Cinco Meses Sur De La Frontera

Now We're All Infected

2009-04-04T07:11:00.000-03:00

By Louise

When I was a sophomore at university, I needed to escape my five, suddenly insane, sorority-pledging roommates. Rather than take the easy route and switch dorms, for some reason unbeknownst to me, I signed up for a study-abroad program in London. Six months later, I returned home a different person. I had seen a whole new world; none of the pettiness mattered anymore, I had discovered that more important things, such as Indian curry and pints of beer, existed. I had been bitten—quite severely—by the travel bug. Infected, I knew in my heart there was no hope for recovery. I would forever crave the excitement, the unknown, the unexpected challenges one faces when visiting a place for the first time.

My infection lay dormant for a short while. I knew it would return when the circumstances were right; I could feel it in my blood. And then I met Andrew. He was highly contagious. Feverish, in fact, and I was immediately re-infected. The next thing I knew I was making tea out of the back of an old Land Rover in the middle of the Zairian jungle. Since then, we’ve both suffered numerous outbreaks. After each episode, we would return home happy, yet wondering when the next fever would hit.

Without even realizing it, Andrew and I found ourselves planning for this latest trip. We would pull the kids from school and travel for five months. The rest, as you all know, is documented on this blog. Now, 12 hours before we board a plane home, I sit here wondering what we have done to our children. We pulled them away from all that was familiar, we tried to make them speak a foreign language, we fed them rodents and insects. Will they be all right? Will they be able to return to life as they knew it, or will they be constantly wondering when the fever will return?

10 Things We're Really Glad We Did

2009-04-04T04:20:00.002-03:00

By Louise

1. Buenos Aires. Love this city.
2. Patagonia: glaciers, mountains, whales, and half a million penguins.
3. Dancing until 3am on New Year’s Eve.
4. Ecuador.
5. Zip lining it over a gorge: Louise defying her fear of heights.
6. Going on a night hike in the Cuyabano rainforest in the Amazon basin.
7. Eating cuy asado (roasted guinea pig), lemon ants, and termites.
8. Seeing boulders fly down Volcan Arenal in Costa Rica.
9. Spotting a pair of bare-necked umbrella birds.
10. Changing our itinerary to come to South Africa and spend time with Malcolm.

Contest! Penguin Challenge!

2009-03-27T04:51:00.010-03:00

Take the Penguin Challenge!

Can you tell the difference between the
Argentine and South African penguins?
Look carefully. Which is which?
Post your answers below.

Penguin A

Yes, I know I'm cute.

Penguin B

Hey, outta my way fish face!

Visit South Africa

2009-03-27T04:50:00.007-03:00

By Graham

If you like the idea of swimming with penguins, hiking mountainsides, surfing, and trying new foods, then Cape Town is the place for you.

Cape Town is a large city at the southern tip of Africa. It is surrounded by mountains and is right on the water. Some mountains give you a look down at the city of Cape Town and the ocean, such as Table Mountain. Table Mountain looms over Cape Town. It is the biggest mountain around Cape Town. It is great to hike Table Mountain.

Make sure to come in the summer only. The summer in South Africa is at the winter of America.
If you want to learn how to surf, Muizenburg Beach is a good place to do so. It is easy to learn how, because the waves are small, fast, and will carry you a long way. Along Muizenburg’s beach edge are numerous surf shops, where you can rent a surfboard, or have surfing lessons.

Swimming with penguins is also a great experience. There is a colony of them at Boulder’s Beach. On the path down to the beach, they are all around you. They paddle through the water and rest on the rocks. The penguins look like short people.

You can drive 1 hour to the wine country, where there are acres and acres of vines. They grow up the mountainsides and along the roads like endless sheets of green.

If you like the idea of doing all of that, why don’t you? All you have to do is order plane tickets.

I Am a Mountain

2009-03-27T04:49:00.005-03:00

Me

As Told To Katharine

I am a mountain, my rocky cliffs are covered in huge boulders. Dassies run on me, lizards scitter all around me, hikers hike on me. Geese soar through the sky like planes above me. I have beautiful sights to see. I can see pine forests, cars whizzing past on the roads, towns busy with restaurants, people hiking on my rocky trail, animals sitting on my big rocks, and other mountains. I can also see four other mountains Elephant's Eye, Lion's Head, Devil's Peak, and Steenberg. On the other side I can see the Atlantic Ocean.

Bathroom Humor?

2009-03-16T12:36:00.005-03:00

La-tee-da, I'm a Hadeda!

2009-03-16T12:32:00.006-03:00

Me

As told to Katharine

I am a hadeda, hopping along the golf course and sticking my long thin beak into the soft dirt that is filled with brown grubs. The pretty blue sky above me is filled with big puffy clouds. Every yard owns pools, trees, flowers, and the thing I hate most of all . . . CARS!!!

Yesterday my friend and I were walking across the road when all of a sudden the pool doctor came zooming up behind us and knocked my friend Bob off his feet. I don’t think the pool doctor knows how to stop.

I have decided to go for a fly. First I stand up on my tippy toes and flap my wings so I lift. Once I am high up in the sky I will fly to the top of the mountain. The mountain is pretty with its rocky ridges and plants. I fly to the top of the mountain waiting for the hot sun to change to the white moon.

Bob, just before the pool doctor got him.

Change We Don't Want to Believe In

2009-03-13T12:35:00.004-02:00

By Louise

Many years ago, my older brother and I were walking around the town where we grew up. We headed to a local bar that neither of us had visited for years. Pushing open the door, I immediately noticed that the place had changed. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was disappointed. “See, you can never go back,” my brother said. At the time, his comment struck me as incredibly pessimistic. I had returned to many places, from New York to California to South Africa, and loved each subsequent visit.

Four years ago, we took the kids to the Osa Peninsula, a remote spit of land on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, near Panama. It was a magical two weeks. We rented a home built of bamboo; it was essentially a two-story tree house. At night, bats flew through the kitchen, hoping to sample uncovered fruit. Mornings, we woke to the sounds of howler monkeys as they moved through the trees outside our bedroom windows. We swung from hammocks as scarlet macaws cracked open fruits from the trees that circled the house. Walking a few yards in one direction took us to the beach. The opposite direction put us in the middle of the jungle, with its butterflies, birds, lizards, and monkeys.

The road leading to our house was atrocious. The closest town was miles away. We didn't have access to a car, only a taxi that had to be ordered (along with our groceries) by radio. We felt remote. Alone. Special. The experience made such an impression we vowed to return when the children were older.

While planning for this trip, we were excited to end our travels in Costa Rica again. With images of our previous trip burned in our memory, we decided to spend two months exploring the country. We planned science lessons around volcanoes, rainforests, tropical fish, and coral reefs. Because we had been there before, we decided not to return to the Osa Peninsula.

When we arrived in Costa Rica we were surprised. The Pacific coast, even the southern Nicoya Peninsula, was too developed for our taste. The northern plains around Volcan Arenal were wonderful, but, if I’m honest, it felt like Adventure Disney. Too many Americans and Europeans. Too many zip lines, resort hotels, and tour operators. Whereas in Ecuador we had felt like travelers, here we were just more tourists. I probably shouldn’t even pass judgment on Costa Rica’s Caribbean Coast. Terrible floods in December and January meant that the beaches were covered in dead trees, the water was polluted, and there was trash everywhere. Around Cahuita, swollen rivers had turned the ocean brown, killing our dream of snorkeling over the area’s coral reefs. And what of our plan to learn Spanish in five months? With English practically the first language in Costa Rica, the plan was swirling straight down el baño.

We were mulling over our situation—during our 10th consecutive day of rain and overcast skies—when Andrew received an email from his mother in Cape Town. His father, Malcolm, had suffered another in a series of small strokes. Over the past year Malcolm’s memory and speech had been on a decline, but the latest stroke had seriously affected his ability to care for himself. Pat, who is Malcolm’s sole caretaker, sounded a bit overwhelmed. We weren’t expected back in Virginia for another month, so there was no doubt in our minds about our next move. Three days later we were on a plane heading to Cape Town. Everything happened so quickly that the flight and our first few days here felt surreal. One minute we’re wondering how we got it so wrong in Costa Rica and the next we were seeing how Malcolm’s health has gone so wrong in Cape Town.

Our decision to cut our trip short was the right thing to do. Cape Town continues to be a wonderful place, but things have changed. While the city, flanked by beautiful mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, will always hold a special place in my mind, the most important thing about it—our family connection—has changed forever. My brother was right. I hate that.

Inflight Movements

2009-03-13T06:44:00.007-02:00

By Graham

I broke out in a sweat. Bleegh...! My mouth filled with the airline's disgusting meal of chicken in cheese sauce.

We were on a flight heading from Atlanta to Dakar, Senegal. It had been smooth flying up until the pilot exclaimed we would be hitting major turbulence. Groans escaped from people all over the plane, including me. What is going to happen to me? Will I vomit or not? When we hit the turbulence, the plane shook. It felt as if an elephant had just rammed into us. Every time we bounced up, my stomach dropped. I felt like a soda being shaken up. Up, down, left, right, we were flung.

I started searching for vomit bags, but there were none. Luckily, my mom had saved some of the plastic bags from the blankets we received. She hurled them at me, and I hurled into them. She called a steward to bring more plastic bags. When we got out of the turbulence, the bags weighed as much as a melon. When we touched down I still felt sick. But since I had vomited up all my food, I could not vomit any more.

Riding the Waves a Quick How To

2009-03-03T20:31:00.004-02:00

By Graham

1. Wax three quarters of the board starting at the tail. The more wax you add the easier it is to grip on with your feet.

2. When paddling out on your stomach, make sure you are centered on your board. Let your feet hang over the tail and do the crawl with your arms.

3. If a big wave breaks right before you, push down on the front of the board and dive under it.

4. When you see a good looking wave make sure it is not going to curve over and fall on you. Turn your board and start paddling about three seconds before the wave reaches you.

5. Have your arms under your chest in a push up position.

6. When the wave has caught you, push up with your hands and bring in your legs so you are standing. Make sure to have your knees bent, and ride it in.

7. If you fall off your board be sure you do not bump your head on the under side of it. Also, if your board is further out to sea than you are, pull in before a wave knocks it at you.

25 Ways To Annoy Your Parents

2009-03-01T21:41:00.003-02:00

By Graham

1. Repeat the same sentence again and again. Really, repeat the same sentence again and again. Repeat the same sentence again and again.

2. If you have sibling annoy them so much that you annoy your parents too.

3. During the night, when everyone is sleeping, take your mom’s best tube of lipstick and draw a mustache or goatee on her face.

4. Walk around your house creating a big racket. Stomping on a second floor is best.

5. Sing in your worst high-pitched voice.

6. Fake laugh at anything your parents say.

7. Fart.

8. Fart some more.

9. Make gagging noises and pretend to throw up.

10. Rock on your chair.

11. Talk so fast that your parents can’t understand you. When they try to speak, talk even faster.

12. Interrupt a conversation with an occasional, What? Who? When? Where?

13. Walk around the house saying, “Vat eeez up my leetle friend?” With a bad French accent.

14. Poke your sibling in the stomach repeatedly.

15. Repeat every word your parents say.

16. Talk about disgusting things during dinner.

17. Talk about disgusting things all the time.

18. When you ask a question never wait for the answer, just ask another question.

19. Pay no attention to your sibling for a whole day.

20. Jump on the beds screaming, “Hallelujah!”

21. Do your loudest burp in your dad’s ear.

22. Ignore everything your parents say and then whine when you can’t have what you want.

23. When the moon is full act crazy. Go around the house moaning and speaking in a blood-thirsty tone.

24. Drop your dirty clothes on the floor and leave them there.

25. Every once in a while throw up your hands and say, “I Love Myself!”

Warning: Use these methods at your own risk. I don’t want to get in trouble.

Monkey in My Face

2009-03-01T21:38:00.002-02:00

By Louise

Dios mios! Cielos! My family has turned into a bunch of whiners. They’re all complaining that they are doing all the writing and I haven’t done anything. If I weren’t stuck with them for the next month... The reality is, I can’t keep up with Andrew’s humor and our kids’ stories. I’m not sure what to write about, plus I’m feeling a tad grumpy.

See, we knew our luck had to run out at some point. Yet the loss of our travel kharma still managed to take us by surprise and has left us all feeling a bit irritated. What happened? This last house we rented was way off from the owner’s description. Before you all start muttering that we’re a bunch of idiots to believe any online rental offer, let me just state that this was not our first rental. It was our tenth and our first dud.

Still, I know some of you are thinking: Why even consider renting in the first place? To put it simply: Kids, convenience, cost.

Before Graham burst onto the scene, we promised ourselves that kids would not stop us from traveling. We’re also realistic and knew that the way we traveled would have to change. No more staying in those, ah, character-building places (to use Andrew’s words). Moving around a lot wasn’t going to happen either. Eating out every meal? Sounds like fun with a toddler in tow. Not. And of course, there was our budget. Can you spell T-I-G-H-T?

So, starting a decade ago, we started renting vacation houses and apartments online. It meant taking a leap of faith and trusting the photos and write-ups. Lo and behold, every single place we rented was just as pictured, until this one.

Last month, northern Costa Rica was shaken by an earthquake. Downed trees and other debris made the Rio Sarapiqui and Rio San Juan un-navigable. Coincidentally, these were the same two rivers we had planned to explore for a week using local riverboat taxis. The boats were no longer running. We needed a Plan B, so we turned to our favorite Internet rental agencies for help.

We had recently spent a week on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, but we felt that the area was too built up and expensive. We could have spent another week in the area around volcano Arenal—we had a lot of fun there—but it was also beyond our budget. Instead, we decided to head to the Caribbean coast, where we had already rented a house on the beach for our last month. With high season in top gear, most of the rentals were booked, but then we happened upon a place called Mono En La Cara. It promised everything from a fully equipped kitchen to Internet service. The online description said they even had satellite TV and a DVD/CD player. We really haven’t missed TV, so that was no big deal, but it did lead us to believe that the house with ocean views in the middle of a tropical paradise was going to be of a certain quality. We emailed the owners (who live in Allentown, PA) and they responded. They sounded nice, so we made the arrangements.

A couple of days later, we boarded a bus to Puerto Viejo, on Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean coast, close to Panama. I should mention here that a few travelers, including some Costa Ricans, told us we might want to rethink spending five weeks on the Caribbean coast. Their warnings began: “Oh, the Caribbean coast… You don’t want to go there. The water is rough. The place is filthy. Snorkeling? Ha! You won’t see any fish because the reef is dead. It’s like going to Jamaica…” It went on and on. Their comments struck us as strange because all our earlier research suggested just the opposite. We’re laid-back travelers, not tourists, as the kids will tell you, so we pushed these warnings aside. We had our sights set on kicking back in a tropical house while listening to Caribbean sounds as we cooked up coconut curries and drank rum cocktails.

We boarded the bus and headed toward the coast. Arriving on the coast at Limon, the warnings turned to reality. Just 70 miles from our destination, garbage started appearing along the road. Intense rains had caused flooding in some areas and the rivers flowed with murky brown water that poured into the sea. Andrew and I stared out the bus window in horror. What had we done? The area was totally unlike any other part of Costa Rica we had visited. It looked as if we had entered a third-world country, not a tropical paradise.

Trying not to panic (while listening to Graham’s running commentary about the brown ocean and the plastic bags lining the road) we held tight. Puerto Viejo was still miles away to the south. The situation could change.

And so it did. The ocean at Puerto Viejo was clear and gorgeous. The high-tide line was littered with branches and coconuts, not garbage. The town was busy, filled with restaurants, shops, and enough American and European tourists that you couldn’t swing a surfboard without knocking one over.

The problem: the house. Not only was the area around the house not as described (picture a large pile of abandoned construction material in the middle of the yard, and the special outdoor eating area filled with scraps of wood, paint rollers, a rusty wheel barrow, bags of garbage, and two splinter-filled benches). As for the fully equipped kitchen, maybe in PA this doesn’t include pots, chopping knives, cutting board….oh the list goes on. Internet service? In our dreams. And the only music we heard was from the neighbor’s hammers. Follow up emails from an Internet café to the couple from PA were duly ignored. But we did notice that they managed to go onto their website and reword their listing pretty darn fast.

With all this said, we have enjoyed our week — outside this depressing house — in Puerto Viejo. The kids are learning to surf. We’ve knocked coconuts out of trees. And taken long walks on the beach. We are keeping our fingers crossed that the place we’ve rented for our last month is true to its word. Meanwhile, I hope I’ve got my family off my back about not writing. Now it’s time to put a little lime in the coconut and drink it all up.

My Dad: A Champion!

2009-03-01T21:37:00.002-02:00

By Katharine

Some caterpillars can be very dangerous. Here in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, they call caterpillars worms. On the beaches of Puerto Viejo grow almond trees. A butterfly lays her eggs in an almond tree and a few days later the worms or caterpillars are born. The caterpillars fall out of the trees and land in the sand. These caterpillars look like fuzzy sticks with hairs.

If a person accidentally steps on one of the caterpillars it squirts poison into the person’s foot. In 25 minutes the person’s body will be in complete pain. I have heard it feels as if you are on fire. The pain goes away in four hours on its own. But, if you go visit the Worm Bite Specialist, the pain will go away in five minutes with a special shot. The Worm Bite Specialist is also a regular doctor.

My Dad went to the Worm Bite Specialist because Dad’s ears were plugged and he could not hear well. We walked into the doctor’s office and sat down and began to read a magazine, when a man walked in. The man was so fat he looked as if he was going to have six babies all at once! He immediately started a conversation. We found out in the first five minutes that he was 70 years old and from California. When his mother died she left him a fortune. He told us about his money, cats, and about being robbed a lot.

No wonder he gets robbed a lot, he cannot stop talking about his money! Thankfully the receptionist called us into the doctor’s office. The office had a breathing mask, an oxygen cylinder, and bandages. On the shelves were lots of papers. First, the doctor handed my Dad a bowl which Dad put up to his neck. Next, the doctor took a syringe pushed water into Dad’s ears. Then he took a pair of tweezers and stuck them into my Dad’s ears and pulled out a piece of wax. The doctor was being funny and called the piece of wax ‘brother’ because it was so big. After that, he pulled out sister wax, mom wax, and dad wax which completed a small family. Last he took out the grandpa. It was a piece of wax the size of a marble. It was yellow, big, and GROSS! The doctor said my Dad was the champion of the most and biggest wax in all of Puerto Viejo. I am proud of my Dad!

GROSS! GROSS!

Turning Blue

2009-03-01T15:56:00.006-02:00

By Graham

The sky was overcast. It had started to drizzle. We were hiking on the slopes of the dormant volcano Tenorio toward the Rio Celeste.

The air was muggy and thick. Tall trees loomed over us, barely letting light in. This is the primary rainforest. Small dirt trails wound around tree roots and plants. The rainforest around Tenorio was different from other rainforests we have visited; it was a ton wetter. Moss grew everywhere, and giant tree ferns with monkey-like tails grew next to the path.

A little way in, the jungle thickened. We heard the sound of rushing water. We had come to our first obstacle. A small river, which we had to cross by hopping stones, flowed by at a fast pace. We stumbled across.

The trail became muddier, steeper, and narrower. We started to slip and slide. I noticed a hole in the ground and walked over to see what lived in it. YELP!!! I jumped back. The air coming out of it was super hot. The steam came from lava warming an underground river. After that, we saw many more steam vents, reminding us that we were hiking on a volcano.

I heard the sound of rushing water again. We arrived at another river, and my family froze like statues. The river water was the most gorgeous bright blue, unlike the blue that you see in oceans or lakes. This blue was formed by a chemical reaction of copper, carbonates, and sulfur coming from underwater volcanic vents. A waterfall, with a sound like thunder, shot out of the green jungle and fell into a blue pool below.

Further upstream we saw where a volcanic vent added the copper to the clear river water, turning it blue.

From there, we started to walk to a natural hot spring. The trail became so steep and slippery it was nearly impossible for Katharine and me to climb up. We were starting to tire. As we crossed a log bridge with no rails, Katharine lost her footing. Slurp! She fell into the mud. As Dad tried to pull her out, I walked on. Soon I was calling for help because I had fallen off the bridge and my foot was stuck in the mud. As I tried to pull my foot out, my shoe nearly came off. When I looked back at Katharine I burst into laughter. She was covered in mud.

The hot spring bubbled up from a hole in the rock at the edge of the blue river. Park rangers had used boulders to create a small pool where you could relax in the hot water. We stripped down to our swimsuits and bathed for a half hour.

On the way back to our car, the guide suddenly stopped. He whispered that he had spotted the bare-necked umbrella bird. It must have been our lucky day. The umbrella bird is very rare to see. The guide had only seen it once, two years earlier. We had been dying to see an umbrella bird ever since we mistook a crested guan for one while hiking in another park. The bird had a mohawk array of head feathers and a big red wattle. Behind it was the female; she was all black. The birds flew all around us, even right above us.

When we emerged out of the forest we were so tired we could barely stand. After seven hours of walking we were ready to go home.

Some people pay extra for mud baths.

This time, the hot air isn't coming from Graham.

Blue lagoon. Donde esta Brooke?

Where the river starts to feel blue

The author considers his next masterpiece

Pigs In a Blanket

2009-02-23T20:08:00.006-02:00

By Katharine Frances Barbour

It was a dark and stormy night when we finally reached our hotel, Leaves & Lizards, overlooking Costa Rica’s Arenal Volcano. It had taken nine long, hard hours to get there from Samara.

The owners of Leaves & Lizards also ran a farm across the road. After we looked around the hotel, we headed toward the barn. It had nine horses and about fifty chickens and four turkeys. I was most interested in a cement stall in which stood a pregnant piece of bacon. Well, it was not bacon yet but if my dad had a knife we would have had a nice breakfast. The pig was as big as a full-size refrigerator. I didn’t want to go in the stall because I was afraid of getting crushed to death.

The owner, Debbie, said that the pig might have its babies that night. She promised that she would wake us up if that happened. The next day, though, the pig still had not given birth. So, we set off to do chores with the caretaker, Carlos. We collected the eggs, and fed and brushed the horses. We could not milk the cow because it was away getting bred with a bull.

Every time we returned from a hike or a trip, we would look in and see if the pig had had her piglets. Four days went by without any piglets, but on the fifth day she had them. Thirteen little piglets, three girls and ten boys. They were brown, pink, pink with black spots, and brown with black spots. When you picked one up, it would scream like crazy. They sounded like human babies. I thought they were adorable.

I sat in the stall with the piglets for hours watching them. They would fight over milk and get squashed by each other. They fell asleep drinking milk. My favorite piglet was the first born. He was pinkish-white and the size of both my hands. He was one of the weakest, probably a runt. He would try to get milk but he wasn’t tall enough to reach it, so he would go to the bottom and get squashed.

Debbie said that the strongest piglets would go in a different pen after six weeks, and the runts would stay for a couple more weeks with their mom.

On the last day my brother and I got to milk a cow. Milking the cow felt really cool because the udders were like jets. When you squeezed a teat, the milk would shoot everywhere. We got 2 gallons of milk. Debbie and her husband Steve will make cheese, butter, and buttermilk with it.

Miss Piggy,um, where's Kermit?

Jamón, Proscuitto, Serrano, Cappacola, Chorizo, Smithfield...

I'm calling him Bacon!

Boston Butt?

Udderly fascinating.

Ant She Sweet

2009-02-23T20:05:00.002-02:00

By Andrew

I’m starting to worry about our children. While we were in Ecuador, I was tickled to see the children attack strange new foods with gusto: They would have made an anteater proud the way they hoovered up lemon ants in the Amazon jungle; a jaguar could not have dismembered a guinea pig with greater élan. If it moved, they ate it, mainly because the locals seemed happy to eat it, too.

With our shift to Costa Rica, I thought that such adventures were behind us. In many ways, Costa Rica could qualify as the 51st state. San Jose is a neon blur of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Taco Bells, and Pizza Huts. Tour buses disgorge hordes of American and European visitors at the country’s major sights; expat Americans have built homes in every little beach hamlet. And, distressingly, our Spanish has ground to a halt because everyone seems to speak English rather well—certainly better than we speak Spanish.

I fully expected our kids to start ordering hamburguesas y papas fritas at every stop. A little American-style cholesterol to clear the palate. But no. It seems our kids have gone wild. Mowgli and Baloo have arrived in Costa Rica.

A week ago, we took a boat tour up the Rio Negro, on the Nicaraguan border. On board was a large family from Buffalo on spring break and a couple of newlyweds from Orlando. In many ways, it was a gentle repeat of earlier adventures. A guide pointed out howler and capuchin monkeys, caimans, sloths, and a wide variety of river birds.

Toward the end of the trip, the captain nosed the boat into the bank so we could disembark to look for roseate spoonbills in an adjoining marsh. The spoonbills had obviously run away with some dish, so we traipsed back toward the boat.

Graham suddenly gave a small cry, not dissimilar to the noise made by my mother upon opening a box of chocolate truffles. He bent down and picked up a dried acacia seed pod on which a few ants were visible.

“Can we eat them?” he asked the guide.

The guide, obviously unaware that our children were raised by wolves, misunderstood the question.

“The seeds? No, you cannot eat them. But look inside.” He broke the pod in two and termites poured out.

“We call these carrots of the forest,” he continued. “The indigenous people eat…”

He got no further before Katharine snared some termites from the pod and prepared for inhalation.

“No!!!!!” screamed a young university student from the Buffalo family, grabbing Katharine’s hand and wrenching it away from her mouth.

A look of utter confusion crossed Katharine’s face. Had she committed some breach of etiquette? Should she have offered her elders the termites first?

The student, who obviously felt that she had saved a challenged child from imminent harm, held Katharine in a vice-like grip while giving us an accusatory stare.

“Do they really taste like carrots?” asked Louise. “The last ones we ate tasted like citrus.”

Sensing that she was holding the cub of a deranged and possibly dangerous family, the student sprang away from Katharine, who immediately declared that it was snack time.

Graham and Katharine set about the termites, comparing tasting notes, while the student did dry heaves in the leaf litter by the boat.

Two days later, we were hiking with our guide through thick primary forest on the slopes of Volcan Tenorio, one of Costa Rica’s many dormant volcanoes. We stopped to examine a bullet ant, a very large specimen named for the extreme pain caused by its bite—and its sting.

“Can I eat it?” asked Graham. Slightly nonplussed, the guide explained that the mandibles of the ant would surely give your lip or tongue a nasty bite, to say nothing of the ant’s stinger.

“What if we ripped off its head and bottom and just ate the middle bit,” queried Katharine.

After that, the guide picked up his pace noticeably. I think he was worried about being caught in the rainforest with us after dusk.

Go With the Flow

2009-02-23T19:54:00.003-02:00

By Graham

We were walking on a small trail winding in and out of the Costa Rican jungle. In the distance we could see our destination, Volcano Arenal. One of six active volcanoes in Costa Rica, Arenal looks just the way you would imagine: It’s a perfect cone. Rain forest covers the lower slopes, while higher up the mountain is bare volcanic rock. Steam pours out of the crater at the top.

About halfway along the trail, we heard a sound like thunder. What could it be? Was it a storm? Emerging from the jungle, we came face to face with a wall of volcanic rock. It was about 20 feet high and was formed during an eruption in 1992. When we reached the top, we all gasped. We had a great view of Arenal. We hiked over the old lava flow until we reached the end of the trail. We could go no further because of the danger of being caught in an eruption. I climbed to the top of a very tall rock. There I sat and watched the mountain.

Suddenly, I saw dust billowing up on the right flank of the volcano and heard the rumbling noise again. An eruption sent half-molten boulders bouncing down the mountain. They sounded like a wrecking ball destroying a building. Because we were so far away, the boulders looked like little black marbles, but they were actually about the size of a tractor-trailer. A massive cloud of dust and smoke exploded behind them.

We all thought of how painful it would be to be flattened by one. Now we are excited about hiking the dormant volcano Tenorio.

La Selva

2009-02-09T16:39:00.009-02:00

By Katharine and Graham

It was night. We were walking through the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador with only a flashlight to guide us through the darkness. Without street lights it was hard to see. Trees loomed over us casting scary shadows in all directions. We heard screeches, clicks, squawks and croaks as we walked. The trail thinned. We tripped over logs. The guide spotted something that could give you nightmares. It was a six-inch insect called a spiny lobster. It was brownish-red and had a pointy rear. It is the biggest insect in the rainforest.

With so many bugs in the rainforest, it's amazing to see the biggest one. For now it is the biggest, but new bugs will be discovered, some very small and some massive. We walked on. Bats flew overhead and insects crawled at our feet, making us jump. It was scary. Suddenly, the guide stopped. He said he smelled jaguar. We all went quiet. Maybe we would spot one. Our luck failed. We knew it was too good to be true. Later on we came across a tarantula the size of a baseball. It was brown and black and camouflaged with the trees. We thought it would crawl off the tree and onto one of us.

The next day, we were paddling in a big canoe in search of the anaconda our guide had seen before, when a big splash nearly tipped the boat.We were really startled. The guide said it was a manatee. Later we found the anaconda in a hollow tree. It was 23 feet long and as thick as a man's waist. Our guide knew it was that big because he had seen it out of the tree. Anacondas are one of the world's largest snakes. They constrict their prey and then swallow it whole.

To be able to see all the animals that we saw, people need to stop cutting down the rainforests. If all 3.5 billion acres of rainforest are cut down, the world would be an entirely different place: The climate would change, there would less food, and tons of animals would go extinct. All this could happen in just 40 years. The rainforest gives us 80% of the food we eat, including rice, cloves, pepper, bananas, peanuts, yams, oranges, cinnamon, sugar, onions, vanilla, pineapples, lemons, and coconuts. They also provide lots of medicines. Why would anyone want to chop them down?

Sabias Que:

50% of Earth's animals live in the rainforest.

Rainforests act as an air conditioner; they store and absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
More than 20% of the world's oxygen is made by the Amazon rainforest.

You can help save the rainforests by recycling, buying reusable bags, and storing food in reusable containers; in winter, turn down your heat and wear a sweater, and don't leave water running when not using it.

Spiny lobster. Best served a la meuniere.

Tarantula, up close and personal.

Pygmy marmoset, smallest monkey in the world.

16-foot anaconda, the smaller of the two we saw.

Ain't bad. In fact, tastes like lemon pie. Lemon ants. Yum!

How To Eat Your Pet in Four Easy Steps

2009-01-29T08:48:00.009-02:00

By Louise

Andrew was right when he wrote that our family will eat almost anything (see previous post). When we saw the paunchy, lip-smacking host of a Travel Channel show tuck into cuy asado, an Ecuadorian specialty, we knew that we had to taste it, too. For months we talked about it. Would we get to choose our own live victim (as the TV host did), or would we just eat what was served? The family was split on the live-dead question. Being softer, gentler souls, Graham and I decided that we did not want to bond with our dinner–we would eat what was served. Plus, we did not want to wait a long time for a freshly plucked...guinea pig.

That's right, in Ecuador, the guinea pig is no mascota, it's lunch. So, after our wanderings up and down Rocafuerte Street, we were ready to sit down for some real chow. We wanted rodent and we wanted it badly. Unfortunately, in spite of the TV lip-smacker's assurance that cuy was readily available in Quito, we couldn't find it...at least not in the fine establishments we frequent (please see earlier posts). So we hit the road.

We boarded a bus to a town called Baños (that would be baths, as in hot springs, not toilets). We didn't actually travel by bus for four hours just to eat cuy; we went for other stuff, too. Like taffy. And rafting, zip lines, bridge jumping, and the thermal baths. I guess the town figures if you're ready to zip yourself across a gorge, fling yourself off a bridge, and hurl yourself at rapids on a raging brown river, you need some solid comfort food, such as guinea pig. How right they were.

Enough chatter. Here it is, in four easy steps how to eat your pet:

Step 1: Examine before you purchase. Grab tightly behind the neck: Is there a enough fat on the critter? Are its haunches meaty? Squeezing is good. Pinching better. Ignore the squeals.

Step 2: Before you start cleaning your purchase, light the fire. It should be hot, but not too hot--you don't want any flare ups. Carefully thread your cuy onto a hand rotisserie. Someone will need to turn it often so it doesn't burn. Season with salt and pepper. Brush with melted fat, paprika, and garlic.

Step 3: Baste often. When the cuy is brown and crispy it's ready to eat.

Step 4: Enjoy with rice and potatoes. One cuy is plenty for our family of four.

Tastes like chicken! No, pork! Chicken! Pork!

Surprisingly, Katharine did not eat this.

Riding the Porcelain Honda down the Avenue of Volcanoes

2009-01-26T10:21:00.082-02:00

By Andrew

Compared with Buenos Aires, which is essentially a European city, Ecuador poses a worthy intestinal challenge. The food is exotically different, the hygiene rudimentary, and the water laced with hostile pathogens. Prominently displayed on the CDC fact sheet on Ecuador is a stark warning: "Do not eat food purchased from street vendors."

Being a stubborn family of limited imagination, we took this as a direct challenge. No sooner had we set down our luggage than we headed out the door on a gustatory tour of Rocafuerte Street.

We hadn't progressed more than 10 yards before we spied a vendor surrounded by a knot of laborers. Having finished a snack just 10 minutes earlier, Graham was understandably famished. He galloped across the street, peered into the vendor's pot, and uttered the one phrase that we have truly mastered: "Que es?" The answer, ceviche de chocho, helped us not a jot.

The pot was filled with what looked like mutant cannellini beans, while our knowledge of ceviche extended only to marinated, raw seafood. Raw. Street food. Sure, why not? The lady ladled some of the beans into a bowl, tossed them with a salsa of lime, cilantro, onion, and tomato, and topped it all with toasted kernels of corn. Only later did we learn that chocho is the bean of the Andean lupin. Whatever. It was very, very good.

At times, our family struggles with its table manners. When the food is both tasty and limited, however, it just gets plain ugly. Ravening dogs with a bratwurst make less noise than the snarling, snapping melee that ensued.

Pausing long enough to wipe some tomato off Katharine's ear, we zigged across the street to snag a couple of empanadas de viento, pastries that puff up like a balloon when they are fried. Topped with sugar and stuffed with a little queso tierno, they provided a delicious, greasy counter-balance to the acidic ceviche.

Back across Rocafuerte we went to the next vendor, who was tending a charcoal brazier. Wafting through the clear mountain air was the unmistakable aroma of grilled chicken feet. As owner of 30 chickens herself, Katharine is "the decider" on all matters fowl. She picked out the biggest patito, which was duly presented to her wrapped in a paper towel. Clutching this gnarled talon, she wandered down the street, nibbling absentmindedly. Dressed in her sober brown poncho, she looked like Madeline as conjured by Edgar Allen Poe. I half expected her to scratch her back with her snack.

Meanwhile, displaying admirable peripheral vision, Graham had flagged down a rotund indigenous woman laden with a huge tray of some sweet that resembled Great Stuff Foam Filler, albeit topped with raspberry sauce. It wasn't ice cream, it wasn't sabayon, it was... "Uno, por favor," said Graham, who at night dreams of waving fields of sugar cane. It was some kind of fluffy meringue, so sweet that I actually heard my molars scream.

We worked our way down Rocafuerte Street like pinballs, bouncing from one vendor to another, from one side of the street to the other: Pan chocolate, skewers of mystery meat, banana fritters, humitas (a type of tamale), on and on...

Just when it appeared we were losing steam, we chanced upon a juice joint that was cranking out freshly squeezed glasses of orange, pineapple, mango, passion fruit, carrot, coconut, plus a host of fruits we had never heard of. The first glass of maracuya was heaven, which prompted a second, followed by a glass of mango, then some carrot juice. After two months of all things beef, we wallowed in Ecuador's fruity goodness. In five minutes, we consumed more fruit than the average family consumes in a year. The quantity of fruit alone would have torpedoed the digestive tracts of most mortals, yet we pressed on.

During the course of our walk, Louise had spotted several vendors selling giant seed pods that were easily three feet long. Imagine a snap pea grown at Chernobyl and you get the picture. After a long discussion with the vendor that cast serious doubt on Louise's ability to work at the UN, we understood that we needed to break open the pod and suck on the seeds inside.

We spent the next half hour at home with knives, scissors, and various power tools before we cleaved our way through the pod's leathery hide. The black seeds, about the size of a New York cockroach, were couched in a feathery white fluff. Apparently, this was the good stuff. We each popped a seed into our mouths and sucked away. It wasn't bad--cotton candy meets vanilla pudding. Graham, Katharine, and I sucked one seed each, while Louise whomped into several more.

You have probably realized by now that our family has no business in a place like Las Vegas: We're not very good at playing the odds. In Russian roulette, for example, only one of six chambers is loaded with a bullet. In our street-food version of the game, we loaded our only chamber with a dozen culinary bullets. You do the math. From a hygiene perspective alone, we could just as easily have knelt and licked Rocafuerte Street.

It was only a matter of time before Houston was notified of a problem. And Louise, who is very competitive, had to be first. Between frequent trips to the bathroom, she reviewed her list of food suspects, eventually fingering the guaba seed pod, the only hermetically sealed food that we had consumed. Go figure.

Even if we hadn't hoovered up the better part of Rocafuerte Street, we knew this moment was coming. Before our trip began, Louise and I had pinpointed Ecuador as the country where our family would battle traveler's diarrhea, otherwise known as Delhi Belly, Montezuma's Revenge, or Abu's Blueberry Squishy. But we would sooner have stayed at home than not eat the local grub.

We did set some ground rules, however. Outside Quito (the water in the city is apparently fine), we employ the same street-food rules that we used on our year-long Africa trip: (1) Only eat where others are eating; (2) No raw salads; (3) No cooked foods that are cold; (4) No unboiled water.

If you're going to eat local foods, though, you have to face a simple fact: Sooner or later, you will end up riding the porcelain Honda.

Over the next three weeks, we devoured roasted pig, mote, and humitas while standing ankle deep in je ne sais quoi at the animal market in Otavalo; we wolfed down llapingachos and empanadas while admiring llamas at the sprawling market in Sasquisili; we sucked the snot-like innards from little fruits ripped from the banks of the Rio Pastasa as we rafted down the rapids; and we feasted on bowls of seafood ceviche in the Quito market, accompanied by huge glasses of batido made from babaco (a star fruit the size of a rugby ball). If locusts had suddenly ascended the Andean heights, we would have sneered at them as rank amateurs. Only bull-penis soup eluded us.

When explorer Alexander von Humboldt first saw Ecuador's central valley, sandwiched between the twin cordilleras of the Andes, he named it the Avenue of the Volcanoes, in honor of the eight active volcanoes whose snowy peaks loom on either side. If Al were to return today, he would be interested to find new volcanic activity in the valley itself, centered on a colonial house in Rocafuerte Street.

Yes, we have sometimes paid a price for our market munchies. At any given time over the past three weeks, at least one person in the family has suffered from seismic rumbles or lava flows.

Katharine, bless her heart, generally eschews the splashy explosions that garner all the media attention. She displays her seismic perturbations via side vents and fumaroles. Make no mistake, these can be as destructive as any Krakatoa-style event. You may have seen the National Geographic film about a lake in Africa where animals come to drink and then simply drop dead from the poisonous fumes. Watch carefully and you will see a cute little girl sitting by the lake, reading.

Generally, we have traveled around Ecuador by bus. With journeys averaging three to four hours and no bathroom on board, we have been forced to develop a contingency plan that goes beyond simple sphincter-clenching. We briefly toyed with the idea of going local after we watched a young boy poop in a shopping bag held by his mother. Since neither of us could agree on who would be left holding the bag, the idea was quietly dropped. Instead, at a predetermined emergency signal, we will simply shout "Bajo!", grab our bags, and exit the bus en masse. Buses run fairly frequently and we would rather wait a few minutes than be caught in a prolonged squeeze play.

Three of us (Louise excepted) recently experienced significant volcanic activity at the same time. Unhappily, it coincided with our stay at an ultra-green eco-lodge tucked away in the mountains. The food was vegetarian, everything was recycled, and the en suite toilets were "dry." A dry toilet is essentially a long drop, with one key difference: After each visit to the toilet, you shovel wood shavings (stored in a handy bucket by your side) on top of your work and walk away. The idea is that the toilet is an odor-free composter that saves water and provides a rich fertilizer for the inn's fruit trees.

When the earnest American inn-keeper built the toilets, he couldn't possibly have envisaged that Cotopaxi, Pinchincha, and Tungurahua would all be staying in the same room. By the end of the first day, the mound of wood shavings in our toilet would have led any sane person to suspect that a rabid beaver was loose down there.

As for the smell, the wood chips were about as useful as Lady Speedstick on a skunk. The maid simply stopped coming into our room; she left whatever we needed outside the door and then ran. I briefly considered torching our hut and asking for another room, but the inn was full.

If only the horror had ended there. A week earlier, we had made the mistake of instructing Graham and Katharine to monitor their stool for signs of blood, which can be a symptom of something serious. Unfortunately, every stray tomato skin now led to screams of horror and demands for parental inspection.

After two days, neither of us were inclined to go into that wood-chip nightmare without a full Haz-Mat suit. So when Graham called to us, we stared at each other aghast. Fortunately, Louise lost the coin toss. Seconds later, she came reeling out of the bathroom, fingers clawing at her eyes, her face frozen in a ghastly rictus. She fell onto the bed, adopting a pose eerily reminiscent of the bodies found at Pompeii, their horrified faces preserved forever in volcanic stone.

Graham's voice followed her out of the bathroom: "Mom, I think we need more wood chips."

A Day At the Market

2009-01-25T20:27:00.013-02:00

Sasquisili Market

Me llamo Llama.

Paper or plastic?

Not sure what's going on here. But the cows look like they're winning.

Juicy fruit, ain't she cute!

Bricks of sugar. Sponsored by the ADA.

OK, no artificial coloring or flavoring here.

Hole-in-the-wall Restaurants

2009-01-20T11:29:00.009-02:00

By Graham

We were walking down Rocafuerte looking for a restaurant. We came across a run-down place and walked in. It was poorly lit, small, and a TV was blaring. The paint on the walls was peeling. Beer advertisements were tacked to the walls. Along one wall pots were bubbling with soup. There were about five tables covered with oil cloths, and the seats were small and metal. But the restaurant smelled very good.

We sat down and ordered three lunches and a bowl of soup for Katharine. Here, you just order a lunch and they bring you what's cooking. Usually, they start you off with a bowl of soup, made of chicken, broth, noodles, and potatoes. You also get a glass of juice. That is enough for Katharine, but Mom, Dad, and I eat the next course, too. Normally, it is chicken, rice, lettuce, and mote. Mote is hominy.

The chicken is very good. I have had some of the best chicken here. It is cooked perfectly and they add the right amount of salt. Some of my favorite lunches have been in Ecuador.

The Zip Line

2009-01-20T09:58:00.006-02:00

By Katharine

It was a long way down. I was standing on a cliff, 300 feet above the ground and do you know what I was doing? I was preparing to get on a zip line to cross a river at the bottom of a gorge. There were mountains in the distance and cows standing on the hills. But the scariest thing was the murky brown rapids below me.

We learned that the president of Ecuador did the zip line, so it should be safe. We were all very scared, though. It was my dad's turn first. He stepped up to the line. A man made him put on a harness and a leather belt. He was doing "Superman." He had to climb up on a chair and the man held onto his legs. Next, my dad got lifted into the air and was hanging on his belly. Finally, the man let go and and Dad went shooting across really fast, high above the rapids. When he reached the other side, a lady ran to get him. She climbed up on a ladder and unhooked him.

We all decided that we did not want to do "Superman." Instead, we wanted to sit and hold onto handles as we went across. It was my turn after Graham's. I kicked myself off. I zoomed across with a loud "zip." It felt as if I had big white wings. But as soon as I passed some boulders, it seemed as if I was falling because I was going down so fast. I landed safely on the other side. I wanted to do it again.

La Oruga

2009-01-13T12:51:00.007-02:00

By Katharine

One Sunday in Quito, a giant green caterpillar appeared at our door. The caterpillar was 50 feet long! Instead of legs it had wheels and lights, it was a bus. It had boxes full of seats, every two boxes were connected with a trailer hitch. Each caterpillar segment was covered with a metal umbrella. In front of the caterpillar was a smiling face, it looked as if he put too much lipstick on. The caterpillar was short in height and played music.

We begged our mom to get on even though it looked babyish. After a while she said yes, and we climbed in. We might have misunderstood the driver because we think he said that the caterpillar would only go around the block and come back in 10 minutes. But nooo, he actually said we would have to wait 10 minutes until it started.

After 10 minutes of waiting we started. First the caterpillar swerved down the street. When the front went to one side of the block, the back would go to the other side! Unfortunately, we were in the back, it was really scary. All the cars had to get out of our way. Some cars even had to be halfway on the sidewalk. When we rode to a certain spot where there were no cars, the driver started spinning in circles, one loop after another. The head of the caterpillar was almost touching the tail. After 10 circles he started swerving again. Close to the end of the ride a guy tried to jump on and was hanging on to the back until he let go. Finally, the caterpillar stopped back in front of our house. I felt sick later.

Rambling down Rocafuerte

2009-01-12T16:34:00.013-02:00

By Graham and Katharine, with an assist from los padres.

When we arrived in Quito, Ecuador, at midnight, we could not see anything. When we woke up the next morning, it was sunny but cold. We went walking down Rocafuerte, our street, and what did we see?

Avocados galore, one behind every door.
Baskets of berries, stacked in narrow doorways.
Colonial Quito, with its cobbled streets.
Dense morning fog rolling off the mountains.
Early-bird children, in gray and blue uniforms, heading to school.
Fish frying in blackened pots.
Gold glittering in colonial churches.
Heavy bags on the backs of tiny women.
Indigenous women in brown felt hats.
Jugos de maracuya, mango, anana, zanahoria, naranjillo, manzana, mixed any way you want.
Kitchens on the sidewalks, with steaming pots of locro, sopa, humitas, and chifles.
Long braided hair on women and girls.
Munecas with rainbow-colored skirts and beautiful shawls.
Nuts, roasted in silver pans with sugar and salt.
Old women with bundled babies on their backs.
Platanos, fried and delicious.
Quinoa, a grain shaped like small beads eaten here for thousands of years.
Rotating chickens in restaurants.
Sopas and locros, served at every meal, usually with chicken, noodles, potatoes, and corn.
Tostados, crunchy corn kernels sold as a snack.
Umbrellas for the daily showers.
Volcanos as far as the eye can see.
Washing hanging on the lines.
X-crossings for pedestrians, striped like a zebra.
Yemas (egg yolks), yellow and rich, added to potato llapingachos.
Zanahorias, as big as Mom's feet.

That's what we saw on our first day, walking down Rocafuerte Street.

Our house.

The view down Rocafuerte.

Fruit & vegetable store.

Roasted pork with llapingachos.

Have Empanadas, Will Dance

2009-01-12T12:07:00.005-02:00

By Eric (visiting cousin)

Tango
My trip to Buenos Aires was fantastic, and I can’t thank my aunt and uncle enough for having me. One thing that was interesting to me was how popular dancing the tango is. There are famous tango restaurants where you can have dinner and a dancing show. There are people tangoing in the streets to make some money. I thought it was very cool to see people tangoing while we walked through the market. I saw one man dancing with a dummy. He had comedy in his act; he would stop people if they tried to walk past him and block them from passing by--all while he was dancing. One group of tango dancers had two people playing the Spanish guitar for them to dance to. I liked them the best because their style was very relaxed and it looked like they were going with the flow. You can see this in the video below.

Pockets of Pleasure
Empanadas are great. I fell in love with the first one I had. Why can’t they be a common thing in the U.S? I may have started with one that was too high class because I got my first one at a luxury hotel before I went to a regular restaurant. But regardless they are great. If you take a trip to Buenos Aires then an empanada is a must-have snack. They can be filled with things like cheese, beef, and chicken.

Punta Delgada Asado

2009-01-05T00:09:00.012-02:00

By Graham (photos & text)

Cordero Asado (grilled lamb) is a Patagonian specialty. We experienced it in Punta Delgada, on the Peninsula Valdes. Raul, the man in the photos, was the maker of this outstanding meal. He also took care of the horses Katharine wrote about.

Here is how grilled lamb is cooked.

First, the lamb is butterflied: It gets cut down the middle, and then pulled down flat.

Here are all the butterflied lambs. Raul is having a break with a tea called mate. He drinks it out of a hollow gourd, using a metal straw called a bombilla.

The lambs are pinned to a cross and put in front of a roaring fire.

An hour later, the lambs are looking better, but they still have a long way to go.

Now the lambs are done. Raul gives me the first bite. It is delicious.

He slices some meat off a lamb and cuts it up. Next, he lays the meat on a platter and rings a bell for the waiters to serve the meat.

This is the platter of meat.

After several mouth-watering hours, we finally get to dig in.

Taxi Scam

2009-01-04T15:02:00.014-02:00

By Louise

Thanks to a short, stocky, old man with gray hair and his much younger, chubby, darker-skinned female friend our kids don’t have any math books. No, this isn’t part of some new-age unschooling thing we've launched into. We were robbed.

We had been in Buenos Aires for 45 minutes and were waiting for the apartment rental agency to bring us our keys. It was early, we were exhausted from a sleepless overnight flight. The street was quiet. The couple mentioned earlier appeared at the apartment building door the same time we arrived. And within moments they had grabbed the kids’ backpack and dashed into a taxi. Realizing what had happened I chased them, grabbed the door of the car, and started shouting. They fought. There was a distraction. They got away.

Unfortunately, the pack had all the math books, the kids’ journals, Graham’s camera, and three pairs of sunglasses that Katharine stashed before we left.

It was a rotten thing to happen within the first hour of our arrival. Needless to say, within 20 minutes it dawned on us that we had been set up by an official airport-approved taxi.

When you arrive at the Buenos Aires airport you’re bombarded with flyers about gypsy cabs. So we did what you’re supposed to do and went to the official taxi stand and made a request. When we got in the car we handed the driver the paper from the taxi service that gave the cross streets of our apartment. The driver asked if we were going to a hotel and we told him no. He then placed a phone call and while on the phone asked for our apartment address—twice—long before we were even near the city.

Andrew and I have always been alert travelers. Living in NYC taught me to pay attention. I’ve never been robbed; maybe I’m lucky, I don’t know. Now, in hindsight, the whole thing seems like a page out of a thief’s textbook. I felt like a fool for being taken. I do keep on reminding myself that we were exhausted and dazed but we did have our wits about us enough to have our passports in a pouch safely around Andrew’s neck and our computer in a pack secured to my back. Why bring this first-day event up on our last day? Because a few friends have shared with me their bad travel experiences, so I thought I would share mine in the hopes of preventing this from happening to someone else.

Fortunately, this did not set the tone for our stay. I love Buenos Aires and am very sad to leave. Katharine, on the other hand, is kicking herself for not sliding at least one pair of sunglasses into a suitcase.

Soy Sauce

2009-01-03T20:00:00.025-02:00

By Louise

OMG. If I am served one more bife de chorizo I will explode. Sure, Andrew loves it, but I've had enough. I crave culinary variety. I need spice. I need vegetables. So, in a moment of sheer foodie desperation, I did what any former New Yorker would do: I sent the children to the apartment lobby to collect menus.

What they brought back made me weep with joy: Chinese menus!

We spent 30 minutes poring over menus. How great was this, translating a Chinese menu written in Spanish into English? We decided on numbers 6 (wonton empanada), 33 (pollo chow mein), 47 (pollo de General Tao's), and 58 (verdura saltada). The next task: phoning in the order. Determined to be in control of this moment, I wrote down everything I would say, right down to spelling out the numbers phonetically. And, to really make things easy, I planned to say that we would pick up the order, because the thought of arranging a delivery was simply mind-boggling.

I placed the call. The woman who picked up was clearly Chinese, not a porteno. This was going to be a whole different bowl of noodles. Now two of us were speaking a language that wasn't our first. I felt my palms start to sweat, but I stuck to my plan. I needed those noodles.

I read my prepared script, I shushed my ll's ordering the pollo chow mein, I hit the "v" in verdura correctly. I could tell my family was impressed. The woman repeated my order. Could things really be moving so smoothly? I gave the kids a thumbs up and gave her my name, saying I would pick up the order. The kids were high-fiving. Andrew was doing a little dance. And then she asked for my address. No, I replied, I am picking the order up. No, she insisted, again demanding my address. Back and forth we went, with me explaining that I would pick up the food, and with her asking where we wanted it delivered. I could hear her frustration growing as her Spanish diminished. My own thoughts were becoming more jumbled than a bowl of lo mein.

The children were silent, recognizing that I had entered the conversation danger zone. I wanted to hang up, but I couldn't. I had to complete the call. I wanted the noodles. By now, the woman was shouting pretty loudly. I held the phone away from my ear. I wasn't even sure she was speaking Spanish anymore. So I shouted back, "No hablo ingles!" I have no idea what possessed me to say that. Probably the same thing that caused me to respond "dos" when asked what my name was earlier in the week. My kids were laughing at me now.

I took a deep breath and, in the absolutely worst Spanish ever, I told her for the last time that I would be by to pick up the order shortly. Twenty minutes later, I walked into the restaurant, struck a dramatic pose, and said, "Soy Orlando."(I am Orlando) The woman looked up at me and said, "Soya? Soya dos pesos mas!" And then she asked me what I wanted to order.

Ode to Freddo

2009-01-03T10:11:00.015-02:00

by Katharine

Ice cream! Ice cream! That's all I can say.
Ice cream! Ice cream! I could eat it all day!
I gotta go when they sing "helado!"
I gotta go for "hela, helado!"
Dulche de leche is the best!
Dulche de leche beats the rest!
I love it! I love it! I love it so much!
I love it! I love it! I could eat it for lunch!
I'll be sorry when we have to go,
And I'll miss dulche de leche at Freddo!

Dulche de Leche Tentacion is the favorite

Sandboarding

2008-12-31T13:35:00.007-02:00

by Graham

Hoy vamos a sandboarding. Lo es increible. El primero vez que bajo, yo no caido. Sandboarding es similar a snowboarding. Bajo muchos tiempos porque me gusta mucho. Mi papa esta bueno a sandboarding tambien. El primero tiempo para Katarina, ella caido. El segundo vez para Katarina, ella va bajo todo. Nosotros dicemos "Katarina! Katarina!" Tengo un tiempo muy bueno. Estoy encima de el mundo.

Graham's English translation: Today, we go sandboarding. It is incredible. The first time down, I do not fall. Sandboarding is similar to snowboarding. I go down many times because I like it a lot. My father is also good at sandboarding. The first time for Katharine, she falls. The second time, she goes down all the way. We say "Katharine! Katharine!" I have a very good time. I am on top of the world.

Cool dude

I Dream of Jeannie

Major face plant

What's Your Beef?

2008-12-22T17:15:00.054-02:00

By Andrew

I have a beef to pick with Argentina. Actually several beefs, but bife de chorizo tops my list. It's a New York strip steak, only better: juicy, dense, and full of flavor. Heaven on the hoof. However you cut it, the beef here is magnificent. Maybe it's because the cows are pampas-ed shamelessly or because Argentines are so meat-crazed that no animal lives long enough to get tough.

I've never found much truth in national stereotypes. Not all Canadians are boring, for example, but Argentina's reputation for cow-mania is more than deserved. If anything, it's been under-publicized. The tango, a dance in which a couple walk the length of the room in a synchronized clutch, evolved in Buenos Aires purely as a way to ensure that neither partner reached the grilled lomo before the other.

I never fail to be amazed each time I walk into the grocery store. In each shopper's cart lies the better part of an entire cow. The only thing missing is four hooves pointing skyward. The check-out line, which invariably extends for a city block, looks like something out of a Hindu horror movie.

The average Argentine consumes 140 pounds of beef a year. Discount the very young and the very old (nonmasticatores) and the average climbs to an Aberdeen Angus per person per week. I always thought South Africans and Americans ate a lot of meat, but I now realize that by Argentine standards we are not yet fully weaned. One resident in our apartment block grills beef for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.

Not content with wheeling bloody carcasses home for consumption, Argentines fill the remaining gaps in their culinary schedule with visits to their local parilla. A parilla, pronounced "pareejah" in Buenos Aires, is a steakhouse. You will find an average of 20 on each block, interspersed with a like number of bakeries and purveyors of hair-removal products. We have had a couple of sublime meals in parillas, highlighted by the aforementioned bife de chorizo. Lomo, the Argentine filet mignon, is a delight that I shall be experiencing this week.

To gauge the role that meat plays in the Argentine diet, a glimpse at a typical menu is in order. The main courses are usually listed simply as a cut of beef, such as vacio, bife de chorizo, or lomo. A mysterious cut known as matambre occupies a special place in the hearts of Argentines. This cut, which (if my Spanish is to be trusted) consists of the diaphragm of retired opera singers, is obscenely tough but (we are assured) oh-so-tasty. One blogger said that the cut gets its name from the Spanish "mate hambre" meaning "kill hunger." The wit goes on to explain that he did not realize that it killed your desire to eat anything ever again.

Order one of these main courses in a restaurant and you will receive a plate containing an outlandishly large amount of beef. And nothing else. If you have the temerity to seek out a vegetable, you have two choices: You can pay for a visit to the salad bar, which consists of tired leaves dumped into metal canisters near the banos, or you can turn to the very back of the menu. There, just before the desserts and just after the explanation of how the restaurant was started, you will find a list of guarniciones. If that sounds like the English word "garnish", you are not far wrong. The restaurant is essentially asking you how you want your meat decorated. The most popular choice is French fries, followed closely by pure. This is mashed potatoes whipped with butter, giving the chef one more crack at filling your arteries with animal fat.

You can order any cut of meat imaginable, but the non-pareil of parillas is the parillada, a selection of grilled meats from every corner of the cow. On the third trip to our local joint, we decided to experience the full Monty of meat consumption.

Either as a cruel practical joke or because Argentina is still bitter about that whole Falklands Islands thing, our parillada contained an awful lot of offal. Some people will go great distances for glands, kidneys, liver, and brain. Fortunately, most of them live in the Congo. The stuff is absolutely abominable. Our family sat in shocked horror, staring down at what looked like the remains of an aircraft disaster, all the while casting wistful glances at a succulent lomo on the next table.

Believe it or not, I actually thought I was going to enjoy them. I dismissed the childhood nightmare of liver and onions as one more culinary abomination committed by my boarding school. Instead, I remembered how the New York Times included sweetbreads among the trinity of epicurean decadence, alongside truffles and caviar. More than anything, though, I remembered years of classical education, where I was taught that the Greeks considered offal the best part of the animal and offered it as a burnt sacrifice to win the favor of the Gods. The ancient Greeks were so good at so much. Could they really be wrong on this count?

In hindsight, my teachers were naive twits. What hundreds of years' worth of classical scholarship has failed to appreciate is something that every Brit on a package tour to Santorini can tell you after one day: The Greeks would swindle their own mother to get an edge.

Where did we get the silly idea that the Greeks considered offal a delicacy? Homer's Odyssey, of course. Like many of you, I have often wondered why Odysseus had such a tough row to hoe. What did he do to get the Gods so peeved?

A careful re-reading of the Greek shows that Odysseus was nothing but a two-bit con man. Every time he sacrificed a cow, he would dedicate to the Gods what he termed "the choicest cuts" but were actually the dreaded innards. These were flung into the sacrificial fire, with the smoke rising up to Olympus. While Odysseus sat on the beach tucking into a grilled bife de chorizo, the Gods had to make do with the poo-poo platter.

I don't blame the Gods one bit for tossing the little bastard around the Mediterranean for a while. He's lucky he made it home at all.

Katharine would not have been so charitable. After a first bite of pancreas (gall bladder? spleen?), she looked as if she had licked a car battery. Only hunger and a passion for sausages brought her back to the table. Unfortunately, the most repellent bits of the beast were hidden in sausage skins. What followed is not something I care to recount, let alone remember. Put it this way: A week later, in Patagonia, I experienced a pang of intense discomfort as I watched adult penguins regurgitating squid for their fledglings.

Six weeks after arriving in Argentina, I felt I had a sufficient understanding of the local diet to make a bold prediction: that all Argentines would be dead by Wednesday. When this failed to happen, I took to the Google, expecting to find a litany of health articles showing that Argentines drop dead at a rate higher than that of the common fruit fly. Nothing. Nada. From an arterial standpoint, they are no more congested than the rest of us.

My first thought was that I had stumbled on a Latin American equivalent of the French paradox. As you know, the French appear able to eat obscene amounts of butter, cheese, and wine without dying or turning into Gallic Hindenburgs. The only side-effect is an unpleasant arrogance. Had I stumbled on the Argentine Enigma?

Like the United States, Argentina is a country of immigrants. The answer could not possibly lie in the gene pool. Argentines were staying alive--and reasonably trim--by some other, unknown mechanism. The answer, I am happy to report, is dulche de leche.

Argentines love sugar. Each block in BA is crammed with enough bakeries and cake shops to make the population of Missouri diabetic. Even the ground coffee in grocery stores is sold with sugar already added. But dulche de leche is the pinnacle of Argentina's sugary artistry. It's made from heating sweetened condensed milk until it caramelizes. Argentines put it in literally everything, from croissants to empanadas to ice cream. They spoon it over bread, they coat it with chocolate, they eat it with a dollop of cream. I think they even use it as caulk. If Ronald Reagan had been Argentine, he would have named it a food group.

I am convinced that dulce de leche, in all its gooey glory, is the Liquid Plumr of the Argentine diet. Combined with the country's strong coffee, it speeds up the Argentine metabolism to a point where cholesterol is simply incinerated in the furnace of caloric excess. More power to them, I say. It sure beats cauliflower.

A Tail of a Whale

2008-12-21T12:30:00.001-02:00

By Katharine

We were in Puerto Piramides, a little village on the Peninsula Valdes in Patagonia. We went there to see Southern Right whales. They are called Right whales because they were the right type of whales to hunt. They have oil in them and float after they are killed. The whales come to the Golfo Nuevo to have babies and mate.

To see the whales, we had to ride on a boat. We wore orange life vests. Mine hurt my neck. There were 16 other people on the boat. It was sunny and the water was calm. We traveled 15 minutes until the captain spotted two mom whales with their babies. We saw 17 more whales, as well as penguins and dolphins.

The whales live to be up to 100 years old. They are 40-60 feet long and average 54 tons. They eat krill, filtering it out of the water with their baleen. Every three years, the whales have one baby.

We saw the whales stick their tales up in the air. Some came up under the boat and bumped us. They had barnacles and weeds stuck to their skin. One time, a whale sprayed me out of his spout. It smelled like snot.

When we were about to leave, a whale jumped out of the water completely and made a huge splash. We had a fun day.

The boat is trailered into the water.

For a three-hour cruise....

Right whale with callosities and other growths.

What a fluke!

One of many, many tail shots

Publish or Perish

2008-12-21T11:12:00.005-02:00

Several readers have asked whether Graham and Katharine have written their posts on their own. The answer is yes, with an asterisk. Here's what happens. The kids first choose a topic; if they're being difficult, we assign one. They write a first draft by hand that we review together. We discuss the essay's strengths and weaknesses, and where it could be improved. Sometimes, we have them go online to do additional research. The kids then write a second draft, which we type into the computer.

Finally, we sit side by side and review the whole essay again. We point out spelling and grammatical mistakes and fix them together. We also discuss problems with the narrative (e.g., the need to set the scene better, etc.) and prompt them to fill in the gaps. We don't write anything ourselves, but we do guide them ("Where were we when this happened?" or "What did it look like?").

The result is definitely much better than they would produce solely on their own. We're hoping to achieve two things: Give all of you something worth reading, while also teaching the kids to write better.

Christmas in the Rocket's Red Glare

2008-12-10T07:06:00.024-02:00

by Andrew

With just 10 days until Christmas, an apartment the size of a taco , and two gonzo children, I now understand why sales of expensive liquors rise so dramatically in December.

Nevertheless, Christmas in Buenos Aires is a pale shadow of its tinseled American counterpart. Firstly, it's summer here, which does take some of the snap and crackle out of the season's festivities. Second, Argentines would never dream of trampling a Walmart employee to death unless he were manning the meat counter.

Sure, businesses here put up a few garlands and lights, but the shop windows aren't festooned with mechanized nodding reindeer, and the TV commercials haven't changed much. Even more noticeably, people who attend church once a year don't snarl "Feliz Navidad" at you if you happen to say "Felices Fiestas!"

None of this festive understatement has phased Graham and Katharine in the slightest, however. You could put our children in the middle of the Kalahari in December and they would happily pass the time building an airstrip for Santa with bleached bones. They are genetically programmed to get stuff at this time of year.

The children have had to make some adjustments, of course. Here, in no particular order, are the issues with which we are grappling:

1) Logistics. Santa can only bring what will fit into our suitcases. This is a dictum that has been handed down by me, and the children have been instructed to pass the order on to Santa in their Christmas letters. No doll houses, bicycles, or swimming pools, please. The children have been noticeably cold toward me ever since.

2) Lack of chimney. Katharine was appalled when she walked into our first-floor apartment and saw that it lacked Santa's traditional ingress. Fortunately, we do have a small patio and the children have our assurance that we will leave the French doors open on Christmas Eve.

3) Lack of Christmas tree. As in South Africa, real Christmas trees are something of a luxury, and most residents make do with an artificial one. We don't even have that, leaving us no choice but to decorate a dusty little ficus tree on the patio. The children are making decorations from the cardboard inserts in old toilet rolls. Katharine hopes that Santa leaves extra presents out of sheer pity.

4) Greed. By now, we are all weary of hearing the excesses of Wall Street. Make no mistake, though, the rot goes much deeper than that. For the past few days, Katharine has been weighing a scheme that could quite possibly destroy the very fabric of our universe. For the sake of profit, she wants to bring together two of the most powerful magic forces known to man: Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

For six weeks now, Katharine has been clutching a tooth that fell out as we drove to Miami. She refused to put it under her pillow in the United States, hoping instead to make a killing on the foreign-exchange market. Panamanian pillows flunked the test after she discovered that the balboa is pegged to the U.S. dollar. She has been marginally more enthusiastic about the Argentine peso, and has watched closely as the dollar strengthened from 3.0 pesos to 3.4. But with Christmas just around the corner, she saw the chance to hit pay dirt. What would happen, she mused, if she put her tooth under her pillow on Christmas Eve?

Have we truly come to the point where a 7-year-old child will risk everything to increase her return by a few points? Who knows what will happen when Santa's magical emanations collide with the pixie dust of the Tooth Fairy? It simply doesn't bear thinking about. Katharine, her eyes set on a big score, couldn't care less. Fortunately, there is still hope (see below).

5) Anti-aircraft fire. As in much of Europe, Argentines enjoy their big celebration on Christmas Eve. The whole country shuts down in the afternoon and the rest of the day is family time. As midnight nears, it's common for the residents of Buenos Aires to count down a la New Year's Eve before discharging tons of fireworks into the night sky. From what we have been told, the resulting explosions make Beirut look sleepy.

As excited as the children are about the prospect of fireworks, they are more terrified by the possibility that Santa will be blown out of the sky as he attempts to make his deliveries. In hopes of avoiding friendly-fire accidents, Graham wants Rudolf to exchange his red schnozz for a flashing blue-and-white police beacon. And, in the event that this safety precaution fails, Katharine and Graham have mobilized their own fire brigade on our patio. They spend hours practicing fire-suppression techniques with the cleaning hose, convinced that Santa will appear smouldering on our doorstep with a Chinese rocket lodged in his beard.

This distressing image has given even hard-hearted Katharine pause. Not only is she concerned about exposing the Tooth Fairy to anti-aircraft fire, but she also worries that Santa and the Tooth Fairy might collide during mid-air maneuvers. If that happens, she can kiss her profit margin goodbye.

At this point, we don't know what will happen with Katharine and her tooth. Ecuador uses the U.S dollar, so it's a bust from an investment standpoint, leaving only Costa Rica. Hopefully, it's not known as the Rich Coast for nothing.

As for Christmas, we're prepared, fire buckets at the ready, staring up hopefully into the sky.

Scenes from Jumbo, a super-supermercado

California plums for sale!

Onions make her cry.

Dried fish.

Cheesy grin.

Katharine hamming it up.

We really, really miss Food Lion.

Scary doll.

Everything has a price.

Hiking With an Assassin

2008-12-08T15:04:00.018-02:00

By Louise

After spending two days in El Calafate standing around gawking at glaciers, we felt the need to seriously stretch our legs on some hiking trails. So we headed to El Chalten, a dusty town within the Parque National Los Glaciares in southern Patagonia. It’s a small, granola/tourist town that was settled in 1985. The town accommodates hikers and climbers eager to hurl themselves at the Fitz Roy massif; Cerro Fitz Roy being one of the toughest climbing peaks in the Andes. Graham had his sights set on it.

The mountain range that surrounded the tiny town was jaw-droppingly beautiful. Even though it’s summer, many peaks were blanketed in snow. Without binoculars, the Glaciar Grande—that flowed between Cerro Solo and Cerro Fitz Roy—looked like a field of trampled snow. With binoculars, we could see that that the snow and ice were actually hundreds of feet thick. We all wished we could hike on a glacier but the walk was four hours long one way and we weren't prepared. Much to Graham's dismay, our goal was to complete two different hikes that would take us only 350 meters up, but would give us vastly different views of the mountains.

As we walked, we did our best to talk in loud voices and disturb all wildlife and any peace other hikers were looking for. We talked about glaciers, global warming, moss, puma attacks, and Santa. It being the season and all, Katharine, who had been walking while sharpening a stick, was keen on reviewing her Christmas wish list. So what if the most amazing mountain scenery surrounded us; let’s focus on the big guy in the red suit.

I asked Katharine what she wanted. Without looking up from her stick sharpening, she very coolly said, “I’m going to ask Santa for a complete assassin’s kit. One with a grappling hook, machine gun, knife, and motorcycle. I want to be an assassin when I grow up.”

I think we may be one of three families on the ES who don’t own a gun. Aside from knocking off the occasional backyard fowl, we’re pretty peaceful. So this was weird; not to mention that she’s seven. But then Graham, rolling on the ground with laughter, explained that Katharine wanted to be the woman in the movie we watched a few days earlier. Oh yeah, that movie, the one starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as husband and wife assassins. Yes, we know it was inappropriate.

Assassin discussion continued for days until Katharine saw part of an episode of Colombo— dubbed in Spanish—and changed her tune. “I don’t want to be an assassin anymore. I don’t want big lips. I want to be a detective.”

That settles it: Dear Santa, Please send Katharine a raincoat for Christmas.

The road to El Chalten.

The assassin leads the way.

Down in the valley

Laguna Capri with Fitz Roy massif in the background.

Glacier with Fitz Roy massif on the right.

The assassin tests the water.

Taking a break: It's tough hiking with regular folk.

Assassin with her sharpened stick.

Horsing Around at Punta Delgada

2008-12-06T15:00:00.008-02:00

By Katharine

On our last day at Punta Delgada, we rode horses along the cliffs above the elephant seals. We walked from the hotel to a farm building where they saddle the horses. There were bunches of sheep skins in piles and heads in buckets. Chickens were running around, and horses roamed the place.

A man named Raoul whistled and the horses came. First, he brought out a tan horse that was very big, and he said “el caballo del nino” and pointed to Graham. Graham got on with the help of Raoul. Then he saddled a tannish brown horse and said “el caballo de la nina” and pointed to me, so I got on. After that, Raoul took two black horses out for my dad and mom.

We kicked the horses and started. We didn’t have to steer because the horses followed the path. We walked along the cliffs, which was very scary but beautiful. Then we went through the plains, and stepped on bushes. My horse ran up a hill and across a dirt road, which really scared me because she would not stop when I pulled her reins. Finally, we were done.

After we stopped, Roxanne (the boss of the hotel) ran to us and said she had spotted three orcas. We said “adios” to Raoul, and ran to the cliff. We saw the orcas swimming along the beach, but they didn’t steal a seal. Roxanne said that she thought they had just eaten.

Salted sheep skins. The lamb is on the asador.

Raoul saddles Katharine's horse.

Katharine with her trusty steed.

The magnificent three ride again.

El gaucho guapo.

I hope our riders aren't French.

Elefantes Marinas de Chubut

2008-12-06T14:35:00.006-02:00

By Katharine

Our family stayed in a hotel next to a lighthouse at Punta Delgada, on the Peninsula Valdes. We went to see a colony of southern elephant seals down on the beach. We sat in the back of a Land Rover on the way, while the guide in the front seat talked to me with a walkie-talkie. The ride down was great, because you could see the sea and the cliffs, and the path was bumpy, dusty, and lumpy.

When we stopped, she led us down a big, sandy cliff to the beach where the elephant seals were lying. First we heard a noise that Dad thought was elephant seal farts, but the guide said that they were calling. It sounded like a burp to Europe. They burped so loudly that they nearly blew our ears off.

We sat on the beach, watching them from 10 yards away. Some were in big groups and some were by themselves. Every few seconds, the seals would try to cover themselves with sand using their flippers. When they opened their mouths to call, the inside of their mouths were a bubble-gum pink. Their eyes were big and black, and the whites of their eyes were red, making them look bloodshot.

A male elephant seal is the size of a Punch Buggy, and can weigh 8,800 pounds. A male is the size of seven females. The full-grown males had gone to the ocean to get food, so only the girls and the young males were left with the babies. They were shedding, so we found lots of skin and hair on the beach.

Elephant seals eat fish, squid, and other sea animals. They can stay underwater for two hours and can dive 4,900 feet deep.

On land, the elephant seals move on their bellies like worms. Their back goes up, then their middle goes down, and then their front goes up, just like a seesaw. They are so fat that when they do the worm, the fat rolls up and down.

We wished for an orca to come to the beach to eat an elephant seal. They come really fast and fling themselves on the beach. When an elephant seal tries to get away, they pick them up and eat them, and then go back into the water. We didn’t see that happen, but we did spot some orcas (read my post about horses).

When we left the beach, Graham and I took the Land Rover, while Mom and Dad walked back to the hotel. We got to drive the Land Rover with the guide. She pressed the brake and the accelerator, while we steered.

Katharine coordinated all movement.

Elephant seals on the beach below.

Making the descent to the beach.

Louise now feels good about her weight.

Louise enjoys a spa treatment.

Dermabrasion helped a little, but not much.

A Black-Tie Event in Patagonia

2008-12-06T12:20:00.008-02:00

By Katharine

In Patagonia we saw penguins, not just one but half a million. We visited the biggest penguin colony in South America. It was a two-hour drive from Puerto Madryn to Punta Tombo. When we got there, we saw penguins walking everywhere. A guide said to us that we could not touch them.

The penguins were sitting on nests in holes that they had dug in the ground and also under bushes. Many of the nests were filled with chicks or eggs. The penguins are called Magellanic penguins because they were named after Ferdinand Magellan, the first man to sail around the world. They are small. They look like South African penguins. They have pink circles around their eyes, a black back, and a white face and chest. They reached a little bit above my knee.

After the nest is built, the mom lays 2 eggs at a time. It takes 5 to 6 weeks for an egg to hatch. The chicks stay in the nest for 1 month. After that, they leave the nest to grow adult feathers. The parents swim up to 600 km for food to give to the babies. They eat shrimp, fish, and krill. Both chicks are given equal care. Usually, they survive. The predators are the sea lion and petral.

We walked on gravel paths and over bridges through the reserve. The penguins were on there, too. We got about a foot away from them. They sing a crazy song that sounds like a car horn. They do it to attract a female. Two of them were fighting. They were pulling at each other and biting their tails.

When we were leaving mom was videotaping a penguin, when another penguin came up behind me and nipped my pants. It didn’t hurt, though. Penguins are cool birds.

Click image for larger view.

Penguin in nest with chicks.

Penguins at the Battle of Ypres.

Penguins view local wildlife (guanaco).

Penguin having trouble flossing.

You lookin' at me?

A gala event on the beach.

She can't swim 600 kms but she's a cutie.

Okay, okay, I'm short for my weight.

My Visit to Patagonia's Glaciers

2008-12-06T10:47:00.008-02:00

By Graham

Three days ago I saw one of the most amazing sights.

My family and I were on a three-story boat on the waters of Lago Argentino in Patagonia. For the first time in my life I saw icebergs and glaciers. Icebergs are chunks that have fallen off glaciers. They are all different shapes and sizes. In Patagonia some are as big as houses and some are the size of a baseball.

Two hours later we saw their source: the gigantic glacier Upsala, 100 m tall, 50 km long, and 10 km wide. It towered over us. Once Upsala was the biggest glacier in South America; now, it is losing 200 m a year, due to global warming. A glacier that loses more ice than it gains is known as an unstable glacier.

We noticed that the glacier was blue. This happens when the ice becomes very dense. Years of compression slowly force out tiny pockets of air trapped between ice crystals. Extremely dense ice absorbs all other colors in the spectrum except blue, which is what we see. If glacier ice is white, it usually means lots of air is trapped inside.

Glaciers are formed when snow stays in the same place all year, and then new snow piles on top of it for years and years. The compression forces snow to recrystalize, forming grains similar in size and shape to a grain of sugar. Slowly, the grains become bigger and the air pockets between them become smaller. After two years, the snow turns into firn, which is between snow and glacier ice.

We sailed two hours to reach an even taller glacier, called Perito Moreno. Named after a famous explorer and environmentalist, the glacier is 250 square kms and one of three stable glaciers in Patagonia. It is fed by the Southern Patagonian ice field, along with 47 other glaciers.
Watching ice fall from the face of the glacier into the lake was amazing. Some of the pieces must have been the size of a house. A gigantic piece of ice would crack off the glacier and tumble into the water, creating a sound like a savage beast grumbling. It just blew thunder away. I jumped every time I heard it.

Sabias Que?
* Glaciers produce 75% of the world’s fresh water.
* Presently, 10% of land is covered by glaciers.
* During the last ice age, glaciers covered 32% of total land area.
* If all land ice melted, the sea level would rise 70 m worldwide.

Click image for larger view.

View of Perito Moreno glacier.

Graham is splashed by glacial water.

Now we know why the Titanic went down.

Hues of blue.

Hielo azul sin martini.

Only blue light is reflected from the densest ice.

Impersonation of Wall Street.

Video of calving ice at Perito Moreno.

Lisp and Clear

2008-11-30T08:53:00.004-02:00

By Andrew

My inability to speak Spanish with any degree of competence has had one small benefit: My arms are getting fit. I spend much of each day pointing at esto, eso, and those thingies over there. Ordering breakfast at a bakery, I could just as easily be directing aircraft at O’Hare.

When pointing fails, I admit that I revert to what is known among linguists as the English Method: I speak ever more loudly—in English—until I am understood. The British ended up with a large empire using this technique, which the natives found intimidating. It’s a little known fact that India was won when Sir Clive stopped to ask for directions.

What frustrates me most is that I can actually read Spanish. All those years of French and Latin, tossed with a smattering of Italian, allow me to decipher a good deal. Seeking some use for my expensive education, I now prepare pre-emptive phrases for any looming confrontations, such as haircuts (see earlier post), beer-ordering, and helado consumption.

This is a technique that was originally employed by my father when we lived in Switzerland. Dispatched to the bakery with orders to procure a dozen rolls, my father would practice his line all the way down the street. Unfortunately, Dad pronounced the German for twelve, zwölf, in much the same way a wolf greets the full moon. By the time he reached the bakery, all the dogs in the neighborhood were howling sympathetically and my father’s nerve had failed him. He would proceed to order thirteen rolls instead, which invariably evoked a glare from the dour Swiss lady manning the counter.

Rattling off rehearsed lines also has an unfortunate side-effect. People talk back. If you’re lucky, they stay on script and you can sweep out of the store feeling fluent and worldly. All too often, though, they fire off a long burst, the only word of which I understand is peso. This is my cue to thrust great wads of cash at them and then stand there waiting expectantly.

To some degree, Spanish itself must take some blame for my problem. True Spanish demands that the speaker lisp alarmingly every time a word containing “c” pops up. This is not good. At my boarding school, people who lisped were beaten up behind the cricket pavilion, so I’ve always been keen to keep my vowels and consonants crisp. Lisping runs counter to all that, plus I tend to splodge a thick mist into the air every time I attempt it. This is fine when it comes from a right whale in the Golfo Nuevo, but less acceptable emanating from me.

Buenos Aires, too, must shoulder its fair share of responsibility. In a linguistic evolution that I do not yet understand, the good residents of BA have reshuffled their pronunciation of the Spanish alphabet. Pollo, pronounced “poyo” worldwide, here is delivered as “posho.” Yo, spoken in Spanish much as it is in English, is pronounced “jo” here. I spent the first two weeks in BA wondering who this Joe fellow was and why everyone was talking about him.

Delivered by a resident in full flight, the BA accent sounds like someone sweeping the floor—it’s a gentle back-and-forth ssshing noise. To duplicate the BA accent accurately, place 16 marbles (the small ones will do fine) in your mouth and say as rapidly as possible: “Surely, sister, some sheep stole your shish-kebab.”

As you can imagine, the combined effect of the lisped “c” and the BA “sssshh” has left me in a pickle. Every time I open my mouth, I sound like a drunk, gay man. Apart from one fellow who was wearing sparkly sneakers, most Argentines have recoiled in absolute horror. I am now placing all my linguistic hopes on Ecuador.

Chukker Up

2008-11-23T22:48:00.011-02:00

By Louise

We have a friend who claims to have hung out with the Argentinian polo team. On horseback. Shoeless. Standing. Apparently, she was showing off her skills by riding bareback barefoot while standing. Uh-huh. But enough about her. We just returned from our first polo match and let me tell you, those taco-wielding caballeros estan muy fantastico! I'd stand on a horse for them, too! Smacking that little plastic white ball while moving at extreme speed....que impressivo! Very exciting to watch. Had no idea what was happening. Couldn't keep track of the ball or who was who — the red and white team lost by a lot, but it was okay. No one seemed to care. It was just a very nice Sunday afternoon at Polo Argentina in Palermo.

Un Poco Nada de Empanada

2008-11-23T10:56:00.006-02:00

By Graham con la familia

The empanada is a pastry
That I find mighty tasty.

With more fat than a Big Mac
It's a golden heart attack.

Meat, chicken, vegetable,
All so delectable.

Crunchy, munchy, golden brown,
Sure to stop a sullen frown.

Moist, rich, very sweet,
Bound to be a super treat.

Comiendolos es muy bien
Until I come to the end.

Then I want una mas,
With a little agua con gas!

I Love Empanadas!

2008-11-23T09:47:00.004-02:00

By Graham

My favorite food here is the empanada. They are a type of pastry. It looks like a golden brown half moon. On the inside there is a filling of meat, chicken, or vegetables. I like soft-crusted empanadas. My favorite kind is dulce de carne, which is meat, sugar, and raisins. Mom says I should not eat an empanada every day because they have more calories and fat than a Big Mac. Even though they are tempting, I've decided not to eat them anymore (well, sort of). Last night I was chowing down on mini-empanadas. I had three huge helpings. I was sure by morning I would be fat as a hog, but I wasn't. I am still the same. Turns out they really weren't empanadas. They were Italian raviolis shaped like empanadas.

A Race to Feel Good About

2008-11-20T10:14:00.004-02:00

By Katharine
Sunday morning we ran in a race for ice cream. It makes people who eat ice cream feel good about themselves. When we got there dad told us it was a 3K race and we had to hurry to sign up. They gave us wicking T-shirts that were white and blue and had a picture of an ice cream cone. Also we got numbers to identify us in the race. My number was 1588.

To get started we had to stretch. First we had to touch our toes. A man was counting down from 20 until we started. I went with Mom. When we saw a mother pushing a stroller, my mom said that we had to beat her. Then we saw a group of kids, I suddenly told my mom in a strange voice that I was going to wipe them down. So I started running. I left her in the dust. After that I had to run back and get her. We decided to walk and run but we ended up running all the way.

We saw people holding up signs at the finish. Then we saw Dad and Graham they gave us water and Gatorade. Then we got free ice cream. After that we rode around in a 4-person bike and took a taxi home.

Because running wasn't enough...We rented a bike and cruised the park for an hour.

Corriendo por Helado

2008-11-20T10:08:00.004-02:00

One reason why Andrew keeps stepping in stuff: All the trees are in bloom, it's really beautiful.

Pre-race stretching while waiting for our taxi.

By Louise

Even though my Spanish is coming back to me at great speed, when I spotted a poster for the 2 da Maraton del Autentico Helado Artesanal, I was certain I had read it wrong. An ice cream marathon? For real? First, it's bakeries on every block. Now, it's running for ice cream? What kind of nirvana is this? On closer look I discovered that it wasn't really a marathon, but rather a 3K/8K race. Even better.

Having had my first tastes of Argentine helado (FYI: The ice cream mugging scene created by Katharine was just a tad exaggerated. There was no screaming. I had clamped my hand firmly over her mouth.), I knew that we needed to be at the place where there were bound to be buckets of the rich creamy, dreamy stuff. So I pointed the sign out to Graham and suggested that maybe he might want to run it while I cheered him on with a spoon in my mouth.

As race day grew nearer, Graham started saying things like, "Mom, don't you think we should start training?" and "Come on, mom, let's run." Graham has known me for nine years. He should know that I'm not a runner; I just like to talk about it.Yet thoughts of dulce de leche would not leave my mind. I figured just this once I could get over myself and run.

When Sunday arrived I pulled on my sneakers. I ate a light breakfast, knowing that in no time I would be headfirst into helado.

I called us a taxi (this being my job now that Andrew has flustered himself out of it by confusing nombre with numero one too many times) and told the driver what park we needed to go to. I suppose it was sort of like saying, "Take me to Central Park," because his response was along the lines of "OK, but that park is huge. Where do you want to go?"

I tried to explain in Spanish that we were going to the big ice cream race. He still didn't get it. So I said, "Corriendo! Helado!" The driver looked at me as if I were crazy. I couldn't figure him out. We were heading to a big race and festival. There were posters all over town. What gives?

The driver, obviously coming down from a busy Saturday night, ignored my continued attempts at communication and got us to the park on time. We registered and joined the other ice cream lovers at the starting line. There was something odd though: Where were all the ice cream booths? I brushed the thought aside, assuming that by the time I finished running things would be set up and spoons set out. Now was the time to focus on the race.

We prepared with a little stretching while sizing up our opponents. I spotted a woman with a stroller; bending down, I whispered to Katharine, my running buddy, "We must beat her." Meanwhile, Katharine counted up her victims. Graham, on the other hand, was focused on the fastest path to the front of the pack. He would not stop running until he crossed the finish line. Andrew's plan: stick with Graham.

The count down began. Graham shot off with Andrew trying to follow. Katharine, holding my hand turned to me and said, "I don't want to drag you the whole way. Get a move on!"

The woman with the stroller turned out to be a little quicker than she looked, but we passed her. Then Katharine spied her first victim: a small boy running with his dad. "I'm going to wipe him down." And so she did. Next up: two girls about her age, their ponytails bouncing as they skipped along with their parents. "Let's go!" Katharine snarled and took off, leaving me in her dust. The two girls sensed a challenge and tried to keep up with Katharine, but I cut them off and charged forward. We crossed the finish line to cheers from Graham and Andrew, and were handed an ice cream in a cup with one of those pressed on lids like you get in school. What the heck? I'm lactose intolerant. I'm not going to waste an upset stomach on pre-pressed helado! I felt my muscles tightening. Oh well, there's always the Queso y Queso 2K run next Sunday.

Attempting to psych out the other runners by showing off our muscles.

The other runners cleared out, they were so scared.

We kicked butt!

The point of running 3K: Ice cream!

Write or Wrong

2008-11-19T22:17:00.007-02:00

by Andrew

I have worried lately that our kids are not learning much Spanish in
Buenos Aires because they have not met any Spanish-speaking children. Imagine my surprise--and delight--when I glimpsed something that Katharine had written and saw that she had sprinkled her work with Espanol. "Hora of pane" stared up at me from a short piece in Katharine's notebook.

My heart went out to her. Although my little scholar didn't know the Spanish for breakfast, "desayuno," she had used her imagination, describing it instead as the "hour of bread." The fact that she had used the Italian for bread, instead of the Spanish "pan," did not bother me in the slightest. My cosmopolitan little daughter, breaking free from the scrapple of the Eastern Shore, had become a linguistic sponge. A burgeoning citizen of the world. I was so proud.

Imagine, then, the depths of despondency to which I sank when I read the full essay. "Hora of pane" wasn't Spanish. It wasn't Italian. It wasn't even English. It was instead the desperate yearning of a child whose parents felt they could homeschool their children.

Katharine had wanted to write of the "horror of pain" she had experienced when a beautician had attacked her cuticles. Instead, stunted by the selfish wanderlust of her parents, she had managed to scratch out her emotions the only way she knew how--in a mutant language that makes the Rosetta Stone look like pidgin English.

If our kids are ever to return to Broadwater, I have an awful feeling we're going to have to endow a new technology wing--or, at the very least, a language lab.

Chicken Electrolysis

2008-11-18T17:19:00.012-02:00

by Andrew

I spent the week screwing up the courage to get a haircut. This may sound like a trivial chore, but I still carry the emotional scars from the last time I tried to get a trim in a foreign language.

La ultima vez was in Italy, during a semester that I spent in Rome. It was early in the term, and my Italian--which never fully blossomed--was non-existent. In fact, the only words that I had learned came from ordering food at a local rosticceria. Seeking strength in numbers, I dragged my friend Tom with me to the local barbershop, in a residential neighborhood near our convent (yes, we lived in a convent).

We stood on the sidewalk outside, practicing our spiel. We had eaten at the rosticceria enough to know that a half chicken was a mezzo pollo. If we asked for a mezzo, surely the barber would understand that we wanted a simple trim?

With this surefire plan in hand, we marched into the shop. Tom went first (I'm stupid, but not that stupid). He took his seat in the chair and waited as the barber wrapped him in a cloak. When the barber finally looked to him for instruction, Tom pointed at his head and confidently requested a "mezzo pollo."

Tom's first signal that he had committed a fatal error was when he saw me roll off the bench in uncontrollable laughter. And when he realized that he had described his head as a half chicken, he too began to giggle, his head bobbing up and down, making the barber's job all but impossible.

I hesitate to describe the barber as a humorless man, but I suspect that he last laughed during Italy's 22nd post-war government and we were well into the 40s by now. He took our giggling as an insult to Italy, to his manhood, and to his ability as a barber. And he punished us accordingly, giving us haircuts that truly made us look like moulting pollos.

So you can imagine my angst as I prepared to undergo the clippers yet again, this time in Buenos Aires. History must not repeat itself, so I prepared. I studied. Louise has this handy little widget on her computer that acts as a translator. Type in what you want to say and--hey, presto!--it turns it into Spanish. Louise had expressed some doubts about the widget, but I had used it a couple of times with good results.

I typed in "I need a haircut," and received in return "necesito un corte de pelo." It looked good to me, so I pressed on. I entered all the instructions for how I wanted my hair cut, and wrote the translation down on a piece of paper.

Satisfied with my preparations, I went to put on my shoes, leaving my crib sheet on the dining-room table. When I returned, Louise was gasping for air on the couch, laughing much as I had done two decades earlier in Rome.

"Do you realize what you are going to ask the barber?" she wheezed, stabbing at my paper between gusts of laughter. Bemused, I scanned my opus. And there it was: "I want my hair short" had suffered slightly in translation. I had been 10 minutes away from asking to have my head short-circuited.

In a land where depilation and electrolysis rule supreme, I have no doubt that the barber would have strapped me to a gurney, hooked electrodes to my scalp , and removed my last precious follicles. I owe my wife one. Plus, I'm growing my hair out.

Questions Answered?

2008-11-17T16:30:00.012-02:00

by Louise

Answers to questions from some enquiring minds:

How do you say "poop" in Spanish?
We're told by some Spanish-speaking friends in the US that it's la caca, although it sounds like they may be making that up. Could it really be that obvious? We don't have the nerve to ask the women in the bakery, but we will ask the tutor we are scheduled to meet this Thursday.

What's the grossest thing you've eaten so far? The best?
Katharine says: The grossest meal we had was in Panama. We went to a restaurant and were served rubber seafood. It was totally gross. Best food so far was in Buenos Aires: Pollo empanadas y dulce de leche helado. (If it were up to Katharine she would Only eat empanadas.)

Please describe the daily routine
We are still trying to figure out a routine. For instance, yesterday while walking to the parque zoological por clase de ciencias, we realized that it was nearly time for lunch yet we had just eaten breakfast. Things will change tomorrow...

Currently our schedule looks a little like this:
8am: Wake up (well, everyone but Katharine). Discover that we ate the bread intended for desayuno with the previous night's dinner. Either Andrew or I run out to get more bread from one of the dozen nearby bakeries and often come back with everything but bread. Today it was donuts filled with dulce de leche (and I wonder why my clothes are snug).

9am-11am: Attempt to teach our children something. This has proven tougher than we anticipated. I am discovering that after nearly 20 years of creating materials for teachers and kids that I picked the easy profession. Teaching is tough. I'm having trouble with two students, how teachers can manage 10 or more is beyond me.

11am-2pm: Explore the city. One of the reasons why we are in BA for two months was to expose the kids to city living and all it has to offer (dog poop, included as a bonus in BA). So far discovered that places like museums and parks are a hit with G&K but the city center where it's all walking and looking at buildings and talking about history is a chore which results in our having to stop for a snack and a coffee or a lunchtime cerveza. The kids say they prefer living on a farm but would like a nice cheese shop and a bakery or two nearby.

3pm: We head home and attempt to enforce a siesta. Funny how G&K can be dragging their feet, moaning about how tired they are only to return to our little apartment and start bouncing off the walls. Nevertheless, it's quiet time for a couple hours.

6pm: Head out for a walk around the neighborhood, attempt to pull together dinner from the small, local pasta, butcher, and vegetable shops, or just head to the large supermercado for one stop shopping. I am nearly positive that the supermarket is getting it's vegetables shipped in from the Cape Charles Food Lion.

A trip to the supermercado can also take a really long time if we need something as basic as milk. There seems to be a lot of choices—I think—but I'm not sure. The packages look different yet similar—they have slight word changes that continue to hang me up. I haven't been able to find the fat free milk, but there appears to be milk for people over the age of 50. And then, of course, you have to decide between milk in a tetrapak or plasma-like baggie.

8pm: This seems to be the time when people meet at cafes for a coffee and pastry or maybe an ice cream. Not us. We're ready for una cerveza o copa de vino tinto. If possible, we try to find a cafe next to a park. So we can park it while watching the kids park it.

9-10pm: We head home to prepare dinner. This is also TV time...in Spanish. We continue to learn a lot here, but have discovered that the kids can actually learn too much from TV. There can be no casual flipping of channels. It seems to go from Disney to dancing shows where the contestants dance in the "rain," while wearing very little. I mean, Very little.

10-11pm: Dinner. If we go out, it's definitely no earlier than 10pm...and we're still some of the first to be seated. This is why the afternoon siesta is crucial. Without it, G&K collapse before you can say agua con gaseosa.

How does Andrew get the dog poop off his shoes?
Poop? What poop?
We now have a "remove all footwear at the door" policy. Just in case. It really is crazy out there.

Mangling Spanglish

2008-11-17T07:48:00.006-02:00

by Andrew

One of the goals of our trip to Latin America is to have the children learn Spanish--at least, more Spanish than they were picking up at school watching Scooby Doo Goes to Mexico. Total language immersion, we were told, would have the children speaking conversational Spanish in three months. Unfortunately, we are having difficulty finding a Spanish pool deep enough in which to dunk them.

All the children in Buenos Aires are in school, so Graham and Katharine have yet to meet any kids their own age. I had hoped they would be able to join pick-up soccer games in the many parks near our apartment, but these are the domain of the famed crap hounds of BA. For the most part, local children play in organized school sports or at swanky athletic clubs near Palermo.

While we intensify our search for a tutor, the children's Spanish instruction has largely consisted of three primary sources:

1) Hearing their parents mangle the language in new and excruciating ways. Employees in the local bakeries and cafes visibly shudder when we walk in the door. There is actually talk in the neighborhood of reconstituting the Spanish Inquisition, with a new language-oriented mandate.

2) Watching TV in Spanish, or rather American TV dubbed into Spanish. Almost all the shows come from the U.S., and it's just a matter of time before we see Scooby Doo Goes to Mexico. We've discovered that it's actually much harder to learn a language when the movement of the speakers' lips doesn't match the words you are hearing. Katharine, either for comedic value or because she is seriously confused, will now say something in Spanish and then keep her lips moving silently for several seconds afterwards. This, too, has posed a problem locally (see Spanish Inquisition, above).

3) By reading billboards and subway signs, most of which involve naked women. Graham may not be able to buy a bus ticket in Spanish, but he is fluent when it comes to any discussion about the benefits of a bikini wax.

Poop

2008-11-15T01:47:00.004-02:00

By Graham

Poop, poop, poop, this city is all about poop. It is here, it is there, it is everywhere. All day long you have to look where you put your feet. One moment you could be walking, and the next you could be sliding. We are having a contest to see who can make it the longest without stepping in poop. Dad is already out.

If you were to put all the poop in Buenos Aires in one mound, it would probably be about 10,000 feet high. Just hope a passing plane doesn't run into it. That would be an awful mess. I have never seen this much poop in my life. This city would be perfect if there were no poop.

I Scream, You Scream, My Mom Stole My Ice Scream!

2008-11-15T01:25:00.006-02:00

By Katharine

One night, we all went out for ice cream at Freddo's. The inside of the shop is small and has a big counter that takes up most of the room. There were only three other people. One little girl had a bowl of ice cream a few inches tall. We thought we could ask for a smaller scoop but then we found out that it was the smallest size. When it was our turn, my dad got raspberry. It was a pinkish color. My brother got wild berry, which was light pink with big purple chunks. I chose dulce de leche, which was light brown. Our dad went over to order in espanol. We took our helados outside. First, we tried Graham's. It tasted like a bunch of fruit put together to make a slushy. Then, we had my dad's. It tasted like a sour raspberry. Finally, we tried mine. It was all caramel, so creamy and smooth my mom went psycho for it. I asked her why she did not buy her own. She said she thought that it would be too much ice cream. She then told me that my ice cream was leaking, which I think was a lie because she just wanted more. I started screaming at her because she wouldn't give me my ice cream back, so I only got a half. My mom was like a dog with a bone. I feared for my life.

Just Like Me

2008-11-12T21:50:00.013-02:00

Before we arrived in Buenos Aires I had some preconceived notions about Argentine women. You know, the typical "they all look like tango dancers" stereotype: long-legged, short-skirted, smooth dark hair pulled into a neat tight bun, heels, manicured, pedicured, neat, cool, a pampered package. In other words, my complete and total opposite. During my period of pre-travel psycho-ness, I would lie in bed (heart beating a little too fast) and think about the hair washings, massages, and pedicures that I would be forced to endure just to fit in. I couldn't wait.

Well, we arrive in BA, and much to my surprise, the women don't look anything like I imagined. In fact, I fit right in, frizzy hair and all. Maybe it's our neighborhood—we're in Recoleta—but I haven't seen a single woman who resembles my mind's stereotype. I'm a little disappointed because now I can just continue as I am, no pressure to smooth the frizz and buff the nails.

Ha.

One Small Foot for a Girl...

2008-11-12T10:38:00.011-02:00

by Katharine

Today was my first pedicure. We walked around the whole of French Street. But all of the shops were closed except one. When we walked in we knew something was wrong. First she took us downstairs (upstairs was much nicer). Then she took us into a little box where we ended up being squashed. We both went through a horror of pain. She took a very sharp pointy thing and stabbed our toes. When can we go, I thought. She asked my mom what color she wanted. My mom said "red." Then she asked me. I wanted black and green but she did not want me to get dark colors. She said, "pinkish white." When my mom's feet were done they looked like she cut her toes with a machete. The woman had splattered the polish all over her toes but she did not care. When we went to pay she told us how much it was. It was 50 pesos! We paid and tried to walk out but it was too late, the woman started kissing us—ewww! We quickly ran out. We saw dad and told him the news.

Perros, Perros, Perros

2008-11-12T10:31:00.006-02:00

By Katharine

There are many dogs here. On every block there is a dog. There are yellow dogs, brown dogs, tan dogs, spotty dogs, big dogs, and little dogs. Sometimes when we go to the park we see them running and playing. We usually see them in packs. All the dog walkers have about 10 or 20 dogs. But there is one bad thing, poop. Everywhere you step is poop. My mom, Graham, and I miss the poop but our dad steps in all of it. So we always have to say dad, you stepped in poop! But I like it here.

San Telmo Sunday Market; Photos

2008-11-12T08:04:00.010-02:00

by Louise

"There's an antique market in San Telmo on Sunday, you want to go?" (Insert sound of groaning children.) "Can we buy toys there?" (Insert sound of groaning parents.)

We set off for the market not really knowing what to expect. Would it be a bunch of tables set up in full sun in the middle of the neighborhood square? Hawkers selling junk? Would our kids be whining and dragging their feet forcing us into a little cafe for a mid-morning cerveza o dos?

After walking in the wrong direction three times and the right direction (but thinking it was the wrong direction) twice, we finally made it to the market. What a madhouse. It carried on for block after brick-lined block. The Spanish colonial homes created a perfect frame for the sellers, singers, tango dancers, and costumed people. Was it like this always? Quizás, we were told, this was just another Sunday in San Telmo. So, like the woman in the ducha libre, we went with the flow.

Graham is developing an interest in knives. We're not sure if we should be concerned about this or not. There certainly were plenty to look at, touch, and wave around in his sister's face.

Katharine spent a really, really long time looking at jewelery. The booth owners often tried to change her focus to "kid" stuff but she would have none of it. She never did find what she was looking for. We're not even sure what she was looking for. She's still looking.

There was a lot of very cool horse stuff. Almost made me wish I could ride. Almost.

Family portrait. You can see that at least I'm still smiling.

First Lessons in Urban Life

2008-11-11T08:21:00.004-02:00

by Andrew

A week ago, as we wandered down Collins Avenue in South Beach, we passed a slew of young men whose sex was not a slam dunk, at least for a seven-year-old. Some wore dresses, some wore make-up, some wore almost nothing at all. All would have won the Miss Exmore competition without a single pirouette. As each one passed, Katharine turned to Louise and whispered: "Was that a man or a woman?"

And so we had the urban equivalent of the birds-and-the-bees conversation, otherwise known as the drones-and-drakes dialogue. Oh, it may be old hat to you folks who live in New York or San Francisco, but for a child whose closest encounter with homosexuality was a Pekin duck and his Appalachian son, this was big stuff. I must announce that Katharine no longer sees the world as Sarah Palin does.

On our first evening in Buenos Aires, Katharine appraised her surroundings with the cool eyes of someone who's been there and done that. No longer a country rube, she knows how to recognize the tell-tale signs of homosexuality: handsome men, show tunes, and escalating real-estate prices.

As we sat at dinner, a group of men congregated on the sidewalk in front of us. They were obviously a soccer team, gathering for a beer at the cafe. In greeting, the men hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. Our little veteran from South Beach didn't miss a thing. Eyes aglitter, she leaned in to the table and whispered urgently: "Are there a lot of G-A-Ys here?"

Primero Impresionas de Buenos Aires

2008-11-10T22:23:00.024-02:00

by Louise

Panadería.
Panadería.
Salón.
Panadería.
Salón.
Maxikioscos 25 Horas (si, 25).
Panadería.
Salón.
Parrilla.
Panadería.
Perros. Perros. Perros.
Poop.
Dad, you stepped in poop again!
Este ciudad es mas bueno y muy bonito.
Quiero vivir aquí.
Sin los perros poop.

Pipeline Alley

2008-11-10T16:06:00.031-02:00

by Graham

Pipeline Alley is a secondary rain forest, part of a national park beside the Panama Canal. Most of it was chopped down so the Panama Canal could be built. Today, the forest is only about 100 years old. It would be much bigger if the canal had not been built. Even though it is a secondary rain forest, the trees are still about 100 feet tall. We saw many animals hidden under leaves, and in the trees. Katharine and I spotted most of the animals, including a tiny frog no bigger than a thumb nail, and several lizards that looked like sticks.

Mom said she would buy someone a present under five pesos if they could spot a toucan. Well, none of us did, but a guide found one for her (he cheated because he had a telescope). Too bad about that prize. We saw more sloths than we could count. We walked through the jungle to a small lake in hopes of seeing a crocodile; instead we found another guide. He spotted an iguana. He knew an interesting technique. He would search for an animal with his binoculars. When he found one, he would then point his telescope at it. He took some great pictures by holding my camera up to the lens. It made a super good zoom. As lunch time neared, we were tiring so we decided to go home.

I had a great time there.

Jacobian White-throated humming bird and a Perezoso (sloth)

Sloth video shot by Katharine. When it's raining sloths move pretty quickly.

Mono titi (Tamarind monkey)
While we attacked breakfast, these guys flung themselves through the trees.

For Grace & Mr. B: A real, live Panamanian armadillo spotted by Katharine in an abandoned pool.

Psycho Mama

2008-11-10T14:46:00.025-02:00

by Louise

I understand through the Eastern Shore grapevine that some dear souls swear that I went "psycho" just before leaving Virginia and pulled the proverbial welcome mat from under my house-sitter. There's actually some truth to the rumor.

Was I stressed out? You bet. Wouldn't you be if you were leaving your house, packing for a five-month trip, home schooling, juggling clients, and leaving your 11-year-old dog behind? I was plenty stressed. What bothers me about the rumor, though, is the implication that the house-sitter was just an innocent victim caught in the crossfire of my emotions.

To make a long story short, I did have a friend lined up to house sit. I had arranged it months ago. Yet there we were, just days from departure, and my friend had still not come to our house for a get-to-know-you tour. As D-day approached, I left messages that were not returned. My blood pressure started to rise.

I have since learned that my friend felt that moving into our home would be as easy as picking the keys up from under the mat. She ignored my emails and calls because she felt she had everything covered. When you're moving into someone's house for five months, though, I don't think that's fair, no matter how competent you are.

I moved into our house once before, too, and it's no walk in the park. The house is over a hundred years old and some of the systems are eccentric to say the least. We also have a whole bunch of animals here. When all is said and done, though, this is our home, our investment, and we have our entire lives wrapped up in here. Was it too much to expect our house-sitter to understand that?

I thought we had arranged for our friend to come on Saturday, just three days before our departure. Silence. At that point, I still wanted—and expected—her to house sit. Andrew and I had spent days cleaning out all the bedrooms that her family would need. We emptied dressers and closets, bookshelves, and cabinets. We wanted her family to be as comfortable as possible in our home.

By 4 pm on Saturday, I still had heard nothing. At that point, I snapped. I went "psycho" if you like. I called my friend and canceled the whole thing. It may seem like a rash, last-minute decision, but I needed to know that the person staying in our home actually cared about our home. For whatever reason—lack of communication or a simple misunderstanding—I didn't get that feeling.

Thankfully, I have some dear friends who stepped into the breach at the final hour. I have depended on them in the past, and I know I can count on them now. For that, they have my deep thanks and appreciation.

As for my friend, I hope that we can move past this. Somehow our plans went off the rails and neither of us communicated soon enough or clearly enough—and for that we both paid a price. I, for one, am very sorry about what happened.

A Man, a Plan, Etc.

2008-11-10T09:44:00.007-02:00

by Andrew

The juxtaposition of wealth and crushing poverty left us gob-smacked in Panama City. The gulf between rich and poor is more extreme in South Africa, but for some reason it struck me harder here. In South Africa, the differences go beyond purely economic--race, language, and culture all combine to make the disparity somehow more comprehensible. In Panama City, though--at least for an outsider--the Panamanian people do not seem to have such clear-cut lines of division. Some are rich, some are poor. Eso es todo.

Magnificent restored mansions in the Casco Viejo district sit cheek-by-jowl with crumbling tenements with no running water (residents erect plywood outhouses on their balconies). Entire neighborhoods look like something out of a Dickens novel with palm trees, while a block away luxury high-rise apartment blocks form a skyline that shames Miami. Que pasa aqui?

Remove the historical bugaboos about what makes an underclass--race, language, immigrant status--and you start to consider other ideas about how such a bi-polar society develops. Does the cream really rise to the top? Are the smartest, hardest-working folks also the richest? I doubt it. Quite frankly, I have no idea how Panama came to this pass, but I know one thing: I would have been a card-carrying something or other if I had been born on the wrong side of the canal here.

Even after a few days, you get the sneaking suspicion that the cards are stacked to preserve the status quo. We arrived in time for Panama's Independence Day celebrations, a three-day fiesta involving lots of flag-waving and amor patriae. The Panama Canal, which was turned over to Panama by the U.S. in 1999, is a source of undying pride among its citizenry. Put it this way: their bladders are not the only waterway that is near and dear to the hearts of the average Panamanian. But scratch the surface a little and you start to wonder if the patriotic fervor whipped up about the canal simply provided cover for a good old-fashioned land grab.

I had an illuminating conversation with a birding guide who stopped by our hotel to pick up some clients. Sitting on the balcony watching tamarind monkeys fighting over bananas, he expressed his wish that the U.S. had held onto the waterway, because at least the Panamanians knew where all the money was. Now great wads of it are simply disappearing.

According to my little bird friend, the 8,000 Panamanians employed by the U.S. were all fired and replaced by friends of the governing party. The Panamanian president is now apparently the richest man in the country. Areas of rainforest that were preserved to prevent the canal from silting up have been parceled out to political cronies for development as resorts. Hearing all this, I hated to tell the birding guide what I suspect is the real truth--Dick Cheney is now running their country.

We arrived in Panama during the Independence from Colombia celebration.

Presidential Palace

Presidential bird

This hombre ain't workin'

Bottoms Up

2008-11-10T07:50:00.021-02:00

by Andrew

Travelers soon learn that the biggest differences among cultures usually concern food: what we eat, how we eat it, and--once the fun is over--how we handle what comes out the other end. Each culture tackles the final curtain in its own inimitable way. Believe it or not, a museum in Buenos Aires is devoted to different types of toilet. No doubt, we will be visiting soon.

Graham's voyage of cultural discovery began soon after we arrived at our hotel in Panama. Attached to the wall next to the toilet was a small hand-held shower, not dissimilar to the sprayers found on kitchen sinks. Since there was neither a shower nor a sink anywhere nearby, Graham's keen detective skills smelled a rat. Before we could even unpack, he demanded an explanation of its use.

Trying to escape a potentially grim conversation, I tersely explained that the spray hose was a poor man's bidet, for use on the toilet itself. This was a dumb strategy on my part, since Graham wouldn't know a bidet from a good day. I was immediately put me in the unenviable position of having to explain to my children the finer points of this most un-American device.

I used only the most delicate language and avoided all scatological humor. When I had finished, Katharine gave a slightly horrified laugh and skipped out of the bathroom. Graham, on the other hand, had contracted a strange, almost feverish glitter in his eye that should have given me pause.

The next morning, Graham quickly disappeared into the bathroom on the pretext of washing his feet, which smelled like a landfill. He re-emerged 15 minutes later without saying a word. The only sign that something was amiss was the fact that the back of his shirt and head were sopping wet. Katharine, who had been waiting for the bathroom, reported that the floor was flooded.

I turned to Graham, one eyebrow cocked in interrogatory fashion.

"What on earth were you doing in there?" I asked.

"I used the bidet shower," replied Graham nonchalantly.

"But that's for your bum, Graham," I said. "Your back and head are soaked, and it looks as if a monsoon just hit the bathroom. How did you manage that?"

"I missed," he replied.

Panama Canal & Ninjas in Training

2008-11-09T22:42:00.021-02:00

The Panama Canal by Katharine

The Panama Canal connects the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. They dug the canal in the thinnest strip of land in Panama. The canal is 50 miles long. It was built because people did not want to go all the way around South America on a boat. It would take weeks. First the French started building the canal. They thought they could dig down deep but when it rained the mud washed back in. Then the US tried. They built concrete walls and gates called locks. When a boat went into a lock the gates would shut and water was poured into the lock to even the sides out. The US also tried using trains. They would put the things the ship carried on the train but that was very hard so they decided they would stick with the locks.

A lock and a tug on a lock

Ship in a lock

Children who should be locked up.

Ninjas in Training
Our B&B is located on Ancon Hill, surrounded by jungle and within a nature reserve. Late one afternoon we decided to hike to the top of the reserve because we had heard that the views of Panama City—which lay spread out below—were fantastico.

Due to our total and complete understanding of Spanish, we were locked into the reserve that evening.

It was growing dark. The air was thick and humid. Rain was near. And as we learned from the previous day, when it rains here, it pours.

Our choices for exit from the reserve were simple:
1. Climb around the razor-wire-topped chain-link fence that lined the road to our B&B and push our way through the thick jungle in the hope that there would be an opening in the fence somewhere before Costa Rica.

2. Scale a 50-foot palm tree, jump onto an old rusty bus shelter roof, take a running jump and leap over the razor wire gate (this was Graham's favorite).

3. Hoist ourselves up onto the thick chain holding the gates closed and try to squeeze between the gates. It was the only way I could imagine successfully making it back to the B&B without a stop in the hospital, that is assuming that we were able to duck under the razor wire wound around the top of the gates. Seeing how this was my brilliant idea, I sent the family on ahead to, ah, loosen the hinges.

In one motion, Andrew raised his left leg and placed his foot onto the chain lock. With two slight shimmies, he was through. I suddenly realized how nimble and thin my husband is. Next, it was Katharine's turn. With great difficulty I lifted her up so she could get her feet on the lock. When did she get so heavy? Like a mouse, she slipped through the gate and fell into Andrew's arms on the other side. Graham was next. Strong as an ox, the kid barely needed my assistance to raise himself to the level of the lock. Again, with the agility and strength of a gymnast he was through.

That left me. The woman who cannot touch her toes. Plus, after several weeks of no exercise, my jeans were a little snug. I took another look at the palm three and bus shelter and actually considered attempting the climb but was distracted by my family insisting I could take the fence. "Climb the fence! Climb the fence!" They repeated. Under peer pressure now, I launched myself at the fence but only managed to get a few inches off the ground. I didn't think I could do it. I told them to press on home, I'd wait it out until morning in the bus shelter. Then Andrew looked at his watch. "Polls are closing on the East Coast. Let's get a move on." That's all it took: I shouted, "Yes I Can!" and flung myself at the fence. This time I did it. I got my foot up onto the lock and just needed to push through that gap: If Virginia could vote blue, I could push through!

Safely on the other side, Katharine declared this to be the best night so far: We were Ninjas in training. "Let's do it again tomorrow!" ¿Qué?

South Beach Goes South

2008-11-09T22:16:00.009-02:00

by Andrew

South Beach needs to be saved by a hunky lifeguard: The economic meltdown and the housing crisis have kicked sand right in the face of this erstwhile model magnet. When I was last here, six years ago to do an article for a magazine, South Beach had a serious case of the cools. Euro-trash playboys in Maseratis competed for space on the promenade with Hollywood glitterati and boy toys on rollerblades. But now it's over the hill, like one of those supermodels who once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated but now vies for attention by appearing on reality TV shows. Any wine bar that offers drink discounts and happy hours has lost its mojo, but the practice is now rife throughout South Beach. Paunchy coupon-cutters, awaiting the feeding trough of their upcoming Caribbean cruise, now rule Ocean and Collins, pestered by increasingly desperate hostesses who used to work at TGIF. It's all quite sad.

Gays are still much in evidence, but they seem to be biding their time, waiting for the next big thing somewhere else. The staff at our hotel were all queer as $3 bills, but they wore their Halloween pirate costumes with all the elan of the customed figures at Chuck-E-Cheese. The zip is gone.

The one redeeming feature of South Beach, however, was the Halloween bash down on Lincoln Mall. Children and adults, all dressed in their ghoulish best, descended on a half-mile stretch, extracting candy from the stores and restaurants that line the pedestrian mall. Given our desire to travel light, the children had to substitute sophisticated costumes for imaginative word play. Katharine cut lots of holes in a white sheet and went as the Holy Ghost. Graham wrote pithy sayings all over his white sheet (e.g., "It was a dark and stormy night) and paraded down the avenue clutching a pen. He was a ghost writer. South Beach, with its host of cross-dressers, gays, and transgender tourists, looks pretty much like Halloween on any given night, so it takes something special to stand out on this particular holiday. The winner, hands down, went to a gay fellow dressed as a scantily clad devil, clutching an axe and the bloody wings of an angel that he had evidently just dispatched.

Graham was a little cautious at first, reluctant to push his way into restaurants, salons, and clothing stores in search of booty. Katharine had no such qualms and shot into each and every establishment that presented itself. Graham soon caught on, only to breeze confidently into an ostentatiously gay bar and request candy from the bemused bartender. One patron, well into his cups, told Graham that this particular establishment specialized in a different kind of candy. Needless to say, I hustled him into the Godiva chocolate shop next door at a brisk pace.

Despite an impressive haul of candy, the children proclaimed Miami a bust and expressed their fervent hope that Panama City would be an improvement. What kind of monsters have we created?

A Dip in the Gene Pool

2008-11-09T21:19:00.016-02:00

By Andrew

From Charleston, we piled into the Gordo Marquis for the five-hour trip to Gainesville, home to Mike and Susan and their two children, Grace and Mr. B. Driving into Florida, we miraculously escaped the gravitational pull exerted by Orlando and all things Mickey, but were catapulted instead onto some of northern Florida's more rural backroads.

Since we moved to the Eastern Shore, we have been increasingly perturbed by the number of neighbors who obviously floated out of the evolutionary channel. In retrospect, we have nothing to worry about. Some of the burgs in northern Florida make the southern tip of Northampton look like M.I.T.

This is a gene pool that has shrunk severely through several hot-rinse cycles. When we stopped for a bathroom break at a Publix grocery store in the town of Starke, I was almost too frightened to get out of the car. It was as if a Picasso painting had come to life and decided to go shopping. I can't imagine how they're going to top the natural order for Halloween.

Without making any political comments, I will simply report that McCain-Palin signs were heavy on the ground. Obama-Biden signs made a comeback as we entered Gainesville, home to the University of Florida.

Ground central for Obama support, however, was Susan and Mike's home. Just days before the election, Susan was scarcely able to turn on the TV from sheer anxiety. Mike, on the other hand, was in fine fettle, donning new T-shirts—his chosen medium of political expression—at a dizzying pace. "1-20-09: The End of an Error" graced his chest during evening drinks. By the time we settled down for a nightcap several T-shirts later, I think we were up to "If you want religion in schools, move to Iran."

If Mike strays from Gainesville's city limits, he will almost certainly be shot, especially if he receives the T-shirt we ordered for him. It reads "Starke Naked? No Thanks."

The UFO that Ate Charleston

2008-11-09T18:03:00.005-02:00

by Andrew

Without doubt, Charleston is one of the most beautiful cities in the United States. Mix one part Key West, two parts New Orleans, a pinch of Georgetown, shake thoroughly, et voila! We visited in late October, with the weather crisp but sunny and nary a tourist in sight. We got the distinct impression, though, that party-hearty hordes descend on the place during the summer months, which probably tips the scales too much to the vomit and honky-tonk side.

As an African-American, I was understandably a little wary about exploring a city that was, after all, the port at which most of the slaves sent to America arrived. But with another African-American standing on the cusp of the presidency, I felt it was time to turn the page and forgive. I won't hold it against whitey any longer.

So what really captured our imagination in this city that dates back to the 16th century? Was it the grandiose 18th-century homes of prosperous traders and sea captains, with their broad verandahs and shady gardens? Was it the giant oaks cloaked in Spanish moss that gave the cobbled streets a sense of cool mystery? The slave market with its echoes of unimaginable human suffering? The glorious churches with their overgrown graveyards? Nah. It was a leaf.

As our children ripped at a vine in order to reach some long seed pods that contained helicopter seeds, Louise discovered a UFO (Unidentified Furry Object) on the underside of a leaf. To me, it looked like something that had been left in the back of the fridge too long, but the science teacher in Louise recognized it as something that we in the business call a teachable moment. The only problem about teachable moments is when the teacher doesn't have a clue what she's teaching.

So started our quest to discover the identity of this furry object and the seedlike polyps that lay within. Charleston boasts a wide number of tourist stands that advertise--quite stupidly in retrospect--that their representatives will answer any of your questions. Louise marched up to one such stand and demanded an answer to her particular question. The fellow blanched perceptibly and took a step back. Finally summoning his courage, he peered at the offending item from a distance before announcing that they didn't pay him enough to know the answer. We marched on, leaving a trail of Charleston residents with two pressing questions: (a) Who let that loony Yankee in my town? (b) What the hell is that thing and am I safe living here?

Eventually, Louise cornered a gardener from the city's parks department, who solved the mystery with breezy insouciance. It was a fungus that was among us. And with that resolved, Charleston lost its air of excitement and mystery. We headed for the car and continued south.

Charleston

2008-11-08T20:31:00.007-02:00

by Graham

Charleston is a wonderful city. My favorite part of it is on the side streets. The houses around were very big. My favorite houses were made of brick. The most magnificent part about the houses were the patios. They had beautiful light wood for the floor ( just like our house). The only thing I did not like about the patios was the furniture. The chairs were plastic beach chairs, and the tables were the wrong color. If the furniture was not all plastic and the wrong color, the patios would be 5 Star.

I did not like the main street much because it was so noisy, cars were honking horns, construction workers were making new sidewalks, cement mixers were turning, and people were using jackhammers to break the old cement. On most of the trees there were some sort of long, greenish hairy plant. There were about 20 of them draping from every tree branch. I thought it was some sort of Halloween decoration. Then dad told me it was Spanish moss. I said "I thought moss is big green clumps between side walk cracks." I had never seen anything like it. At the Charleston Museum I learned that the first slaves brought to America were in Charleston. Also the first cannon fire of the Civil War was shot there. Charleston is a beautiful city, and I would recommend you to go there.

A Nose for Adventure

2008-11-02T18:44:00.005-02:00

by Andrew

We spent our first night on the road in the Raleigh-Durham area, at the home of Anne and Olivier, Belgian friends whom we had first met when we all lived in San Francisco. Their daughter Laura was born just one week after Graham (we actually met them in a natural-birth class).

They live in a lovely cottage in Carrboro, a progressive community with strong connections to the various universities in the area. After four hours in the car, we repaired immediately to the playground at Laura's school, five minutes away along leafy lanes and walking paths. The school itself looks wonderful, complete with its own vegetable garden (the sort of thing that we are always told is impossible on the Eastern Shore).

The playground was fabulous, although I suspect that it was designed during the brief period when the Marquis de Sade was the city's safety inspector. The number of methods by which children could disembowel themselves or each other was truly impressive. Needless to say, Graham discovered almost all of them.

The piece de la resistance, however, was a small balance beam. Spanning one end of the beam was a half-inch iron bar, thoughtfully positioned at face level. Recognizing the possibility of injury, the school had painted the bar in bright yellow and black stripes as a warning. Unfortunately, Graham needs something a little more obvious--like flashing lights and sirens. Absent those, he attacked the bar with his face at the first opportunity. His nose and upper lip compressed like a tired accordion, and he was fortunate to keep his teeth. He was very brave about the fact that his nose now protruded from the back of his head.

Needless to say, his face was already starting to swell by the time we returned to the cottage. When we settled down for dinner at a nearby sushi restaurant two hours later, the swelling was significantly more pronounced. His blossoming proboscis, marring what he considers to be his startling good looks, dampened his enthusiasm somewhat.

If there's one thing that can restore Graham to an even keel, however, it is sushi (just ask our credit-card company). Upon its arrival, he completely forgot his Elephant Man countenance and tucked in with great gusto. With his elongated upper lip and swollen nose, he looked for all the world like an anteater hoovering up termites. Seated across from him, Laura had an up-close and personal view. She probably still wakes up screaming in the night.

As we headed in the car to Charleston the next day, Graham announced that his nose still hurt when he touched it. "So don't touch it," replied his loving mother. Four months, 29 days to go.

Le Grand Marquis

2008-10-31T17:19:00.002-02:00

by Andrew

With the NYSE now known as the laughing-stock exchange and airfares more expensive than most homes in the country, we decided to drive to Miami for our flight to Panama. That required a rental car capable of holding the luggage needed for a five-month trip (one suitcase for Louise, Graham, and I, and 17 for our 51-pound princess). This did not pose a significant problem, since the high cost of gas means that the rental companies are sitting on fleets of idle behemoths.

We drew a Grand Marquis, which is French for 51-foot cabin cruiser. The car was W-I-D-E. I like to rest my elbow on the door armrest when I drive, but I couldn't even reach it. In the back seat, the children eyed each other across an enormous no-man's land. I thought that the extra space might actually eliminate the need for fighting back there. I am an extremely stupid man, however. Within two minutes, the children had--much like Germans--attempted to take over the vast expanse of land between them. Only after I had waved my hand threateningly over an area that I assume was Poland did peace take hold. At that point, Graham took a closer look at his surroundings. "This is a car for fat people," he pronounced. We were off.