Celebrating the 4th

I think I have managed to get out of the house more in the last three days than I did the entire month of June. Wednesday was at the Land Transportation Office getting my Filipino driver's license renewed. I was a little nervous to do it because when we went to get our license the first time it took all day and it provided a heavy dose of culture shock on the 4th day after arriving in the Philippines. What I remember the most was having to take a drug test and they ask you to pee in a cup which is quite possibly the smallest cup known to man. Then to make it worse the toilet didn't have a seat nor did it flush, the door only went from my knees to my shoulders and it is right in the middle of the waiting area. Thinking back I can't believe I actually had to do that. So it is safe to say I was less than thrilled to have to go through the whole process again. I decided to try out a new LTO location this time. It was strictly for license renewals, so I was hoping it wouldn't take as long. It ended up being much longer than the 20 minutes that the sign on their door "guaranteed," but was considerably less than the last time. I was done in about 2 hours and to make it even better when I got the drug test the door went all the way to the ceiling and all the way to the floor and they even had a toilet that flushed. However, there was no sink to be found anywhere. I guess you can't have everything.

On Thursday I decided that three years without a 4th of July celebration was just too long, so I made Daniel take me to a grocery store where we could get some real American Johnsonville brats. There is a great store that is similar to Sam's Club about an hour away and they are the only place I know of that carries brats in the entire country. We loaded up and marveled at how many things they carried that were straight from the US. My other very exciting purchase (well maybe not for Daniel) was frozen blueberries.

Since we had the brats and I had made some potato salad we grilled out last night with our friends Josh, Dave, Michele and their kids. Or at least we tried. It was a beautiful day all day, but of course about 15 minutes before we planned on starting a storm came through and it rained pretty hard. So we moved the party inside. Then to end the evening we had a surprise fireworks show. There is a short term team here from the US helping one of the other missionary families and they put on a ten minute show of fireworks. It ended up feeling more like the 4th than I thought it would.