Update from B

While I have been jet-setting all over the country, my wonderful husband has been keeping busy as well. Here is a recent experience he had, hosting some locals (giving them tours of the helicopter and ship) and enjoying dinner at the Mayor's house (Mayor of where, I don't know). I cut and paste these excerpts from a couple of emails he sent, so forgive any grammatical errors or anything like that!

Giving Tours
It was a busy day for me yesterday with all the tours. We give tours pretty much everyday when we pull in, so it is kinda a pain in the butt. I don't really think most of the people on the tours speak English, but they seem to have fun and like I said before take a lot of pictures. I think they are at awe with my height because these people are so small. These little old ladies just run right up to me for a picture. And it is usually not just one. I have to get one with each of them and then some with two or three and then some with the whole group. That is only one group and I think I had 10-12 yesterday. It is not that big of a deal though and there are definitely worse things that I could be doing. I am excited to go to the Mayor's house tonight and have dinner. It should be very interesting. I'm sure I will let you know all about it tomorrow.

Dinner at the Mayor's Home
So I had a very nice evening last night. The food was great as well as the company. The mayor probably has the biggest house in the city. So we got picked up from the ship and we had a police escort throughout the town. Sirens blaring and everything. It was pretty crazy trying to go through these tiny roads that were suppose to be two lanes, but really only made for one car. Everyone would stop and stare. It was like the president was going through town. It was pretty crazy. I think that if we just went through without than nobody would have given a care in the world, but we drew a lot of attention our way when we had the big police escort. So it took about a half and hour to get to the mayor’s house. He has a very beautiful house and not just in that country. He built it himself and everything is made out of pine wood, so it smells really good as well. It looks like a log home in the US, but about double the size. He has a huge yard as well with a couple man made ponds and he had a swimming pool in the back. The whole estate has a 10 foot stone wall around it with barbed wire above that. He also has police and army guards. Pretty crazy.

Dinner was awesome. We started off with some sushi, which was really good. Then we had prawns, fish and pig. Yes they had a whole pig that was roasted. It was really good. The also had some really good rice and what I thought was black beans with bacon in it. I ate it and thought it was awesome. Come to find out it was pig’s blood cooked with pork in it. I am glad I didn’t know that before I ate it, but now since I thought it was really good I would probably eat it again. You would also be happy to know that I had wine for dinner. In fact I had Redwood Creek Cab and Carlo Rossi California Red. Good to know that in PI they support Gallo. It was nice to have some wine. They only had a few bottles, so I only had 2 glasses. It was very nice to get a little wine though. For dessert they had this great fruit cocktail and a mango cake. I know you wouldn't like that, but I thought it was delicious.

After dinner we just conversed with the mayor’s children and grandchildren. He has four girls and two of them were there and they are both lawyers. The other two live in Chicago. They were very interesting to talk to. Their children reminding me a lot of Michael’s kids, when they were a little younger. They look very similar. They are very cute children. I actually had given them a tour of the aircraft the day prior, so they were still asking questions about it. We left shortly after for the same drive back to the ship.