Buenos Aires, Argentina

I haven't had a moment to write in front of a computer, although I have been jotting in a journal ...sometimes old fashioned is the best way to do things. When I have been on the computer it has been to keep in touch at home and then only for moments at a time, to get email out then run. I guess that's just how I am when I travel...I don't take a lot of time out. Then, like last night, I will just collapse in exhaustion and sleep for 12 straight hours, and feel better the next morning.

And now I'm in Buenos Aires. I already did Iguazu Falls...incredible, even at 5X below normal with the drought currently felt here. I now await E's return to the departamento y ya...a ver la ciudad. It is actually really hard to sit and write this in English as I haven't operated in hardly any English at all since last Tuesday, and nothing I've experienced has been in English. My journal isn't in English. But I'll get it all out somehow, maybe just as captions to the photos...which won't be published until after I get back next week.

But I am still alive and enjoying my vacation very much. I've had a lot of good, necessary, reviving Time. It's been good for me. Hope not to have to wait 6 more years for another one...but maybe not such a big trip next time. However, I have a feeling MQE may not let me leave again!!!! He's going to be so ready to go back to work and take "vacation" from the kids come Monday...pobrecito.

Paracas, Peru

I made it...I am officially on vacation!

I think it definitely hit in the airport yesterday morning. I was the only gringa there for a while and got to talk to all the salvadoreños, and we had a wonderful time in the terminal awaiting the plane. Then the trip into El Salvador was absolutely breathtaking. The volcanic chain over which we flew was beautiful, everything was emerald green with recent rains and the volcanic lakes I saw were huge. As I sat in a cafe enjoying a grilled chicken salad in the San Salvador airport, I was watching Japanese anime on TV. I couldn't hear the dubbed cartoons in Spanish due to all the airport noise, but with Spanish all around me I was sitting there reading the Japanese characters on the TV...one of those times when my worlds just kind of collided...and in El Salvador, of all places on Earth.

The flight to Costa Rica was only an hour, and the flight to Lima seemed endless. But I finally arrived, and I got some dinner and got down to Paracas, a small fishing village on the coast about 3 hours south of Lima on the Panamericana Sur highway. Today I took it easy. I went to the beach--private beach but definitely not a pretty beach--took pictures of heron and pelicans and wrote and journaled and did some sudoku and watched fishing boats going out to gather their catch and sat by myself...not that there was anyone else there anyway. It was wonderful. I have just had lunch and am going to take it easy, go over to the malecón for a while, where artesanias are also sold and have a look around.

And I will try to check in tomorrow afternoon from the city of Ica! Hasta entonces...

stuck

It's funny...I have a burning desire to write. While I am out gardening, which I did for 7 straight hours yesterday and am now paying dearly for 5 straight hours of what were essentially squats...I can hardly move!...anyway, the words flood to my mind and I feel inundated with a myriad of images and words and language and it feels so cathartic and I cannot wait to get to my computer and get it all out. But of course, after appeasing the children and finishing chores and cleaning myself up, by the time the computer time comes everything has escaped me and I feel completely lost in a world in which I thought I had found at least some semblance of self-expression. Perhaps I am a pencil-and-paper girl. Perhaps I'll have writing time on vacation (right...). But the yearning, the burning, it is there, and I should run with it--if only I didn't have so darned much else to do. I am still trying to figure out how I would make it all balance had I continued on the PhD/academic track and thus HAD to write for my career. Pretty much all I know who have that life also have nannies to help with the children, housekeepers to help with the house, are DINKS or live by themselves. It would be impossible for me to live that kind of life. Not only for the lack of financial means, but for the fact that I cannot have somebody else in my house cleaning up my messes, raising my children and basically making me feel like I cannot run my own life. Somebody recently told me that we American women are "jodidas"...screwed...in all that we are socialized to believe that we have to be able to do. This is a mindset that, in me, has been instilled since childhood and is unshakeable. I was once approached by a Bolivian woman who, in complete innocence, asked if there was anything she could do at my home in order to earn a little extra money for herself. I know she meant nothing by the question, but I felt offended and insulted, that it appeared that I couldn't handle my own responsibilities.

Whew!!! So where did all this come from? Boy, Pandora's Box has been opened. I guess I have a lot bottled up and I need to let it escape somehow.

patience???

What was it I was just typing about patience?

Oh, yeah--that I seemed to have more of it in the wake of our beach trip.

Well, well, well...the more I seem to have, the more it seems my children, namely my son, find the need to try.

So almost exactly at the same time I was blogging the virtues of vacation, my lovely son had moved the little red chair from our garden room into the kitchen (two connected rooms) as he has seen Big Sister do oh so many times, find a Panda Bear cup, and stuck it under the filtered water dispenser of our refridgerator.

Where it stayed.

When I got upstairs to check on dinner I was stunned--to say the least--to see the entire kitchen floor covered in about 1/16 inch of water or so, as well as half of the garden room. As I frantically scanned the ceiling for The Probable Leak in our half-a**ed house, my eyes caught sight of the light illuminating my answer on the freezer door.

Every single towel in our house was thus called into involuntary active duty sop. Nobody had better be wanting a shower tonight.

It is only with the help of a BIG glass of Merlot that I have come to see the humor of this situation.

So...how many days again until my vacation??? SEVEN....AND COUNTING!!! (Do you hear me, New Zealand?!)

quality time

We just returned from an Independence Day weekend trip to the beach. Our friends R&S's parents have a house out there on the canals, and we went as one of three families and had an absolutely wonderful, relaxing time...sometimes surprisingly relaxing considering we did NOT get to leave the children home (!) but they are now of the age that they can play together relatively well. As P mentioned a couple days ago, these are the kinds of trips that these kids will remember.

Although I did not get to take the kayak out in the early morning nor go for a nice long walk by myself on the beach, I still found the time away from our physical home quite rejuvenating. My patience level is higher today and the children seem much more relaxed and willing to spend time doing something other than hanging all over me in the summer heat--or at least to a lesser degree!

The most stressful part of the trip was, of course, the drive but I chose to leave both days early in the morning, thus missing the holiday traffic on both ends. For our first road trip following the accident, things went pretty smoothly and our new car drove wonderfully.

I leave in a week on my personal vacation and am now practically counting the hours. If I feel this good after a weekend, I can only imagine how filled with new life I will be following 11 days! Maybe it will be noticeable enough for MQE to send me away EVERY summer for a week! (jajajajaja!)