Another week gone

We've rounded the half way point of our assignment.  The next 50 weeks will very likely fly by since we are spending more than 10% of them on vacation.  As for now, we're following our routine:

Sunday:  Stay at home and do things around the house.  Sometimes, I'll go to the driving range in the early AM.
Monday:  I have my piano lessons.  Yep, after 25 years of not playing, I'm taking lessons again.
Tuesday:  My daughter has ballet and swimming lessons.  My wife does Pilates.
Wednesday:  My wife does yoga, my daughter has tennis lessons.  It is also our date night, and we endeavor to try a new restaurant each week, but often visit a favorite instead. 
Thursday:  Tennis for my wife, dance class for my daughter.
Friday:  Family movie night.  We watch a new, family friendly movie none of us has seen (or at leas most of us haven't seen) and order dinner from Toscana's.  This week we watched E.T.
Saturday:  Day trip with the family. 

Last week, for our date night, we saw the movie "Frozen", which was a much better movie than I thought it would be.  Might be a little too much gore for some, and plot was very similar to the love-it-or-hate-it "Open Water".  For me, it passed the test of a good movie - my wife and I were talking about it the rest of the night.

Our Saturday trips are quite the event at our house.  We are prepared to have a great time, and we all need to look the part.  Even our son gets into the act.

This week our Saturday day trip was Gelanggan Samudera an animal park in the Ancol entertainment complex I've written about before.  If you add Gelangan Samudera and the Ancol Sea World, which we visited in June of last year, it is a close approximation of the Sea World we all know in Orlando and San Diego. 

At Samudera, we saw a 4-D movie about sea turtles with the obligatory environmental message. We then saw a Miami Vice-like "Scorpion Pirates" show that featured jet skis and acting like you see on Mexican Soap Operas. 

Next to the pirate show was an animal variety show that surprised us with the animal participants.  It really was quite amazing.  I have seen video of bears riding bicycles, but never seen it in person.  More amazing was the tame hippopotamus.

After the animal show, we were all soaked to the skin with sweat from sitting outside, and needed to cool off.  We took the opportunity to visit the indoor fresh water aquarium near the sea lion and dolphin show.  Half of the aquariums had fish that I had in my aquarium back in Arizona - neon tetras, bala sharks, ciclids, tiger barbs, knife loach, catfish.

We finished with the aquarium just in time for the start of the dolphin show.  Good, but nothing spectacular.  I guess I've seen enough dolphins jump through hoops and do flips in the air that it isn't exciting anymore.  It is always amazing to see these animals move with such power and grace through the water, though.  That will never get old.

The dolphin show wrapped our day.  We'd seen everything at that point and weren't interested in any of the rides.  Four hours after arriving, we left...and had dinner at Hacienda.