And here we are in San Francisco. Our furniture arrived here last Saturday, and we came across on Monday. The two day delay was a good move; the young people from the church here came in over the weekend and put our furniture together before we arrived! At the moment we are pretty much camping out in the house as we are still waiting for hot water, and gas, and a cooker, and phone-line, and internet. Yesterday we had our first asado (BBQ) with fourteen of us round the table. This afternoon one of our neighbours helped us to connect some more electric light fittings, so now we have light almost throughout the house. At the moment we are in the house of another of the neighbours, piggy backing on their Wifi system.
Our cooker should be arriving on Wednesday. Most of it is already in San Francisco, but we managed to leave the top part – i.e. the useful bit with the gas-rings – behind in Cordoba. That would have been OK, because I was going to Cordoba anyway on Saturday to teach a seminar, so I arranged that someone would bring it from the house where we had stored it on the other side of the city, to another house nearer the church, so I could collect it after the seminar. So, when the class finished, we went to the house and rang the door bell. First there was no answer, so we rang again. After a while, the youngest (teenage) son came out and opened the door, wearing his underwear and a towel. As he came to the gate, the door slammed shut behind him. In the manner of normal teenage males, he knew nothing about our cooker, nor the location of his parents, nor how he was going to get back into the house without a key. We tried to phone mother’s mobile, but it wasn’t being answered, so we loaded him into the car complete with towel, and trundled back to the church. Here we found someone who had his sister’s mobile number, so they phoned her, and thus found out that his mother was at this moment on her way back to the house. So we went back to the house. Sure enough female parent arrived, and informed us that the cooker had in fact not been brought across from its original location, and we would have to go and collect it. So we set off again across the city. On arrival, we found the house apparently occupied, except that there was no answer at the door. So we mounted an unsuccessful piece of research to try and make contact with the occupants. Two hours later, we gave up on the attempt, it being ten-thirty at night and the kid wailing on the back seat, and the increasing thunder and lightening indicating dramatic storm approaching; and set off back for San Francisco sans cooker. A fairly “direct” phone call from Martin extracted a promise that it will be brought without fail to San Francisco by the people coming to the church meeting on Wednesday.