There's no water!

On Tuesday morning I turned on the news to find out that 40 % of the neighborhoods of Montevideo had been affected by a main water pipe rupturing and were without water.

However, I was able to take a shower that morning so I thought that my building had not been affected but by the time I got home I was also one of the hundreds of thousands without water. Can you imagine it? I mean, not only did I have to walk around without taking a shower for about two days and could not flush my toilet but businesses had to close and emergency water had to be pumped into the tank supplies of hospitals!

A few things I learned:

Unplug the water heater--it could explode because it lacks water to heat up.

Washing your hair with cold, bottled water---not worth it, if you want to do it then heat the water up first

Wash your dishes every night---I could have had a lot less dirty dishes lieing around the house if I had done them before the water disappeared.

The New Zealand Group

I love my job, it's a lot of work but I love it. Right now I am working over 55 hours a week, 8am-10:00 pm, Monday-Thursday and on Fridays I come into plan lessons. But I don't mind all the work because I have so much fun and I learn as well. Of course, by the end of the week I am physically exhausted from creating activities, being energetic for each class as well as consistently translating for students. Sometimes I literally feel like a human Spanish/English dictionary as all day I hear, "how do you say avestruz in english?" "how do you say estoy agotada" or I hear the students talk in Spanish to eachother and I translate what they are saying and get them to use the English that I have just translated rather than the Spanish. For example, they will say "Me toca a mi!!" and I will say, "You mean you want to say, it's my turn" and try to get them to say that phrase, "it's my turn" rather than the what they have just said in Spanish.

I am teaching so much this month because there is a group of Uruguayan students who will be traveling to New Zealand in April and need a month of intensive English training before leaving. They are such a fun group! The boys hardly speak a lick of English and the two girls in the group are at an intermediate level. I have the boys for 2 hours of conversation class but how do you talk with someone who hardls speaks the language? So we end up playing games or I find creative ways to get them talking using the little that they know, and somehow, every class period we end up laughing so hard. The other day I was laughing so hard that tears began to fall down my face! Yesterday was wonderful as well because the weather is so nice right now that we decided to have class outside! The picture I've put up was taken in one of the bigger classrooms at the institute and is where I usually teach. I'm in the front surrounded by 7 of the 8 New Zealand kids and the other teacher who is also working with them is also in the picture, he's the tall, thin guy in the back, he's Irish and it's a blast listening to his accent!

Proof I cooked!

Learning to cook Uruguayan style!

I haven't posted in a while because I was hoping to put up some photos of the vacation I took with Adrián and his family to the beautiful beaches of Rocha. However, his older brother hasn't sent me the photos I want yet so that post will have to come later. So, rather than put off blogging any longer I thought I'd share about my weekend cooking Uruguayan foods with Adrián. We were up until 4am last weekend cooking 3 types of delicious empanadas and a vegetable tarta (a type of casserole--you mix a bunch of ingredients together and usually pour it over a thin or thick crust).

The three different types of fillings we chose for the empanadas were: ham with oregano and cheese; tomato with basil and cheese; and sautéed onions with green olives and cheese. The vegetable tarta was made with a homemade wheat crust, then sautéed onions were thrown in, cheese, spinach, corn, tomatoes, and a few other ingredients to help it cook well and stick together.

Since there was leftover whole wheat crust makings, Adrián decided to put all the extra empanada fillings together to make a second tarta! It actually turned out even more delicious then the first! And at 4:00 am in the morning we enjoyed our homemade, nutritious dinner! Of course we did feed our hungry bellies before that because we ate a massive box of sweet popcorn (my favorite!) at the movie we went to earlier that night.

It's finished!

Last year reconstruction began on the citadel gate, a monument that represents what use to be a large defense system that protected the city of Montevideo. I was able to catch a glimpse of it just before they covered it up with a cloth and doomed it to Montevideo's infamously slow reconstruction process.

However, yesterday I went to lunch with one of my very good Uruguayan friends in the old city and to my surprise, after more than a year of reconstruction, you can finally see this precious monument!