Christmas in Santa Fe

I just spent my frist Christmas away from home...and I'd say it went pretty well. Sunday after church Mario and I came home and after 2 weeks of asking me every day if he could open them, we finally opened all the gifts from my family. Later that day we drove to Mario's brother's house a couple of hours away and had a great Christmas Eve dinner with Mario's parents, Paco, Alicia, Pilar, and Alicia's dad and stepmom. The dinner that Alicia prepared all by hand and then just stored in the fridge at a local caterer was delicious!
At midnight we toasted and watched all the fireworks set off by various neighbors, then went inside just as it started to rain and opened gifts.
Christmas day we had lunch with Mario's extended family in Santa Fe, then headed to the POOL! The Smart sisters will be pleased to hear that Mario has so taken to diving sticks that we have not one, but TWO sets of sticks, which we play with at the same time. Mario, Paco and I played until we drew blood.... great times. Here Pilar lines them up to throw for us.

Happy Hour at the Mall!

I discovered a new dimension of frantic holiday shopping last week in the form of "Happy Hour" (actually what they call it) at the local mall. This is how it works. Starting at 10 pm, they make announcements over a loud speaker calling out "Store X is offering 20% discounts, you have 5 minutes to get your tickets." In which case anyone wanting to purchase RUNS to this store to get a special ticket from a guy in a clown costume standing out front. Then, with this ticket, customers have the rest of the night to make a purchase with 20% off. Every 20 minutes or so they make another announcement with discounts between 10 and 30 percent off. This starts on the last shopping night before Christmas, and goes from 10 pm until 3 am!!!

We went by the mall to go to the movies with some friends, and although I had long finished all my Christmas shopping, the shopping spirit in me was rather antsy at missing out on possible discounts and jumping to join the frenzy. But alas I restrained myself (or Mario restrained me, I'm not sure which) and we headed to the theater...

The night before, we headed to the river and hung out on the beach all night chatting and drinking maté.

Torture or Train??

Clearly I'm making up for no posts for a month here... but just wanted to post this picture of Mario being trained on a new machine to help neurological patients learn how to walk. The clinic he works at just bought it and a special trainer came from Switzerland to teach Mario and three others how to use it.

It's quite a contraption with straps and harnesses and computerized everything, and I think it's a rather flattering photo... :)

Una Casa de Navidad

With a couple of strands of garland and my beloved advent box being all I brought from my previous life in the way of Christmas decorations, I was essentially starting from scratch this year. And I will just briefly say that, as with almost every other category, shopping for Christmas decorations is NOT what it is in the USA...and once again I am filled with envy of my friend Linsey in Peru and her diplomatic pouch...

As many who know me are aware, I have wonderful childhood memories and thus very strong feelings tied to having a live, transported-on-the-top-of-your-car, drops-pine-needles-all-over-the-house, wonderful smelling Christmas tree. However, that does not exist here in Argentina, so I was reduced to searching for an acceptable false replacement. Mario's first comment was "We don't need a tree, we can share my parent's tree." That was the point at which I stopped even commenting on Christmas decorations to him. I have a most wonderful, loving husband and I adore him more than I can describe, but sometimes I think "he just doesn't GET me!"

But after much searching, I did in fact find a tree that was taller than 3 feet, with more than 4 branches, and some acceptable decorations for it, and I bought some felt and made some stocking, and we are now feeling very festive here in our house.

Our Top 10 for 2006

It's been quite an eventful year for us, so we're posting our top 10 for those who want to skip the details and just catch the highlights.

10
Much to the joy of our parents, we were married in Argentina in April and had an absolutely fabulous celebration with our family and friends.
9
We took a fantastic trip to the US and visited lots of friends while touring San Francisco, New York, Washington DC and attending my sister’s wedding in Arizona.
8
Eight months after the initial decision to buy – we moved into our new house! (But don’t worry, there’s still work to be done!)
7
We were assigned to help a small branch of our church in Funes, about 20 minutes from home, where we met our great new friends, the Azcuy’s.
6
Mario has so impressed the coach of his new tennis classes that he is begging him to begin tournaments.
5
Adrianne started tennis classes, reconfirmed that her horrible performance in college tennis class was not a fluke, and stopped attending.
4
Mario discovered the joy of purchasing via the internet and we now spend many a night searching CircuitCity.com, amazon.com, amongst others.
3
Going on six months without one, we have discovered it IS possible to live without a telephone – but at long last we did get internet at home.
2
We were released from our assignment in Funes and Mario was called as Bishop of our church ward in Rosario.
1
We discovered that something as easy and cheap as a home pregnancy test can change your life forever – and now anxiously await the arrival of a little Argentine-American next June!

We truly have been very blessed this year, and we want to wish all of our wonderful family and friends a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful 2007. And remember Argentina in your travels plans - we LOVE visitors!

P is for Papyrus

A few days ago... actually I guess it was more like 2 weeks ago but I'm just now getting around to updating this... we had fun and relaxing Saturday which started with a trip to the local nursery. I am highly motivated/jealous of Emy and Drew's amazing yard, so I figured we could at least spruce up our 8' x 8' patio... Mario swears I drug him from plant to plant for over 3 hours but the truth is that we visited 4 different places, purchased plants, pots, compot and bark, went out to eat lunch and were home in 2.5 hours. And let the record stand that I offered to go alone, but he wasn't quite comfortable with that either!

At any rate, we ended up with two Papyrus trees that are very fun and have a certain Dr. Seuss quality that I love. When I told the woman working there I was looking for something tall and kind of thin she looked at Mario and then smiled at me - I think she detected a pattern in my life - and then showed us the few options that fit the bill.

I still have some arranging to do - get bigger pots and some kid of stand for my herb plants and not sure what to do with the table, but you see the beginnings.


After our outing to the nursery, we went with our friends Leandro and Jasmin to visit the monument to the Argentine flag that is in Rosario. I've been around the bottom of the monument often (we even took wedding fotos there) but had never been to the top or to the museum. It was a bit cold but we had fun all the same. Here are some pics of the city from the top as well as one truly terrible one of all three of us. Mario might get fired as photographer...

"This kind of storm doesn't have a name..."

That's what our neighbor told me yesterday afternoon after we were pelted with hail the size of golf balls for 45 minutes. It was really pretty amazing. I can say that because we were incredibly lucky (and live in a ground floor abode with someone above us and no south facing windows and our car safely in the garage) and we had no damage. But most of the city has broken windows on houses, building and cars. Mario's parents have an aluminum roof over their patio and it has HOLES in it from the hail flying through! That is some serious hail. The streets are also littered with branches, leaves, and one block over an entire tree blew over- roots lifted out of the gound and everything.

I just realized I'm a dork and forgot the cable to down load the pictures from my camera so will do that later so you can appreciate our stormy city.

I decided that white stuff falling from the sky was as close to my typical Christmas weather as I'm gong to get so went home and turned on the Christmas music...

The sidewalk in front of our house.

Mario uses his mouth to demonstrate the size of the hail. This is an hour or so after it had fallen, and that mouth is not small!

Our neighbor Pancho's house. The hail broke his wooden shutters and the windows behind them!

Our friend Marcelo got out of his car to take pictures and got nailed by one...

Friends and Floods

We've had a good last couple of weeks here. First, I have two new friends who are Americans adapting to the south out of love for a boy... Stephanie and Claudio got married last Friday and Chelsea and Alvaro are young and in love. They all came over to eat Mexican food and participate in the marvel that is two completely different conversations in two different languages going on simultaneously. It was great fun, and we managed to find such treats as cilantro, limes and avacados to make it somewhat authentic...

Mario pulled out all the stops trying to make my first married birthday a good one... including tickets to the opera. Here you can see a little bit of what a beautiful theater we have here.

Then, last Thursday we had essentially flash floods here in Rosario. I could not believe the amount of rain that fell in such a short time. We have an enclosed patio and at 4 in the morning we just sat there staring as the drain could no longer handle the amount of water and the patio started to fill. Luckily, the rain stopped about 15 minutes later and we didn't have any damage, but I am now motivated to flood-proof our home and get insurance! Below is a shot of the street in front of our house that literally became a river. It's hard to see, but the water filled the entire street and was up onthe sidewalks. You can see a white bottle floating by. About 2 hours after it stopped raining and there was hardly a puddle left, but there was so much in such a short amount of time it just couldn't drain quickly enough.

More House...

One day I was having particularly pointless fights with the phone company trying to get our phone hooked up (which btw we STILL don't have) and Mario bought me an old door to cheer me up. Such a great husband I have!!! I actually really wanted to door and we made it into a headboard that he claims is too tall but we have yet to locate an electric cutting device so for now it stays as is.

An acquaintance of ours came over a couple of days after I finished the headboard, walks into the bedroom and says "oh, I don't like that at all." I was SOOO bugged. The one time she came to our apartment she told me she didn't like the painting I bought in France which is now in the entry way. What's with people thinking honesty is always the best policy??


So here are the before and afters of the bedroom, you can see both ends of the BIG closet we installed that I love. Also you can see the window that had at least 100 coats of paint on that we stripped. SO MUCH MORE WORK than we thought... And I'm really happy with the wall color, but after I got it all painted I realized it doesn't quite match the blanket at the end of the bed, and Mario responded "REPLACE the blanket, we're not repainting again!!" So looks like the blanket has to go.

Home Sweet Home

After almost 8 months, we finally moved into the little house we bought that was "ready to live in, but we just want a few updates"... so many times I thought of that old movie "The Money Pitt" with the Cheers people (Of course I can't remember their names - Shelly Long and Sam, maybe??). I'm adding the before pictures along with the "current" (don't want to say after b/c it's definitely stil a work in progress) so you can appreciate it more!

Above is the entry way with the fantastic blown glass 1950's light Mario's mom bought us. I love the design it makes on the walls when it's on. Obviously the front door still needs to be painted...

Here's the dining area - we knocked out the window and expanded into sliding glass doors. Made such a HUGE improvement...

Obviously we've still got a few walls to paint and definitely a lot of decorating to do, but I can't tell you how great it is to finally be living there! I'm slowly making curtains, buying furniture, hanging things on the walls, but it's taking me time to find things I like that are affordable. I'm consistently amazed at how outrageously expensive things are. You never realize how much free trade impacts you until you're trying to outfit a house in a country with protective import taxes on everything. More pics to come.

------

Last Saturday was the baptism of Mario's nephew Santiago so all the family came to Rosario for the weekend for the baptism and party. Tio Mario's house turned out to be pretty popular with the boys (and I'm sure the PlayStation had NOTHING to do with that!) and there was only mild confustion with the youngest ones discovering I also lived in tio Mario's house...(how strange!) As always, we had a great time together and it was over too soon.

Here's Mario playing with the kids in the inflatable castle we rented...

The Mundial

Our life has pretty much been revolving around the Mundial - or The World Soccer Cup. Mario schedules his work around the games. General Motors cancelled the English class I taught that intereferred with a game, buses and taxis don't run during game time... serious business. But the excitement is kind of fun too. Lots of celebrating over goals, and now very sad that Argentina lost in double over-time penalty kicks last Friday. But no worries, we're still watching the games, and unfortunately, listening to the constant news commentary on them!

Hoping the Honeymoon Never Ends...

Mario and I finally returned to Rosario yesterday. We had a great trip full of friends, fun, and reminders that the US has dumb things like broken subways and dishonest taxis, just like Argentina! We spent 5 days in San Francisco going to Jeremy Andrus' wedding, visiting with Jeff & Paige, walking across teh Golden Gate Bridge, touring Alcatraz, driving down the coast to Monterey & carmel, and all kinds of fun stuff. From there we went to New York for a very short 2 days where we had just enough time to complete a double decker bus tour and go to Century 21! We then headed to Washington DC for three days where we spent some great time with the Degn's and Lesofski's, had a little party for Mario to visit all my friends, and did some sightseeing. We then finally made it down to Arizona for Lindsay's wedding and a lot of pool time - about the only thing you can do in that heat. Lindsay was a beautiful bride and we had a great time with everyone.

Now we're back to daily life, but hoping to get this blog up and running (under the inspiration of Holly) to keep everybody updated!