Back From Vacation!

We spent the last 6 weeks visiting our grandparents and seeing lots of sights in the USA! We started out visiting our Grandpa and Nana in the mountains of Georgia. Grandpa likes to go hiking in the woods! We went on some really good trails and we took the dog with us. Her name is "Georgia."

Then we took a road trip (that's what Dad calls it) to visit relatives and sight-see. We visited some cousins in North Carolina and Virginia. We got to see our Great Aunt Jane and learned how to shoot a rifle!

Then we drove on to Washington D.C. It is the capital city of the US. We got to see the Lincoln and Washington Memorials, the Vietnam Memorial, and had a private tour of the White House (although President Obama was busy working so we didn't get to meet him.) One of our favorite things was visiting the Air and Space Museum. Very cool. It is one of the museums in the movie, "Night at the Museum 2."

The next place we visited was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This is the city were the United States began. We got to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall - where the "Declaration of Independence" was signed! Our Uncle Joe is a Park Ranger there. He explained to us some of the history in Philadelphia.Then we went on to see our Grandma and JaJa in Buffalo, New York. We got to do all sorts of things with themincluding seeing Niagara Falls in Canada,and going to Detroit, Michigan. We also got to eat good local foods like Pizza and Chicken Wings.

We are back in India now. It is really hot here! Our summer vacation is almost over! We go back to Lotus Valley School on the 1st of July. We will post more pictures of some of the things we saw during our trip soon!

Summer Break

Summer break in India started on 9 May and lasts until 1 July. Schools are closed now because it is the hottest time of the year in India. We are off 8 weeks -- no school and no Hindi lessons! Yeah! It is so hot here, after a few days of heat we get a dust storm and then some rain to cool it off. Dust storms are really bad - very windy and dust gets in your eyes and mouth.

This is how people stay cool in India: take lots of cold baths, eat ice cream and popsicles, swim, drink alot of water, drink nimboo-pani (lemon-water), stay in the shade, go to the movies, go to the mall, go to a water park called THUNDER!, go to the mountains. The largest mountains in the world, the Himalyas, are in North India. We want to go see them too.

Boring Turned Fun

We had a hot, boring afternoon the other day. Dad said we couldn't turn on the A/C because it wasn't quite hot enough. We were finished with our homework AND our reading. The pool was closed. It was too early to watch our favorite show, "Ben 10." There was just nothing exciting going on.

Then we went out on to our balcony. Hooray! The gardeners turned on the sprinklers!
We quickly grabed our umbrellas and ran out into the "blast zone!" The umbrellas make great shields and the sprinklers shoot water everywhere! It really cooled us off! Boring really turned into fun fast!

Swimming!

Its now really hot here in India. Yesterday it was 43 degrees Celsius (about 110 Fahrenheit). So that's why we always go swimming here. Since April we have been taking swimming lessons everyday after school. Our coach is very nice. He has us practicing the front crawl, backstroke, the breaststroke. On Friday we even did some underwater somersaults!

We have a really nice pool here where we live. On weekends and in the evenings we swim with Mom, Dad and some of our friends. The pool here even has a water and palm trees. These are some of the best things about India!