We live in a big house where we’re treated to delicious meals. Ila gets to feed a dog, watch TV with her uncle, eat cookies almost daily and call half the basement her playroom. We have access to a sweet little New York apartment smack dab in the middle of our old haunts. We have babysitters who not only want to take care of Ila, they do it for free. We get to hang around with my family (most everyone anyway) for hours at a time without the pressure of imminent departure. And, everyone’s been getting along really well. On top of that, our travel plans have finally come together.
We’re leaving on January 23rd for Buenos Aires where we’ll spend about a week before we head down to Bariloche in the Patagonian lake district. In Bariloche we’re signed on with a language school that’s also, amazingly, helping us find childcare and a place to live. My friend Liz called yesterday to give me the good news that she’ll be passing through Bariloche at least twice during our stay. So we’ll even have visitors! We expect to spend a couple of months there with a side trip or two. Our plan after that is not firm, but I’m hoping we’ll head over to Chile for a while, then back to Argentina to spend some time in some of the northern towns.
Other than that, with so much time on our hands, we’ve actually been, what you might call “relaxing.” I’m not much familiar with this concept, so I’m not certain, but whatever it is, it feels nice. My sister called yesterday and asked what we’d been up to and I was hard pressed to come up with any activities that had actually produced a tangible result of some kind. It took me a day to realize that I’m actually proud of this fact.
The warm weather has us visiting some of the many amazing parks nearby. Saturday we walked around Pepsi Headquarters, a ten-acre complex of gardens and huge sculptures open to the public. On Sunday, Tod’s Point, a Greenwich park on the Long Island Sound, was packed with families, dogs and folks merrily chatting about global warming while tossing dry Christmas trees and wreaths on a pile for the wood chipper. The wildlife also has spring fever. Much to the delight of a resident hawk, small birds are out in huge numbers in the backyard, along with Disneyesque squirrels slowed by their overstuffed bellies and winter fluff.
We spent New Year’s weekend in New York City with my sister and her family. Among other awesome New Yorky things, Peter, Ila and I visited the Natural History Museum and checked out the cool dinosaur fossils and the living butterfly exhibit. A day or two in the City and I want to move there. I know we'd have to live in a dark basement studio and sell our souls back to the Man, but, we'd be New Yorkers! It's hard not to get caught back up in the feeling that any place else is just crap. Of course, you also drop ten bucks on tea and a cookie. And mostly the happy looking people are tourists, heiresses or people with rent-controlled apartments. But it’s fun to think about.
Christmas was the usual. Overdone despite all of our promises to the contrary. I think my favorite illustration of my personal struggle with Christmas was the fact that I gave my brother-in-law an economics book about “Life after Capitalism” but missed watching him open it because I was greedily digging into my own shamefully large pile of gifts. Gotta love it.
Much love all!
Stand up Ila
New Friends
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