The little things

As I mentioned before, we have no oven or microwave. I know, bummer. It has also been hard to find certain foods, which is something we expected - but still, bummer. For my birthday I really wanted to find some refried beans so we could make some burritos. No such luck.

But I'm happy to say that we finally found a good toaster oven the other day in the Old City. We love it. Then today we decided to go exploring and find another grocery-type store we had heard about. It was a tiny little corner market that was so small that all the produce was outside, and our stroller wouldn't fit inside. But they had refried beans (for me) and barbeque sauce (for Tom). So we are happy campers. We now love our little corner market.

These simple things make us so happy!

Also, we found hangers yesterday. I think they have had them at our grocery store all along, but we had never been able to find them. We finally found them hanging above the cheese. Duh.

AND I've been invited by another lady in the branch here to go to playgroup tomorrow morning. So nice! I guess it's a group of expat ladies, mostly Americans and Brits. So it'll be nice to have some girly conversation, and Joni will loooooove having kids to play with.

Another thing we were finally able to find was decent towels. Tom had bought some before the kids and I arrived (and they were beautiful), but get this...they didn't work, and I'm not kidding. They didn't absorb anything! They would just wipe the water all over, so when you put your clothes on after showering, you were still sopping wet. Yuck. And when I would wrap my hair up in one of them on top of my head, my hair would just drip out the back and sop the back of my shirt. So we've looked and looked, but the non-absorbent towels that don't work are apparently common here, because that's all we could find. But a few days ago we found a shop that carried American toiletries and makeup, and they had decent towels! (Not great, but a lot better). Yeah!

Now if I could just figure out a way for my flat iron to work here, maybe I could start doing my hair again...