Cooking, Cleaning and Keeping Cool

We left home two weeks ago today.  It feels more like two months ago.

The unscheduled days drift into a timeless miasma of sweating, pool trips, food prep and consumption, and water/food procurement. We keep checking our computer to remember what day of the week it is, and how long we’ve been here. It’s like a typical chapter in the Phantom Tollbooth (if anyone remember that kid’s book from the 70’s). Writing blog posts and picking photos for them can fill up hours of a day!

We are all homesick.  Except that, that idea is more complicated for James. Though, two days ago, during another long afternoon, he blurted out, “Let’s go to our house in the United States.”

It seems that the point of our days in Barranquilla has been: waiting.  Waiting and trying not to spend very much money because we were told that an adoption in Barranquilla would take up to eight weeks -and our expenses are averaging over $100/day.  Someone asked us, “What strange foods have you eaten?” Almost none, since Carina’s done most of the cooking. 

Old Sparky

Our hotel room is like a little two-bedroom apartment.  On the right is a picture of our little kitchen (fridge not shown).  We are pretty sure the stove is from the early 1960s (like the entire hotel).  Only two of the three burners work, and the ones that do work tend to shock you as you cook.  Keeps you “on your toes”….or better yet, “in your shoes.”

Someone else asked if we had been out to see anything interesting.  Well, no. Not really.  Not due to budget constraints as much as our heat intolerance.  Daytime it is suffocating.  90+° and 90+% humidity.  Night time it can drop to 79°. We hole up in our little air conditioned apartment and ‘survive’ with toy cars, art projects, journals and card games.  We do try to go out once a day, but often it is just to the grocery store.  Last Thursday, Carina found an excellent bookstore and scored some Usborne books in Spanish and other Spanish language first grade curriculum books for James.

In order to make sense of our days, we made a calendar to mark the days as they go by, and we created a schedule for the kids.  

James and Sam Sam race in the kiddie pool.

The big highlight of every day is swimming in the pool.  The pool opens at 8am, and the kids are always ready to go well before 8:00. (James, darn him, gets up with the sun…6am). They swim for one to two hours, and again around 4pm for another one to two hours.  An unexpected benefit of this adoption is the swimming improvement we are seeing. 

Check out James' cute little socks
next to Victor's on the far left!

A not-so-exciting part of the day is the daily laundry…. hand-washed in the bathroom sink and hung off our balcony to dry. 

On Wednesday, the 31^st, we received some unexpected and very happy news.  
Our adoption court hearing will take place near Bogota, rather than in Barranquilla. This change will shorten our time in Baranquilla by weeks!  Woo—hoo! We are more than ready to get out of the blasted heat here.  And getting home a month earlier sounds wonderful.

We must show up in Bogota by this Monday, so we took advantage of the remaining few days to visit a cute beach town called Santa Marta, about 2 hours northeast. 

Colombia won 2-0.
James Rodriguez got the 1st goal.

Well, it would be 2 hours, except we left on the afternoon that Colombia played Venezuela in a big soccer game (World Cup Playoff Game) - in Barranquilla. … We had to pass by the very stadium where the game was held…. Along with a crawling, honking herd of taxi’s, buses, cars and freight trucks. We passed the stadium a half hour before game time. Thousands of people in Colombian yellow jerseys, filled the plaza around the stadium. All this made traffic crazy, and our trip took four hours instead of two.  Our driver took some kind of evil delight in tailgating everyone, finding bumps and potholes, swerving past whoever was in front of him even if that meant playing chicken with oncoming traffic, and slamming on his brakes at irregular but frequent intervals… Kinda of like the brake pedal was an avant garde improvisational jazz instrument.  Poor little James could not take it.  He threw up about 3 hours into the drive. Quite the volume he spewed all over himself.   Good thing those yellow soccer jerseys are for sale real cheap all over town.

Speaking of spewing, we promise to “come up with” just how “vacationy” Santa Marta is on our next blog post.

Waiting for the bus to Santa Marta on game day.