Inside our apartment

Now that we've gotten unpacked, I decided to take some pictures to show you the inside of our apartment. When you enter the apartment, the hall is directly ahead of you after the living room on the left and the kitchen on the right.

Here's the view looking down the hall. The first doorway on the right is to the bathroom. The second on the right, which you see opened into the hall, is to the office, which is also our "safe room" (meaning it has heavily reinforced walls, a metal door (the one you see), and a metal panel that can be rolled out of the wall to cover the window). The doorway on the left, which you can't really see but you CAN see the light streaming from it, is to the bedroom. That's Peachy, our female calico cat, who is about to go into the bedroom.

Here's the view of the living room looking left after just entering the front door. You can see David sitting at his computer on his desk, and you can see our large front window, which faces southwest. Peachy is also in this picture, sitting on the coffee table at the left. This is a bit ironic, since, if you actually VISITED us here, she would disappear somewhere and it would be quite unlikely that you'd even see her at all!

If you go into the living room and look left, here's the view of the balcony that you see. The balcony has a roof, but there are small gaps between the slats, so it's not intended to be water-proof. On the left, you can see my bicycle (which barely fits, in "wheelie" position, in the elevator with me, saving me from having to carry it up and down 72 steps!). On the right, along the edge, you can see the 3 cat dishes. The balcony is where the cats have to stay at night so that they don't scratch the bottoms of the bathroom or bedroom doors trying to get to us. Their litter box is also out there. Of course, on the rare occasions when it actually rains here, we'll have to bring them and their box in.

Going back to just inside the front door and looking right instead of left, here is the view of the kitchen. Actually, this isn't quite all of the kitchen. The counter continues left from what you seen here, and there's a place for the oven (which the landlords have promised but have not yet delivered to us) with drawers below it and cabinets above, including a nice one for our microwave oven! And there's more -- to the left of that but separated by a wall is our laundry room. It's tiny -- there's just room for our dryer stacked on top of our washing machine and some shelves and cupboards; it's so small I couldn't even get a decent picture of it for you, but it's very efficient and convenient. The window you see in this picture faces northeast, giving us a nice view of Aqaba, Jordan, and the Edom Mountains along the other side of the Arava (the valley between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea; north of there, it's known as the Jordan River Valley, but that's FAR, FAR from here!).

Here's the view of our spacious bathroom. The toilet is politely out-of-sight to the right of this picture. The window opens into the laundry room. The landlord will soon be installing a shower curtain so that we can take showers without get the whole room wet. In the mean time, we've been taking baths instead.

It's hard to show a good view of my office because I've packed it very efficiently with plastic cabinets (4 tall ones and one half-height one) and bookcases (5 of them). But here's a view of my desk (which I bought MANY years ago at a thrift shop in Redlands for the princely sum of $10! What I LOVE about it is its HUGE desktop space, which allows me to have large books or papers on it between me and the computers. This was useful for grading papers when I was in the States, and it's also very useful here for placing the printed Berlitz materials in front of me while teaching. Immediately to the right of the desk, you can see one of the tall plastic cabinets.

Here's a view looking across my desk towards the window, which is open (it has a screen). The heavy metal cover for the window is completely out of this picture. In fact, most of it is rolled into the wall to the right of the picture. But, in case of an attack, it could be rolled all the way across the window and locked shut. This window also faces northeast, with a slightly better view than from the kitchen window. From here, I can also see the luxury hotels right at the end of the Red Sea. Also, in this picture, you can see the half-height plastic cabinet, which I deliberately placed in front of the window so that the cats can get up on it and look out at the pigeons (oh, how they LOVE birdies!).

So, I hope these pictures give you some feel for our apartment. I didn't get a picture of the bedroom that was good enough to show you. The bed fills most of it anyway, but its coolest feature is a large built-in closet/clothes cabinet across an entire wall, with 3 rolling doors that are completely covered with mirrors. The actual clothes hanging space is a bit limited, but there is plenty of space on the various shelves for ALL our clothes, shoes, and even some bedding and pillows!