Christmas for us was spent at Lian and Nil's lovely cottage. They very kindly offered to let us house-sit for them for a month whilst they returned to Europe for the Christmas season.
Here we are enjoying our Christmas breakfast on the terrace.
Which was swiftly followed by a dip in the pool - it's not often you can go for a swim on Christmas day after all.
Having decided that this would be a very unusual christmas anyway, we (along with a few of our friends here - Tamara, Claire and Nikolai) decided we would spend christmas weekend at an orphanage for HIV positive children. We actually had a wonderful time. The kids were fantastic - full of energy, affection and life. We took loads of presents and organised games like pass-the-parcel (which almost ended in riot - terrifying).
Our piece-de-resistance was a projector and sound system which we borrowed in order to show them a couple of films cinema-stylee. Slightly less altruistically, it also gave us and the staff some much needed sitting-down, quiet time. The children, particularly the younger ones, absolutely crave attention and seem to need you to interact with them all the time. Just a symptom of growing up without parents I guess, and very sad, still we were immensely grateful to The Lion King for distracting them!
Nikolai is looking grumpy because he wanted to watch Finding Nemo.
Anyway we all had a great time on both our visits, even Tamara who got wee'd on...ha ha.
In the evening of Christmas day itself we went back to our house (for those of you who don't know/haven't seen it, we live in a *massive* shared house) and cooked a traditional christmas dinner for all the expat waifs and strays who, for one reason or another, couldn't be with their families. It was actually a very enjoyable christmas even though it didn't feel like christmas at all.
