4th of July in the Philippines

Yes...we celebrated.

We brought a little non-manifest destiny taste of America to Stairway in the form of a fun history lesson, a huge bucket of "dirty ice cream", a game of kickball, and hamburgers for dinner.

Alex and Mitch put together a fantastic powerpoint presentation including not only the story of the American revolution, but also videos of some of America's finest cultural moments such as Jazzercise, the Bu font hair style, platform shoes, MC Hammer, etc.

The best part of the presentation was when we showed them what an assembly line was. In order to convey the point, we looked to Lucy and Ethel, in the episode where they get jobs wrapping chocolates. If you want a good laugh, check it out here, on youTube.

Both the kids and adults at Stairway were in tears because they were laughing so hard.

What is dirty ice cream? It's not dirty- it is actually quite delicious. They call it dirty ice cream because you can buy a cup of it for only 3 pesos. But it also comes in HUGE containers if you are buying for a lot of people- and we ordered two flavors- chocolate and cheese. Yes. Cheese ice cream. It was more like strawberry with some type of cheese in it- it was actually good!

We played kickball on the beach with the kids- the closest thing we could get to baseball! It took a few innings for them to get the hang of it, but wound up having a blast once they figured it out!

For dinner, we were planning on having hamburgers. We had gone to the market in the morning to get the ground beef for the burgers. We did not expect, however to see the woman helping us to cut the beef directly from the carcass that was dangling from the top of her stand, then slap it on a (probably unwashed) scale, then onto a (definitely unwashed) block of wood, chop it up a few times, then throw it in a grinding device and plop it directly into a plastic bag that you would use to carry groceries. Talk about fresh meat?

Nani Sitas, the cook, said she would prepare the meat for us and to come up after beach time to make the patties and start grilling. When Carissa and I came up to help her, the hamburger meat looked more like hamburger meat soup, and she had started to use tinfoil on top of the grill to cook the gloopy concoction. Knowing that the kids would probably not enjoy hamburger pancakes, I quickly suggested that we find something to add to the mixture to absorb the liquid. Breadcrumbs were the only thing in the kitchen, so our burgers wound up tasting a little bit like meatballs! But with ketchup and mustard, they wound up tasting pretty good! At first the kids were nervous that there wouldn't be rice at dinner, but we kept with the every day tradition and ate rice as well. The kids liked the burgers so much that they were hiding then in their pockets to save.

Overall the kids loved every second of the treat-filled day and all of the fun, and we enjoyed showing them a few things from home.

Pictures will be posted as soon as possible!