Fully Furnished...and then some!

While we've been hunting for a permanent home this month, we're staying in a furnished apartment that a friend found for us before our arrival. We were so grateful to have a place to land after the long trip that got us here, and the place he found for us is great, with plenty of room and all the basic things we need...but it does have some quirks that we thought it would be fun to show you.

The living room area is decidedly Arab in several ways. It's a nice-sized room, but way too crammed full of furniture! In addition to the dining table, there are not one, not two, but three entire sets of living room furniture--all in one room! You can see one set directly behind the table in the photo above...

then another orange floral set to the left...

and a third 80s-looking set on the right. None of the sets matches any of the others, and the large curtains on the wall don't match any of the three! However, on the positive side, we're ready if 40 of our closest friends come over and need to sit down! You can see that we've designated the 80s living room area as our "laundry room." The washing machine is in the bathroom, and the dryer is, well, you're looking at it. Our dryer is still in storage until we move into our apartment, so until then we're drying all our clothes in the living room.

If you scroll back up to the first photo, you'll also notice one other common decorating feature from this part of the world--chandeliers! Our living room is home to FIVE crystal chandeliers. Pretty impressive, huh?

And this is the kitchen we're working with this month. We don't have a dish drying rack, so we've been spreading the dried dishes out on a towel on top of the stove (stoves here all have a fold-down lid that makes them flat on top). It's a great spot for drying dishes, but a big pain anytime we want to actually use the stove.

The kitchen is also very sparsely equipped, so we've had to improvise when making meals at home. I cooked garlic bread in a skillet that had lost its handle one night, and another day we made cookies in these little foil pans. We've also eaten out or ordered in A LOT. Thank goodness for cheap delivery and restaurants in walking distance!

Finally, we wanted to show you one other room in the house--the bathroom. We're all five using this one bathroom for bathing because the water heater in the other one has a short and won't stay on. We tried turning it on a few times, but it always ended with a loud POP and a blown fuse. So we finally gave up.

The water heater in the bathroom pictures works ok, so we've all been bathing in there, but we wanted you to see one glaring omission in this bathroom that makes it different from any we've ever seen in the states: No shower curtain. Shower curtains are entirely optional and not really that common here. In fact, bathtubs themselves are also a luxury. However, every bathroom has a tile floor and a drain somewhere in the floor. What millions of people do here is simply stand in the middle of the bathroom, turn on the shower head attached to the bathroom wall, take their shower, and then squeegee the water into the drain when they're done.

Now if you did that in Florida, your floor might be wet the rest of the day, but when you combine our desert heat and lack of humidity, it's not really a problem here. We do have a bathtub, so our floor doesn't get too, too wet, but the lack of shower curtain does mean a fair amount of splashing onto the floor. So you can add "shower curtain" to the list of things we'll be excited to unpack when we move into our new apartment next week. Stay tuned for new house pics soon!