Kyla's Friday afternoon playdate went great and she and Abigail have another playdate planned for this coming week on Thursday. I am thinking that I will arrange for Brendan to have a friend over that day...
Saturday morning soccer was quite chilly and very wet! I am getting a sense of what winter will be like...hmmm, but later Saturday the sun did make an appearance now and again. Today (Sunday) was pretty nice overall and we had quite a bit of sun :) I guess one of the cool things is that we see lots of rainbows here, and some are amazingly bright! I am including a picture of one we saw from our balcony over the lake this week.
The best part of Saturday was being invited to join some of the soccer team kiddos' families to hang out and eat with them. They are all military (NATO) folks so it was really cool for them to include us. Hanging out with them reminded us a lot of our Drake Court friends...smoked brisket, sides, beer for the guys, tons of kids running around...oh and we also enjoyed the fact that we got some "American" food that they have access to and we don't! Military folks have different rules they follow and are allowed to get stuff shipped over without paying taxes, etc. My kids were so excited to eat "Great Value" fruit snacks...oh, and Ruffles and Keebler crackers and real ranch dip and...yep, the list goes on! And the smoked brisket...mmm, mmm, mmm, good! Plus the company was great and it was interesting to hear how the military handles
"expats" versus how the corporate world here does.
This morning, we headed to church. After church, Brendan had a fundraiser walk to participate in for an organization he joined at school called SWEC (Show We Care.) It is an environmental group that does little activities and fundraisers for various things like endangered wildlife and plants trees, etc. He is supposed to get sponsors who pay him for each lap he walked of Mosvanet Lake. We (Brendan and I) ended up walking it two times around (about 3 km per lap) so that was pretty good. Daddy and Kyla stayed home. Spencer had some work to do this weekend and Kyla always prefers to be with Spencer if given a choice...:)
Later this afternoon, we headed over to the Darbys for a little visit and the weather was good enough for us to walk around over by Tananger harbor. We walked up to an area where there is a small lighthouse and climbed around and found some good potential fishing areas for Dan to check out. We could look across the water and see the COP offices and a big rig out in the water. Another thing we have seen several of are concrete bunker fortification things along the coastlines. Come to find out from our military friends, they are from WWII and were built by the Germans. We saw one today in Tananger and have seen them by the beach as well. I am including a few pictures from our walk around Tananger this evening.
I guess the only other big thing going has to do with drivers' license stuff...we thought we would be in good shape for a year and would be leaving for our next place before a year was up, but we recently learned that the rules changed July 1 (we arrived July 20th or so) and you no longer have a year to get your Norwegian license...you have 3 months to apply and start the process moving. Greeeaaat...the really pain in the butt thing is when you go to apply, your Texas drivers' license is confiscated. And they don't mess around here with tickets and stuff - crazy expensive if you get a ticket for anything from parking to speeding to not having proper paperwork in your vehicle...nevermind the HUGE stuff like talking on a cell phone or worse! AND get this...they set up periodic and random road checks where they pull cars over from the road and check for paperwork and that all your signals and such are working on your car, etc. I had just heard about these on Thursday morning, but never seen one and then, as if by fate, saw it happening on Friday morning. Nuts! I didn't get flagged over, but my reprieve would be I am still driving a rental car as ours is still sitting at the shop.
Other good news from this week - we are completely set up and booked for our vacation in October. We are set up for Munich and Salzburg and we are so excited!!! A HUGE thank-you to Barbara Koy who worked her travel magic for us!
So...that's what's happening in our part of the world.
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