The House

Hey! I thought I should add a few pictures of the house and yard. It's actually a pretty cool place we're in. It's like a little slice of home.. except that it's bigger, feels a bit more like California, and the power goes out at least once in the morning and evening for an unspecified amount of time. The latter, I must say, is fantastic when I'm trying to talk to people in the U.S. You'd think the power would have the courtesy to wait until I'm done with my conversation before it decides to cut out ;)

-First, notice the size of the door.. yes, it is about half the width of a normal door. There are normal size doors to the other rooms in the house, but not to mine. I think it's kind of cool. Also.. I didn't notice that it wasn't a normal size until about a week after I got here. I'll blame that on jet lag.

-This is my room.. It's actually the office, so I don't have a real dresser. I get to put all my things into drawers and onto shelves. It's pretty neat.

-At the end of my bed there is an entrance onto the small balcony. By small I mean 2x8. It has a nice view though. This is the house across the street. Most houses are like this, some are a LOT more fancy.

-This is the kitchen. By Indian standards, it's HUGE! I think it's rather large by American standards too. You can comfortably fit four people in here, all doing things. Unless of course you're all trying to use the stove. Our cook has shown us that the toaster oven bakes cookies and bread quite well. :)
- The front room..between the entry and the dining room. We haven't spent much time in here yet, the couch really isn't that comfortable and the dining table is far more convenient to play games at. But this room is pretty. The doors at the far end open to the patio where there are a couple of chairs and a table. Those are perfect for sitting at in the afternoon. We can watch the sun go down behind the houses, which is quite nice. Then it's time to go inside because the mosquitoes become friendly just before the sun sets.

In the yard we have at least three different fruit trees: guava, banana!, and something that tastes a bit like brown sugar which I have decided would taste much better baked with apples than it does raw. I'm pretty excited for the bananas to get ripe. I've never had them fresh like that before! On the way to CIS in the mornings we drive through a whole orchard of banana trees. I feel like I'm in the jungle!

- These are some of the weird brown sugar fruit.

- Here is a pretty flower from the yard.

-If you look real close in the middle you can see a clump of bananas!