March 12th 2014 30 Years!

                                                                Howdy Folks!
          So the biggest news  is that I have spent the last 30 years with this wonderful dude!
                                                           

We have certainly packed a lot of living into those 30 years! We have lived in small villages with no running water or electricity, sleeping on the floor on a straw mat under a mosquito net and washing our clothes on a rock in a river. We also lived in small and mid-size cities and mega-tropolises! I'm looking forward to seeing what the next 30 years have in store for us!  

Since we had just spent the last week visiting with Hopie and working on getting the church building ready for it's grand opening , we have decided to put off any "big" celebrating for a few months.  We did have an enjoyable day and ordered in some pizza too which was quite nice! 

Hopie headed back State-side on Sunday. The house is quiet again and we miss her! We certainly enjoyed her visit though and in true Hopie fashion she managed to run around on her own and make friends in one week and get lots of going away presents from them! 

Gary and I took Hopie to the famous Ghibli museum near our house.  We got to see some cool things!

Cute school children visiting the museum!

Yesterday, we were at the church doing some work when we decided to take one of the city buses that is in front of the building to see where it went. We knew it was headed to Chofu but we wanted to ride the bus and time the trip since we are working with a lady from that area and also to see what route it takes. It's a good way to learn different areas of the city by taking public transport to new areas of town.  We arrived and looked around a bit and then we saw a return bus that would take us to Kichijoji so we rode that one back . We stopped for dinner while we were there and then came home. Tokyo is so big it's ridiculous, we spent a couple hours traveling around and only saw a very small portion of the city.

On to Food!!!

While Hopie was here I had wanted to take her to a yakiniku (grilled meat) place to eat but we didn't get around to it. Instead, one night I decided to pull out an old favorite of ours...Maangchi!!! Maangchi is a Korean lady that posts recipes on you tube, my girls and I used to watch and make her recipes when we lived in Panama. I decided to do her recipe for  Samgyeopsal-gui!

Here's a picture of how ours turned out.

I love Korean food... it's like Mexican-Asian cooking with all it's chile and garlic!

That's it for now! Later folks!