Jessie Stoll and the sites of Bangalore

Well, we had our 1st official guest this weekend. Jessie Stoll came down from Moosorie (northerm India in the hills) for a long weekend in Bangalore. It was great to have her here. It gave us an excuse to see parts of Bangalore we hadnt seen before and the kids LOVED having an extended "sleep over":). I think she had fun. She commented that Bangalore was so clean. Holy cow, if Bangalore is clean, I am scared to see the rest of India!!

Jessie is my long time friend, boss, mentor, Paul Stoll's daughter. She is also an Ole and just graduated. She's doing her student teaching at Woodstock, an international boarding school in Moosorie. She will be teaching there through the spring and then home for a Minnesota summer before she commits herself to 2 years in the Peace Corp in Central Asia.

She's incredibly brave and adventurous and has been traveling around India for 2 weeks all on her own (she has another 2 weeks to go). She is especially brave to visit the LoudAmericans for 3 whole days.

The highlight of the weekend was our "tour" of Bangalore. Tom and Saravanan had it all planned out... Bull Temple, Krishna Center for Higher Thought, the Palace and finally Shiv Temple. This was all carefully planned around a stop at KFC for lunch. We go all out for our guests:) Actually this was the drivers request.... KFC for lunch. Since he was driving us around for 9 hours to go 30 kilometers, I figured he deserved this...

Little did we know that included in our tour of the day was 1 public bathroom, 1 random restaruant bathroom, a side of the road "pit stop", the KFC bathroom, the Palace bathroom and finally our own home bathroom. Needless to say, this is what you get with 3 kids in 1 car. I think we had stopped to go potty 3 times before we saw anything of historical interest. Please refer to the prior "10 things I learned on vacation" blog. My newly learned bodily function tricks came in handy again.

We rented "Oliver!" mainly because I had the song "Consider yourself at home" stuck in my brain. Rent it. Is surreal. The bull terriers name in the movie is Bullseye. Coincidence? I think not!

Then, Sunday was a lazy day of playing with kids, the gym, naps and a pedicure (for Jessie). She was a doll and watched the kids Sunday night so that we could go for dinner with a new coworker. It was great for us, but I'm afraid Jessie is scared off of having kids and thinks that all we eat is KFC, Pizza Hut, Fruit Loops and Pop Tarts . Can you tell who went shopping last?!

I'll have Tom post some pictures. It was a really great weekend. I hope you had fun Jessie, I am sure we'll be talking about you for weeks to come! Good luck with your travels, maybe you'll have 5 loud visitors this spring...