November, December, and half of January

OK, we have to cover a lot in this post, so I'm going for bullet points:

• We spent November and December trying to ensure we have checked everything off our "Argentina" list (we'll finish up there May 1st).  
• We finally found a Thai restaurant that surpassed Mike's expectations (the curry was so hot, he was sweating and tearing up, PERFECT).
• We went to the botanical gardens down the street from our apartment (sometimes it's easier to get to know Patagonia than your own backyard).  The highlight of the gardens was the Mate bush section.
• We ate some great seafood at the Fisherman's Club restaurant, El Muelle, right on the Rio de la Plata.
• We had Mike's cousin, his wife, and little boy with us for Thanksgiving.  Thank goodness they handled the turkey, it turned out amazing.  I made my Dad's sweet potato casserole (I actually don't know if it's like how Dad does it, I just know that neither of us use a recipe).  I also made my Mom's homemade rolls.  
• It was fun seeing the sights with our cousins -- we revisted Recoleta Cemetery where Evita is buried, and ate some of our favorite Argentine foods (namely pizza, empanadas, and ice cream :)
• We headed to the U.S. at the end of December, and had a great Christmas with Mike's family in Rocky Point, Mexico (on the Sea of Cortez).  
• Our nieces handled Christmas like champs -- sharing toys (the coveted one was a plastic Disney Cars key chain that made noise), making us laugh, painting my face, and eating more vegetables than I think I've ever eaten in one sitting.  The youngest took a real liking to Mike, jumping on his lap whenever he sat down in the living room, and gabbing away at him. 
• Mike grilled up some Choripan for everyone to try (chorizo sausage on a nice toasted bun with chimichurri sauce).
• Mike's parents know how much we like Mexican food, and gave us ample opportunities to get our fill (LOVE the fish tacos down there).
• We also spent some time in Phoenix, saw some friends and family, and Mike surprised me with a visit to the botanical gardens with a fantastic Christmas light display, and tickets to the Phoenix Boys Choir concert (my favorite part was when Mike said, "That guy has been in the alumni choir since I was in the boys choir!).
• Our next stop was VA, to see my family.  
• We had Christmas round two (which worked out, because Kristi missed round one, as she was sick).
• We went to see the lights at the LDS Temple Visitor's Center, and got to see the new display with Mike's Grandpa's architectural model from when he was designing the temple back in the 70's. 
• We relaxed, got our fill of Taco Bell and other American specialties, and Mike headed back to Argentina and to work.
• Since then.....
• It has been freezing in VA (or below freezing).
• Mike has been melting in Argentina (heat indices well above 100F)
• We've been checking things off our getting-ready-for-baby list!

As you can see from the above list, we have been very busy.  My lack of blogging really stems more from that than from not feeling well.  I have had some issues with low blood pressure and poor circulation, and getting out and moving and doing things has helped (as well as yoga and the Atkins diet, weirdly enough).  I am 4 weeks from my due date, and still feeling great.  I do understand why women complain about feeling big, though I tend to forget that I am until I run into something (sorry, baby).  

PINK!

Well, we're having a girl!  February 10th is still our date, and the plan is for me to have the baby near my parents in the DC area.  Sorry for the lack of blogging, my mom says people will think I've been on bed rest, but to the contrary -- we have been so busy because I feel so great!

In other PINK news, I recently did a women's 5K here in Buenos Aires.  I'm really glad my friend Megan decided to come along and walk with me, because the other 12,000 motivated ladies left us in the dust!  It was really fun to get to know the racing culture here in Argentina.  My Grandpa Epps has run dozens of marathons, and I tried to stick to his rules as best I could (which meant I stuck out a little bit :)  I did NOT wear the race shirt until after I finished the race, but I only saw one or two other girls who didn't wear theirs.  At least I wore pink, I was afraid they were going to kick me out.

Speaking of getting kicked out, let me tell you a little about being pregnant in Argentina.  When we went to pick up our race packets a few days before, I was terrified they weren't going to let me participate in the race because I was pregnant.  There were all these notices on the website about how each runner had to bring a doctor's certification etc etc.  So, when we were standing in line, I tried to wrap my sweater around myself and hunch over so they wouldn't notice my belly.  Ha, yeah right.  They spotted me, and immediately moved me to the front of the line.

Being pregnant here has taken some getting used to -- the Argentines are very forceful about "You shouldn't be standing/You shouldn't be carrying that/You shouldn't be bending over."  I get yelled at several times a week for something I'm doing wrong.  I was waiting in line at the airport once, and an entire family behind me started pushing me towards the front of the line, "Pregnant women NEVER wait in line!" I tried to explain them that I couldn't go to the front of the line because I was waiting for my husband to buy me a bottle of water, but they just kept whispering to themselves about how pregnant women should never have to wait in line.  It was kind of funny.  I also got yelled at on the city bus when I got on by myself and stood by the front for a few minutes because all the seats were full (the bus was completely packed).  That time I cried, the scolding always surprises me, and I'm so shy about parading myself around like "Give me priority, I AM PREGNANT!" especially when I'm feeling so good.

Megan hosted a baby shower for me this past weekend, and it was so much fun!  Another friend Tanya helped out, and they really went above and beyond.  Salmon mousse on cucumbers and pink and purple macaroons, fun games and good company.  One of the ladies made a diaper cake (see below) with little finger puppets on top, which I love (and will use!).  Thanks for reading, more later!

Baby and Bariloche!

Well, the big news first -- Mike and I are expecting a baby in February!  I'm about 15 weeks along now, feeling great now that the first trimester is done.  I highly recommend spending your first trimester working in Mexico where no one knows that you don't usually go to bed at 8:30 every night, and where you can stay in a hotel and don't have to cook anything or deal with kitchen smells making you nauseous. And though I was glad Mike didn't have to suffer my continual moaning and complaining (amazing how you don't complain when there's no one to complain to!), I sure did miss him.  Due to a bureaucratic technicality, he couldn't come visit me in Mexico after all, so he went straight to the US to hang out with my family a couple days before I got there.  We loved spending time with them, and loved celebrating the big news with lots of hugs and smiles.

Although I'll likely give birth in the US near my family, in the meantime we are having the unique experience of going to all our pre-natal medical appointments in another country.  We are really lucky to have a great embassy doctor who meets with us before and after our local obstetrician appointments to make sure we aren't completely lost.  Although we could technically speak English to the doctors at our local appointments, the staff speaks Spanish and the doctors tend to slip into Spanish too.  The real miscommunications happen I think because of a cultural gap -- they're not really sure what to say to us because we're foreigners and we're not really sure what to ask (since it's our first time).

For example, at our first ultrasound appointment, the doctors were so focused on one particular measurement (which is actually the purpose of that whole appointment, come to find out later), that we had to shout out things like "Um, is there a heartbeat!?"  "Of course there is!"  Then they'd say something like "Good grief, I wish the baby would put those hands down."  "Oh, he has hands!?"

At the end I asked if the baby had legs, and the answer was affirmative.  So far so good :)  All my test results have come back normal so far.

Right around 6-7 weeks, we took a trip to a beautiful part of Argentina called Bariloche.  Mike made reservations for us at the finest lodge in the area (see below).  Unfortunately, I wanted to spend most of our time curled up in bed at the hotel room.  I was able to muster enough energy to check out the town, try the local chocolate and fondue (they go for the Swiss Alps experience there), take a tram up the mountain to have hot chocolate in a rotating restaurant with panoramic views, and I learned from Mike how to walk in the snow (missionaries in Siberia have to learn that first thing, dig your heels in the ice so you don't slip and break your back).  Thanks to Mike's patience and great planning, the trip turned out really well.  Absolutely breathtaking views.

Hello from Mexico!

Hola amigos!  I decided I needed to blog because I love reading all of y'all's blogs SO much, that when you don't post, I go crazy.  I really do, no sarcasm in the ethernet here.  Yet I'm usually even MORE guilty of never posting, so here you go.

I am on a month-long assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, doing tourist visa interviews as they're a few officers short.  Mike is busy running the American Citizen Services section in BA, so he couldn't come with -- he'll join me for a few days at the end.  I'm not sure he's going to enjoy it.  He's going to want to see the sights, and I'm going to want to show him all the dorky little things I've been doing for a month, like walking around the mall next door eating frozen yogurt and watching awesome 90's music videos at the take-out sushi place while I wait for my order. Though I DO think he'll let me take him to my favorite tiny hole-in-the-wall lunch place for tacos, pan de elote, and horchata. 

Now you've got me talking about Mike -- I really love working in the same office as him because when I get any little case that I find interesting, I can tell him all about it.  Or, if I see some cool clouds outside or something, I can show him (I don't think I've actually done this, I'm just trying to think of examples).  You know, the little things.  I probably drive him crazy.  But now that I talk to him just once a day, I can't cram in all the little things I've been thinking to tell him all day (I had this problem when we were doing long distance back a couple years ago).  Our conversations now go like this:

Mike: "Well?"
Me:  "I had at least 40 things to tell you and now I can't remember any of them."
Mike: "OK......."


I have told him how beautiful Monterrey is and how great the food is.  Though that almost goes without saying; I'm in MEXICO. 

And here is a random picture I took to prove I've been here.  More later.

Ruins and Wetlands!

Hi everyone, I'm back!  So, in April I got to take a trip to Utah to be present for my brother's college graduation!  It was great to see family (I had 5 cousins and cousin-in-laws graduate too, and between their parents and my aunts and uncles already in UT, I got to see so many relatives!).  It was also great to stomp around my old stomping grounds with my parents, see my sister's apartment, and especially to watch my brother graduate knowing how hard he's worked! 

Misiones and Esteros de Ibera

Well, this blog entry is to tell you a little about a less-well-known Argentina destination: the wetlands. (Check out the link to our pictures above).
We combined the trip with a little hop over the Paraguayan border to see 2 abandoned Jesuit missions.  If you've ever seen the movie The Mission, this was it!  The Jesuits built several missions in this area (Posadas, Argentina and Encarnacion, Paraguay) in the 1700's.  They taught the gospel to the locals, but the locals taught them too.  On the walls of the ruins, you can see a fascinating mixture of indigenous and Catholic motifs (our guides called it "mestizo" art).  In the 1760's, the Jesuits were expelled from this area.  The Spanish and Portuguese governments perceived them as a political threat (and felt they were harboring the natives, who they wanted to enslave).  The papacy also apparently thought that they were getting too sympathetic with the natives.  Now all that is left are the beautiful churches and homes built to teach and shelter the Guarani natives (and a province of Argentina called "Misiones").

We then headed southeast to Corrientes province to see the second largest wetlands in the world, the esteros de ibera.  Incredible.  We went on two boat rides through the wetlands and one "night walk."  We saw howler monkey parents and baby, armadillos, capybaras (which are much bigger than you would think, and they BARK!), some kind of large chinchilla, caimanes (smaller than alligators), 20 baby caimanes with their mom, a black, white, and red stork (that eats baby caimanes, though we didn't catch him in action), egrets, herons, chajas (really loud, scruffy grey birds), kingfishers, hawks, vultures, swallows, butterflies, lightning bugs, cardinals, woodpeckers, marsh deer, smaller deer, bats, and.......lots more animals I can't remember.

A couple trip highlights (besides the incredible safari-ing):

The Paraguayan border official took awhile trying to figure out our passports and visas (don't get a lot of gringos there), but when he finally did and stamped our passports, he gave us a thumbs up!  Then, 2 hours later as we were leaving Paraguay, he ran around to the other side of the street to tell the exit immigration official what to do, and gave another thumbs up!

Quotes from our taxi driver that took us to Paraguay:  "Brazilians retire at 40 and don't give their money to their kids; they buy Harleys."

"Oooooh, Paraguay."  when the signs to the ruins weren't there anymore.

"The reason they make their food spicy in Mexico is because they're poor, and your body stops wanting food after eating something spicy."  (They don't really like spicy food here, and we didn't try to convince him that Mexicans can eat A LOT of spicy food without a problem, and so can we :)

My Small Tribute

I am writing this blog post for two reasons: 1) I want my family and friends in the U.S. to know how much we value our work and how much we value each other and 2) I want my "Caracas Crew" to know how much I've been thinking of all of you.  Looking at pictures and remembering good times with Anne brings back so many memories of spending time with all of you.  You were my family in Caracas; it was my first time living overseas, and you all were the best friends I could have asked for.  I hope in telling a few of my memories, you all will say "Oh yeah, that reminds me of when....." and have more memories of your own to treasure.  They're just little things, but they mean a lot to me.

I volunteered through the embassy to sponsor a new officer arriving at post.  They assigned me to sponsor Anne.  I sent her an e-mail, and we friended each other on Facebook.  I had just added some pictures of a recent trip to Angel Falls, and she was so excited to get there and see the country.  I remember seeing on Facebook that she had graduated in 2005.  I couldn't believe it, she was my little brother's age!  I was really worried that I was going to have to keep a constant eye on her and watch out for her, in such a dangerous city (yeah, because I was so much older, 24 :).  But I was amazed at her maturity when we finally met.  She just really had her act together.  I offered to get a ticket to the Marine Ball for her before she came, so she could go with the rest of us.  Not only did she go, but she somehow got a gorgeous ball gown down to Caracas before the rest of her stuff arrived.  She spent several months in the Tamanaco hotel, waiting for her housing assignment, and finally she moved into my building!  I remember running into her in the garage in the mornings or after work, and she always had her great aviator glasses on, driving her gray Pontiac.  

The rest of my memories are at work, house parties, and birthday dinners.  I remember seeing her catch a ride in the evenings to play soccer.  It sounds not-as-significant after reading it in the news so many times, but I will repeat it because it is true: she always had a smile and something funny to say to me, she always made me feel welcome, like I was one of her closest friends even though we had just met.  For the next year and a half, I knew I could call my neighbor Anne anytime if I needed something.  At work (where there was plenty of tough work to go around) she never shied away from it.  And for those of us who were exhausted by all the hard work we were putting in, and were thinking about how we needed a break, she was signing up to go to Afghanistan.  Anne didn't join the Foreign Service to live in nice apartments and serve in cushy assignments.  She came to work.  And since she wasn't able to finish her work, I will try (and I know each of us will) every day to make a little bit more of a difference in what I do.  Put in a little more effort, give a few more smiles.  Mike said it best when he wrote on her Facebook page: "Anne -- We all know how excited you were to do work that would change the world. Know that you changed us all for the better."

Ushuaia and Calafate

Hi everyone! We took a 5-day trip this weekend to southern Patagonia. Our first stop was the city of Ushuaia in the province of Tierra del Fuego. Ushuaia is considered the southernmost city in the world, and has a population of 56,000. It is the gateway to Antarctica, and a very important port for ships going there, or cruise ships going around Cape Horn.

We are heading into fall here in the Southern Hemisphere, and while highs in BA are probably in the 80's, temperatures in Ushuaia have been in the 40's (not including the ever present windchill. Glad we came in the summer!

Our first day in town we took a boat tour of the Beagle Channel. The Beagle Channel was one of the three navigable passages between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (before the Panama Canal came along in 1914, these were your only options). The Strait of Magellan lies just to the north, and the Drake Passage to the south (pretty much the open water between South America and Antarctica, very treacherous). It was named after the HMS Beagle, which explored it and the surrounding waters in the late 1820's, and which had a young amateur naturalist on board named Charles Darwin. We observed some natural activity ourselves: Sea lions sunning themselves on the rocks and blue-eyed cormorants trying to keep seagulls from eating their eggs.

The next day's activity was visiting Tierra del Fuego National Park, Picture 1 (the southernmost national park in the world! Gotta love that new adjective: "Southernmost"). The park is mostly sub-polar forest, and has (surprisingly to me) hardly any pine trees. Instead, there are three types of deciduous beeches that grow there. It was raining during most of our 3-hour trek through the forest, but we were by ourselves almost the entire time, and we kept thinking we were going to run into Tolkein elves or dwarves around every corner.

Well, we did run into something...Mike shouts "Hey! I think that's a wolf!" It was a HUGE Andean fox, at least 25 pounds, and it walked right in front of Mike with a catch in its mouth (looking quite pleased with itself, really). It was kind of crazy, luckily it just kept walking by, not even stopping to stare at us (though Mike said he was definitely looking at him).

The next day we caught a flight an hour north to El Calafate, a city like Ushuaia that runs off of tourism, but much smaller -- only 18,000 residents (warmer temperatures though, in the 50's and 60's). They didn't even have an airport until 2001, and have only really started developing since then. El Chalten to the north (a jumping-off point for Mt. Fitz Roy hikers) wasn't even a city till 1980's. It is the newest city in all of Argentina.

Our Calafate tour guide pointed out that when people hear "Patagonia," they picture ice and glaciers, when in fact 95% of Patagonia is actually a very arid steppe, with no trees and hardly any water. And -- Patagonia is a huge swath of land, filling the latitude equivalent between Boston and the Labrador Strait. Maybe a bit more.

But don't worry, we saw the glaciers! I tried to get a picture of the steppe too, Picture 4, but every time we drive though it I fall asleep, so the "arid" picture you see below has way too much water and too many green bushes.

The "mother glacier" that feeds the glacier we saw (and dozens of others) is actually called an ice shield, and forms in the mountains. Picture 2 and 3 below are of the Perito Moreno glacier. As the glacier grows at the base of the mountain (snow and rain collect and compact), the ice is pushed forward and on the end crashes into the lake. We actually saw several pieces of the glacier crash into the lake during our 2 hours there, which shocked me; that glacier really is moving! Since the glacier is continually breaking off, but regrowing in the mountains from the snow, it hasn't really seen effects of global warming, as do other glaciers around the world. But we took lots of pictures just in case.

The snow and ice in the glacier is under so much pressure, that the air bubbles are squeezed out, and pure, clear ice remains. All the other colors at the red end of the spectrum are absorbed, and we are left with a deep blue/purple (which doesn't show up on film nearly as incredibly as it did in real life!).

Speaking of (if you've actually read this WHOLE thing)......who's coming to visit? Southern Patagonia is only a few hours' flight from BA, and there are activities for all ages and skill levels! From riding in a boat to hiking one of the most difficult mountains in this hemisphere! Come on down! But probably wait until next "summer." I don't fancy my chances down here in July.