The View as We Do the Dishes

We are loving it here. We each received our shipments from Caracas this week and are really starting to feel at home. We sorted through our duplicates, and will be donating quite a few things, which also feels good. The apartment is really coming together, more pictures soon.

Highlights from my jog yesterday: hundreds of people out in the park, and at least half of them were roller blading, including a few 60+ year olds! The skill levels also varied: some were playing street hockey and some were trying to teach other how to simply stay on their feet. Lots of joggers too, running with me around this track in the park. It felt like a 5K again! I can't imagine when the weather warms up, it'll feel like I'm running a marathon! Except I'll still only be running about 2.5 miles :)

We really loved Caracas, but I think we are really going to try to take advantage of our time living downtown here in Buenos Aires because it's so much safer. Not perfect, but we really feel at ease being out and about and it's great. We love walking everywhere! We're not exactly sure what we'll do with our car when it comes......guess we'd better start planning some road trips!

Oh yeah, Iguazu

I forgot to blog about our trip to Iguazu! We went two weeks ago, and loved it. We saw lots of wildlife, including toucans, a cuckoo, alligators, turtles, and....coatis....

The first coati we saw scrambled across the sidewalk in front of us, and we couldn't believe we didn't get a picture! We were disappointed, until we saw approximately 200 more over the next two days. Haha! They were like pigeons, running over to anyone that opened a bag of chips. But they were so cute!

The falls were incredible, the amount of water pouring over was staggering.

Mike also set us up with a boat ride that took us right into one of the smaller falls (small is a relative term). It was AWESOME and we got soaked.

Um, Mike took all the pictures, so I will refer you to his blog to check them out!

Farm Show and Fakesgiving

Yesterday, Mike and I and a friend from work went to an Exposicion de Ganaderia, or in other words, a Farm Show! It was like a State Fair, every kind of farm animal you could imagine, stands selling all kinds of jams, meats, and cheeses (and dulce de leche), and giving away samples! There were companies like John Deere showing off their GIANT pieces of farm equipment as well.

The drink called Mate is an incredibly essential part of the culture here: people carry their thermoses and gourds around all day. We laughed to see a hot water vending machine that people could use to fill their thermos, and a mate stand in the middle of the horse ring for the judges.

Another part of the gaucho culture, I guess, are these ginormous berets called "bouinas," and of course I had to buy one, after seeing all the gauchos wearing them. You can see me sporting the boina and Mike with his new mate gourd in one of the pictures.

Oh, and you'll also see a picture of some cows in pens next to a steak restaurant. Not sure what goes down there, but we stuck to the Choripan stand outside.

Another part of life here in July is that it's COLD! Well, relatively chilly, anyway, highs in the 50's or 60's. With the weather like this, a couple of our coworkers decided we should have a potluck Fakesgiving. It was great! A few non-Americans attended, and though I think they were bewildered about a few thanksgiving traditions, like setting out cranberry sauce in the shape of a can that no one eats (the girl next to me couldn't stop laughing), they loved the food. I made sweet potato casserole, and my goal was to make it taste as similar to my Dads as I could.

Unfortunately......the sweet potatoes here are white with a purple peel, excessively starchified (though yes, they're still sweet), and as hard to cut as tree trunks. I boiled them for half an hour, mashed them, then added exorbitant amounts of butter, cream, and sugar. They tasted fine, but were a greenish-yellow, with a couple of purple chunks. So.......I shredded two carrots, and blended it all up! Pretty close! Threw on some walnuts (no pecans here), and....I made my own marshmallows! Actually not too tough -- you just need gelatin, melted sugar, and beaters or a blender.

So (keeping in mind that I left out all the steps it took to get the potatoes the right consistency, after having so effectively de-starchified them), it took me about 7 hours total. Yup, that is a once a year (or once in a lifetime!) recipe. But I'm so proud they turned out!

This is my kind of city!

So this morning I went jogging around a nearby park (there's a track that goes around a little lake), and I loved it!

I saw: hundreds of joggers, roller bladers, mounted police, dog walkers (10+ at a time), jump ropers, bicyclists, paddle boats (though no one was on them today, it's the middle of winter) and green lorikeets! 

In fact, there were so many joggers, I felt like I was running a 5K or something, super cool!