Auf Wiedersehen!

This last week we said sad goodbyes to our friend Bjorn. He's been living with Josh's parents for the last year, but on Wednesday he headed home to Stuttgart, Germany. We hope we'll get to see him someday soon - here in Utah or in Germany (if we're lucky).

The New Place . . .

After looking at dozens of places, we've finally figured out where we're going to live for the next year (or so). All three of us are very excited for the new place. It will be nice to have a little more room to stretch out, have a yard, and be just a few minutes from Josh's work.

We're going to miss Provo and the friends that we have here. We'll miss being so close to family.

It's a little scary to be moving on. It's nice living here on our oddly numbered street . . .
It's been a good place for us. Life has changed a lot, but we're excited to see what comes next . . .

The Happenings . . .

The summer has been pretty busy so far. Josh has been attending his bar classes for the last few weeks now, and he's well on his way to being ready for the test in July.

Janae and Ainslie have made it to the pool a few times, and they've been busy working on their dance moves at home.We've also been eating some delicious food.Josh took a trip down to Moab with a few of his brothers to ride the slick rock trail. We also took a trip out to the Hogle Zoo. We went to the zoo last year, so we were excited to see if Ainslie was more excited about the animals this time around. We had fun at the bird show, and we saw lots of other fun animals. Ainslie's favorites this time around were the giraffes. We managed to catch them getting a bit of lunch.

Our biggest time commitment lately has been the ongoing search for a place to live. We're looking for something closer to Josh's work. We've seen a lot of different places, and we have one that we think would be great. Crossing our fingers that it works out.

This last week we also went to Mat and Breezy's wedding. The day was great, and the wedding was beautiful. Ainslie looked pretty cute in her new dress, and she loved playing at the reception. We were all very happy for Mat and Breezy. We love you guys!

Pearl Harbor

When we were planning our trip, we knew that we wanted to visit the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. The memorial was one of the more serious stops on our trip, but we were very glad we had the chance to visit the memorial and think about what happened there. From the memorial, we could see a few places where the Arizona still reaches out of the water.But for the most part, the ship lies beneath the water.At the memorial, we were reminded of how many lives were affected by the attack at Pearl Harbor when we found Chandlers and Webbs listed among those who died that day.After visiting the memorial, we spent some time exploring the U.S.S. Missouri.The Missouri ("Mighty Mo") fought in WWII and more recently in Operation Desert Storm, but the ship is best known as the ship where the peace agreement was signed, ending the war in the Pacific. The agreement was signed right here . . . While walking around the upper decks, we were amazed at the sheer size of the firepower on the ship. We took almost two hours wandering around the seemingly endless halls inside of the ship. Josh was excited to see that the Legal Officer on board had a relatively spacious room towards the front of the ship, in the air conditioned section. We were both intrigued by the bread dispensers that we found in one of the cafeteria areas.The boat really was huge. We couldn't believe how much there was to see, and we were amazed when we saw that this little steering wheel steers the ship. We imagined something a little more of this variety . . .
It was pretty amazing to visit Pearl Harbor and the Missouri to see how the war started and where it ended so close to each other.

Polynesian Cultural Center

One of Janae's favorite parts of our trip to Hawaii was visiting the Polynesian Cultural Center. She liked it so much, we ended up going twice. We missed a few villages on our first visit, and Janae was more than happy to go back and re-live some of the "memories" from the first day.

We enjoyed learning some of the history of the Polynesian islands and seeing some of the great displays/demonstrations that they have there. This double-hulled canoe is similar to those that the earliest Polynesians may have used, and some students and BYU-Hawaii learn how to sail it as part of a class. Not bad homework . . . The cultural demonstrations for each of the different islands were very interesting. It was fun to try our hand at a few things. Janae got adventurous with a Fijian tatoo . . .

And Josh got roped into some adventurous Tahitian dancing . . .
The word "volunteer" only loosely describes his decision to dance, but he didn't do too bad . . .

After a full day of exploring the villages, we headed over to the luau for more dancing and some delicious food. Janae has a post about the luau here, and more about the other great food we ate in Hawaii here. After dinner we watched another show with more dancing. We thought we had seen it all by this point, but this show definitely took things up a notch with more dancers and some pretty amazing fire dances.

The Cultural Center was definitely more relaxed than some of our other activities in Hawaii, but we thought it was great.