Paintball, Turkeys and Reindeer

Sorry that the blogs haven’t been more forthcoming, you just get into a groove when you’re living somewhere as opposed to traveling. Really, not much exciting happens day-to-day (which is a good thing around here, believe me.)
I’ve been working a bunch, usually four 9hr days a week. These next two weeks I’ll be working 5 days because the studio closes for two weeks for the holidays (hear that American bosses?) Most things shut down during that time.
The job is going great. I’ve been doing illustration work, web design and am the contact person with clients in Germany and Holland. I’ll post the websites soon, they should be ready in a couple weeks. Last week we had an office outing of playing paintball. It seemed kind of odd at first to be playing war in a such a violent place, but it was actually a lot of fun. There was the added fun of possibly coming across wild baboons in the forest where we played. You don’t get extra points for shooting them though.
Thanksgiving came and went uneventfully. In fact I only realized it was thanksgiving once (while at work) and then forgot about it for the rest of the day. Christmas is coming up, but it doesn’t seem to be as big of a deal here. A couple temporary angel stencils on some storefronts and some cheap gift ideas at the stores. No lights though, electricity is too expensive to use on that. Have I mentioned that you have to buy electricity per kilowatt? You can literally run out. For a while the country was having a hard time producing enough electricity so there would be semi-scheduled rolling black outs. Problem was that some were unannounced so business would have to shut down and sometimes loose their perishable stock. Some tourists got stuck on a tram hundreds of feet in the air for a couple hours. Our house ran out of electricity the other day because people were using too much juice.
The internet is sold by the megabyte. I use about a gig a month. It costs around 24 dollars. It makes you careful about what you download when it’s not infinite and you can run out of internets. The studio where I work often gets capped out and is quite a pain in the ass. The boss has to call and order more internets and often work gets slowed down.