The Snells: One Week!

It has officially been one week since we arrived in Saudi. I think we are finally adjusted to the time zone, but it was pretty rough for a couple of nights! Hopefully we can now get on a regular schedule. Our first day here (last Friday), we decided to get the kids up and go for a walk to get some fresh air. We ended up running into some friends on the beach and stopped to talk with them for a bit. The kids ended up playing on the beach for 2 hours (in their regular clothes...oops) and meeting some new friends! Then, on Saturday, Ryan took us to the big grocery store here called LuLu's. In order to go anywhere here, we have to call a driver, since we are not allowed to drive. I (Sarah) am not legally allowed and Ryan's company policy is such that he can't drive either. So, we have to get a driver, load up the carseats (yes each time we go anywhere we have to load and unload carseats), and then get the kids loaded too! (Side note: the weekends here are Friday and Saturday, with Friday being their holy day. So, you don't really want to go out anywhere on Friday, because it is just CRAZY!) The grocery store was massive and a bit overwhelming. Later, Ryan informed me that he wanted to completely overwhelm me with the biggest store first to, as he puts it, "just rip the bandaid off!" Well, mission accomplished. :) You know that feeling when you move to a new town and you don't know how the grocery store is laid out and you have to go a few times to get your groove? Well, multiply that by 100 and that's kinda how I felt. There were a lot of new things - new fruits and vegetables, new food, new meat, new everything! Thankfully, everything is in Arabic and English, so at least I can read everything. We were successful in finding groceries easy enough to cook without our kitchen supplies (since that stuff is all in our shipments still to come) and we were able to get out in about 2 hours. Whew....I was pretty spent after that outing! We tried to get a new sim card for my phone as well, but the shop was closed, so that was saved for another day. Sunday was Ryan's first day at work and our first day here by ourselves! We unpacked some of our suitcases and just hung out. Monday we played with some of our new friends, who just happen to live 2 doors down from us! They told us about dance and gymnastics classes, and so we tagged along with them so Elsa could try dance. She LOVED it and so we plan on going again next week! Tuesday, they had a town hall meeting for all the employees and then a dinner followed for the families! We got to meet some more people there and I didn't have to cook! Wednesday, Elsa got to try gymnastics class and did great! We are looking for ways to get Soren involved too! We were hoping to get him into boyscouts, but that doesn't start until 1st grade. We may be able to start him in tennis lessons or he may do gymnastics too! Still trying to figure all that out. We have his school interview on Monday, so we are hopeful he will start school sometime next week. He is in desperate need to have his routine back!!! We are hoping to go to a few different grocery stores this weekend (Tamimis and Farm2) as well as the general store called Saco. We may even try a Dairy Queen! It was a good first week in our new home. Now if only our air shipment would get here....

Some of my favorite things so far:
*The view from our house is gorgeous! I love waking up and seeing the blue water!!
*I love how it feels like a small college campus/1950s small town! We can walk to all our friends' houses in 10 minutes and kids can just run around and be kids!!!
*Ryan gets home around 4:30...which is just AWESOME!
*No yard work to consume half our weekends, so we get much more family time!

Here are some pictures from our week!!