Outrageous Outings

Ken and I haven't been able to go out alone too many times, but the dates we HAVE had have been a lot of fun. One Saturday morning, a friend from church called us and offered to watch our kids for 4 hours if we wanted to go out. We JUMPED at the chance (literally, I jumped out of bed. It was early and I was just that excited) and in 15 minutes, we were kid-less, with a city full of opportunities opened to us. We decided to go kayaking. (P.S. This woman is a saint. She gave us our first chance to go out in the 2 months since we had moved here, and I will forever thank her for that. Her timing was amazing :)

Near our house are some protected mangroves. There's all kinds of little channels that open up or disappear due to the tide. It was an absolutely perfect morning. Even though we were still in the city, you couldn't hear any noise. We only saw a few other people during our time out on the water.

Any time Ken got tired paddling, I took up the slack. Or maybe, it was the other way around ... 

When we got to one of the little islands, we got out and saw the ocean floor CRAWLING with hermit crabs. It looked like the ground was alive. You can't really tell in the picture, but it was pretty neat. 

We opted to go down this exciting path, in hopes of finding a previously undiscovered treasure trove. 

Instead, we discovered this tree!

 These birds were all over the place, probably annoyed with us for disrupting their fishing. Judging by the schools of thousands and thousands of fish, I'd say they eat pretty well!

Our next date night was to the Formula 1 Racetrack to see some of the qualifying races for the world Grand Prix. Talk about something new and exciting. Here you can see the expensive yachts lined up to watch the race in style. We didn't want to be just like everyone else, so we left our yacht in the garage and watched it from our box seats :)

All of my previous experience with races and racecars came from watching the movie Cars with Tyler 58 times when he was about 3 years old, so there were a couple things I didn't know... Like the noise the race cars make is absolutely DEAFENING! Covering your ears wasn't even enough. We watched a lot of it from inside the box. 

Plus, they had some pretty sweet food there too, another reason to watch from inside!

Artistic haze is due to us forgetting once again to leave the camera outside to adjust to the humidity.

Afterwards, there was a concert, and we figured we would stay for it. It was by a group called Muse, that neither of us really knew ( I was really bummed we had missed the concert from the night before, which was Amr Diab. My days in Egypt will forever be remembered to a soundtrack sung by him).

Hurriedly trying to drink our water before getting in line for the concert. The place was worse than the airport, but at least we got to keep on our shoes :)

Waiting. And waiting and waiting...

This concert led us to a startling revelation: we're getting OLD. After an hour and a half of waiting for the concert, inhaling smoke and watching people get drunk, we realized that (a) we were tired, (b) we just really weren't into their music, and (c) we just wanted to go home. So THIS is what it is like to get old! Really, it's not so bad. Excuse me a minute while I go downstairs to get a glass of warm milk from the microwave and put on my slippers:)

A couple weekends ago we went to the Marine Ball. They took a couple pictures there, but gave us hard copies and my scanner isn't working right so here are the pictures the babysitter took of us, as well as friends at the ball. Here's my date - handsome and funny!

This is where the ball was. Yep, pretty nice.

Hmm - really, just a bunch of pictures of us. PROOF, that we don't live in flip flops, shorts, and tee shirts all the time :)

I was too embarrassed to take out the camera to document all of the dinner dishes (I felt kind of like country mouse visiting the city...), but no one was getting dessert yet so I slipped a couple pictures.

Waiting for our taxi, with the Grand Mosque in the background.