Bumping into my sister...

During our lovely holiday in Montenegro we heard that Astrid and David (my sister and brother-in-law) were going to be in Dubrovnik... a plan was formed. On the way back to Trebinje from Montenegro we would take a detour to visit them :) 

It meant an extra border, but luckily we were all able to cross into Croatia as Ljilja and I are vaccinated and Sina is EU, so we could "just do it" as they say...except it took an hour at the border, but it was worth the wait! Even thought it was very short, just a coffee together, it was very sweet as we haven't seen each other since the beginning of last year! 

We managed to surprise my mom as my sister called her to say "hey look how hot it is here...while you are cold in SA" and then said "oh and look who else we found here..." and turned the phone unto me! Yay for fun surprises! (Although my Mom is quite clever as she had written to my sister, "Hey, the 3 Musketeers are in the area, maybe they will come and see you"... so I am not really so sure how surprised she was!)

And the best part of all was that she managed to bring me some marmite and Twinings tea, so I was grateful for that too!! 

I have especially been craving marmite which you can't get here... and that is something no one who doesn't love marmite can understand!

Montenegro vacation

This year, our 11th year of taking vacations together, Sina, Ljilja and I decided to enjoy our neighbouring country, Montenegro. We started up in the beautiful northeast of the country, in the Durmitor mountains. We took a lovely hike around the "Black lake", which was beautiful, despite being caught in the rain: 

We also went to see the Tara canyon, which was equally lovely: 

We then headed to the southwest, nearer to the coast: and stayed near to Skadar Lake. One day we took a drive along the scenic route to the sea, and it reminded me a lot of Cape Town: 

We took a little boat trip on the lake, which was very special: 

Then we headed to the coast, just in time to celebrate someone's birthday: 

Sina and I managed to organise a cake and candles and surprise her, yay! 

We were staying near the city of Bar, so one night we enjoyed "Stari Bar" or "Old town Bar": 

This is me with my arty pic through the Arch of the aquaduct! 

One of the down sides of this whole lovely vacation was the fact that I was nursing an extremely sore shoulder and my pain medicine would run out in the middle of the night, so I would wake up take some more and then have to wait until it kicked in... 

But that actually turned into an advantage as I managed to see the moon over the sea in various different ways every night. We had a wonderful view over the sea which really helped! Here she is waxing on a cloudless night: 

And here she is full on a cloudy night, so beautiful: 

So even despite the sore shoulder putting a pall on the vacation, I did manage to see the advantage of it! We had a wonderful time as always otherwise. I read 11 books, we watched 10 movies together and played over 8 different types of games... All in all a relaxing holiday :) 

Hosting teams again!!!

In the last two weeks of June, we hosted two teams back to back. After not having any teams for almost a year and a half, it was refreshing having teams come again! 

The first team of 8 was with InterVarsity from the USA and were spending most of their time in Sarajevo, but started with us to do some orientation and also have a fun "Cultural Night".

The second team of 4 was also from the US, and spending time in many cities around Bosnia, helping run English Camps for kids. They taught completely in English (with a smattering of translation here and there) and the kids picked up a LOT of English in the 3 days of camps.

One fun thing was that we got the youngest "family unit" from the Children's Home to come and join in (here are two of them from the back) and so we got to spend time with "our" Children's Home kids that we haven't been able to see because of Corona... The other kids were all from our sponsorship project. 

 

Here we all are (faces of children are delibrately blanked per our Child Protection Policy):

We had some of the older kids come and help out as volunteers which was also fun! 

And then we had some time together to debrief out two weeks of teams... Ljilja, Belinda, Käte and Haley:

It was fun to have teams again after such a long time of not having them. It did help that they were all vaccinated, and that our covid case numbers have been very low. But after the busy two weeks, we were all ready for a break!