What a week...let's start with a recap of the weekend...

The week has just flown by! I will give a recap of the weekend today and continue to update about the week, now that we have officially visited Jen's entire extended family in Vietnam this week!  It is like having 20 Jewish grandparents...all calling Jen's phone saying, "when you come visit?!".   So, we started off this past Saturday with taking the kids to the beach and to lunch after.  On Sunday we took them bowling and to the arcade at Co-Op Mart downtown.  Same drill...we piled into three taxi cab vans and made our way over the bridge in to downtown Da Nang.  As we would come to find out, the kids love the taxi rides on the way to outings, but after we eat, there are several of them who get carsick!  Tey have grown up riding on motorbikes their whole lives, so a car is a bit much.  Anyway, we got to the top floor of the shopping center for bowling and 14 kids wanted to bowl while the others wanted to just play video games.  Some of the kids are great bowlers, seeing as they have never done it before.  Hong and Anh and Tai were super into it!  Truong would jump in and just throw a ball down your lane if you weren't paying attention!  It was like watching speed bowling....fluorescent bowling balls flying into the air and crashing down on the lanes, some of them riding the gutter the whole way, some barely making it to the pins!  So much fun for them and for us!

We headed for lunch at pho 24 after the bowling and arcade games and watched the 22 kids devour 30 bowls of pho.  Little 8 and 10 year olds piling on the chiles and loving it.  Nothing you would ever see in the US for sure.  Once the kids were pleasantly stuffed, we went to get back into the taxis to go home.  We met opposition by three boys....Duc, Khan, and Hue.  Apparently, all three had gotten really carsick after beach day and were afraid to get back in the taxis!  After some coaxing and having them hang their heads out the windows, we made it back to Mary's House puke-free!  The kids were totally tired and had a great weekend before starting school on Monday from their summer break.