This week we visited one of our students and her family in a small village, about an hour and a half away from our town. The nature was beautiful, the air was so clean, and the lifestyle was so simple and peaceful. We loved it there and enjoyed climbing mountains, scaling some cliff-like mountains, exploring caves, watching fishing, chomping on sugarcane, and being together. Here are a few pictures from our time there.

I've decided to start blogging again. I guess it's been a few months, and I know I don't exactly have dedicated readers who have noticed, but I just love to write, to journal. The past few months I've been writing more and more, writing my daily thoughts in my trusty journal, but it's time to whip out some pictures again and share a little more.

We had an absolutely disgusting dining experience recently, yet it was a whole lot of fun and we got some great pictures! We were invited to one of our student's homes and his dad introduced us to his rodent farm. Out back, he keeps about 100 fat part guinea-pig-looking, part rat-looking rodents.  We got to look at them, hold them, and pet them... and then ingest them. He fried up some rodent meat, paws and all, and added some horse meat and goat stomach as side dishes. Here are a few photos of us taking in our new experience.

I turned 24 this year. TWENTY-FOUR! That's a big number! Besides a quarter-life crisis, making sure I wasn't wasting my life, I spent my special day with my wonderful husband and students. That weekend, Austin threw me a birthday party with some of our friends from the local college. Here are some pictures:

First, we had an instructional Ants on a Log making session. They loved it!

Then, we had some birthday charades... this was really fun. We made them up ourselves and chose all kinds of random things, like "a spider eating pizza," "pizza eating a spider," "purple dinosaur," "the man of my dreams," and lots of others.

Sadly, when it was time for cake/brownies, the candles were really cheap and melted upon impact with the warm dessert.

Some people say the best part about a party is the people. They lie. Let's just be honest here, it's the dessert that takes the cake. Austin made a chocolate brownie/cake to be eaten warm with some ice cream (soft-serve ice-cream with oreo pieces mixed in, frozen... yeah, that's cookies and cream ice-cream!!!) It was amazing!

Our friends held the plates in their hands and were so amazed-- "Wow! Cold on one half. Hot on the other half."

I just love him, and from the look on his face, I think it's mutual.

Last week we invited some friends... somewhere between friends and acquaintances, really... to our home for dinner on Friday night. They called a few days before Friday to let us know they'd forgotten that it would be their daughter's birthday on Friday and they were having a party at 6:30 pm. They invited us to the party instead, and we rescheduled the dinner at our place for Saturday evening.

Friday evening. 6:38 pm. We were strolling in, fashionably late. (Is there any other way, really, when fashion is just bursting out the seams of your being?) We knocked on the door and it opened several seconds later. Expecting to find a party of screaming six-year-olds, we were met with silence, and a host who may or may not have forgotten we were coming... They just smiled and went to the kitchen to start cooking. We sat on the couch and watched TV with the birthday girl. Later we were told we were the only ones who would be at the party that night. So interesting... so slightly awkward... did they know we were coming to the party to which we were invited?

Finally, around 8:00, they started calling a bunch of people, and slowly, the six-year-olds trickled in, just in time for cake. I applaud them on their impeccable timing. 

Now this country isn't really rockin' it on the birthday cake front. In fact, we didn't know if they knew what real cake was, so we decided to make some cake for dessert the following night. All of our normal desires for health were replaced with a drive to introduce this family to some real cake. I found a great little recipe for cake, and another for icing, and went for it. I baked it in two circles, then assembled and frosted them to make this little ladybug cake. For a cake that took only 3 minutes to decorate, it was really cute and well loved.

The cake in its early stages of ladybug-ship.

The completed ladybug. I left the head unfrosted, frosted the body pink, added some Oreos* as spots, and some chocolate sprinkles (thanks, Austin's family) to divide the wings. We had a thin pink candle I rounded for its smile and some white foam circles that I designed as eyes last-minute. So fun!

*I raced to the supermarket last-minute for these Oreos, one of the few western food products existing in our town. They were out of regular flavor, so I grabbed these ones called "Double Delight," assuming they were just like Double Stuffs or something... Turns out, they were half chocolate filling, half peanut butter. Do they have that in America? They're super amazing... A dangerous discovery!

Last weekend, our friends Black Bear and Gemini took us around our town to visit some beautiful places and have a little fun, including a swimming pool (which was more like a Speedo festival!), a beautiful mountain, and a little restaurant with some great food!

Me and Austin-o-saurus.

As you can see, this was a very intense event. This kid looks like skin and bones, but he was super strong. We still won a couple of times.

A fun picture of feet. Gemini is quite the photographer.