A tour of our language school
Posted in family news by Liz on October 11th, 2011 at 8:55 pm.
As promised, here are some pics of our language school campus!
First, here’s our apartment building! A retired couple lives on the top floor, and the bottom is split into two apartments – we’re on the left, and another missionary couple is on the right.
Next is Jacob’s favorite part of the campus… the playground! This is right behind our apartment building.
Standing between our building and the playground, if you look to the left you can see the pavilion – a building that’s often used when the school hosts their summer and winter camps.
Turning around and looking down the hill, you can see the basketball court (summer) and hockey rink (winter).
Walking down the hill and to the left is the administration building. The top floor is apartments, the middle floor is offices, and the bottom floor is split between offices and classroom space. To get to our classrooms, you go through the bottom entrance and take a right. 
The next building is primarily used by the students in the Bible school here; the top floor is the girls dorm, the middle floor is the cafeteria, and the bottom floor is a lounge/hangout area for the students.
We feel blessed to live on such a beautiful campus! The leaves are just about at peak now (fall photos will be coming soon!) and it’s truly a sight to behold.
Last but not least is the “family” building, which is more apartments for language school students. Jacob catches the bus in front of this building every day.
The campus also has a boys dorm/Bible school classroom building, several outbuildings, a pool, multiple soccer/volleyball fields, and a few miles of hiking trails in the woods (the organization was given 90 acres of land, with some of these buildings already on it a few decades ago). All in all, not a bad place to spend 10 months!
Chez nous
Posted in family news by Liz on September 22nd, 2011 at 8:32 am.
We’ve finally reached what I would basically consider to be the end of the unpacking and settling in phase in our apartment here in Sherbrooke, and I must say, it feels great! Everything is unpacked and put away in a place where (I think!) I can find it, we have pictures up on the walls, houseplants have been purchased and potted, the cupboards are full of food… we are now “chez nous” (in English:- in “our home”).
Since I shared some of the crazy unpacking pics in my last post, I thought I’d include a few pics of the end result:
This is the view from our front door, of the dining area.
Turning to the left from the front door is our living room/office.
Here is our humble "salle de bains", just past the dining table through the door on the left.
Here's our bedroom - I've had fun putting up some Parisian wall decor, recovering the lampshades, and putting the black stripe on the curtains... making it feel a little more French!
This is the room that the boys share... its a little on the small side, but that's made up for by...
... the toy closet! Its even bigger than it looks, as you can walk in and turn right, too!
Last but not least, the kitchen! It's a little short on counterspace, but has room for all of the essentials (notice the coffee grinder and coffeepot, front and center?!). It came with a cute baby, too.
Next time… a tour of our school campus!
Unpacking craziness!
Posted in family news by Liz on September 10th, 2011 at 4:59 am.
Now depending on how you read the above title, I guess it could sound like we had packed craziness into our bags and then unpacked it upon arrival in Sherbrooke… we may as well have, with as crazy as things felt as we went through the unpacking process! We were hoping to not have to ship much (or anything) on this move, as we had the whole back area of the Suburban to use to transport things for ourselves and the boys. We – barely – succeeded, through some pretty tight and loose packing. (think lots of loose items tucked into nooks and crannies, as opposed to like things together in boxes or bags). This made for a more economical move, but some crazy unpacking!
Here are a few pics of the progressive unpacking of the Suburban!
I’m not quite sure what we were more excited about on unpacking day… moving stuff OUT of the Suburban (after living with feeling packed like a Sardie into the car for more than three weeks) or moving stuff IN to our new apartment! Either way, it was a fun – even if tiring – day!
But of course, any of you who have moved anywhere, ever, know that it usually seems like it gets worse before it gets better! As we unpacked all of the loose items, we basically had to make piles of like things to get them back together, and then start thinking about where to put them away… so here’s a few pics of all of our piles!
Now, just over two weeks later, the apartment is looking much more “together”. We are pretty much all unpacked and organized, and it’s starting to feel like home! I’ll take a few pics of the finished product and post that next time!