“Sunday morning, rain is falling” -Sunday Morning by Maroon 5

Haleigh and Amber were grateful to have the day off. We spent the morning catching up on busywork and the various things we’ve been too tired to do. Spoiler alert, it was raining. But it was really nice to just relax and be productive while it was storming outside! Haleigh even did a fun activity on the back of her cereal box while she ate breakfast in under fifteen seconds— can you beat her record?

Once the weather cleared up, our host, Sammy, was gracious enough to take us out to lunch. On the car ride there, Sammy played American music. Although we didn’t recognize most of them, Haleigh was able to deduce a few song titles, and Amber recognized a song as one of Marvin Gaye’s biggest hits (private message us to guess which one!) We also noticed that Amber’s geography skills appear to have taken a turn for the worse, while Haleigh’s seem to be slowly improving.

We ended up eating at Eunie’s Kitchen (a place that both Sammy and Haleigh’s dad recommended through his google searches so good job!) We were ecstatic to get some cheese pizza and also tried a local food called Rolex. Yes, a Rolex. No, not the watch. As Sammy said, “we eat our Rolexes, not wear them!” The dish consists of an egg omelette with an assortment of vegetables wrapped in chapati, an unleavened flatbread. We loved it!The highlight of our day was discovering the restaurant can deliver food to our airbnb, so we will now be trying almost everything on the menu. We even got chapati, vegetable samosas, and chocolate chip cookies to go.

We then decided to run some errands, so the three of us ventured to Paris Corner grocery store to buy some items like paper towels, tupperware, water and rice. In spite of the 80 degree weather, Amber has had a pretty consistent craving for hot chocolate. Stay tuned to see how our cocoa powder and bagged milk endeavor goes! Interestingly, fruit and veggies are sold at a stand outside of the supermarket— we had to purchase fresh produce to cook with separately from the rest of our items. We also found pasta sauce that has a screw on top, so unfortunately, Amber will no longer be stabbing lids of tomato paste cans (@dad)!

Upon returning in the early afternoon, we sprang into action to do our one week’s worth of laundry. Let’s just say that by the time we were finished with the actual washing part, there was hardly any sun left outside to dry our clothes. We were given four buckets, hand washing powder and laundry soap, and no instructions. After some quick googling, we filled the buckets with hose water and dissolved some powder in two of them.

A couple of Haleigh’s favorite quotes from Amber, all within the first thirty seconds of doing her laundry:

“Where did the bar [soap] go?” (It was at the bottom of the water bucket)

“This shirt looks clean to me!”

“I’m a pro”

That said, Amber was only able to dump a few shirts in the water before Sammy’s housemaid appeared to correct her technique. Amber will now have one shirt that was fully washed by Sammy’s housemaid, while the rest are definitely still full of soap suds. See the video of Haleigh laughing at Amber’s attempt here.

It soon became a family affair to watch us slowly work through each piece, amazed we had never done laundry like this before. However, they were very impressed, with Sammy even telling us we were outdoing ourselves, which we took in stride. Three and a half longggg hours of Amber being too short to hang most of her clothes (thanks Haleigh!), and even the ones from the beginning still weren’t dry. Our current plan is to leave them outside overnight and hope it doesn’t rain. We’ll let you know how well that goes tomorrow… we suspect the dogs outside may have taken some of our clothes but not risking going outside with them to check.

We ate our leftover pizza, samosas and chapati for dinner. We had some meetings with our LFR team back home and VTCA to plan tomorrow’s agenda. Here’s to another day—

xoxo Amber & Haleigh

*Names have been changed to protect privacy

All images posted with permission of the included parties

Apologies if formatting shows up weird - only way we can manage to post the blog now is from the squarespace app on our phones