My first day in Uruguay

So, I´m sure everyone has been waiting with baited breath to see how crazy my first day in my home country-away-from-home country proved to be. Well, I´d hate to keep you waiting any longer.

Saying that Day One in Uruguay was a smidge trying would be a gross understatement. Now that it´s Day Two, it´s all pretty funny, but yesterday...eesh. It began with the method of transit - the ferry. Choppy water + smallish boat + Kevin = no bueno. I did not lose my lunch, gracias a Diós, but there were moments where I started to wonder about the likelihood of said illness occurring. Then, we arrived in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, and it was time to go through customs. Being the genius that I am, I forgot to wait for my luggage before going through customs, so I got to clear customs TWICE after I realized my error and made the walk of shame back to the baggage claim belt. From there, it was onto the bus to Montevideo. This segment of the journey went fairly well, barring the positioning of my leg rest, which made it look like I had just given birth to my backpack...since it´s blue, I suppose that means that it´s a boy. I´ll wait until the baptism to give it a name, though.

Then, all of the sudden, the bus pulled over a scant 15 miles from Montevideo. A customs agent hopped on board and start calling out random baggage ticket numbers to inspect, mine among them. So, yet again, I got to go through customs, this time on the side of the road. Upon reboarding the bus, Milton assured me that "this NEVER happens" and that he had never before encountered a side-of-the-road customs inspection in his entire life...he´s a native Uruguayan, so I´m assuming he knows his stuff on this. We finally made it to the church, and they weren´t kiddin when they said it was downtown - it´s about as downtown as they come, right on one of the main streets in Montevideo. Wilma and several members of the congregation met us, and we had a great time chatting, doing a Bible study, and having dinner together. I received an invitation frm an expert in the art of the parrilla to come over to his house and exchange grilling techniques - he´s curious about Texas-style barbecue, and I´m dying to know how to grill South American-style, so it´s a great arrangement. He also apparently makes a dang tasty fejioada, a Brazilian dish involving black beans, meats, onion, etc - we´ll have to whip some of that up, too, methinks. The three of us volunteers (we were joined on the boat by Dorotea, a German volunteer who´ll be working and living with us until March) also played with an ADORABLE little girl at the church, Alejandra.

So, sounds like the perfect end to the day, eh? It would have been, had that have been the end. Oh no. Not in MY life. I went into my room to unpack, and I discovered that my guidebook had somehow worked it´s way into my jar of dulce de leche, so now I have a delightfully caramel-flavored Lonely Planet book on my desk. That, however, was funny....and the clean-up process was pretty tasty, not gonna lie. Yeah, that´s right - I licked my guidebook clean. So sue me. It tasted incredible. However, I then discovered that one of my toothpaste tubes had decided to explode all over the toiletries pouch in my suitcase - glad I didn´t put it in the main compartment. There was cinnamon-flavored Crest Pro Health over about everything. Suffice it to say that some non-ELCA Global Mission Office approved words were said within a few minutes of discovering the little toothpaste Chernobyl in my bag. I kinda cleaned up, but by that point was tired, flustered, and just wanted to sleep. However, there were some challenges on this front, namely...

-Not being able to find my lightswitch. That would be because it is not, in fact, in my room, but outside of it in the hall, so I have to exit my room to turn the light off before calling it a night. Fortunately, I do have a lamp by my bed, so that cuts down on superfluous trips to the lightswitch.

-Having to put extra clothes on. It was really cold in my room, and I didn´t have a blanket. I put on my pj pants and a shirt; that did it for a while. Then, socks and a sweater had to go on. Again, that worked for a little while. Eventually, I had to pull out my massive Bariloche parka and use it as a blanket. That mostly worked, and I slept reasonably ok until wake up at 8:30.

At breakfast, I learned that the girls had 8 (count ´em, 8) blankets in their room. Suffice it to say that I´ve since corrected that unequal distribution of bedding material. Today was less disaster-filled; we went to La Obra Barrio Borro (the after-school center) for the grand tour, and I spent my afternoon working with the 9-12 year olds. By "working," I mean answering questions about how to say this-and-that in Spanish, going to the park, nearly killing myself with a "trompo" (basically a top which is sent spinning with a string...this takes more skill than you´d think, apparently), drinking mate with the teachers, and then playing some basketball and on the teeter-totter after we got back to La Obra. It was a great first day; exhausting (esp. after the semi-sleep of last night), but I love the kids.

Well, that´s life in La Republica Oriental de Uruguay right now; I still don´t have a schedule figured out yet, or regular work per se, but the former should begin to materialize fairly soon. The latter...vamos a ver. I still have yet to see what sort of expectations and jobs Wilma has in store, and there are a lot of different things going on at La Obra, so my job description for the next year may very well be summed up as "other duties as assigned." So yeah, here´s to dulce de leche flavored guidebooks, toothpaste meltdowns, and a year filled with who-knows-what in Uruguay!