Sorry it's been so long!!

Hello! Sorry that it's been so long!!! I hope this catched you up on what's been going on with me lately!!

Last week I went with some of my roommates to the "Taiwan" to go bowling. Not sure why it's called the Taiwan, but it's a park with a big fountain, cafe, and bowling alley and such. We had a lot of fun bowling, and it was great to spend that time together! My old bowling skills came back and I ended up bowling a 190! Hopefully that didn't set some sort of precident for my bowling in the future!

Besides that things are going really well! School is going along very smoothly, and I'm slowly adjusting to teaching so many different subjects! My kids continue to be a huge blessing and are just great kids. The staff at the school is also very supportive as well as fun people to hang out with, so that's always a bonus!

Life with the roommates is good as well. A couple of them are sick, so you can definitely pray for them to get better quickly and that the rest of us would not get what they have! We have had water for the past fews days, so that has been GREAT! With the cold weather coming I'm interested to see how the electricty is going to be because it we already lost it for most of one day last weekend.

My language is progressing as I've been meeting with a conversation partner for 6 hours a week. Basically we just talk in Albanian (shqip) the whole time...it's really fun! I am also doing grammar lessons, but those are only 2 hours a week, and I am actually in the middle of changing teachers right now, so I haven't had a lesson in a couple weeks. Please pray for me as I continue to try to learn the language!!

Oh, last weekend I climbed Mt. Dajti, a mountain here in Tiranë! It was GREAT, but definitely not the safest thing I could have done! It was an adventure to say the least. I went with a teacher from school, the two guys that moved into my old apartment, and one of their Albanian friends. I was thinking that we were going to just go up the road to the top, but apparently that's in a military zone, so we had to go the hard way. We climbed up the really steep hills for about 2 hours or so. It was so steep that we actually had to have TWO walking sticks. At that point we found a road that we could use that brought us to the rocks to climb to get to the very top. It was seriously like those rock climbing walls! If anyone knows how I did the last time I tried a climbing wall, they are probably already scared! Thankfully no one was hurt, and we made it to the top! Unfortunately after all of that, the sun went down and we had to go down in the dark. We ended up literally RUNNING down because we wanted to get down so we could take the lift down from half way up. There were a stream of interesting events, which include trespassing on the Prime Ministers and Presidents residence's, and meeting 2 arms guards! Craziness for sure, but we made it in time for the LAST lift down (literally, they shut it down after we got off!). Another adventure in the life of Lori.....

Until next time! I guess it's not letting me put pictures on again...I'll try that again in another blog.....