Wallking, walking, and more walking....

Today was filled with plenty of walking, and we covered alot of ground! We were dropped off at the Farmers Market in Hollywood, and walked to a fabulous shopping center called The Grove. The bottom picture is our group walking in The Grove. I enjoyed looking around at the American Girl doll store and Bath and Body (which we don't have in Hawaii). We were only there for about an hour. In fact, we don't stay anywhere for more than an hour, usually. That seems to be the attention span of the group!

After The Grove, we drove through Beverly Hills, saw Bel Air, and the UCLA campus. We spent an hour at the Getty Museum- our one and only museum on the tour. An hour was enough time for the kids (me too, hee hee) :) I asked the guards which was the most valuable painting in the museum, found it and took the photo you see above. Vincent van Gogh's painting "Irises" is $68 million dollars! I did make an effort to stare at it for a bit and enjoy it and try to understand why it would be worth that much, but alas, staring didn't enlighten me. I just have no art appreciation in my genes. I had this problem in Italy, and that's NOT a good place to lack art appreciation....

After the museum, we went to Venice Beach. It was a beautiful, sunny, warm day! Venice Beach is full of unique characters and shops. Lots of cool things to see and do. We walked clear to Santa Monica Pier. We were told to meet at the carousel. Here's the problem: some of the kids thought the "carousel" was the ferris wheel, others thought the "carousel" was the merry-go-round! We'll need to be more specific next time, as different countries call things differently. Maybe we should have drawn them a picture. By the way, I went to the ferris wheel (wrong place); the meeting spot was the merry-go-round. My bad!

Our last stop for the day was at Melody and Paul's house for a party. We had great Chinese food, great music, and some real big laughs! What a fun group we have! Thank you Paul and Melody for hosting all of us at your house! The kids were photographed with their country's flag. The top photo is Emilia and Cami, both from Chile. I hoped they would photograph Kayla with the American flag, but they didn't have it out. It's not the normal routine to have an American girl on a foreign exchange trip! Today was a fun filled day and the kids are tired. The hotel is much quieter tonight because we wore them all out! Tomorrow we head to San Francisco....