Katmandu living

We are now home again in Yemen for a couple of days before we take off for Holland tomorrow night. We have had a great trip to India where we met up with old friends from our time in India 10 years ago. We managed to see both Delhi, Jodhpur, the Rajasthani desert, Jaipur, Pune and Mumbai and had a great time with Dipali, Åsa and Jagat, Katrine and Frank and Giulia and Ronnie. It is amazing to see the development that India (especially the big cities) has gone through since we lived there in 1996 to 1998. You now hardly see an Ambassador taxi on the streets of Delhi anymore and whereas we had to do our shopping in small corner shops when we lived there, they have now gotten Malls and Supermarkets. Jodhpur was fantastic and very relaxing and we even managed to go the desert to spend a night in tents (not of the villa type but the colonial type with a real bed and individual toilets and bucket showers) and to see Jagat getting beaten in polo. It is of course difficult to write all about the things we have seen but you will get a flavour of it if you go to our Flickr page where I will try to upload as many photos as possible. So go ahead and click on the Flickr logo on the right of the page.

Just a short udate to say that we are doing fine in India where we have been for the last week or so. We are now in Jodhpur where we arrived ysterday morning with the night train from Delhi. It is lovely here and we are enjoying ourselves very much. I have already taken at least 200 pictures and we will try to upload all of them before to take off to Holland on the 1st of Jan. I will write when we are back in Sana'a again.

I have been playing around with the design of our blog somewhat, and though it is not perfect it will hopefully be improved over time. One new addition to the blog that know Oma and Opa will enjoy is the access to our Flickr page. Though we have not uploaded many pictures yet (I have only opened an account today so I have still not had time) you will be able to access many more of our pictures on Flickr than we will be able to post on the blog. So though I will still post pictures selectively (no pictures of Lieke with morning hair) you will be able to access many more of our pictures. To go to our Flickr account all you need to do is click the flickr box on the right hand side.

We will be off the India the day after tomorrow so there will now be a two week period without updates. However, hopefully we will return with many colorful pictures, so see you in a couple of weeks time.

This morning Joop then had her birthday breakfast and got her presents.

Joop's is turning four today and yesterday she had some friends over for a birthday party. After having celebrated quite a few birthday parties by now, Lieke gotten it down, though she is introducing new elements every time. At the request of Joopie we had a puppet show this time and also "pinning the tail" on the donkey. Besides that it was with the Piñata and a cake - all in all the party was a big success, thanks to much work from Lieke and Rachel.

As today is Sinterklaas, Swarte Piet came past our house and left some presents - Sinterklaas himself could not make it as he had to be in the Netherlands to take care of all the kids there (this is according to Liva) but luckily Swarte Piet made it and he left many presents, one of them being a game of twister that had to be tried out right away.

And here are a couple of more pictures from the Sinterklaas party. Swarte Piet, Joopie, Liva and SinterKlaas.

It is now yet again Sinterklaas and Lieke and kids went to the Sinterklaas party while I was in Denmark. Here is Joopie talking to Sinterklaas.

Today, the School celebrated Yemeni Day, so Liva was dressed up in her Yemeni outfit.

While in Denmark I bought a new digital camera and today I have been playing around making a David Hockey'ic collage of our living room. To see the collage in full size you should dobble click on the picture.

As daddy has returned from Denmark we have gotten some new dresses

And Liva managed to stand in the middle of an aqarium.

During the summer holiday in Denmark we had a rather cold day at Legoland where we tried the lego monorail.

Now we are finally able to upload new photos. Here is Liva at a preformance at the school a couple of weeks ago.

Though I have been promising new pictures for a while now I have had problems getting the pictures from our digital camera to my computer. In the meantime, you will have to live with the lack of updates. Hopefully, I will be able to resolve the problem soon. Today is the Danish election and I am somewhat concerned about the outcome. Though this is the closest election in a long time, all indications are that the current government will continue, though it will be on a more uncertain mandate. The last couple of days I have been participating in a trading game on the web-site of the biggest Danish newspaper - Politiken. The game is simply put that you trade on outcomes of the election and the opinion polls.

Before I loose many of my saved up points today, after a bad investment in the Social Democratic Party being the largest party in today's polls (which they didn't become), I just wanted to share my good track record. As of this morning I was no. 14 out of almost 1500 participants - Unfortunately I will now fall a couple of 100s positions. Anyway, I have been true to my believes, and truly hoped that we would get a change of government.

On the way home from Europe, where Lieke, Liva and Joop got delayed for 22 hours in Aden, they met a guy from Egypt that was very kind to the kids. He is here to work on some programming work for one of the mobile providers and we met up with him last week where Lieke and the kids took him to the old city.

After a well deserved holiday in Europe the whole family is now back in Yemen. Lieke and the kids got quite a delay on the way back as a plane had skipped off the runway in Sana’a and their plane therefore got rerouted to Aden where they spent almost 24 hours in the airport and later at a hotel. So they have not quite recovered yet. We have returned to the last draws of the monsoon season in Sana’a and an invasion of locust. Parts of Yemen is suffering quite a bit and the situation is complicated further by lack of action due to concerns for the honey production. So right now the grasshoppers are allowed to roam free as insecticides would kill off the bees as well. The citizens of Sana’a are happy though as they eat the grasshoppers – it is considered a delicacy and is called the “flying scrimp”. Anyway, I just wanted to make a short update with the promise that I one of the coming days will upload some pictures from our summer holiday. Thanks for everything while we were in Europe.