Cat Lag

My computer says it is Monday August 18th 5:09AM.  I woke up today at 4 and decided to get up and be productive.  Luckily I went to bed at 9pm the night before so I still got about 7 hours of sleep.  Not too bad considering we have major cat lag in my house.  Turns out animals get jet lagged too, so Maddie has been waking me up at 2am wanting breakfast.  Today we were able to stretch it to 4 so I guess that is progress (or pro-gress as the Canadians here pronounce it).  I don’t think it helps that both of the cats hide in cabinets when I am gone so they are completely thrown off with no sunlight, but I imagine it is kind of scary being a 10lb animal and flying halfway across the world to a new place.

While I have only been here for 3 full days it feels like much longer for sure!  All of the teachers who live in my building are wonderful and since we take the shuttle/school bus back and forth to work we get to see each other often.  There many new teachers this year so we have a big cohort to get to know.  Last night the lower elementary and upper elementary teachers all had dinner at one of the principal's villas which was a great way to begin the year.  My co-workers have been teaching all over the world and it is so exciting hearing about places like Bangkok, Venezuela, Singapore, Malayasia, Bombay, Croatia, etc.  I am already entertaining the idea of a 10K run in Istanbul where you get to run across a bridge connecting Europe and Asia, wouldn’t that just be amazing?

Our building is called Bin Mahmood but everyone calls it “The Bin”.  My apartment has the basic furnishings to get by but we have planned an IKEA trip for this coming Saturday to get some things to spruce up our apartments.  One of the most important things about living the expat life I am told is to make your place feel like a home.  I will post pictures of each room after that trip and the furniture is all arranged.  As for my classroom, things are looking good so far and I hope to have everything sorted out by tomorrow when we have all morning to work in our rooms.

I only live about a 10-15 minute cab ride away from Ryan’s apartment right now so that has been nice.  I was able to relax at his place on Saturday as he cooked me a lovely Indian dinner and caught up on some Chiefs preseason football.  It will take a few weeks to adjust to the different work week but we are so close we should be able to see each other most of the time.

Well enough on those little updates, I am attaching some pictures of my apartment building, from the outside and my front door for something fun to look at.  Let me know if you have any other questions and I can answer those in my next post.

View from the Street

The Building Number

My Apartment Door (no more 4th floor walk up)

The Front Doors