured...a pleaseant little tree-divided road that passes in front of our school.

It's relatively easy to tell time in our neighborhood or I should say it's easy to tell when it's 5:00 am, 9:00 am, noon, 3:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. as we hear the Muslim call to prayers from several nearby mosques. It's not a particularly "pretty" sound through the loudspeakers but at the same time it has a certain exotic appeal and is a daily reminder that this isn't Kansas, Dorothy.

Our school campus is large and well-maintained. You can see a portion of the soccer pitch in one of the photos. Immaculate, soft lawn. What a contrast to the Rosslyn rock-hard termite mounds. I don't know how our Rosslyn teams survive injury or play so skillfully on that field! One pool is an 8-lane, 50-meter pool and the other one is a "fun" pool with kiddie area. And the GREAT thing is that both of them are warm enough for me to swim in regularly. For those of you who know me well, you know that means they are so warm they are almost hot. Enough for today. Thank you for reading.