Happy Reformation Day!

Yes it’s true, the Church household does not celebrate Halloween, we celebrate Reformation Day. We’d like to thank Brian Allred for initiating this and let him know the tradition continues… We’re having a get-together to watch the movie ‘Luther’, drink German beer (though we all know I won’t be drinking it – gross!) and eat German cookies together.. We’ll let you know how it goes :)

Ok, we’ll admit it.. we’re not very good about posting on the blog. We still don’t have the internet – they say we’ll have it Monday but even my optimism is having trouble believing it after all this time. We’ll see.. Anyway, we realized that in our lack of internet we’ve actually forgotten to post about a few things that we’ve done since we’ve been here. For example…

Very early on in our time here, I went with my dear friend Hannah Phillips to a little town called Broughty Ferry. While it turned out that what we were looking for was not actually in that little town, it was really fun and we got to see a castle and go into some great little charity shops.


This is a view of one of the streets, right across the street is the sea.


This is Brought Ferry castle and Hannah and I went as far up as we could possibly go inside that tower and found rooms that were meant to entertain children that entertained us very nicely. There was also an observatory with binoculars that said you could see dolphins, but sadly there were none.

Another thing we did while the Ellis’ were here was climb up in St Rule’s Tower. The tower is on the cathedral grounds and is taller than the cathedral spires.


It’s tall!


This is a picture of the stairs you had to climb – Ian’s foot is there to give you an idea of the narrowness. It was a tight squeeze and a whole lotta stairs, but totally worth it when you came out on top! The climb to the top made you feel like you were back in the 12th century when it was built – fortunately in our safe 21st century there is now a hand rail to pull yourself up with :)


a view of town from the top


Ian and Brannan found a nice person to take a picture of them at the top!


This is a picture the guys took of Katie and I while we were looking for them. We had separated to look around the cemetery and cathedral grounds and next thing we knew, we couldn’t find the husbands! Eventually they yelled loud enough that we found them and when they came down we learned that some other nice person had given them the tokens to get into the tower for free.


Finally, this is a picture of our building from waaaay far away at the tower. Way to go camera zoom! (if you follow the buildings coming our from the lower right hand corner, it's the last one sticking out - grey stone, cute, that's the one!)

I mentioned a while back too that Ian and I have begun cooking whole chickens to save money…


This was my first attempt and it was deeelicious! We served this dinner to Will and Vanessa Kynes a long time ago :) Since then I have cooked many a chicken with many different flavors and it’s our new favorite. Here is dessert..


It’s called brownie pudding.. also very good.

This is a picture from a day that we went for a walk in early October…


This is a zoomed version so you can see the SURFERS out on the water!


I just have one thing to say… insane.
I don’t care if you’re wearing a wet suit or not, it is waaaay too cold to go surfing.

I think that’s all that we did that we failed to mention previously..

We went over to some friends’ house for lunch after church on Sunday and found ourselves eating the most delicious meatloaf (yes mom, you read correctly, I LIKED, nay LOVED the meatloaf). After eating we went for a walk because they live on a farm. There was a horse out that was very friendly that Ian naturally named Uncle Jason (long story) and proceeded to feed any grass or weeds he could find. It was very amusing but sadly we didn’t think to take the camera, so you’ll just have to imagine.

If we have the internet by Monday as they say we will, I’ll be posting to show you that there are already Christmas decorations up throughout our little town and tell you about some other things going on…
Until then!