(Reproachfully…) “Mummy, you didn’t say Wow. You have to watch me and then you have to say Wow!” That was on the climbing frame in the plaza the other day. Now I’m trying to teaching him to ride his “big boys bike” (with stabilizers) which we acquired second hand from a neighbour. It’s too big for him, but he’s been asking for one for a while, and by the time he’s stopped being in excited awe of it, it’ll probably be about the right size.
There’s probably loads to write about, but mostly I think things are chugging along as normal…
The project in Quebracho Herrado has mostly fallen apart, as the person we’re supposed to be working in partnership with has a heavy schedule of giving workshops on the importance of working in partnership. Actually the project hasn’t completely died, but we just made a decision to stop renting our room. I expect it probably will die, but I’m planning on plodding on with it for a bit longer, and given that I wasn’t fully in agreement that we needed to rent a room in the first place, one might say that the project is now at the point which I would have started from except that it’s taken us three years to get here.
I’ve spent too many hours trying to resolve a conflict with Pay Pal, which is probably a waste of time since they’re far to big to care. Their problem is that my bank is located in the UK, while the residential address attached to my account is in Argentina, and their set up doesn’t allow for people’s details to straddle more than one country. Ironically my bank themselves have never had a problem with this and I can’t believe that out of Pay Pal’s 250 million account holders (which you get to read about a lot of times if you spent the hours on their website that I have this week) I would be the only one. But I’m guessing that most of those 250 million are in the USA which is a big country with a large population of whom only 17% have a passport. Whatever the socio-geographical explanation might be, the fact remains that Pay Pal manages to be a humongous corporation operating across the world and yet having all the multi-national awareness of a 17th century cow herd, which is quite an achievement particularly in the banking sector. At least their guy in my latest phone call had the honesty to admit that probably the only solution was going to involve either moving house or changing my bank. Their final move was to email me a questionnaire asking how likely I would be to recommend Pay Pal to my friends. I answered it.
Friday night we held a peña to raise money for the Scouts. Peñas are Argentina’s answer to a ceilidh; folk music, dancing and alcohol; good clean(ish) raucous fun. We served up locro; tradtional stew with a basis of maize, pumpkin/squash, and an assortment of bits of dead animal. The best ones are boiled for several hours in a metal dustbin on a wood fire in someone’s back yard (in our case around the back of the barn) for a wonderfully tasty winter brew. The carousing and cavorting goes on into the night and we crawled home in the wee small hours (4 o’clock). Sadly Danny seems to share Joni’s opinion that the day should swing smartly into action in the morning no matter what time you went to bed, so sure enough one appeared at seven, and the other at seven-thirty. It’s been flippin freezing here (literally) this weekend but we’ve done the round of Scouts, prison, church some bike-riding on the patio, and Gonzalo did a fine parillada (BBQ’d organs and innards, it sounds gross in English) for lunch today. And tomorrow’s Monday again.