We dragged ourselves away form the comfort of our new home to stop by the student art exhibit at Rice, we shouldn't have been surprised – it was great!
Next we hopped over to the village for a little shopping before once again growing hungry and finding a Dim Sum restaurant. In the village!!!! Not only was it there. It was alacart (instead of circling carts) so you got EVERYTHING you wanted fast and fresh!
The shrimp dumplings, the lotus fluffy dumplings, the sweet rice, the red bean filled sesame balls, the… I have to stop before I start to give away the amount of damage we did:) ! only downfall was they had my all time favorite the hairy taro things, but since it was Friday and they had pork it was a no go… exhausted by the wonderful day we returned to the hotel.
I knitted while my mom started to snore:) (before 10!) . like I said the beds were fluffy and we were both a bit dazzled and pleasantly surprised by our sleeping ability at 10 the next morning!



So refreshed from our night and the fresh coffee we started our day with a swim in the indoor rooftop pool. We aqua jogged and swam and listened to the wonderful music until it was time to unify the Opera Family – Jason was on the WAY!!!!

Just as we were finishing getting dressed Jason arrived, full of life, enthusiasm and ready for fun as always. I was blessed with the best Opera Bro! Starving from the drive or swim we went to Mai's to feast on the most wonderful Vietnamese food!

Our next adventure allows mom the genius title! We had decided to visit the Body Work 3 exhibit at the Science museum, but when we arrived the line for a ticket was hours long. My skillful mother noticed that there wasn’t a line at will call, so we found the number and I purchased tickets over the phone and picked them up immediately. In the time it took the operator to answer the phone we had tickets, no line!
Now for the exhibit…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Worlds as strange as it sounds it is an exhibit of human body parts. Upon the donors consent the human body is injected with a chemical that basically turns it into plastic (I was able to touch some and it really feels just like plastic). Anyway it is done as a research/training method since the body can be segmented, separated and displayed. It was incredible. Some of the more striking things in my mind were seeing the entire web of human nerves and blood vessels independent of their body. We were able to view all the organs individually and within complete bodies. My mom was a wiz with her science background, but it took Jason and I substantially longer to make sense of what we were looking at – who knew what a liver, kidney, nerve, diaphragm etc looked like? It was also interesting to see organs and body parts of diseased patients – lung cancer, emphysema, Alzheimer's, etc. although a bit disturbing it was an awesome to see!


Mum and Jason at the museum