Getting Settled

This picture is taken from the steps of the front door of our building. Our apartment building is two-sided, forming a corner. It is 9 stories and the playground/gathering area is in the center. Many of the apartments are privately owned by families, but some are privately owned and rented out (like ours). We were surprised at the number of cars in Yaro and especially when we found out they pay twice as much plus $16,000 as we do in the U.S.

That's Anne carrying groceries back from the market. Our front building door is on the right. Our apartment is the second level on the right. We love having it on the end so we don't have noise from other apartments.
Outside our building is a little fresh fruit and vegetable stand. They have very good produce and a large variety from apricots to watermelon. We love the apples and especially the tomatoes. There are two other little stands within a block, so it's really convenient to buy produce as we come home each day.

Getting into our apartment is quite a system. We have a numerical/magnetic pad for opening the solid steel outside door. On the second floor is the locked iron gate which services 4 apartments. The picture on the right shows the two apartment doors from the inside. There is one solid one and then the paneled door. We have joked that it is like being in prison to get into the apartment, but we feel very secure when we are in. There is a buzzer for visitors outside the main door which connects to a telephone inside our door. We have a button we push to unlock the building door. There is also a doorbell that can be pushed from outside the iron gate if someone gets in the building without calling us.
Look at the keys we have to use to get through all those doors. Magnetic key is the black button thing at the left, brass key on bottom is for the gate, silver key at top right is to first door to apartment and the normal looking key to the right is to the inside apartment door, which we never lock.
We really felt at home when we saw this restaurant just a block from our building. It's one of the better places to eat in Yaro. We're looking forward to a special occasion to try it out. They are supposed to have really good steaks.

This is our building from the Texas Restaurant parking lot. The building in front is a bank. We take this way home a lot of the times.

This is one of the main streets in Yaro. We take a bus like the one above to go to most of the places we need to go that are not within walking distance. If you look closely, you can see the golden arches of McDonalds on the right. They use the street banners for business advertising.
The branch building is about 1 1/2 miles from our apartment. We can walk to it in 20 minutes. It is in a multi-story business building. Ironically, the business next to it is a rather well-known night club. When we show people the map for getting there, they always say, "Oh, right next to the night club."
This is one of our favorite places to shop. It's the Real Mall. There is a nice home improvement store and a large grocery store. The food court has "American" pizza, Italian, Oriental and "Mexican" food. There is a cleaners we like, clothing and shoe stores, toy store, card shop, jewelry, flower shop, etc. It's about a 25 minute ride on the bus, but once we are there, we can do most of the shopping we need to and then catch the bus back. We had so much stuff one time, we had to call a taxi to take us home.