Our New Home....

...or should I say our current home?  Soon after moving in to this apartment, we learned that Matin's company is looking into moving the offices to another city farther north that might offer more opportunities for business growth, so we may be moving again in a matter of months...or weeks.  But we didn't think that should stop you from getting a glimpse of our current penthouse pad (our apartment is on the third floor, so we're considering it "penthouse").  Oh, and did we tell you we have been given Persian names?  M*'s name is "Matin", and L* has been named "Laylo", which is a type of flower here.  Cool, huh?  From now on, we're going to use our Persian names on this blog, because they are awesome.

This is the view from our balcony.  Unfortunately, here it's considered rude to be seen looking into someone else's courtyard, so people don't hang out on the balconies here.  But we still go out to catch the view from time to time....shhh.

This is the hallway as you come up the stairs - our four rooms are in each corner, and the double doors go out to the aforementioned awesome balcony.  Most nationals here don't use a table and chairs, but when it's just us, we don't eat on the floor ;)

This is our saloon, which is the equivalent of a living room or a family room in the US.  People here also don't sit on couches; instead they use toshaks, which are the pillows around the room.  Sitting on the floor all the time takes a little getting used to, but luckily we're young and relatively limber. 

And here is the bedroom, again with furniture that no one here would use.  Most people here sleep on mats on the floor, but we'll definitely take a bed.  The wall of doors & drawers to the right of the picture is actually the wall between our bedroom and the saloon - some of the compartments open from both sides, so you could actually see right through if you had both doors open!  Across the street from the window above our bed is a mosque, which means that 5 times a day we hear the call to prayer blasted from a tower mounted with loudspeakers.  The call to prayer has to be loud enough that people can hear it above the mid-day hubbub of city life, so you can imagine how high they set the speaker volume.  What makes this even more awesome is that the first call of the day is around 5:15am every morning, followed by a 35-45 minute sermon from the mullah.   And by awesome, we mean NOT awesome - hopefully soon we'll be able to sleep through it, but for right now it means early mornings for us.