It's come to light that we've been particularly "slack" in the blog-update department over the past couple of weeks. I'll skip the excuses and instead tell you what we've been up to lately...
Much of our time seems to be related to settling into our new home... discovering what things we don't have (usually at an inconvenient time!), and then going out and finding them. For example, we bought a few Food Made Fast cookbooks (for inspiration and to mix up our regular dinner stand-bys - they are wonderful, btw!), made a grocery list based on a couple recipes we wanted to try, and went about finding the items we needed at the grocery store. Who knew that something as simple as spinach or fresh basil would be so hard to find! And red wine vinegar? I've given up on that one! I suspect that - because it has "wine" in the name - we'll never find that one on grocery store shelves. However, I DID find red grape vinegar. Hmm. Maybe the same thing? Not sure. So, we get (most of) our ingredients home and begin making a meal... then we realize we have no measuring cups or spoons. We "guess-timated" for a couple weeks. I have yet to find measuring cups! It makes cooking interesting, to say in the least!
Also, Kelly now has a liquor permit (a requirement if you want to buy booze here in Qatar). It helps with dealing with the above-described situations. To acquire a permit, you need your residence/work visa, a letter from your employer with your monthly salary (they give you a monthly quota based on your income!), you have to state your marital status, nationality and religion! Then you get an id card with a photo on it. And only those people with ids can go into the store. So I just have to give Kelly a vague list and hope he picks out some good wines. So far, so good!
Thanksgiving also happened in the time between our last post and this one. While I was sad to be missing the beautiful Maritime autumn weather and fantastic harvest food (Honey Crisps, oh, how I miss you... *sigh*), we were lucky enough to be invited to, not one, but TWO Canadian Thanksgiving dinners here in Doha. We had real, honest-to-goodness roasted turkey, stuffing (well... Kelly did), gravy (our hosts even made gluten-free gravy for me - it was the awesome-est!), carrots, mashed potatoes, corn.... all the good stuff! Among other things, I was especially thankful for the kindness and generosity of Canadian friends this Thanksgiving.
More recently (as in, this weekend), we had a housewarming (or is it villawarming??) get-together with some current and past Bristolites from the Gulf office... or is it Bristol Gulf-ites? ...or Bristol Gulfies? Regardless of the term, we had a chance to visit with the peeps outside the office, share some laughs and a few drinks, and infuse our home with some positive energy. And we also got to talk to some friends and family this weekend on Skype. We even did a walking tour of our home for a couple people. It was fun!! It looks like we'll make Saturdays our day for connecting on Skype. So, if you want to chat, log on in the morning or early afternoon (which will be afternoon or evening for us) and hopefully we'll be around! Our skype names are miranda.devoe and kelly.devoe, and our iChat name is DevoesInDoha (I think its an AOL or .aim profile, if that makes any sense?).
What else???
Stella and Hendrix (the fur-kids) are settling very well now. They have found favourite perches to look out the windows at birds and visiting stray cats (!) and also have regular cozy spots on the sofas. And - FINALLY - they're back to cuddling with me in the evenings. I was worried that they had grown out of cuddle-time, but it's BACK! (P.S. sorry to be one of those people with no kids who turn their pets into their kids... I do recognize that its a tad bit ridiculous. But it is what it is, and I love the little munchkins). They have new food that they seem to like, but we still haven't got them a litterbox as nice as the one they had in Canada. Hey - don't judge - having a decent place to do your business is important!
This post is digressing quickly so I'll sign off now.
Cheers!
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Hey Miranda - if Kelly has a card, you should be able to get one as his wife, although that might need to wait until you have a proper res. permit, as opposed to just a visitor's visa.
ReplyDeleteThey used to have these hilarious signs all over the inside of the store to promite this feature, basically saying, "If you get your wife a card, you can send her out to do this instead!"