June 2nd

This was our second take it easy day. It started with the usual breakfast routine and then it was time for laundry. The laundry mats here are all outdoor ones. So basically it is a small room (probably 12 feet wide and 20 feet deep) that is open to the street. There was one large washing machine, three medium sized ones, and two small ones. The large one was in use, but the three medium sized ones were all open and those three fit our clothes perfectly. When the wash was done we were able to separate out about half of the clothes to be hung up and dried in our apartment and the other half we did in the dryer. I never had a dryer when I was a missionary and I don’t know how common they are in the homes, but they seem pretty essential for the thicker cotton things like socks and some of our shirts and stuff. With the humidity here, I don’t know that those things would ever dry without a dryer. Of all the clothes that we did hang up, there was only one item that didn’t dry before it started to get a moldy type smell – that was my dress pants. So next time I will have to make sure those get in the dryer too. After we finished with all of the laundry, we walked back down to the beach. This walk went much better than our first trip to the beach. It was overcast, we knew exactly where to go, and we brought about three times more water than last time. We found a good spot and the kids played in the waves for about an hour. The tide was pretty strong and there was a quick drop off, so they couldn’t play as deep as they wanted and I had to stay really close to them, but they still had a fun time. We probably would have stayed longer, but it started raining again. So we made our way off to dinner. Ethan had suggested that we go to the dumpling place and really fill up, since the next day was Fast Sunday. Everyone thought that was a great idea. We ended up ordering 50 dumplings and 80 potstickers and they ate every single one of them (well I guess there was one dumpling that fell on the ground). They were so good, but I have definitely had my fill of dumplings for the next few days. That night we also got some mango smoothie drinks to enjoy once we made it back to our apartment.

Rebecca got this soup for lunch. It was a seafood one and it had a little of everything in it (a whole shrimp, a clam, some squid, a fishball, a carrot slice, etc.). It reminded us of a soup version of paella from Spain.


The waves that come into the beach are pretty strong, especially when typhoons come in. So they have a lot of these concrete things on certain parts of the beach as well as about 100 feet out into the ocean to try to stop the waves from eroding away too much of the shore.


There were a lot of people at the beach this day. We even saw some flying kites.






You can see that the beach here was mainly small pebbles instead of sand. They were all perfect for skipping stones, but hurt a little to walk on.




A very satisfied customer. This is outside the dumpling place just after we finished our feast. You can see that they make them right at the front of the shop and then steam them up in those bamboo steamers.