Martin & Hazel Frost

Signs that you might be becoming culturally adapted to Argentina;  You think it is your lucky day when there are only forty people in front of you at the bank (forty-one to be precise this morning). 

I preached on Sunday, continuing my meander around the “I am” statements in John.  It’ll be up under the sermons tab when I get round to putting it there.  I did “I am the gate” thinking about the start of Advent.  The summing up at the end conclusively demonstrated that the “summer-upper” had totally missed my point by a factor of a hundred and eighty degrees.  What ho!  We battle on. 

As soon as the service finished we hotfooted it out of the door and into our even hotter car to our rapidly-becoming spiritual second home of Miramar, complete with tent and related accoutrements.  We divided our time between the beach, the pool and the waterfront cafe.  We took a funny little 4×4 truck drive to see flamingos and black vultures.  I even managed to use the long lens that I brought back from the UK last year.  Next time I might even manage not to over-expose the images, and at least now I know where the vultures hang out, I’ve even got written instructions for future reference, so they’d better not move house without telling me. 

Danny dispensing baby-charm and blonde cuteness around the beach found himself set upon and photographed from all angles by a young girl who turned out to be working for the Miramar municipality to put together this year’s tourism website.  (It’s OK, no-one asks permission to take photographs here, that’s normal, we’re OK with that).  When the second young girl arrived, also armed with camera, the first one went into raptures about the toddler she’d been featuring.  “Oh I know that baby” said the second girl, “I took pictures of him for last year’s too!”  Sadly we’re not receiving any royalties for all this high quality photo material, but it’s nice to know that we aren’t the only ones who think our kids are fantastic. 

     

  

  I just finished knitting Danny a chunky hoody to take to the UK with us for Christmas, given that neither of my kids have ever experienced real sub-zero cold (I already made one for Joni a few months back which is still too big for him).  He though it was very funny.  Either he thinks I’ve taken leave of my senses bundling him up in a great woolly thing when it’s forty degrees outside at the moment, or possibly he just likes the idea of dressing up as the court jester.  Although of course he doesn’t need to dress up, he was made for the role.

Lucky I didn’t clear away those cobwebs then! 

This impressive beast has made herself at home behind the light switch in our washing area and is clearly doing a fine job at keeping our cockroach population under control.  Although actually we do need a few cockroaches because, strangely enough, they keep the scorpions at bay.  We have small scorpions “Alacranes” and they are occasionally fatal, but I’ve not yet seen one in our house.  So let that be a lesson to all you over-zealous house-wives out there; you need your spiders to keep the cockroaches down, and you need your cockroaches to protect your kids’ bare feet from the scorpions.  That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.  Hear the word of the Lord. 

This is me checking in with the world to report that I have nothing to report. 

The temperature has been around the forty degree mark most afternoons the last few days so it´s frankly astounding that I even have any brain left to do any reporting with, had I anything to report. 

Our car is going in for fixing yet again tomorrow, which is obviously not “news” in the sense of news being novel, different or unexpected.  We´re trying the posh dealership this time in the hope that paying through the nose might actually result in the car being fixed.  Its latest game is that moving in a slow queue or waiting at traffic lights causes the temperature gauge to rocket skywards.   Added to which, taking note of fuel consumption over the last little while reveals that our fuel consumption has actually doubled in the the last two years, (as has the price of fuel, so our unrepentant beast is actually costing 400% more to run today as it did a couple of years ago deep joy). 

Our power went off for sixteen hours yesterday.  We do have quite a lot of power cuts although mostly very short, and occasionally for a couple of hours, so a whole day without power is almost reportable news.  Which of course meant that the fridge defrosted itself, and we also didn’t have any water (water being pumped up from the underground mains pipe by means of an electric pump which every house has installed somewhere).  I could get along for quite a while without electricity but not having water lost its novelty value quite fast. 

The kids are fine, Martin´s writing stuff on the computer, the melon seeds that Joni and I planted the other day are coming through, my disabled kid is fine, my itinerant friend pops up every so often, the village “reimbursed” my petrol costs with counterfeit notes the other day (grrrr) and I didn’t realise till I tried to spend them the next day (double grrrr), there is no progress at all re recognising my qualifications although I’m finding imaginative new doors to bang on, and I did get paid an unexpectedly large some of money the other day for contributing frankly very little to someone else’s English class for in-service primary teachers. 

Here are a couple of photos that Joni and I took the other day while walking the dog. Seven thirty in the morning is the most hospitable time of the day at the moment;-

  

Hello world.  We’re back.  Thank you to everyone who was thinking and praying for us. 

The boys did great.  Martin says he would even be happy to repeat the experience at some stage, although probably not next week.  Danny enjoyed going to nursery so much that we´re thinking he might as well carry on going there until the summer holidays start in December.  Joni thoroughly enjoyed having Daddy’s undivided attention all morning, every morning, to the extent that at the moment he’s struggling with the readjustment of having to share with the rest of the family again. 

Meanwhile, I had a ball, starting with flying over the Andes which was a first for me.  This through-the-window shot doesn’t begin to do justice to it, but you get the idea;

   

I enjoyed the weekend in Temuco with our Latin Link friends, drinking coffee, chewing the fat, a spot of epic dog-walking, and the confirmation service and subsequent knees-up at the Anglican church.  All highly agreeable.  Followed by an uneventful journey up to Santiago on Monday morning for the conference of the Ecumenical Disability Advocacy Network. 

Only in Latin America could we organise a conference for a bunch of people with disabilities and not think to go check the location; with 24 hours to spare, it was discovered to be completely inaccessible.  But only in Latin America could we manage to resolve the situation, in a completely new setting, with all catering and electrics in place as though nothing had ever gone wrong, and still start more or less on time (delayed mainly by the Venezuelan airline which had managed to both lose and break the specialised wheelchair of one of the key delegates.  Ooops.  Luckily, so the Venezuelan contingent informed us, one of Chavez´s main achievements has been that the Venezuelan population know their rights to the extent that they are able to quote chapter and verse of the relevant statutes.  So off went the airline representative to organise the purchase of a replacement wheelchair.) 

It was probably the best of the three EDAN events I have been to so far, or maybe I’m just getting the hang of them now.  As with any event, the sessions ranged from interesting to less so, challenging to less so, and relevant to less so.  There were some emotional reunions with old friends; and isn’t it funny how you have to travel half way across the continent in order to catch up with people who only live a couple of hours from home.  And of course many others started the week as strangers and ended it as friends; like the Peruvian member of government proudly displaying her first guide-dog, and the Venezuelan representative of the International association of mouth and foot painting artists who I helped in and out of bed a few times. 

  

Wednesday was “International evening”.  I’m not a big fan of talent shows, particularly those which aren’t on TV and therefore don’t come with a handy volume control or off-switch.  But when the Argentinean contingent called me to come and sing their national folksongs, my heart leapt with a little pride; my adopted people have adopted me.  And we were great!  We sung a set of traditional numbers, including famous Tango “Caminito”, and the folky “El Arriero”.  (You can find a zillion interpretations of both on YouTube).  The chorus of El Arriero (the mule-driver) goes

“Las penas y las vaquitas,
Se van por la misma senda,
Las penas son de nosotros,
Las vaquitas son ajenas”…

The sorrows and the little cows both follow the same path; the sorrows are ours, the cows belong to others.  Which I think is just great, and a wonderful illustration of that British-Argentinean talent for listing our woes, followed by “it could be worse…”  And then just sometimes everything falls into place, and for this one week it seems that the cows might turn out to be ours after all. 

“But if God is invisible then people would keep bumping into him”.  Good point. 

“Mummy, we have to be civilised” Admittedly I was pretending to beat him with a ping pong bat at the time but I was more than justified:

I was knitting a puppet for someone else, and Joni decided he would like one too.  Make a monkey, he said.  So I knitted a monkey.  At around the 90% mark he said “don’t want a monkey, make a snake instead”.  Redesign the head a bit, line the mouth with red, improvise a forked tongue, sew a couple of red buttons on the eyes, and Bob’s your uncle, or possibly your snake.  It probably wouldn’t feature on the centre-fold of “Good Housekeeping”, but considering it started life as a monkey, I don’t think I’ve done too badly; 

 

This photo appeared in yesterday’s paper;

which made me realise that I maybe should have been a bit more impressed at having been granted private audiences in the personal offices of some of the figures depicted here.  I guess it’s like a foreigner in England running into George Osborne or something; no good reason to know who this person is or why anyone should be impressed by the encounter (if indeed they should).  We may therefore have reason to hope that having made it this far up the food-chain, my qualifications are at least being given the best possible chance of being recognised by somebody somewhere. 

We received a fine for having an unpaid tax on our car from September 2009.  According to my husband’s anal comprehensive filing system, we officially took ownership of our car in August 2009, and we have no record of having received any bills until the 2010 tax bill early in the new year.  So I took the stack along to the tax office this morning.  “Ah we probably wouldn’t have sent you a bill because your address wouldn’t have been in the system at the point where the bill was issued”.  So you’re fining us for a bill from three years ago that we were never sent and couldn’t have possibly known existed since this is a local tax?  “That’s right” she said, without a hint of irony.  I paid it.  What else could I do? 

Meanwhile I’m off to Chile in approximately seven hours time, and although I have the power to transform a monkey into a snake, my stuff appears not to have packed itself at my command.  And they say faith moves mountains. 

Bobby Fischer here we come…

Really we’re just at the stage of “the horsey is called a knight and it moves like this…”, but he’s enjoying himself very much, as well as making for an impressive looking photo. 

Hey we’re English, we’re supposed to talk about the weather.  And we’re not the only ones; from the national broadsheet to the local rag, a paper isn’t a paper in Argentina if it doesn’t contain at least an entire page analysing comparative temperature and rainfall from one province to the next.  It’s one of those points of connection between our diverse nations. 

So here is yesterday’s weather.  Up in the hills it hails golf-balls on a regular basis, but down in the city this little lot that came down last night was by far the biggest we’ve seen since we’ve been here;

 

It was pretty loud on those shutters, and luckily the car was safely away in the garage.  And Martin would like you all to know that he took his life in his hands venturing out onto the patio to collect this two-centimetre specimen for your appreciation. 

Mummy, did you make me a cake?

I did (thinks; lucky I knocked that out at one in the morning after we got back from Cordoba last night).

Has it got smarties on it?

It has.

And chocolate icing?

It does (phew, good guessing mummy).

——————————————————-

What would you like for lunch on your birthday?

Cauliflower!

OK, and what would you like with your cauliflower?

Cheese! 

And anything else?

Fishcakes!

 

That part was actually harder than it sounds; from being in plentiful abundance three days ago, it took a trawl through three greengrocers to track down some cauliflower which had also inexplicably tripled in price; either the cauliflower season has finished, or possibly someone’s field was flooded out by all the rain we’ve been having.  The fish shop was also closed, but luckily we discovered the posh butcher also does fishcakes so we were able to meet all his requirements.

He had a kite with a lion on it for his birthday, which had its maiden flight at Scouts in the afternoon to much delight (both his and the Scouts).  It also accompanied us to the plaza today, although the plaza turned out to be rather more complicated owing to the presence of too many trees, unlike the scrubby bit of waste-land behind the Scout railway-shed. 

We’re doing his party on Thursday, partly because the weekend already had too much stuff in it, and partly because it’s a bank holiday (yes, another one) so some people are away including the lady who owns the play-barn which he and his mates are going to trash uh enjoy for his party. 

And isn’t it amazing what 24 hours can do?  Joni’s been showing us all day how much more grown up he is, how much taller he is, how much faster he can run (obviously he grew half a metre overnight) and generally how much more impressed we should be with everything he can do now he’s five.  So naturally, we have also responded by giving him an opportunity to impress us with how much more quickly he can tidy his toys away, and how much less complaining he can do when we ask him to help clear the table… High fives all round, he’s a fantastic kid. 

… And I can tell you why.

You can splash around in duck feet.

You don’t have to keep them dry. 

(Dr Seuss I wish that I had duck feet 1965)

Duckfeet wouldn’t be a bad option around here right now, given that my current choices are between the wet footwear or the other wet footwear, and this has been the view from our dining room window for various parts of today;- 

… I wish I had a whale spout

A whale spout on my head!

… BUT…

My mother would not like it.

I know just what she would say:

“Not in the house!

You turn that off!

You take that spout away.”

Very little chance of turning it off while the rain continues, as indeed it does.  Our own spout is caused by the grass roots restricting the bottom of the guttering.  Note how the water flows directly into the road, it’s meant to do that, which partially explains why San Francisco disappears anytime it rains for more than twenty minutes.  And we should be grateful for small mercies since the deluge into the road does at least mean that most of the water on the roof is draining off in traditional manner rather than via the alternative route through the cracks in the office ceiling. 

Loveliest of trees the cherry now

is hung with bloom along the bough

From Dr Seuss to AE Housman I think caters for a fairly broad literally span.  Ok so this isn’t a cherry, and it isn’t white and it isn’t Easter.   But it is pretty, and it is the view looking the other way from our dining room window, and it even still has a cloud of blossom on it despite today’s rain: