Saturday

Saturdays are great because I get Caleb for the whole day. This morning, I took him to my favorite breakfast spot downtown-- Marigold's. I always want to call it Gloria's, but that's not the name of it. It does have all the same letters, though. I have been to Marigold's about 4 times in the past three weeks, and I can't get enough of it. They have fresh flowers on every table, great specials, and some of the best coffee in Madison.

After breakfast, we went over to James Madison Park where I row, and I did a little demo for Caleb of how we take the boats out. Funny thing, there was little to no seaweed on the dock today... very interesting. Wish that could happen on the days I go out.

While we were walking back to our car, there was a French-speaking African church meeting in the park, so we stayed and listened to one of the pastors share his testimony, and then someone else came over to talk to us and persuaded us to stay and try some of the food, even though we were (at least, I was) stuffed from breakfast. And, let me just say, the food was so worth it. I loved the rice, and there was this delicious vegetable salad kind of like pico de gallo. The best thing was the egg rolls, surprisingly. I have never had a better egg roll. The music was great and we had some good conversation with people, some from Cote d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, the U.S. It was an unexpected cool thing in our day. I loved watching the kids-- two of them tried to hula hoop in the same ring. They reminded me of the Haitian children I worked with in the DR. Afterwards we wished Jon my brother had been there to speak French to everyone. He would have loved it.

As we went through the food line, one of the women we had been talking to, Yolan, pointed to this thing that looked like lemonade and gestured for us to try it. She said "gin gin" and then she said "juice," so we thought it was juice. One of the guys at our table saw that we had gotten a huge cup of it to share and he asked us if we knew what it was with a smile that communicated that we were in for it. I had taken a big swallow a minute earlier, and it tasted kind of funny. It was really strong. It tasted sweet at first, but when you swallowed, some flavor kicked in and burned the back of your throat all the way down. I said it tasted like ginger and he said that they usually had it at their houses and it was ginger beer or made from ginger root. It seemed like he tried to avoid it. We switched to much smaller sips after that.