New Year's, new house, new school semster

This past Saturday was a New Year's celebration here.  From what I can gather, not only is this young country (only independent since 1991) trying to meld 2 languages and political ideologies, but they are also operating off of two different calendars.  In addition to the one we are used to, there is also an "old" calendar (Orthodox, I believe) that has holidays falling on different dates.  I asked the cab driver I met last week about this, and he basically summed it up as, "There is Christmas, and then there is Old Christmas, and there is New Year's, and then there is Old New Year's... and we celebrate them all."  Smart people, I guess -- twice as many celebrations!

So while many Moldovans were observing another New Year's this weekend, we were moving into a new house, which seemed appropriate.  We are very thankful for this house... it has many more comforts and extras that we were not expecting to have during our time here.  For example, there is actually a clothes dryer!  (It can only run on 1 setting and we can't run any other appliance, including the washing machine, at the same time that it is running, and it takes a long time to dry things -- but hey, it's a dryer!)  And the kids were thrilled to find that there is both a Playstation and a Wii -- a better deal than we have at home.

Here are a few pics:

From the street...

The front yard..

C'mon in!

The foyer (complete with our boxes of curriculum we just picked up at the Embassy -- and an enthusiastic little boy):

The living areas:

And we've already gotten set up at a couple of desks so we can (finally) resume some schoolwork!  Half of these students is excited... the other half not as much:

As we're getting settled after a crazy few weeks, we are looking forward to what God has for us in 2012... pretty sure it will be a very unique year.