American.

I've been here for a few days now, but I realize that if I were here for a few years, that wouldn't be enough time for me to adapt to the culture. I SCREAM American. From my smile to my laugh to the way I play with London to the way I look at Kyle- I am 100% different. On the plus side, I am married to Kyle. It takes him about .2 seconds to get everyone he meets laughing and telling him their life story. I knew he would be fabulous, but even I wasn't expecting him to be accepted by the people here so quickly! They all rave about his accent and I can't help but feel so proud to be his wife.

I wanted to include some interesting things that have blown my mind so far. There will surely be many more to come...

1) There are stray cats everywhere. The first thing I hear each morning when I step outside is a literal cat-fight.
2) The malls here are enormous, and each mall has a grocery store, phone store, clothing stores, restaurants, pharmacy, every store you could possibly need to go to, and you just push a cart around the entire massive building.
3) Gas is 50 cents a gallon. We can go on a 20 minute taxi ride, and it costs $2.
4) They have entire stores dedicated to just fruit and fresh fruit juices! They even have fruits I haven't heard of! It's fabulous!
5) Everyone drives nice cars. Most people drive Corollas or some sort of Mazda, but they are all new. I have even seen some Range Rovers and BMW's.
6) The people here drive twice the speed limit and pay zero attention to lines in the road, but I have yet to see a single car accident. In Provo, I drove past a few car accidents a day, then again, lets NOT get me started on drivers in Utah.
7) I haven't seen a single girl playing outside. Even in the public children's park--only boys.

So far, the hardest thing to get used to is not looking people in the eyes. Women are supposed to look down at all times, except when looking at each other. It's always a relief when I see a woman because I can FINALLY smile at someone, and they always smile back.

These pictures are insanely boring, but I wanted you to see what our house looks like...

The Living Room.

Never send your husband to buy the shower curtain.

The Kitchen.

I was going to include a picture from our balcony so you can see what the city looks like, but it's dark here now, so that will have to wait :(

Tomorrow is Friday and that is when we go to church- so crazy! Kyle and I opted to go to the ward where all of the members from the Embassy attend. I can't wait to speak English to other people! Yahoo!

The Arrival.

Our last day in Rome, we woke up early and saw everything else I was dying to see: The Roman Forum, Colloseum, Pantheon, and Trevi Fountain. We ate some more of the most delicious food, especially this spaghetti place near the Trevi Fountain! 




London continued her streak as the highlight of everyone's day, first posing for a line of about thirty Asian tourists who each got a picture with her in front of the Forum, and then playing peek-a-boo at lunch with a table of adoring, laughing local grandparents. I love my baby.

We made it to the airport at 7:45pm. It was so surreal. We kept saying to eachother, "This is crazy! We're really doing it!"- a thousand times. On the flight, they brought out our "dinner", and I feel like I have to include a picture and an explanation so you can appreciate the look on both our faces when they brought it out.

Three circles of processed turkey product
One green olive*
Cucumber*
Carrot*
Cream cheese
Roll
Raw salmon
A prune
Celery
Apple slices
Yogurt
Crackers
One grape
A hard boiled egg
A single piece of raw cabbage
Warm peach(?) juice

*It should be noted that these were the exact size and circumference of a standard mechanical pencil and tasted like the nasty processed turkey product, because they had been sitting on the "meat" wrapped in plastic for who knows how long.

We landed at 2:30am, only to find that the ten-foot duffel bag containing all of me and Kyle's clothing, toiletries, shoes, AND make-up had been lost. Kyle filled out all of the claim paperwork while I tried in vain to soothe London, who hadn't taken a nap all day or slept all night. We got to our new house at 4:30am, and only put the new sheets on our bed before passing out. 
Five hours later, I woke up to find Kyle gone at an informational meeting at the University. It was suddenly kind of scary to be here alone, in a country where I don't speak the language, without any water that I could drink, not knowing where anything is, and not able to go anywhere without my husband who was gone for the morning. I turned on the lights, opened up the blinds, and began what would become twelve entire hours of scrubbing until my hands were raw. 
Let me first preface this by saying that our apartment is absolutely beautiful! It is all made of stone and the floors are shiny and tiled, all the furniture is made of a rich, dark wood, we have two bathrooms, and ours is the only apartment in the complex with an ourdoor space, rougly the size of our whole apartment. 

Now the not-so-good part. My theory is that fourteen homeless people lived here for about three years, then moved out about six months ago, and the apartment was last cleaned before they moved in. There are no words to adequately express the grime and rotting filth Kyle and I scrubbed out of the apartment. I had to leave the room several times because the stenches literally made me choke. Luckily, London slept until 4:30pm (yes, that is 12 hours straight, the poor thing!) so by the time she woke up, at least her bedroom was clean enough for her to run around in. It will take at least a week to clean all of the trash out of the outdoor space, but then it will be perfect for London to play around in! I'll take pictures of everything once it's all done.

So far, Amman has far exceeded my expectations. Think of Mexico with much taller buildings, really nice roads, half the trash, and palm trees that aren't painted. Most things are written in English too, kind of like how in America, everything is also written in Spanish. Today, we are taking a tour of the city all day, and I'm excited to get my bearings a little bit!

Bella! Bella!

So, our flight left Salt Lake City at 11am on Wednesday and got to Rome at 9am on Thursday.

Thirteen hours of flying with a one-year-old was pretty tiring. She really did so well the entire flight, but after that long, my arms were seriously sore, and I hadn't slept for a single minute. London is on this "mom is the only one allowed to hold me" kick...meaning that no matter how much Kyle tried to help, London was mine for the flight. Once we landed in Rome, we needed to get to our hotel, which is about 45 minutes from the airport. At the tourist desk, they told us to take a train and then a bus to our hotel. This sounded perfect because we are traveling with 200 lbs of luggage, and we wanted a locker to store all of it in. London fell asleep for the "night" in my arms when we were walking to the train, leaving Kyle with all of the luggage. He loaded it on the train, bag by bag. To us, it was three in the morning, and exhaustion set in for me. We got to the station with luggage lockers thirty minutes later, and Kyle left me and London on the platform so he could get us a locker. The poor guy carried all of the luggage himself, strapping one on his back and pulling one in each arm. He came back thirty minutes later WITH THE LUGGAGE. By this point, London was still asleep, I had set her on top of our carry-on, and I was collapsed in a heap on the floor of the train station. A taxi finally rescued us and took all of our things to the hotel, which in the end, was cheaper than a locker. We went right to sleep, and woke up only to eat spaghetti and gelato.

We spent the day today at the Vatican, which by far exceeded even my lofty expectations. Every single detail was absolutely breathtaking.

One not so great idea was to CLIMB to the top of the dome. For anyone who has done this before, it is literally a straight up tunneled staircase made for midgets. Behind this smile is...not a smile.

After our tour, we ate the most insanely fabulous pizza ever invented. After my 5th slice, I started thinking about Eat, Pray, Love, and I realized that I would gain 30 lbs if I moved here too!

Kyle isn't feeling well -the humidity is pretty insane here- so we decided to do the colloseum tomorrow morning and call it a day!  It's hard to travel with a baby, but she loves it here! There are dogs everywhere and everyone on the street stops us to look at her and call her "Bella! Bella!". So far, Rome is fabulous :)

I'm Bristyl. Kyle is my darling husband. London is our angel and the daintiest one-year-old I'm convinced has ever lived. Tomorrow, we're moving to Amman, Jordan because Kyle is studying Arabic at the University there. We thought this would be the perfect way to keep our family and friends up-to-date on everything we experience together.