We found it!

Post written at 8pm Tuesday January 22 Guam time

We found our old house!

Our old address was 56 Y Seng Song, but there is no 56 to be found on Y Seng Song. So my dad stood in the street and tried to remember the old home movies of my mom & Sarah Barden riding motorcycles up and down the street to get a frame of reference. My dad and mom narrowed it down to the blocks they think it was and then we drove up the street real slow. There was only one house that had the door in the middle of the front of the house; however there wasn’t a carport, but it looked like the carport could have been filled in. My dad then got out of the car, and after comparing 280 Y Seng Song to the picture of 56 Y Seng Song, it was declared a match!

(My mom just read the above paragraph over my shoulder and wants me to point out that we don’t know FOR SURE that that is our old house. She wants to go to the Department of Public Works for confirmation – the Dededo mayor’s office told us that the DPW is in charge of the house numbering and they should be able to tell us if 56 is now 280.)

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After getting entirely too much sun yesterday (Princess Not-So-Bright failed to apply any sunscreen to the backs of her legs, so I’ve had a rough day sitting down today), we took the day off from the pool and did some more exploring. Rick and my dad wanted to find some old war memorial, which they did and got a ton of pictures of, and since they are both out night snorkeling right now, I am not going to try to sort through those pictures and tell a story that I didn’t witness. We also tried to find some remote beaches, driving our Toyota Corolla rental car over some roads/paths that weren’t made to be driven on in a Toyota Corolla. Last on our agenda today was to visit the University of Guam. We found it and did a little tour of the campus and ended up at the student union/bookstore. I thought it would be fun to get a University of Guam shirt but I guess they aren’t a real marketable school – the shirts weren’t great so we waived it off.

We ate at Fridays again today. I feel a little bad not eating at more local-like restaurants but there isn’t really a local-like restaurant around. They have Denny’s, Outback, Tony Roma’s Fridays, Lonestar, Dominos, Pizza Hut, KFC, Subway, and McDonalds. Rick got a recommendation for a restaurant in Hagatna and my parents have offered to babysit to I think we’ll have a date night on Thursday. Hagatna is the capital of Guam – it used to be called Agana, but in 1998 the spelling was changed to match the Chamorro pronunciation (you can read more about Hagatna here…) Chamorros are the native Pacific Island people of Guam…click here to read more about them.

Mallory continues to be wonderful, especially because she let us sleep until almost 7am this morning! She has continued her “roll with the punches” tradition and now that we are on Guam time (just in time to come home) she is on her regular nap schedule. She LOVES the pool and water slide; we have been working on the sign for “more” and as soon as she & Rick get out of the pool at the bottom of the slide, she turns back to him and does the “more” sign, so off they go, back to the top of the slide. We also taught Mallory the old Truax trick of “tickle daddy’s back”, which really means “push daddy in the water!”. She tickled daddy and grandpa’s backs over & over again, sometimes stopping to jump in to swim with them.

I am off to bed, it is now almost 9pm. Tomorrow is a pool day and maybe a trip to Underwater World. We might try to arrange it so we can watch the Michigan basketball game that is on at 10am our time. It would SUCK to live here and not get to watch any of these sporting events because we were at work! They get ESPN, ESPN2, CNN, Nickelodeon, and many other stations we get at home. I haven’t figured out yet when the Today morning show is on. I mean, by the time it’s on live in New York, it’s 9pm here…I guess I could go turn on the TV right now and do some research. Check back for my findings.