I Spy.....

OK, so in this top box I found......candy wrappers?  I have no idea why I saved those.  I must have had a reason though.  A couple of Christmas ornaments I painted.  I used to paint anything I could get my hands on: last week I found a ceramic fish (circa 1992), whale, and wolf that I had painted as well, and about 40 painted sea shells.  My rock collection was also a huge find (I only painted a couple of those though).  We used to go panning for gem's at Panner's Creek growing up in North Carolina.  I had fool's gold, little garnets, obsidian, pumice, quartz, amethyst, and who knows what else.  I LOVED going panning.

I Spy #2: POGS.  Did any of you collect POGS?  I had that little orange container FULL of them!  But I still don't understand how we played with them or won them.  I just knew they were cool to have.  We also have here an eagle that balances on your finger, a snake made out of beads, a yo-yo (which yes, I could actually make work), a little penguin floating in a bubble, a penny collection (only from the 80's on though), a tiny flower pot, some Asian fans, a mini etch-a-sketch and simon says game, a "prayer rock" that I painted like a puppy, a troll (loved those trolls!), a Tamagachi (remember those!?  You had to keep your little electronic pet alive!), and of course another of my painting projects, my initials!

....and a thing for every place....

One of my favorite sayings is "a place for everything, and a thing for every place."  I am SUCH a sentimental and nostalgic person, that it is extremely hard for me to get rid of things.  However, getting married, receiving many wonderful wedding presents, and moving to an apartment half the size of each of our apartments in Caracas means some things have got to go.  Mike loves sorting and consolidating, so every time we get rid of something, he feels happy, but I feel sad.  Poor guy, every time he holds something up and says "can this go?" I get all teary-eyed and say "but I got that when I was 12 at such and such a place and such and such a time!"  It's been exhausting for both of us.  But such is life in the Foreign Service.  Moving every two years means you can't hold on to every little thing.  And anyway, as my mom always says, "people are more important than things," and Mike's the most important thing in my life now.  Just gotta make sure I pack him up with me each time I move from this point on :)

Luckily, we are about done sorting and donating/tossing, and it feels so nice to be settled into our own apartment, and everything has a place.  To help ease the pain of getting rid of some things, I took some pictures of some of the memories I uncovered and thought I'd blog about them so they're not lost forever! 

I think this will probably be a series of blog posts (there are a lot of pictures), so thanks in advance for indulging me in this bit of sentimentality/memory recording.

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!