Day trip

The other day we all loaded into the van to take a little road day trip. We left the city and headed for the mountains. We drove along the coast for a while and then started climbing and climbing. We arrived at a summit and pulled over at lookout area to take pictures and see the sights. The views were amazing. We got to see Mt. Fuji and the mountains surrounding it. We also could see Lake Ashi. We then drove down to the town of Hakone and did a short cruise on the lake. It was a gorgeous day with lots of sunshine, but it was COLD, especially on the mountain. We took lots of pictures and they all turned out great, so I will try to post a few to give you an idea of our day out.

View from the lookout point.

Uche holding up the post.

I have no idea what this post says, but the numbers say we are 1011 meters above sea level. I looked up online and that's 3600+ feet. We started at sea level and climbed all the way up in a matter of minutes. It was quite a drive with some great views of the sea.

Welcome! Sarah as tour guide.

During our boat cruise we saw this pirate ship on the lake as well. It was pretty cool looking.

It was a very pretty cruise with lots of photo oppurtunities.

The whole crew. U&S with Uche's brother and his family and a guy from Nigeria with his girlfriend.

Christmas 2008 in Japan

On Christmas evening Uche's brother invited a few Nigerian guys over to eat Nigerian food to celebrate Christmas. In Japan, Christmas day is not a holiday, so it's a normal day that people work and do life as usual. So after everyone got off work they came over to celebrate Christmas and welcome us to Japan.

Uche with his nephew and their matching Santa hats.

My sister in law bought a cake for the celebration. She loves cake, another reason why she and I get along very well! I've been told that pretty much all the Japanese cakes come with fresh strawberries, there's also strawberries in the filling between the cake layers.

Candles came with the cake so the kids got to blow them out. I don't know if this was the first or second time they were lit. The little one didn't get to help the first time, so they were relit for her to help blow them out. Kids are the same all over the world!

Our niece doesn't like the cake, just the frosting, so she picked all the frosting off her piece. I think she probably got some frosting from her mom's piece as well!

The guys enjoying their Nigerian food. In my opinion Nigerians are the loudest people in the world, these guys didn't disprove my theory!

The international Ajero family.

Eating out Japan style

My Japanese is not so great, so I can't tell you what this is, but we ate at this restaurant.

Uche is pretty good with the chopsticks. He was showing off by picking up single grains of rice.

I might starve to death if I had to eat with chopsticks all the time. I finally gave up trying to pick up all the corn kernels from the salad.

They gave our nephew a fork and spoon to eat his meal. I would have asked a fork, but they were clearly for the children as it had Snoopy for a handle.

Guess where we are right now????

Taiwan. On our way to Japan.

Christmas Party

Last night we had our church's Christmas party. The leaders chose several symbols of Christmas, shepherds, tree, bells etc., that different families or groups could do some sort of presentation about that symbol. We chose candles and set up advent candles and talked about each candle and read scripture. Other groups did songs, skits and even some dancing. After the presentations we ate and chatted. It was a fun party!


Uche with our friend Ate Eveylyn. The kids loved Uche's hat. Ate Evelyn has a full Santa costume that she wants Uche to wear next year...

Here's some pictures of a couple different presentations.

Fashion Police

Uche came out of the bedroom this morning dressed in an outfit I didn't approve of. I finally convinced him to change. What do you think??

Scenes from Manila

Here's some pictures of life in Manila.


Here in the Philippines each barangay, small neighborhood area, has a fiesta one weekend out of the year. So that barangay decorates the streets and spends the weekend partying. A couple weekends ago Uche and I noticed that there were a lot of fireworks going off and there was lots of loud parties happening. Uche even saw at one house there was a live band playing in the courtyard. We thought at first it was early Christmas celebration as Filipinos start celebrating Christmas as soon as the "ber" months hit beginning in September. A day or later we realized that it was fiesta time. Next year we'll have to join in.



The first picture shows the whole street decorated and here's what they used. Spaghetti noodle wrappers. So when you're looking down a street it looks really cool and decorative. Then you get closer and see what they used. I think it's such a creative way to make inexpensive cool decorations. Of course, someone ate a lot of spaghetti as the decorations go on for blocks.


Here's the Catholic church down the street decorated. This is probably my favorite decorations in this area. You can't tell really well in the picture how shiny the plastic streamers are.


I couldn't tell what exactly was used to make these decorations. They're silver plastic and very shiny. All I know is that it looks cool especially when there's a breeze.

Part of adjusting back to life in Manila is getting used to crowds again. As it's Christmas time, the malls are ridiculously crowded. Uche tried to get a picture that would do the crowds justice, and this is as close as we got. We'll be working on getting more because it's really quite amazing. As far as you can see it's a sea of people...

This is the mall two streets from our house. It's huge, of course, and they've been working on a new addition to it. It's going to be the 2nd biggest mall in the Philippines when they're done with it. It may be hard to see, but there's quite a few guys working on the blue section.

Here's a close up of two guys working. Notice the lack of any kind of safety anything. It kind of freaks me out to watch them because they're working really high up and if something bad happened they would be dead.

Evening at Mall of Asia

Monday evening Uche and I joined a couple from our church to go see SM Mall of Asia. Basically, if you haven't seen an Asian mall then you haven't seen a real mall! American malls are childs play compared to the ones here. Malls here have all the normal mall stores, food courts, restaurants, but they also have movie theaters and grocery stores. Mall of Asia has been built in the past few years since we were last here. We heard it was huge, and it was! It's the largest mall in the Philippines and the 3rd largest in the world. It sits right on the bay, so they've created an esplanade outside of the mall that borders the bay. It's quite an amazing place.




This in front of the only Olympic sized ice skating rink in the country. There's other malls with ice skating, but not this big. Every few minutes "snow" drops down from the ceiling onto the ice.


This is outside the mall on the esplanade.

This was taken from the skyway between the mall and the esplanade. It's hard for the picture to show how cool it is. The lighted Christmas tree changes color every few seconds.

Also taken from the skyway.

This is Uche in line for one of his favorite treats here in the Philippines. They are blended drinks with tapioca pearls in the bottom. So you get this really wide straw so you can suck up the pearls with your drink. I got mango and Uche got ube, a purple yam.

Chocolate Buffet

Chocolate and buffet, two words that should always go together... The celebration of my birthday continued on Friday night as Uche and I went to a super fancy hotel, The Manila Peninsula, for a chocolate buffet. They only do this for a couple months out of the year, so lucky us we're here at the right time.

It was wonderful! Not just the delicious chocolate goodies, but the atmosphere as well. It's held in their huge lobby with a live jazz band playing. The service was fabulous and we stuffed ourselves with all different kinds of goodies. We ate a very light dinner, so we'd be able to go wild for dessert!

Uche's favorite was a chocolate, Bailey's cheesecake. I don't know what was my favorite... was it the chocolate panna cotta with brandied cherries or the chocolate fudge cake with a truffle on top or the pot of chocolate hazelnut cream or the chocolate cups with cream and fruit or the dark chocolate fondue and strawberries.... I can't decide!

Afterwards we walked around a little bit to try to work off some of the damage. We looked at some of the windows that are decorated for Christmas and then headed home. It was a wonderful end to my birthday.

Look!! There's chocolate!! Up on the top left in the brass colored pots is ice cream that is set in a block of ice.

Aren't those big blocks of chocolate with truffles scattered on them beautiful??

The presentation was gorgeous. On left you see a chocolate scuplture with gold leaf covering parts of it. The pictures don't do it justice.

Uche enjoying a chocolate dipped breadstick. They were surprisingly good.

Getting the last little bit of the chocolate/hazelnut mousse, I refrained from licking out the bowl... just barely.

A Christmas window at Rustan's department store. It's still bizarre to think Christmas while walking around in sleeveless and capris...

Uche in front of another window at Rustan's. The windows were quite beautiful and really well decorated.

Happy Birthday to me...

Well, Wednesday (the 19th) was my 33rd birthday. I'm afraid I'm getting old... Anyhow, we used the birthday as an excuse to plan a party for our building. On the top of our building is a covered patio area. The owners have some plants up there and it's a great place to hang out.


We bought some Krispy Kreme donuts (yes, there's KK here!!) and made some popcorn and headed upstairs to get to know our neighbors better. I love donuts, so I didn't really miss birthday cake.


Our party had four different continents represented. There were 3 Americans, 2 Nigerians, 1 Mongolian, 2 Japanese, 1 Australian and 1 Chinese Filipino. Pretty cool, huh? That's one of the great things about living overseas, getting to know people from all over the world.


The other two Americans there were Simpson students, so we're able to discuss Redding versus Manila life. There are a lot of similiarities between the two cities, like they both have fast food restaurants and Starbucks and ... ... ...... ok, there's no more. Of course, even the fast food restauants are pretty different, unless you think you can order fried chicken with rice and gravy at the local McDonalds there...


Here's a picture from our party. The others didn't turn out so we'll have to introduce you to our neighbors another time.

Class Schedule

On Tuesday, Uche and I enrolled for the next semester. We met with the head of the Commuinty Development department and set up our class schedule for our first semester. She also gave us an assignment due on the first day of classes, write a page on why we chose to study Com. Dev! So, here's the classes we will both be taking this next semester:

Gender & Development
Organizational Development
The Art of Dialogue
Personal & Spiritual Formation
Health & Development

Once we start classes we'll let you know what they're all about!

Bits and Pieces

We’ve been pretty busy the past week setting up our home and getting things ready for school. Our house is almost complete; we just need some kind of table/desk and then we’re set. Our apartment building is full of international students going to our school, and they have been wonderful. I guess as people graduate and leave they start passing out their belongings, so we’ve been the recipient of these hand me downs. From our neighbors we got: a table, chairs, stools, dishes, silverware, gas tank, 2 burner stove, water containers, and a couch. These were all things we would’ve had to buy, but the Lord just provided them through our neighbors.

Yesterday we went and did our medical exams, blood test and chest x-ray for our school to complete our application. We chose to wait and do it here in order to save some money. By doing it here we saved around $475. Yay!

Today we’ll be registering for classes and next Monday we’ll start school. I can’t believe it’s all really happening. After years of planning and preparing, it’s good to see God has making our dream a reality.

Here’s some pictures of random things for you to enjoy:

This beauty is my pride and joy. It's a hot water heater. Apartments here come with just cold water. Even though it's blazing hot here a cold shower just hurts me, so I knew in order to live here for 2 years a hot water heater is a must. Now, I don't take hot showers cause I would die of heat stroke, but a lukewarm shower is a good thing!

This is my sweet husband sweeping the floor in our kitchen/dining room. It's a local broom, so it looks quite different then what I'm used to at home. Behind him you can see some our borrowed items.

This was taken just down the street from our place. Rooster fighting is a big time thing here with men pampering their roosters and gambling on fights. I won't go into what I think about that, but all I have to say about these roosters is they wake up early and let the world know they're awake for the day!

Our apartment

Here's some pictures of our new place. Yesterday we shopped all day and today we start the cleaning organizing process. It's a lot of work to go from nothing to a home....

Here's Uche in front of our building.

The sign that greets you at the bottom of the stairs. Fortunately we're only on the 2nd floor, so not too many stairs to climb.



Looking into the apartment from the front door. The kitchen is to the right. The room on the left is our bathroom and the bedroom is on the right.

This the kitchen area.

Our bedroom. Notice the air conditioner under the window. Praise the Lord it came with the apartment, so we didn't have to buy one!

This the top of the building. It's covered, but open so everyone can enjoy the cool breeze (if there's one...). It's a common area for all the people in the building. We're looking forward to using it alot.

Round one of shopping.... There's more to come if my swollen feet and ankles can handle it!