A Weekend with Friends

Two weekends ago, we were visited by Kristin and Kathy Andrade. The Andrade sisters have been my friends ever since I can remember. They are now both attending BYU-Idaho and are only 4 hours away! I was so excited to spend a weekend with them.

We picked them up in Salt Lake City and immediately headed to the new mall, City Creek Center. Oh. My. Gorgeousness. I felt like I wasn't in Utah. It's Utah's first high-end shopping center. It's so beautiful and HUGE (700,000 sq ft)! There is a creek running along the entire center. There were also numerous fountains that made me feel like I was in a theme park. There were musicians and live bands playing in every little corner. It reminded me of Miami's Bayside - just nicer! It's an outdoor mall with a retractable roof! How cool is that! Now when it rains or snows, it doesn't matter! They had every store I could possibly think of. I was most excited for Nordstrom, the Pandora store, Tiffany & Co. , Michael Kors, and Steven Madden. All but Nordstrom are the first stores in Utah. It's about time! We tried going to as many stores as possible with the time we had. We had to stop our window-shopping to eat. The food court has so many choices! Blaine was super excited when he saw Suki Hana. It's one of those typical Asian food court restaurants but it's the only one in Utah and Blaine loves it! We're going back this weekend :)

After the mall, we went to watch The Hunger Games. Unfortunately, we arrived pretty late and had to sit in the second row. I liked the movie a lot, but I felt that it left out a lot of things from the book that were pretty important! The scenes and characters were well done. Everything looked exactly as I pictured it. But books are always so much better.

The next day we attended the Holi Festival of Colors. It was crazy. I had been twice before, but it had never been this packed. It took us an hour to drive from Provo to Spanish Fork and we had to park far away and walk quite a bit to the entrance. The line to get in was huge (and we missed the 3 pm throwing). But we still went inside and threw some colors on each other and random people walking by :) The traffic going back to Provo was even worse - it took us 2 hours! That night, we ate dinner at Zupas and watched Hugo at home. I heard that some people didn't like the movie, but I loved it! It was different and had a nice message. I highly recommend it. It was a great day.

Saturday night Blaine started feeling really sick. He had a really high fever and the rough nights began. We didn't go to church and just hung out with Kris and Kathy at home. Blaine was watching the golf channel and Kathy showed a lot of interest in learning about golf! I thought it was hilarious. I tried making baleadas (a typical Honduran meal) from scratch for dinner. The tortillas weren't coming out as great as I planned and Kris helped me in the kitchen. We got lucky and the end result wasn't too bad! Unfortunately, the time came where I had to drop off Kris and Kathy at SLC so that they could meet their ride back to BYU-I. It was sad to see them go, but I'm grateful for the time I had with them and for their friendship!