..SouthAsiaRocks..

We made it to Thailand!! Aashini did great on the flights! We got the bulkhead for them, so Aashini slept on the floor in front of us (her preferred place) :) I've gotten a couple foot massages since being here - it's been great!!! Much needed!! (this picture makes me laugh :) The ladies beside us had some sort of silly putty stuff on their faces!!) Aashini is loving the public transportation and having blast!! She's loving her class too - she's exausted every day after a day of playing ;) I'll post more pictures soon :)

It's pretty hot right now.... but although it's hot, it's much cooler than it is normally this time a year, so for that I'm very greatful :) This time last year it was about 125 - yikes!!! Well, today it was 117, so we thought we would try to fry an egg on our balcony :) Well, it didn't really work... I was sad - I thought for sure it would work :) Oh well... it did look pretty funky though... not sure if I would count some of that as cooked or not :) haha! It sure does look funny :) We leave for Thailand tomorrow (Thursday) - we're sooo excited! It will be a chance to see friends & cool off a little :) The city we're going to first (Chaing Mai) had a high of 86 today! YEAH!!!! We're going on vacation too, so we'll have plenty of pool & beach time :) whoo hoo!!! Plenty of pictures to come!!!

First off... some fun! We hadn't played Settlers of Catan in a while (you can't play with 2 people and Aashini keeps us quite busy) - so we invited some folks over to play the other day! It was very fun! (We missed you Carie & Keith!) OK, so I was requested to post a video of how to cut a mango :) We're not claiming to be professionals or anything, but here's how we do it! If you do it another cool way, let me know! :) Here's Adam eating off the pit. It hink it's kinda gross (but it does taste good!) :) Here's Aashini eating her mango! She usually goes through at least a huge mango every day!! She begs for them! I don't know what we're going to do when mango season is over! We now have a Hard Rock Cafe in our city! We went to it the other day and had a lot of fun :) They have a lot of things on the menu that we can't get here - like Pecans (on a salad)... I guess they import them or something - pretty cool! Today I got to eat a Raj Katori!! ...

Hrithik Roshan is one of Bollywood's most popular actors. He's a little different than most famous Bollywood actors... he has 6 fingers on one hand. It's actually an extra thumb. This happens sometimes in America but it's almost always "fixed" right away. In South Asia, it is considered lucky if you have an extra finger. Some people here get them removed. Hrithik was teased a lot in school, but decided to keep his thumb to be natural... We saw this guy's feet the other day... it made me laugh :) I feel like I would stub my toe a lot with those toe-nails :) You never know what you're going to see here :)

We have to make pretty much everything from scratch here (b/c that's pretty much our only option). It is hard to find good "from scratch" recipes that are super quick and easy to make. I like to cook, but not every day and I don't like to spend a long time in the kitchen this time a year (it's 100 degrees in our kitchen right now). So anyway, I made this the other night and it was yummy and super easy so I thought I'd pass it along :) Black Bean & Corn Taco Salad! - Cook up some black beans (if you have canned black beans then just drain and rinse them - if you are in the Capital I can tell you where to get them, or you can just get them in Thailand). If you don't have black beans you could probably use the little red beans or black-eyed peas - it would taste different but would probably be good :) - Cook some corn (or un-freeze it or de-can it and rinse and drain) - Cut up onions - depending on your taste - I love onions so I usually put a lot! - Put...

Today we had some things to do in the Central part of our city, so while we were there, we decided to take on some adventures :) Adventure #1 - the underground market. This market is pretty crazy. It's actually underground and has electronics & clothes mostly. They sell things pretty cheap, so it's an interesting place to go. Today we got an 64 Gig flash drive/pen drive for about $5. Crazy hunh? Here's Adam and Aashini in one of the stores. They're all REALLY small stores - about 10x10 feet I would guess (but I'm really bad at guessing that sort of stuff :)) We go here a lot to get things, so I guess it's not a new adventure, but an adventure nonetheless. Before the next part of our adventure (the real part of our adventure) we stopped for lunch. Aashini will always eat at McDonalds, so that's where we went :) They just started selling chicken nuggets here at McDonalds, so it's super easy to get her to eat there :) This McDonald's had high chair...