Trip to the Beach!

From Brad.

Well as school was approaching, I thought it might be nice to get away for a few days, take a break from language study (although, impossible to take a complete break...and undesirable to some degree), and travel to a nearby beach. Our kids love the sand, beach, water and the weather is just about right...not too hot, but warm enough to still swim. So we hopped on a choo-choo train (basically an amusement ride as far as our boys are concerned) and within a couple of hours, our vacation had begun. Here’s a slideshow of about 40 picts which I’ll comment on below



A few interesting facts about the beach here…

· Very crowded, tons of people
· Many children up to about 8 years old…no bathing suit
· Thankfully the adults had them on, but I did notice a few men who would swim out to the deeper water and take theirs off for some reason. Floating on the water right next to them.
· The sand apparently had some clay in it and was terribly difficult to mold and shape.
· The people here love to cover themselves in sand. We saw a number of people who simply buried themselves up to their head and just laid there.

Other highlights of our trip included several western (mostly European) restaurants that were frequented by us. This included a Mexican restaurant. Not nearly as good as the worst Mexican place in the states, but still in the Mexican category and thus enjoyable to us. You’ll also notice some pictures of an aquarium we visited. It was really nice and well worth the $30 we paid for admission (not cheap in these parts). They love Christmas decorations here and some do it year round ‘because they are so beautiful’…thus the pictures. Its also been funny shopping occasionally in July and hearing 'Jingle Bells' of all things. Finally, there’s a really funky looking monument built close to the beach which we captured a couple of times.