We have arrived!

What a whirlwind summer this has been - visiting family and friends in WA (crammed into far too short or time), dog and cat sitting (allowing us to give our aforementioned family a break for constant entertainment), attending the Genest family reunion in Santa Barbara (wow! that was a week to remember), a quick trip to Turlock and North For and the blink of an eye return to Portland for final packing - we are exhausted. Following this exhaustive schedule, we then boarded the plane for a marathon 18 hour sojourn to the other side of the world - Qatar. It's hot and surprisingly more humid than expected - we knew it would be but I thought not quite so much.
We landed here actually around 7 pm on Friday (we're 10 hours ahead of you now) and were met by a whole crew of teachers and principals to bring us out to our new place - and what a huge place it is! By Japanese standards it's like 3 houses in one - even has a maid's quarter out back! Unbelievable.
Tonight we are simply vegging...and writing up a list of things that we already know we are going to want to pick up. They have left us with maps and places to go so we're going to go out tomorrow morning. They did give us a few things to start off with - water, tea, soda, cereal, but we need to do some serious expanding on the food. The school has planned various meals out but we will have quite a few on our own.

I've posted just a few pictures of the house - and I'll put more up as we fix things up. The kitchen is absolutely huge - about the size of Twyla's front room! The Front room is bigger than the one on 15th Ave - and the bedrooms are also good sized - 3 of them in fact! (we had expected a 2 bedroom place). Do need a desk and a few other things but...they will come.