Hi folks,
Below you will find a little slide show of our semi-recent trip to our future home of Olinala. (I don’t think it really works properly so you may have to click on the view images icon to take you to another window.) As it turns out, most of the pics in the slide show are of the neighbouring villages that we visited. I typed descriptions of the pics into the slide show program but somehow they didn’t make it into the show…such is technology when I’m in charge of trying to figure it out, oh well!
We really enjoyed our trip to Olinala! Some of the highlights were:
- the all night bus ride to Olinala in which the bus broke down and we had to wait two hours for another bus to come (this is Zam’s highlight…somehow he thought this was very cool!)
- Hizee got to see oodles and oodles of animals and even got bit by a chicken on her lip (this wasn’t a highlight at the time, but she’s quite proud of this now and tells everyone about it!)
- Ziko was little Mr. Spanish while we were in Olinala…he trotted down the street waving his hand and shouting “HOLA!” at everyone we passed.
- I was impressed by the sheer vibrancy and liveliness of the bustling town of Olinala (which I now realize I don’t really have any first pics of…market, tiny shops sandwiched together painted in a rainbow of colours). People we met were very friendly and very forgiving about the fact that we speak basically zero Spanish!
- Bruce liked all the basketball courts and had a few games with some “ninos.” The kids we met were generally quite shy, however, right before we were about to leave we managed to eek out a few Spanish words (phrase book in hand) and get a few games going.
- And an obvious highlight for Bruce and I (as can be seen by the pics we took) were the smaller communities surrounding Olinala. It is breathtaking country…rolling hills and lush green vegetation (only in rainy season we are told)…we were blown away! We also checked out some housing possibilities.
The only bad thing about the visit to Olinala was that it was a real teaser…we would love to be there right now, settling in to out new home!