my apartment

We're slowly, but surely getting our apartment fixed up!!!  Our new stove (see previous post for why it was necessary) and fridge came on Friday and the washing machine came on Monday.  Our kitchen is fully usable at last!  I celebrated this weekend by baking a lot. :)  I'd been wanting to make chocolate chip cookies for awhile now, but hadn't either had time or a working stove for the past couple months, but I was finally able to on Sunday.  When I started out grocery shopping on Saturday, I wasn't exactly sure what kind of cookies I'd end up making, sense I'm still learning what kinds of foods are available here.  I know that people have told me that chocolate is hard to find, which was hard for me to believe since I've seen cacao trees here!  But I knew what ingredients were necessary for a few different kinds of cookies and what I would make would depend on the ingredients I found.  I ended up walking halfway to the school from our apartment (7 blocks didn't seem like much going there, but coming home, it was a lot longer!).  There's a large grocery store there that carries many different kinds of foods that you can't get in other places, plus the closest open paper store was on that block so I had to be there anyway.  I started wandering around the aisles and found chocolate bars!!  No chocolate chips, but that's ok, the bar works. :)  The picture above is of me making my own chocolate chips.  So, Sunday after church I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.  Yumm!!  I even found whole wheat flour, so my mom will be happy. :)  Cookies are a bit of a novelty here, so people who have been over to the apartment are pretty impressed, which is very nice for me! :)

I also thought I'd share a little bit of my view from my bedroom window.  The first is looking south, the second to the west (at Quilamo, the local hill) and the third is looking north.  :)