House Tour – Office

Part 2 in a series on our apartment in San Jose.

Above: Our office, as seen from the doorway in our bedroom.

When we first saw pictures of our apartment, there was an odd room off our bedroom that no one quite knew what to do with. Too small to be a bed room, yet too big to be a closet, and our landlord suggested we use it as a TV room (?)

After searching for weeks for a desk, which we found at PriceMart (think Sam’s Club), we finally started to use our room as the office. As you can see, it consist of a desk, a chair, and a bunch of wires.

- In the foreground on the left are two lonely shelves, one for books and the other for random stuff (like the top of your dresser.)
- As you can see, we’ve put some of our 12 suitcases to work for storage.
- The printer/copier comes in handy for reimbursements with our mission agency and scanning receipts for insurance, which we have done a lot of lately with Lindsey’s pregnancy check-ups.

Below: This is the only decoration we have in the room, my proudly displayed “certifica.” Never in my life have I made a dean’s list or graduated “cum laude” from anything, and alas, this graduation was no different from all the others. Though I was the top student in my class (a class of the four worst Spanish speakers in the entire school), I still only mustered a B+ in grammar. And yet despite my apparent mediocrity in beginners-level Spanish, I will always be able to point out to my detractors that I did in fact complete 60 hours of class, and did it with a perfect record of attendance!

Spanish Word – En Serio?

From time to time, as we learn some Spanish, we’ll try to help you learn some as well.

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Above: Lucy loving her rain jacket, indoors none the less.

“En serio?” This is a question loosely translated in the lingo of a US high schooler, “seriously?” Other translations might be “really?” or “are you serious?” We hear it a lot when we tell Tico’s here about our strange customs in the US (most recently, hiding plastics eggs in the park, “en serio?”)

How does this relate to the picture? Well the other day it was drizzling when we went to the park with Lucy, so we put on her jacket and her hood. When we got to the park it stopped raining, but she screamed when we tried to take off her hood. She wore it all the way home in the bright sun, and then wore it all over the house during her snack, causing us to look at her and laugh: en serio?

House Tour – Bedroom

Although this has nothing to do with our ministry, we thought we would do a series of posts (sporadically) on what our home looks like, and specifically pointing how it looks different than yours. We hope you enjoy the series and get a better idea of what it is like to live in another country.

Above: Our bedroom.

Our bedroom consists of a double bed, a night stand, and a built in closet/chest of drawers (kind of like what is in some dorm rooms). Pretty simple, but pretty different.

- The bed has no box spring, just a mattress on wooden planks. Although it is hot here and there is no A/C, we have a two blankets on our bed because it gets pretty chilly at night.

- The reason it gets chilly is the window, which is always open. It has no screen, just like every other window in our house.

- Although Lucy is almost a year and a half, we still have a monitor for her (on Lindsey’s bedside table). Even though our house is small, we almost never here her because of all the street noise.

- Below are some pictures of Lucy we have above our bed. When we moved in our house had nothing on the walls, and though we’ve searched high and low, we can’t find any sort of 8×10 picture frame, so we finally broke down and stuck our pictures directly to the wall. Having pictures up has really made our bare apartment look like home.

Although our bedroom is sparse and our bed is hard, it has worked out pretty well for us. The breezes keep us cool and the blankets keep us warm at night. So although not at all like home, it has become our home.