Catching up is hard to do!

Hello! We are back in DC- the kids (and grown-ups) are glad to be home, asleep so I expect we'll be up in the middle of the night. Hooray for AC and drinkable tap water!

I'm going to post chronologically mostly with pictures and try to catch up on 6 weeks of absenteeism from the blog... though hopefully you enjoyed reading Makiko's blog that I referred you to! The address is http://makikocollege.blogspot.com/

Now, I've gotten some feedback that it's nice to have more thoughts/musings etc on the blog- do you want more of that or really just pics and few stories about the kids? We've been refraining since this was intended to be a blog with kid updates...

Regardless, here we go...

We spent a day at Kovalam Beach- not far south of Trivandrum- now a touristy town but plenty of local fishermen. Many of the fishing boats were pulled up high, the waves were much higher with the coming Monsoons and there were few tourists while we were there.

We had lunch at a rooftop restaurant by the beach- it had beautiful views and the vegetable pasta sauce was fantastic... While we were eating, one aggressive vendor below us on the boardwalkwas opening up his cloth wares trying to entice us to purchase giant bedspreads.

Beach, lighthouse

Alex and Makiko enjoying the waves

The Taj hotel had a rooftop pool that we enjoyed!

After Angela finished working in Trivandrum, we went on a houseboat tour which started in Aleppay. The houseboat traveld along the waterways, we spent the night and had our meals on the hosueboat. Some of the boats are really pretty wooden structures, mostly outfitted for toursits with dining areas, bedrooms, lounge areas... relaxing and beautiful.

Alex did some fishing off the houseboat while we waited for dinner. We were swarmed by giant-roach-like bugs and retreated to Makiko's room (Rory was asleep in our room before dinner ever started... ahhh jet-lag)

beautiful backwaters

Makiko and Rory on the houseboat

Rory, despite being all grown up, still enjoys her toes

After the backwater tour we went to Varkala beach and spent the night there. There were very few toursits and we were uncomfortable about running around in our bathing suits since most people- espcially women, were fully covered.

Alex of course, loves the big waves

Alex collected some sand for our beach sand collection

Rory was leery of the ocean and didn't want to put her feet down in the sand at first

Rory soon warmed up to playing in the sand...

the sand is really really fine and it got everywhere. After we got back to our hotel- we herded the kids into the bathroom to wash them down... there was sand EVERYWHERE. The hotel housekeeping staff came and swept up our room after we came back because we had a mini-beach in the room!

Beautiful red cliffs along the beach

We went for dessert along the top of the cliff above the beach. There weren't many places open in the off-season so we missed out on having ice-cream.

It was beautiful, we stayed at one end of the beach where there were a lot of Hindu worshippers. There were people who received blessings on the beach and then carried some flames to the water.