Currents of Memories and Waves of Learning

Braxton and I went for a walk on the beach today and he said “I feel like time is going so fast!” I couldn’t agree more. We recently passed the 4 month mark in our travels and some days it feels like we just left Colorado. We have a little less than a week of time left with Debby here, and we are making so many fun memories with her!

Memories Made in The Little Moments

Night markets are a big thing on Guam. I mentioned before that our neighborhood of Tumon Bay has a night market every Sunday. We visited this market again this past week and enjoyed seeing what was new and different. Braxton did the climbing wall and Alexis got a henna tattoo.

We also went to the Mangilao Thursday night market. This was much smaller and kind of a bust. Our food was good, but the flies were so bad we literally paced around as we ate to keep them away. We didn’t stay long.

Debby tried sushi for the first time this week! We were all impressed with how adventurous she was, and she was pretty good with the chopsticks by the end. She had eel, salmon, crab, scallops, wagyu beef, yellow tail, and a variety of tempura items. This was a conveyor belt sushi restaurant which the kids have grown to love. We were surprised at the price difference compared to places we went in Tokyo and Osaka. Japan really has affordable food!

We have also visited a couple new beaches this week. All the beaches here are stunning, but it’s fun to see their subtle differences. Gun Beach got its name because it has the remains of a WWII Japanese artillery gun. This was amazing to see! It has super soft sand that your feet just sink into.

Tanguisson Beach is known for its rock outcroppings in the water.

World School Projects

We have used some of our school vacation days with Debby here, but both kids recently wrapped up projects about Guam. It has been so fun to connect their projects to our current location. Braxton did a slideshow presentation “All About Guam”. We learned that the population on the island is about 151,000 and their official languages are Chamorro and English. We also learned that the brown tree snake (an invasive species) is responsible for the extinction of many of the native birds here. The brown tree snake is not native to Guam and is thought to have arrived as a stow-away on a military cargo ship back in the 1950’s. It still has significant impacts on Guam’s ecosystem to this day.

Alexis did a presentation on Shoichi Yokoi. This is an amazing story of a Japanese soldier from WWII that spent 28 years hiding in the jungles of Guam after the end of the war. For a long time he didn’t realize that the war was over, and thought capture would bring shame to his country. He is quoted saying upon his return to Japan “It is with much embarrassment that I return.” His nephew wrote a book about his time on Guam called “Private Yokoi’s War and Life on Guam, 1944-1972.”

We are all still loving Guam and decided yesterday to extend our time here until after Thanksgiving! Because Guam is a U.S. territory, it was the only place we could enter without proof of onward travel, giving us this flexibility. The kids both asked separately if we could just spend the rest of gap year here. It really is a wonderful place!