Day #5: Monday

Today was low-key...school, grocery shopping, and the pool.  The grocery store was fun - surprisingly not a whole lot of fruits (papaya, bananas)...mostly vegetables.  Lots of things I didn't recognize, but have heard of in Spanish class (name...for example), HUGE sweet potatoes, and lots of unfamilia root vegetables.  We all picked out fruit juices we had never tried before: acerola (I've ALWAYS wanted to try this - it's the first fruit in my food book and now i can say I've tried it), tamarind, guayaba, guanabana, parcha.  I know I need to get over this, but I can't believe how much Spanish "stuff" is everywhere!  Even Spanish Christmas candy "turron".  So, yes, we bought some.  The other really funny thing was seeing how many words are used differently.  Mantecado in Spain is a type of candy - here it is ice cream.  Pastel in most places is a cake - here it is a tamale-type  food.  The word for garbage is totally different - anyways, it's been fun!

Random side note:  At church yesterday, Zach looked at me w/his serious-I've-been-thinking-about-something look and said, "I guess here instead of pretty lights, they have fans..."  The chapels we have attended in Orange County really have been beautiful (w/lots of "pretty lights" aka chandeliers). The chapel here was much smaller and since it didn't have AC, the ceiling was covered in ceiling fans.

It was our first time to the hotel pool - it is beautiful and the kids had a great time!

Emma's doing her own thing...although she's usually the first one to dive into the water, she was too busy checking everything out.  Every time she sat in a lounge chair she would look at me and say, "Cheese!"  She knows me too well!

Braving the waterfall!!!

Doing tricks

Noall and I ended the evening by attending the hotel's Christmas party.  They had great food...almost all of it was fried (I never have heartburn...but I am enjoying it tonight!).  Fried mashed green bananas, fried plantains, fried sticks of cheese, fried chicken, fried cow's stomach something or other, fried empanadas, blood sausage, seafood salad (octopus, fish, shrimp, etc.), AMAZING pina coladas, rice pudding, coconut flan, and vanilla flan that was AMAZING!!!  I know I used that word twice, but the flan and pina colada really WERE amazing!  Everything else was really good!

There was music - of course - salsa and merengue.  I love that music and I loved watching all the dancing.  The best part of the evening was watching one of the servers.  He was standing in the back kind of rocking back and forth, clapping to the music, etc.  He finally grabbed someone to dance with and when the song was over, he walked by our table and cleared it w/o hesitating.  It was like something out of a musical.  It was so funny!   

I really wish that the US had some universal dances that crossed generations - that EVERYONE of ALL ages danced to and enjoyed.   That's one thing I really love about latin cultures - family parties are almost always accompanied w/dancing...children, grandparents, etc.  I love it!

Then there was the guy taking out picture, who couldn't stop swaying to the music even to take the picture.  When Noall and I got up to dance it was a slow song, and no one else joined us on the dance floor.  Maybe some unwritten rule about not dancing at the same time as the GM?  Anyways, everyone was watching us and taking pictures.  It felt like our wedding dance all over again...8 1/2 years later.