Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is the American holiday of 'Thanksgiving', a tradition in the States which is among my favourites. Today families join together for good home-cooked food, to spend time together, watch football, and to celebrate all that we have to give thanks for.

Unfortunately for the past 6 years I have been too far away and without enough money to return to celebrate with my family at my grandmother's house, as I did every year until moving to India, getting married and all. It's been good though. Every year since leaving home 6 years ago, there have always been friends (regardless of nationality) around to celebrate the day with - best of all my lovely wife. :-)

Today we wanted to share with you some of the things that are happening here which we are thankful for.

For a long time now, Dana and I have been planning to return to the States to continue studying and finish up the paperwork required to be free to live inside or outside the US as we choose. Many of you know that the process of applying for Dana's visa to come to the States has been a long and complicated one. So we're very happy to let you all know that we are finally very near the end, and that we're now just waiting for an appointment date for our interview at the US embassy here in Romania. This is the very last step in the process where the final approval is given. We are hoping and praying that this will take place by the begining of January! :-)

We also would like to announce that in mid January, I will be starting school at Bloomsburg University in the philosophy department. This is a step that I've been waiting a long time to take and we are both excited for me to finally get back to school!

Because of this, Dana is able to quit her job at the British School. Her last day is just a little more than a week away. This last month or before moving to the States, we wanted to spend with family and friends while we can. Also, the job has been a hard for her and the travel to the other side of the city every day has been quite time consuming. I have to say that I'm very much looking forward to spending our days together this coming month. :-)

Other good news is that this past month I finally got my residence card for Romania (which would allow me to work here if we were staying longer). This is a good thing because it will make it much easier to spend longer amounts of time here without having to leave the country every 90 days and is a step toward potential dual citizanship.

There are a lot of unknowns in our future right now, and although the unknown is scary, and we feel torn between 3 continents and our friends and family scattered across the globe - wishing we could be in 3 or so places at once - we feel that this is the right direction for us and we are so thankful that these opportunities are finally coming to being.

We hope you've had a great Thanksgiving (even if you didn't celebrate it) and that you have a great day.

Peace and Shanti

A Day in the Mountains

Two Saturdays ago we spent the day with a group of friends driving up into the Carpathian mountains to a huge dam and lake and then a little further up the road for a picnic. It was great. ;-) Although they were calling for rain, the day actually ended up becoming a little sunny. But it's now clearly autumn/winter weather here with a sudden bout of cold weather. The leaves are falling now though maybe only a third of them have fallen by now.
The day out was great. Dana had a very good time playing with our friends' 4 month old girl Alma, a beautiful baby. :-) And I had a good time building the fire, helping the guys on the grill, and taking all these pictures (below).
Over all we're doing well. Dana's job is demanding and she has to travel to the opposite side of the city and out to get there too. It's quite a stressful job for her, so we usually end up not going out with friends much, but it's been nice to do that too. I'm keeping busy with a bit of paperwork that we're working on now as well as helping out with the construction of our church's new building.
We hope you're all doing well too.

Peace




Carpathian Mountains



Dana and Joel

The Dam Lake

The Guys working the Grill

Our Picnic

Dana and our friends's baby, Alma

The Girls

At the Dam

Looking out over the edge

The view from the top of the Dam

166 meter bungee jumping platform

It's a long way down

The Bungee Jumping Platform

The Dam Lake

Birthdays!

It's been a while since our last personal update on how we are and what's happening with us. We wanted to write because today is Joel's birthday. :-)

This week has been a good week for us - full of celebration with family with special meals for both Joel and Dana's father whose birthday is a day before Joel's. This past Sunday we had a cookout at Dana's Grandmother's house in the garden with Dana's family. Joel and Tata ('Dad' in Romanian) worked the grill. We had cake and stayed for the afternoon and evening. Then, both yesterday and today on our actual birthdays Mama made special meals and a cake and we exchanged a few gifts.

It's been nice to stay here in Romania though it's been hard too. Time with family after such a long time away is priceless. It's true that you don't know what you have until you don't have it anymore, as we've learned from our years away from family while we lived in India.
But this is also a bit of a hard time for us. Dana's job is demanding and so she feels drained a lot of the time, which means that we don't have as much time to spend with friends here. We're also still in transition, not adjusted yet from moving from India. Even though Joel can't get a job here in Romania and is waiting until January to start school, he is trying to use the time each day wisely. This time here in Romania is perfect for him to work on learning the language.

Over all, things are a bit difficult, but good. We are blessed more than even we realize. We hope you are doing well (whoever is reading this) and may peace be upon you.


Below are some recent pictures of Dana with old friends, and from our cookout on Sunday. :-)

Back!

Hey all,

It's been more than a month since we last wrote, and so much has happened. Already, it's the ninth of October, crazy how time flies.
One month ago, on September 9th we finally said goodbye to Mama and Tata ('mom' and 'dad') and boarded our flight to India.
We arrived in New Delhi at around 2:30am and caught a taxi to our hotel where we were told, they didn't have any record of a room being reserved for us - even though Joel called them (from Romania!) the week before.
They did get a room for us though a short time later when some other guests were leaving to catch an early flight. Everything sorted out, we enjoyed our few days in Delhi (in Air Contitioning) before getting seats on the train for the overnight trip back to our home in Varanasi.
When we got back to our house though, it was a mess. Not only was everything super dusty, but all the clean sheets and clothes we had stored over the summer had mildewed because of the damp monsoon weather. We spent the next three or four days just cleaning our house and settling back into our place. It was nice to get back home in spite of the work and the heat though.

Since comming back to Varanasi we've been steadily getting back into the routine of things. We've started back in our office to work on our various projects - School of Hindu Studies curriculum, material for the web page, as well as some other studies. Joel also plans to start back into his music lessons.

On Saturday we had a party at our house to celebrate Joel's Birthday. We invited our closer friends, had a nice meal and watched 'The Skeleton Key' together. Good movie. Joel got some sweet books about the strange rise of 'modern India' which will be great reading...

Anyway, we don't want to bore you to death so we'll just end it here.
Hopefully we'll be posting more often than we have been. It's just been a bit crazy trying to get back into the swing of things.
Take care of yourselves.

Shanti (Peace),

J&D



ps. By the way, Joel cut his Hair! After Three Years!!!!

Family

Joel, Dana, and Parents at the Park just after sundown

Castle Rishnov seen from the town

Beautiful View

From Joel and Gabe's 'Beach Work Out' video
Order Yours Today, and we'll send you the Calendar, for Free...

Time with Family

Hey All,

Just wanted to update you all on what's going on here.
We had a good month - Especially with our (Joel's) family coming.

We had a great time. My parents were able to take two weeks off this year and come to visit us here after two years apart. We spent a total of 10 days together with them as well as my youngest brother Gabe and Grandma (dad's mom).
We had a great time together and were pretty busy most of the time. We visited two castles in the Carpathian mountains (Transylvania) and spent some days at the Black Sea. :-)
We had some great discussions, went cool places, and ate a lot of really good food. (Romanian food is some of my favorite in the world - with such nice bread, soups, cheeses, etc). We were also blessed with a new camera so we took A LOT of pictures (which of course we will share and have already shared below).
But the best part was finally being able to talk and spend time together regardless of where we were and what we did. It was so nice to finally be together again.

Since they left last Friday we've also been able to spend some time with Dana's family as well - especially with her aunt Claudia and cousin Jennifer before they went back to Germany.
Over all it's been really great.

Gotta run now but we'll share more photos as we go so check out our blog again.

Peace,
Joel and Dana

Finally together after two years!

The Boyers and the Dinus - party for Grandma's birthday

We took a trip to Bran Castle (aka Dracula's Castle) but we didn't see much of Dracula himself :-[