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!

Getting to Know Palermo

Outside the Museo Evita.  Mike took all these great pictures, FYI, so he's not in any of them.  I will remedy that shortly! 

We've had a great first couple of weeks.  Last weekend we took a city bus tour and got to know the different neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.  This weekend we've been exploring Palermo -- the neighborhood we live in.  Museo Evita is in Palermo, and it has a great cafe with crepes!

Our church building in Palermo.  We definitely are city dwellers now, it's stuck right in there with all the high rises.  Our grocery store is also definitely an urban grocery store -- small, packed right in with the rest of the buildings, but the best part is: everyone brings their own little carts to wheel home!  Which is great, because we've got a cart coming on its way with the rest of our stuff.  Living across the street from Costco in the US will teach you the necessity of your own little shopping cart.

Speaking of grocery stores.......this leads me to courteous-encounter-#1 of the week.  Let me say that neither Mike nor I expected outpourings of warm friendliness here, for a variety of reasons, but we have been proven wrong.  Sure, there was the little old lady who pushed Mike out of the way when we were in line at the museum, but on the whole everyone here has been very nice!

We were looking for bacon at the grocery store and couldn't find it, so I asked a young man who was stocking shelves: "Tienen tocineta?"  And he had no idea what tocineta was.  I was racking my brain, trying to rewind back to high school Spanish in case there was another word for bacon, but when I turned to Mike to ask and said the word "bacon" in English, the boy shouted out "Ah, panceta!" and then in English, "Come here!  Come here!"  He ran across the store to show me where the panceta was.  So nice!  And he knew a little English!

 The view from our balcony.  Can you see the Rio de la Plata in the distance?  It's great, except that every time I see it, the line from the musical Evita jumps into my head, where she calls out "Rio, de la Plata!"  And then the entire musical gets stuck in my head again.  "Hello, Buenos Aires!  You wanna know whatcha gonna get in me?  Just a little touch of star quality.  And, if ever I go to far, it's because of the things you are, beautiful town, I love you."    It's very difficult to get those songs out of your head when you live in Buenos Aires, let me tell you.

And here's a photo from our city bus tour.  It was actually pretty chilly sitting on top of the bus, with the wind and all.  It was probably upper 40's, low 50's when we went.  My brain refuses to accept that it can be cold in South America for some reason, especially in June, but it definitely is.

Ah, courteous-encounter-#2:  We were walking to a co-worker's house on Friday night, hadn't been there before, and I wouldn't say we were lost, but we couldn't find the building (no street signs or building numbers in sight).  A girl came up to us, and said "Are you lost?  I've been walking behind you for two blocks, and it looks like you need some help."  And she helped us find the building!  No laughing comments like "Ha, you guys aren't from around here," which would have been easy for her to say, since we were also carrying a plate full of treats and probably looked ridiculous.  I was so shocked that she stopped and kindly helped us find where to go, and didn't point out the fact that we were foreigners. 

Anyway, we are settling in here pretty well, more updates soon!

We're here!

Haha, the only picture we have of us so far is one the pet expediter took for us when he dropped off the cat.  Yeah, he's alive!

Well, we made it to Buenos Aires.  It was an overnight flight, and we only had to go an hour east in time-zones, so we weren't too exhausted when we arrived.  Oh, and some of you have probably not met Mike's cat -- his name is Kyska, and he's really more like a dog than a cat (runs up to meet you when you come home, follows you from room to room, weighs 23 pounds).  We love him.

Mike and I are both working in the Consular Section in the embassy here in Buenos Aires.  We've had several people ask if we like working together in the same office, and we say "heck, we worked together in Caracas, when we were secretly dating.....it's a lot nicer to have everyone know you're officially in love and married! :)"  And really, we spent so long being good friends and co-workers in Caracas before we even started dating, that we've kind of fallen back into that pattern, swapping visa interview stories at lunch and such.

I think the section here is glad to have us -- with our experience in the consular section in Caracas, and our Spanish language skills, we were able to jump right in.  Not to brag, but Mike did 225 visa interviews before lunch on his first day (I only did 162).  So yes, we're fitting right in!

Buenos Aires is such a great city -- we live in a great part of town with lots of restaurants and parks that we can walk to.  We're getting a lot of exercise, which is great because we're eating a lot!

People LOVE dogs here -- we've seen professional dog walkers walking more than 10 dogs at a time.  Then they go let them loose in the park, where it just turns into a dog barking frenzy.  We've never seen anything like it, I swear I saw over 100 pooches at a park the other day. 

What else.....hm, my brain is dead, we're at work right now......more later!  Just wanted to send out a first update!

Buenos Aires, here we come!

Well, it's official! Mike and I have both officially been assigned to consular officer positions at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. We are very excited. Buenos Aires is an incredible city, and we're very lucky to have both been assigned there. In fact, it was nothing short of a miracle: we had been trying for months to be reassigned (my original assignment as some of you may recall, was Vienna). But in the end, the State Department was unable to assign us together.

I was a couple hours away from quitting when we got word that a position for me may have opened up. It turns out that someone else assigned to BA was no longer able to go, and I would be able to serve in that position. The job starts at the same time as Mike's, so we'll both arrive May 30th and work there for 2 years.

We view it as a complete miracle that we are both able to go to such a wonderful city when we were begging to get sent to much worse places (Juarez, Iraq) in order to get reassigned together. Also, now that I don't have to quit, I am eligible for "tenure" this year, which means I can take LWOP and could even quit and re-enter the service if I wanted, without starting the process from the beginning again. My not-having-to-quit also means we won't owe the Department a substantial amount of money to pay back my training, per diem, and leave. VERY lucky.

The prospect of having to quit much sooner than I had anticipated also made me realize we had no plan B for what I would do if I weren't working and we didn't have kids (or even if we did have kids, and I decided to take a break or quit). For weeks I couldn't come up with the answer to my own question: what am I interested in? What would I want to get a Masters in? And then, coincidentally the day I almost quit, I came up with what I thought was a pretty awesome plan (Mike thinks I had to come to terms with it all and come up with a plan B before the miracle could happen :).

I had been thinking about how much I had enjoyed the 5 months of German training I had received (for my Vienna assignment), and how fascinated I especially was with the grammar (finding common Latin roots between German and Spanish, noticing how Biblical or old English sentence structure is very similar to German,and shouting out things in class like "Is that a gerund?!). And I thought, perhaps, I would love to get a Masters in linguistics. And I think I will. I also had been looking that day into jobs for FS spouses in Buenos Aires, and I found opportunities to work at the international school there, or to get a TESOL certification and teach English as a second language. These were all options that I could do in combination or one at a time, short term or long term, on and off again, in any country in the world. It sounded fantastic (I was, after all, originally an elementary education major in college) and I was so convinced that's what I was supposed to do, I was a little baffled when a couple hours later, I got a call from the Department, asking me to please not quit.

Well, needless to say, when I got the call asking me to stay on as an officer, I said yes. After 6 months of long distance, which included an engagement, marriage, and getting ready to move to another country, Mike and I are just glad to be back together and to not be heavily indebted to the Department. What happened really was a miracle, we're convinced of that, just like us meeting in the first place was. I mean, meeting the love of my life in Venezuela, who'd have thought?

We're SUPER excited about BA, we have heard it is just a fabulous place to live, and I really enjoyed my visit there last year. Please come visit!