Well, I could never write an entry long enough to cover what I have been up to in the last two months, so the plan is that i will ramble and add pictures which hopefully will give you a sense of what my life is all about.
This is our apartment building. My roommate, katie, and I live on the first floor, but we live on the back side of the building so you can't see our apartment from this picture.
Right outside of our complex there is a nice path around a man made lake, which is nice to walk around, but only very early in the morning (before 8 really) or at night (after 7) otherwise you will just sweat continually from the moment you step out of the apartment until you come back in. Sweating was a thing i was only used to doing in Michigan if i had been working out, not so here. You go outside and walk around and you will begin to sweat, and not just little. But the weather isn't all bad. We have very cool lightening and thunderstorms at night at least once a week that shake all the trees. Once i thought it might be a hurricane, but really it wasn't nearly that bad. Strangely it seems to only rain at night, except for 5 minute downpours. And it will rain hard for 5 minutes or less and then just quit out of nowhere like it came.
Our living room before we put anything in it. We now have two couches, a rocking chair, and television, as well as some end tables. Our apartment isn't bad. it is a bit far from school (30 minutes) with traffic, but only 13 miles from school. i am used to the commute now and i found that if i leave the apartment around 6:30 then i can make it to school in about 20/25 minutes instead of 30/35 if i leave ten minutes later. It is a lot of stop and go, and I go through a whole tank of gas a week because mostly i am sitting idle, and if you are moving the speed limit is never over 45.
One of my favorite things about Miami is that they have all these strange restaurant down here that you would never find up north. One of these is chicken kitchen, which has great food. They chop up the chicken right in front of you and you get this fairly big bowl of yellow rice (which for some reason is amazing) and then you can different things on top of it. I had chicken, lettuce, and tomato. It is pretty cheap (5 bucks) and it really fills you up, so chicken kitchen is on mine and katie's list of good places to eat. We also want to try out some of the cuban places, but that is a bit more intimidating because we hear that people don't speak english at those restaurants. And through a group at church in a couple of weeks we are going to eat in a 5 star restaurant with all the courses in south beach for $ 35, which i guess is an amazing deal.
So that's a glimpse of what life is like in Miami, I try to do fun things on the weekend, and spend all my time during the week teaching and planning lessons, which doesn't really feel like work because i did it last year without getting paid. I really feel that it is a blessing that my job doesn't feel like it is a job. It is very hard sometimes, and especially because i am way to hard on myself, but overall I have fun most days, and the staff I work with at school is amazing. Once again God has brought me to a place and while it wasn't clear at first why, I now see that I belong, and I am starting to like it here, except for the fact that i really miss the seasons. It is always summer here, never ending summer! I will take some pictures of the school and my classroom and post them next time.
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