Our Apartment

We wanted to give everyone a tour of our place…and since you aren’t here, the best we could do is to give you a virtual tour. Before we begin, here is the floorplan:

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When you come in, you are looking at, essentially, the kitchen. It is rather small…perhaps 1.5-2 meters wide and 3-4 meters long. In it we have a BIG refrigerator (about US sized…that is huge for here), a round table with four chairs, a stove, 4 burner oven, and cabinents. We also have a pantry off of the kitchen and an entrance onto the balcony.

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Our kitchen
A view showing the sink, stove, oven, etc….

One really odd thing is that the sink faucet turns LEFT for cold and RIGHT for hot. This is exactly backwards of every other faucet in our apartment and backwards of what we are used to. From what we can tell, this is done because there is a mini-hotwater tank under the sink and that is just how they do it here.

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If you turn left when you come in, you will see this. The entrance to the bathroom and a wardrobe. We store shoes, coats, and books in the wardrobe. The bathroom is fairly self explanitory. Although if you look closley at the wall, you will notice some switches:

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The switch on the right is for the light in the bathroom (yep, it is outside.), the switch in the middle is for a heater in the bathroom (which also has it’s own on/off/temp. control in the bathroom), while the switch on the left is for the hot water heater. Here electricity costs 4-5 times less from 10pm to 6am than at any other time of the day so people tend to want to turn things off while they are gone or not using them. We are trying to adjust to this by using our hot water like Serbs. We’ll heat it at night and use it in the day. That works out ok as long as we don’t take marathon showers.

DSC06013 While we are here, I might as well show you inside the bathroom. On the left is the whole view of the bathroom. You can’t see the washing machine (it is in the bathroom) or toilet. On the right is the hot water tank. (on the right of this text as well as on the right of the picture). Below is a closeup of our shower head. I don’t know if it is low flow or not, but you get wet. it also has nice water pressure. DSC06014

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If you leave the bathroom (or enter and turn right) you are essentially looking down a long hallway. The hall is probably 2-4 meters long. Along this hall are our two bedrooms and a HUGE mirror. Lydia’s room is the first on the left and our room is at the end of the hall. Each room is close to the same. On the inside wall there is a huge wardrobe to store clothes in (no chest of drawers here) and the bed is opposite that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lydia’s bed
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Our bed

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a wardrobe

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If you turn around from our room, you’ll bee looking into the living room. In the picture to the right, you can see a better view of the mirror. One other thing you will notice is the doors. Serbs don’t like a draft (they think it will make them sick) so when they do open a window, they’ll shut the door. If you look closely, you may be able to see that the doors all have lips on them. This helps to seal the doors up better to prevent drafts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Our couch, chair, and trunks we are using as coffee tables
Our TV and some computer stuff

By now, I’m sure you are wondering about our windows, view, and balcony. What does it look like? What do they see every morning? Well, I have saved it till last because I think it is just awesome! We are on the 5th floor (6th if you are counting the way we do in the US, but 5 here) and have a great view of the city and mountains around the city. Way off in the distance you can see two mountains…Ovcar on the right and Kablar on the left. Ovcar was what I rode walked around last time we were here. And from Kablar, there is a tremendous view of Cacak.

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[Update 05-28-2008 10:15:14] I posted some more information on our apartment here .

Around Cacak

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Here are some pictures I took of us walking around Cacak today. We went over to a friend’s house and decided to try to walk home instead of have him drive us. We made it with no problems (we didin’t even get lost once). Although, that isn’t saying much…the route was fairly simple and involved two major streets.

Sunset over Cacak

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This is a sunset as seen from our apartment. It was taken with my camera phone so the quality isn’t great. When we get our camera battery charged, we’ll take some better pictures of the view and let everyone see what we see.

But, why not use this opportunity to pray for the people of Cacak. Pray that God would reveal Himself to them. Also pray that we would be able to get involved and meet people.

Here

Just wanted to let everyone know that we made it to Serbia.  We don’t have internet access at our place right now, but we’ll blog about our trip when we do get it.

 One thing right off though, the airlines made us gate check our 3 cary-ons (hassle, but saved us from lugging them all over).  But when we got to Belgrade, they weren’t here.  Well, this morning there was a call saying that multiple bags were on there way here!

 PTL!

We have a place!

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We received word today that we have a place to stay in Cacak! God is good (well, our apartment has nothing to do with that fact.)!

From our team leader:

It is on the 5th floor (with no elevator), but that’ll get your exercise in! J The bathroom and kitchen have just been remodeled and are very nice. You have a big fridge! Yea! It’s a two-bedroom and there is a door that closes off the bedroom sections. It’s just been painted, so it looks really nice. I hope you like it. It’s right around the corner from our house. Lots of young families around.

Serbian Music

{enclose http://media.maxsons.org/BregovicGoran_SilenceOfTheBalkans_ChupChik.mp3}

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Just to give everyone a taste of Serbian music, we’ll put this mp3 on our podcast.  I don’t have a clue what the song is about…I just know the artist (Goran Bregovic) is a big guy in Serbia.  While we were there several years ago, he put on a performance in the center of town that we went to see part of.  (for more on that, see our writings on the 29th of September 2006 )

Turkish Coffee

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When Cyndi and I came home from Serbia, we brought my dad Serbian Coffee.  We finally gave it to him, and this really got me thinking about turkish coffee.  So, I decided to try some on my own.  I found some instructions on the web and got the smallest pan we had.

Well, it didn’t work.  For two reasons:  1) I didn’t have an ibrik and 2) I didn’t use enough coffee.

[Update 2012-03-27 15:19:52] I wrote a howto once we moved to Serbia and I actually learned how to make Serbian Coffee.  You can find my HOWTO on Making Serbian Coffee here.  I also added a picture.

Movies online

Based on Cyndi and I's trip to Serbia, we created this movie. We hope it will help people around the world get a sense of Serbia, the Serbian people, and their need for Christ. All the files below are the same movie…just different sizes.

Here in a bit, I'll have an avi up (sorry they are all Windows Media Player files right now…that is all MS Windows Movie Maker wants to make) and I'll put a copy on google video. When I do, I'll post a link. In the meantime:

Serbia by Matt and Cyndi Maxson

38kbps (1.2 MB)
48kbps (1.5 MB)
150kbps (4.5 MB)
340kbps (10 MB)
512kbps (14.2 MB)
Variable Bit Rate (50 MB)