From Jamaica to Ethiopia...

Well, not really the country, just a restaurant. This past Friday, we went with Tami's parents and a family friend of theirs to Abbyssinia, an Ethiopian restaurant in Memphis, in celebration of Tami's birthday. It was really quite interesting, because rather than using silverware to eat, you use this spongy-pancakey-type bread called injera. You can order different meats and vegetables to be put on a large plate in the center of the table, and you are each given a plate of injera with which to eat the food. You just break off pieces of the bread, pick up the food from the plate, and eat it. You can see all the different foods we had in the picture below. Also, they had normal tables and chairs where you could sit if you wanted to, but for a more authentic (though likely not totally authentic) experience, you should sit on the little wicker stools and eat from the wicker table. There are better pictures of it on their website. Anyway, it was a very fun meal and it didn't taste bad, either. If you're into trying new things, you should check it out.

Jamaica Farewell...

Well, we're back from Jamaica and we had a wonderful time! We had so much fun, in fact, that it will take more than one blog entry to cover it all, so look below for all the marvelous things we did.

The Atmosphere...

Romantic walks on the beach, beautiful sunsets, and the warm tropical breezes all made the atmosphere very inviting.

It did rain two of the three night that we got all dressed up to take pictures on the pier by the sunset. The third night, we finally got some decent ones. It was very fun, though. It was all things Jamaican. When we tried to windsurf, we asked the guide if it was hard to do. He said, "You're in Jamaica, mon, nothing is hard here." Well, he may have been a little bit wrong about that. More on windsurfing in another post.

That was the general attitude of the people, though. All things possible, all things fun, all things relaxed. From the beautifully landscaped tropical rain forestesque environment to Skippy the parrot, we had lots of fun just being there with each other(awwww).

FOOD!!!!!!!

We ate sooo much, and it was sooo good! Each day started off with breakfast at one of two buffet style restaurants or another two restaurants where you could order a la carte. After breakfast, the grills would open up. There were two main ones, where you could get hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken, Jamaican jerk chicken, french fries, nachos, popcorn, and a few other things. You could eat here all day long. For lunch, the grills were open, plus two buffet styles restaurants. At dinner, we could pick from one of about nine different restaurants, ranging in styles from Italian to Asian to Jamaican to Southwestern, and all of them were really good.

Anyway, because it was an all-inclusive vacation package, you could just go in whenever you wanted to, eat, and then, rather than pay the bill at the end of the meal, you just get up and leave. We're hoping we don't leave the bill at the table the next time we're out to eat here.

The pools also had drink bars attached to them, so you could just swim up and get something to drink. They even had stools and stuff in the pool to sit on. We only had the non-alcoholic drinks, though, of course. The last night, they also had a Jamaican beach party, where they had all kinds of different foods and made cool little sculptures out fruits, ice, and butter. All that to say, the food was absolutely wonderful and the environment around the food was really fun.

Water Sports...

With all the food we ate, we had to find some form of exercise. There were tons of water sports included. We just went down to the beach and signed up to do multiple things. We did glass bottom boat tours, two person kayaking, hobie cats (big sailing-type things that are made for two people to sit on), water trikes, and windsurfing. Windsurfing was fun, but it was kind of difficult to maintain balance. Tami did a whole lot better than Dan on it. You can see that in the pictures.

We also snorkled twice, but we're going to devote a whole entry to that because of the cool underwater pictures. Indeed, the water sports were very cool and we hope you enjoy the pictures.

Snorkeling...

Here are some cool pictures we got while snorkeling with a sweet underwater camera Tami got for her birthday (which was May 12).

And Other Things...

Finally, there were lots of little games all over the place to play. Outside were basketball goals, giant chess boards, and shuffleboard games. The picture below is of Tami beating Dan in chess in about 5 moves.

Inside, there were pool tables, ping pong tables, dart boards, not to mention all the board games, whether it be Scrabble or Backgammon, there was definitely enough to do to keep ourselves busy. The other picture below is of Tami beating Dan in darts. There seems to be a theme. Anyway, it was a great week and we had a wonderful time together. We were very glad to see our baby Zeke when we got home, though. If anyone would like to see more pictures, email us and let us know. Have a good day.

Jamaica, Here We Come!

Yes, that's a picture of our brand new passports! About 11:00 this morning the phone rang and at the other end was a vaguely familiar voice that called out, "Who's your favorite mailman?" To which we replied, "Larry!" (Larry's our mailman, who's also a friend of ours. We told him about our passports last week.) Anyway, Larry proceeded to tell us that he had two very interesting looking packages, one for each of us. Well, we were getting ready to go visit my grandmother and take her some of the delicious strawberries we got earlier in the day (see Zeke's blog), so we went and met Larry the mailman and he gave us the packages. We opened them to find our very lovely new passports. We would have posted a picture of the inside, but there's lots of sensitive information on them, which probably wouldn't be too good to have posted all over the internet, plus the pictures weren't that great. Anyway, they are here, and we are headed to Jamaica Monday morning! We'll have lots of pictures upon our return.

Passports and such...

"We have finished processing your passport, and it has been mailed to you."

That is a direct quote from the United States Passport Application website on their application status page, and we couldn't be more excited. You see, Dan's passport expired in March of this year and Tami needed her name changed on hers, so we sent them off about 2 1/2 months ago to get renewed, etc. We've talked to the friendly people at the Passport Office multiple times to try to make sure that we'll get them this week b/c we are planning on going to Jamaica next week for vacation. This brings us to the next somewhat scary statement on the status page:

"Passport Agencies use Priority Mail. This means you should receive your passport on or about 05/06/2007."

Well, that's Sunday, and we all know that the mail doesn't run on Sunday. Our flight leaves for Jamaica at 9:35 on Monday morning, so we really need the passports by Saturday. We have a feeling that the good people at the Passport Association add a few days to their estimated delivery date to cover themselves. Also, in two of our several phone calls to the agency, we requested them to upgrade our status to "expedited," which would mean overnighting the passports back to us. They said they would put in the request but couldn't guarantee anything. Well, all that to say, we hope we're going to Jamaica next week, and we have pretty good confidence that we will be. We'll keep you posted as to the status of our passports, and, if we do get them in time, we'll post some cool pictures of Jamaica upon our return. Have a good day.