Hello

Today one of our friends decided to move into our apartment when we leave which means that we don't have to pay 2 whole months rent after we've left. WOOHOO!!!! We're also leaving our furniture for him which means we don't have to take apart or haul anything to the Salvation Army with a truck that we don't own- and by the way- NOBODY owns a truck in Belgium so I'm not sure how we'd get it there anyway. I don't think I've seen a truck in 9 months. Now I no longer have to worry about trying to sell things -in french- on craigslist and finding a place to stay after we've emptied our apartment. So basically, all I have to do is pack our 4 suitcases and clean our apartment which really won't be that hard because . . .

I measured our apartment today. I was home sick from church and reading my little sister's blog and remembered- Wow! She lives in a house! Then I looked around and thought about how incredibly small our apartment is and realized we never figured out quite how small it is. When we saw the ad it was all in meters. They don't have inches or feet measurements in this land. Ok, the only thing I had to measure with is a piece of paper, which is 11 inches in length, right? So sometimes I just rounded up to a foot, sometimes not. Here are the results in feet:

Main Living Space 12 x 15

Bathroom 5 x 5

Kitchen 4 x 7 (I need to interject that the kitchen counter/fridge/cupboards take up 2 ft which means we literally have 2 ft of space to walk around in while cooking- it's an adventure and gets REALLY hot)

So if you take our WHOLE studio as one it is 17 ft x 15 ft. Take a look at the room you're in. It's probably not too far off from our ENTIRE apartment! Imagine living in this space for 10 months straight! Ha! I just had to document this once in a life time experience. I'm surprised how well it's gone. I really think it says a lot about me and Greg. There have been moments where I've gone to the bathroom to hide out. It's the one and only time I shut the bathroom door, but at the same time I feel ridiculous 'cause it's SO OBVIOUS that I'm trying to say, "I'm mad and don't want to be in the same room as you." But there's only one room to be in. Ah, pretty soon we'll be back to multiple room options.

I've been feeling a bit like a snot factory while Greg is literally DANCING around the room and singing songs about this bread he is making. And I mean RIGHT NOW he is singing BACKSTREET BOYS and dancing a foot away from me as I'm typing. I haven't seen him this giddy and excited in a very long time. It's a brazilian cheesy roll and he's been wanting the recipe ever since he left Brazil. He finally found a recipe from a Brazilian here but was disappointed when he made it today. So he was frantically searching online, recipe after recipe and altering the one he tried. He is already on his 3rd recipe/3rd batch today. He is jumping around the apartment singing because he thinks this is THE ONE. It's in the oven RIGHT NOW. He is so anxious he took one of the balls out too early and brought it to me (bouncing in his hand 'because it's fresh from the oven) because it already looks so much better than the previous batches. And now he's taken a bite even though I'm sure it's burning his tongue because he just can't wait. He's been way too cute through this whole process and I've just been laughing at him all day (in a good way, of course.) It's been fun.

Our phone busted this week. Just went black for some reason. So now we don't have a phone. We hardly use it anyway. But now it's just ANOTHER thing we've had to pay for in advance that now we won't use. Like our INTERNET and Greg's FRENCH SCRIPTURES that he bought on the spot at church from a very old lady that walked up tons of stairs to get so he felt a little obligated. I would've said no. Greg has probably read a total of 5 verses from them. Hmmm . . . we learn as we go.

Tomorrow Greg and I have the day off together AGAIN!!!! We don't have anything planned. We'll probably go to the forest. Speaking of forests, Greg's been finding a bunch of new ones to run through. He's been running a lot lately coming home all sweaty. I've been impressed with him. I'm not as disciplined.