Settled in to our boring, exciting new life

A bit over a month into our life here in Georgia, and we’ve figured out quite a few things. You might take these every day phenomena for granted, but figuring out where to get things, setting up a bank account, getting insurance and paying bills can seem quite daunting if you’re not sure how it works. We’ve mastered all these things before, of course - just not here. Now we are all set, though – I think. We have paid a round of electricity, gas, internet bills and rent. We’ve even managed to become members of Atlanta Zoo and Costco (although we have only managed to visit the zoo, so far), AND we’ve opened a Netflix account. We’ve made a friend of two (although it’s very hard here – more on that later), and the boys are making friends in the homeschooling coop that we joined. I no longer have to use my GPS to get to the grocery store or to pick up my husband (although we still use it extensively as a backup and for adventures), and we’re happily exploring our neighborhood in the early evenings during bike rides or jogging rounds.

“How boring,” you think, but this is all (or at least mostly) new to us, and still quite exciting. We still feel like strangers, and the whole situation – the fact that we are now living in the US (even though it’s only temporarily) – still seems almost too good to be true; like a dream or a mistake that is about to be discovered (the fact that I have to renew my US visitor VISA soon, doesn’t help either). I still have to get my GA driver’s license and our GA license plate, but this will have to wait until the government shutdown is over (a bizarre issue in itself).

The food! Oh, the food!

We are a family of food snobs; my intention here is not to give you the impression of arrogance, but rather illustrate our genuine interest in food. We love exploring new foods, cooking with strange ingredients, from scratch, and I mean really scratch, as in make your own curry powder by use of a spice grinder scratch. I have talked about this a little before. By living in other countries and through our travels, we have tried, explored and learned to cook some great dishes from every corner of the world. Recently, as you might figure, we’ve been eating and cooking quite a bit of Lebanese and Mediterranean food. The ingredients for this kind of food are cheaper than other ingredients in Lebanon. It’s often easy and quite tasty, and so, I enjoy Mediterranean food. Restaurants and grocery stores in Beirut are certainly a step up from Cairo, however you can’t usually decide on making something and then go out and buy the ingredients – there’s always going to be something missing or that is imported and way too expensive. Coming to the US is always fun too, and we eat things in Indiana while visiting family there, that we can’t enjoy in the Middle East, but we don’t make very complicated food since it’s not our kitchen.

Atlanta, we have discovered however, is playing in a whole different league entirely. Oh my, oh boy! The farmers markets that we have explored so far, carry ingredients for most dishes that we could ever come up with. There’s everything from Swedish pickled herring and Italian specialty cheeses, to any spice imaginable and kimchi by the bucket. The first time we entered the De Kalb International Farmers Market we walked through the doors and just gasped. After a few minutes of running around like a kid on Christmas morning, exclaiming, “Look at THIS!” and “Oh, honey, check this out!” Courtney said, “I think I’m going to have to go sit in the car for a while and calm down. It’s too much.”

Culinarily speaking, this is going to be a great year.