holidays

Summer decided to finally arrive, along with Sarah and Sam's parents and sister Amy. So did a much needed break away not that far away from the college campus really, but far enough to be away from the non flushing toilets, unreliable water supply and being woken in the morning by the communal corridor chorus. We headed up to St Lucia Wetlands and then stopped at the coast on the way back. So over the next few days we'll try and give you a glimpse of what we have been up to and some of the random photos that were taken. There were plenty of bugs, flowers, butterflies and the like to keep certain ones of us happy. Following our slightly untraditional Christmas here we had a British Christmas dinner together as a family, sitting outside in the sun-shine with our paper hats on. We BBQ'd, flew kites, strolled around many nature reserves, watched the sunset on the beach and had a couple of special days out as our Christmas presents to each other. One was a game drive, the other a boat ride on the river amongst the hippos and crocodiles! Today Tommy is back at work, school starts on Wednesday so life is sort of getting back to normal. Sadly we are not back on the Ship yet, but watch this space, hopefully just a few more weeks (we hope, I can't tell you how much!).

shoes

One of the Ship traditions is that everyone puts their shoes outside their doors on Christmas Eve and during the late or early hours people go around the ship and leave small gifts and notes in them. This year living off-ship in different parts of the campus there was the opportunity to leave little things for people in the dining room. This was really fun for the boys to be able to leave little things in peoples piles. And then to go to the dining room on Christmas morning and see all the lovely things people had left for us.

a 5th Farrell in South Africa :-)

Tommy's sister Ann has been to visit us for ten days and spent Christmas with us. We have made the most of having a car for a bit, spending time with her and seeing lots of the local area and beyond too. It has been fun having her here and we enjoyed showing her the Ship on Christmas Day. We have visited waterfalls, museums, the Drakensberg mountains, some battlefields and went for a game drive (which was one of our Christmas presents :-) ) and where we saw a rhino with a tiny baby and a herd of 20 elephants with babies amongst the much more common zebras, kudu, impala, wildebeest etc.

Tom enjoyed hiking to the bottom of one of the waterfalls and talking the guides ear off about all the countries he has lived in - 'where are you from?' is not such an easy question to answer when you have lived in 5 countries in a few years of life. Josh enjoyed seeing the injured cheetah in the Boma in the game reserve and when the safari vehicle got stuck in the mud so that we had to be towed out and the guide got covered in mud. There were tons of antelope, zebra and wildebeest in the reserve where we stayed a couple of nights, we heard there were giraffes too but hadn't seen them until we were leaving and Tom shouted that he could see giraffes. We could see two at the top of the hill, but later Tom said he had seen two and a baby, which we didn't believe until we saw our pictures which clearly show them all!

The Drakensberg Mountains were stunning, they looked like green carpet laid over the mountains and there were small waterfalls in every direction. We walked, found worms and photographed flowers and enjoyed the beauty of the mountains.

One thing that worked really well for our boys was borrowing cameras from some friends so they could take their own pictures. This kept a four year olds interest when you take him to three different waterfalls and on a 4 hour game drive. He enjoyed clicking away even though he was so tired by the end of the game drive he was clicking the button and holding the camera in one direction while looking at the elephants on the other side of the vehicle! -a bit of a shame as our camera is broken and the old one we took didn't record most of the pictures we took :-(

Happy Christmas!!

We wish all our friends and family a very happy Christmas from the sunshine of South Africa! We miss you all and hope that you are having lots of mulled wine and mince pies for us. We miss some of the usual British/Farrell/Slennett Christmas activity but it has been fun to share some traditions from other cultures and to remember that Christmas is so much more than just traditions anyway. We are off to the Ship today, which will be fun to show Tommy's sister our home and to join with the rest of the crew in celebrating our Saviour's birth.

 We get to have two Christmas trees this year, drawn by the boys. And we had tons of Christmas cards arrive just yesterday thanks to some kind friends thinking of us and many of the youth from our church - thanks Impact group - your cards made our day and are decorating our playroom :-)

 One of the Christmas activities last week was to make gingerbread houses. Yesterday on Christmas eve we were served a very special candlelit meal and part of the dessert was to eat them - this was the one our table got to demolish made by some of our friends. It didn't look this good once we had finished with it!

Whatever you are doing and wherever you are we hope you enjoy this Christmas day, not just for the traditions and fun, but as a true celebration of something significant.

decorating Christmas trees

Someone got hold of some Christmas trees for the dining room - and we all got to decorate them...stringing popcorn (apparantly people do this?), making paper chains, colouring salt dough tree decorations and cutting snowflakes from paper. Above Tom is at the table colouring and here are some of our creations:

and you can see one of the finished trees here:
http://giniporter.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/christmas-is-coming/