HAPPY 4TH

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!! The 4th of July is an American holiday so when you try to celebrate it in another country it gets very interesting and you have to be creative. Typically the 4th of July includes but is not limited to playing on the lake, eating hot dogs, and watching fireworks. This year however it included church, some casual "family" soccer, and a dinner of chicken, rice, tomato chutney, boiled eggs and lots of other random food. One excellent thing that helped me feel a big more american was that we had some strange red white and blue string that we hung around the house and some napkins with american flags on them that we used to decorate. Oh ya and a few of us had gone out the day before and bought ingredients to make chocolate poo poos or chocolate no-bakes (whichever name you prefer) so courtney and I made up a batch of those in the afternoon as well. all in all it was an excellent 4th of July, however un-traditional it was. A side note on the soccer game we played: there is a little 12 year old boy whom i have befriended that came and played with us. His name is Marika (pronounced like america without the a) and he is basically amazing at soccer and was blowing us all away. finally we asked him if he plays on any soccer teams and we find out that he plays on the junior NATIONAL team for fiji and he is basically mvp for his team that was going to go play in France this year but it got cancelled. that made all of us feel a lot better about being dominated by a twelve year old boy. however i WILL get his autograph and photo because he WILL be famous one day i am positive.

other than that there is nothing too new to report on. I have tried passionfruit fanta and pinapple fanta and decided that they are both way better than orange or grape or whatever flavors we get in the US. Now i must go because i'm hopefully building a garden today and i need to find out a good replacement for vermiculite. HOW EXITING!