A "Normal" Night

Today we were scheduled to go to Hogar (where the younger girls are) and do a kids' church, or basically an "Awana" night was how we were thinking of it.  Singing, teaching, games and candy.  Unfortunately the director of Hogar said that he wanted to the girls to study tonight rather than do kids' church.  At first we were bummed, because we were really looking forward to this.  But then we realized we could have a "normal" night.  That is, we could eat dinner at a regular hour, rather than coming home after riding the metro for 90 min. tired but happy and unsure of what to make for dinner.  Greg and I had a pisco sour out on the deck of the apartment.  The clouds were lifting, so you could start to see the mountains with their new, fresh layer of snow these past few days.

Since we were home a little longer than usual in the evening, we decided to make something other than pasta or pizza (those are the only two meals we've had so far, over and over).  Greg and the boys found some local fish at the grocery store.  We made some rice and mixed in some bananas and kiwi (the boys didn't like the kiwi so we left that out).  Add some salsa and it was really good.  Since this was new food Greg needed an English/Spanish translation to figure out how to make it.

I tell you what, we Americans don't realize how "cush" our lives really are.  The biggest adjustment we've had being in Santiago is not having a car.  We never realized how much stuff a car enables you to do.  For example, when we go to the grocery store we can only bring home as much as we can carry.  We eat as much food as we can carry home each day, so we need to walk to the grocery store EVERY day.  At first this didn't seem annoying, but some days we just don't feel like going to the grocery store.  Another adjustment is that stuff in another country works differently than you're used to.  You can see all kinds of white splotches in Greg's t-shirt above.  We brought a couple loads of laundry soap to get us started.  But US laundry soap doesn't dissolve well in the water here, so there are these stains on his shirt.  The washer doesn't get stinky things clean either, so we wash those things by hand.  We have a washer, but no dryer - so we hang clothes up all over the apartment each day.  There is no dishwasher.  Etc.

I don't write these things to whine about them, but we've just been surprised at how much time each day we spend sort of just "surviving" - riding the subway to get places (~3 hours/day), washing dishes (~1 hour/day), doing laundry by hand (30 min./day), going to the grocery store (~1 hour/day).  Something about this simplistic way of life is interesting and appealing (as we get more used to it).  For one thing, it's hard to be in a hurry.  You just know it takes awhile to get stuff done, so you just kind of move along at a regular pace.  A funny thing though - all kinds of car dealerships are in the area we live in.  So when we walk anywhere (to the subway, grocery store, whatever) we walk by car dealerships.  We both realized we sometimes walk by them and have car envy as we pass.  :)

We got to eat dinner by candlelight tonight, kind of like we do at home in the winter.  This was fun.

"Now is the appointed time; now is the time of salvation." (2 Cor 6)  Now is our appointed time!  Living like this is changing us in ways that we don't quite understand, and that are harder still to articulate.  I'll never look at someone standing in the rain or snow at a bus stop the same again, that's for sure!