Closing the Loops, Children's Home and Chinese Food

This morning, we returned to El Jordan to finish off bagging the giant fruit loops which pretty much took until noon.  We headed back to our place and waited for Ken to pick us up around 2:00.  Luckily, the cleaning lady had been through in our absence and tidied up a bit which is a nice bonus.  Ken showed up at 2:30 which is pretty much on time for Bolivia, and we headed to the market to pickup some additional Christmas decorations to donate to the children's home along with an artificial Christmas tree that Ken had to donate.  While we were there, we finally found some nice shoes to replace the somewhat funky ones that Lukas has been wearing for the past year and a half.

We met with the director of the children's home and made plans to cook for them on Christmas Day, and as a bonus, we will pick up some fireworks to blast off after supper.  We also left them 3 soccer balls for the kids to play with. This home is a somewhat special since Andres (one of Ken's boys) two sisters spent 11 years with the home until Andres graduated and took them in along with his younger brother.  It is also a very nice place with lots of trees and greenery since they rent space out on the property to a greenhouse business.

By the time we were done, it was getting close to supper time, so I offered to take Ken and the 3 of his boys who were home out for supper.  We are getting a little tired of chicken, so I suggested we try something that they wouldn't normally have the chance to have.  We ended up at a Chinese restaurant (they are everywhere aren't they?) that was empty but looked promising.  As we proceeded to order, other customers started coming in and the majority were Chinese, so we figured we had picked a good spot.  Turned out we were right.  The food was quite good.  As we ate, we watched the food that was coming to the other tables, and it looked quite elaborate and very different from our food however. After we paid, we asked the waiter what the other tables had ordered and he explained that they have one menu for "normal customers" and one menu for Chinese customers that had more exotic items on it.  The exotic items are the exact kind of things I would have wanted to order.  Maybe next time...

We got back to the apartment around 8:00 and now we have to cut a few hundred sheets of Christmas paper down to size for wrapping day tomorrow.

Here are some pictures of the day.