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Happy Late Valentine's Day and Happy Early Saint Patrick's Day Everybody.  I started thinking the other say that it's been almost six months since I've arrived here in my new home.  It's amazing how quickly time flies here but looking back how long it seems to last as well.  We've been telling stories in language the other day and while I still have serious problems with verb conjugation, I can still manage to tell about Goldilocks and the three bears (or the girl with golden locks and the bears three as it is translated here).  I got back from vacation last month and while it didn't seem to last as long as I would have liked it was still a much needed break from work and school.  We got to see the tallest building in the world and eat at all our favorite restaurants while on vacation.  We also got to hang out at the pool (which is an awesome thing to do in January), go the movies (we saw Les Miserables), get massages, and just relax. 
Speaking of school I have about three weeks left before I am done with official classes.  It doesn't even seem real though and there are still some days I get so confused with language but overall it is good. 
We've been taking different trips around the city to look at different place and two weeks ago we went to a palace in our city.  The pictures below are of the palace (as you can see it's seen better days but is still gorgeous).  We also ate street food (which we've been doing lately but still is always an adventure).
The weather here lately has been amazing and my roommate and I have begun opening up our windows and only lighting our heater at night.  We've been told spring is about to start which if that's true I will be so glad, but I'm also cautious about getting too excited because we were told spring was close then it snowed like two and half weeks ago.
It always amazes me at how much western things I can see here, not western like cowboys but western like America.  The other day we were at the market and heard Taylor Swift music playing and saw a poster with her picture.  We can also see posters with people like Orlando Bloom and George Clooney outside of the local barbershops.  My favorite thing would have to be the Starbucks logo, McDonald's Big-Mac picture, and KFC emblem that are outside of Kabob shops and street vendors' stalls.  Although my favorite food story happened one day coming back from school when my roommate and I stopped and got fish at a local vendor (which was kind of a risk because we are a landlocked country and you never know how long the fish has been sitting there).  So anyways we stop and get fish and our driver gets out of the car goes to the street vendor and comes back with a whole dead fish asking my roommate if this is an acceptable fish.  She says sure and they then proceed to cook it and then we take our bag of deep fried fish home for lunch.  What we didn't know is that the fish was still whole head, tail and all.  They had only cut it in half and deep fried it, and we didn't realize this until we had taken it out of the bag.  Needless to say it was an experience (pictures included below).
Oh I mentioned we had snow a few weeks ago.  Well since it was hopefully the last snow we'll have we made local snow-women.  Mine had the brown head scarf and is the one in the picture that looks like ET.  Well I'll write more later.  And I do realize I need to get better about keeping these up to date and am working on writing more often.  All for now.  Enjoy the picture.

Pick Your Favorite Part

Fish for Lunch

Local Snow Women