Dec 29: Shopping

Today was definitely a shopping day. For the first time we walked all the way to downtown with the kids. Ariana did pretty good, and even Ciara walked further than usual. The big ticket item was a new stove. Unfortunately they will not be delivering it until later this week or early next. While we were downtown we even took the liberty of buying a couple small ice cream cups for the kids to enjoy. Today was also a cash withdrawal day so we also stopped at a bank machine. We always find this a little nerve racking because it means we then walk around with quite a bit of money on us. Today was a bit more stressful because our usual bank machine, which is in a private room, was too busy to use and we had to make do with one in plain site. I think it would be pretty obvious to someone watching that we are withdrawing cash even though we try to make it discrete. We have no specific reason to be concerned as those who live here have not had any trouble, but we still want to be cautious.

While waiting for our taxi ride home we met another motto-concho driver who speaks excellent English. It’s funny here that many people will cary multiple cellphones, but they may not know the phone number for any of them. The driver spent a good minute trying to recall his phone number for us, and he couldn’t look it up because he wasn’t evan carrying the phone.

It is worth mentioning another local custom we found out about last night. At about 12:30am (during the night) we were woke up to the sound of a group of people yelling, shouting, singing, and banging on drums. This is hardly worth mentioning anymore, except for the cause. It turns out that this was a fundraiser! We don’t know what for, but it works like this: the group will go around to different homes, make a little noise and then sing some songs to entice the person to donate some money. We have to wonder if their timing could be improved a little. Add that to the list of things you shouldn’t try at home…

Picking flowers "to sell"

Caught!

Nicole won’t let me end this post without sharing another language blunder from yesterday. I was explaining to our neighbor how I had patched our leaking roof with soap and used the phrase “con sopa” for “with soap”. Unfortunately, although sopa may sound like soap, it isn’t. I had actually said I fixed our leaking roof with soup. Understandably he was confused!