Pope-ular Papa!

There's a total buzz around town right now since The Pope has been here, in Luanda, for the last 4 days! It's been pretty crazy. Even work was cancelled on Friday and Monday (the days the Pope was scheduled to be at the airport) because they predicted the traffic might be so bad that it could take the men 5 hours to get home from work (which is only 5 miles away). We were not on lock down or anything, but they did encourage us to stay on the compound if possible so as to avoid all of the choas surrounding the Pope's visit. We did not have a chance to actually go see him (for good reason- sadly 2 people got trampled in a stampede on Saturday while rushing to get a good seat to hear him speak), but it is pretty cool to think that he is in town while we are living here. The locals were all very excited to have him here too. There are posters up all over town with "Papas" face on them- they were taped to fences, store windows, brick buildings and the backs of taxis. An article I found on the internet reported: “Benedict arrived in Luanda on the second leg of his African tour, with tens of thousands pouring into the streets along his motorcade route, honking car horns and slowing traffic to a crawl. Many of the faithful wore white T-shirts emblazoned with the pope's picture and "Welcome to our land" written in Portuguese.” We enjoyed the extra days off and just hung out as a family. We had a cook-out with friends on Friday and I made potato salad for the first time ever, which was super yummy and in memory of this historical event (and to celebrate the extra days off) we renamed it "Pope-tato Salad"!

The Pope in the PopeMobile driving down the streets of Luanda

The REAL world

After explaining to Colby that you can't just go out and buy new things here (like Legos, Batman pajamas, and Fruit Roll-Ups) and that we have to wait to buy them when we go home to Houston for the summer he said, "Can't we just go back to the real world!?" Too funny! We already have a list of "real world" things to stock up on when we head home in June!

Water Weekend!

Phew! We spent a lot of time in the surf, sand and sun this weekend!

It's a holiday weekend (Internationl Women's Day) so we took advantage of the long weekend and went to the beach two different days!

The first day we went with our next door neighbors to an island (that you can see from our veranda) called Masula. It only takes about 2 minutes to get from our house to the marina, and then another 10 minutes or so to get from the marina to the island via a boat taxi service, if that's what you want to call it...

The boat can best be described as a rustic, bare bones, wooden looking fishing boat with a motor on the end of it! It did indeed get us to the island, but not without a 2 minute break in the middle of the ocean to wait for the motor to restart!

That was a bit crazy, but the rest of the day was very fun and relaxing. We did the usual beachy things as well as played baseball and looked for sand dollars.

The next day we went out on the Esso boat "Discovery" with some of our friends. We spent the majority of the day trying to fish off the boat. We didn't get any fish, but we did have a lot of fun just toodling around in the ocean! Before heading home we "parked" at the island and got out and played in the ocean for a little while. The kids had a blast just floating in the waves with their friends with their life vests on!

Beach day (above) & Boat day (below)