Truly fantastic weekend despite non-stop rain, on an outing with Scout leaders team to visit the campsite where we’ll be taking the kids for summer camp. The site is great, the scenery fantastic, and the guy who manages it was really helpful too, well set up with information, and he didn’t even charge us for the overnight stay.
We did a couple of walks exploring the area, had a good barbecue in the evening, and some great spontaneous team-building discussion, which was like refreshing rain to my soul, and probably the most important thing that happened even though it wasn’t the bit that we had planned.
This week I have been twice to the town council chasing the letters and folders that we have been repeatedly submitting in order to try and secure a grant for our fencing. Yesterday we had the interesting experience of being told that there is no record of us ever having handed anything in, despite the fact that we have a heap of bits of paper with the official date-stamps on, which is what they return to you when you present something at the front desk. So now we’re trying a three-pronged approach, submit another copy at the front desk, go in through a side door through another contact we have managed to make, and also try and find out if there is any known reason why our stuff might be being “lost”. Politics here is complicated and I am reminded that I don’t understand it.
Yesterday I got a parking ticket for the first time. A couple of years ago they set up a metred parking scheme in the town centre. We normally avoid it by going by bike, or parking a couple of blocks away, but yesterday I parked in the wrong zone for half an hour and got myself a ticket. It was a fair cop, so I went to pay it without complaint like a good upright citizen. It cost me eight pesos. To put this into context, a kilo of bread costs 15, our monthly electricity bill around 300, and a packet of chewing gum six. The real punishment was having to stand in the predictably long line in order to pay the thing; especially since the electricity went down and the computers went off when I was two people from the front. I’m not advocating a major price hike in this land of much inflation, but maybe enough to pay the utility bills would at least keep the queue moving.