Home Sweet Home ... Temporarily

Today I'm posting some pictures of our temporary home. It is a charming little house. It is older, but I love a lot of the little details. The word is we should get into our permanent home in 4-6 weeks. The great thing about that is I get to move again! I've lived in 5 different houses in the last 5 years, so what's one more!?!

Before I post pictures of the house, I'll tell you Lance's train story. It was a week ago today, and our sponsor invited us to go to La Boca. It is a famous neighborhood in Buenos Aires with brightly painted buildings, tango dancers on the streets, and shopping.

Solo, my sponsor, told me I should leave my house ten minutes after she called me from hers, and walk to the train station and wait up by the front platform, and she would be on the first car, and would poke her head out, so if I saw her I would jump on with her and her two kids. I wrote down exactly what I needed to tell the clerk to buy my tickets, "Cinco bolettas a Retiro, y vuelta."

I got to the clerk, and a note said something about regreso. Apparently she was on a break. So I went to the other side of the train tracks and bought our tickets there - fortunately for me the first clerk I had gone to was on the wrong side of the tracks, so it saved me getting on the wrong way.

So the kids and I stepped out onto the platform to wait. We waited about five minutes before we saw the train. As soon as the train doors opened, we saw Solo, so we stepped up next to the train along with a few other people.

As we stepped onto the train, I didn't notice there was a gap of about twelve inches between the platform and the train. So when I stepped onto the train, Lance stepped into the gap, and his body fell in between the train and the cement platform.

Fortunately, I'm on heightened alert, so I was holding his hand. As my arm dropped, so did my stomach! Although he was dangling below, I had a firm grip on his arm. Taelor immediately saw what had happened, and the two of us pulled him up together just in time for the train doors to close.

As I stepped onto the train, I felt like I couldn't breathe, and my heart was pounding in my chest. The first car of the train has a large empty area where people were standing, some with their bikes. I moved to the center and tried to stabilize myself in between all of the people, so the kids could hold onto me as the train swayed on the tracks. Lance wrapped both of his arms around me, and I could feel him go limp. I looked down and his face was completely white. It looked like he was about to pass out. I said in English, "Is there a seat anywhere?", and a nice Argentine woman understood me and gave up her spot on the bar (it is a bar you can sit on) and motioned for me to sit. I went and sat/leaned on the bar and Lance climbed onto my lap.

Lance doesn't scare easily, but this scared him enough that he couldn't stand. After about ten minutes Lance's color started to come back, and I spent the rest of the afternoon yelling, "Lance get back here"!  I was hoping the experience would have made him want to stay next to me at La Boca, but he was already over it. In fact, yesterday at the school he said, "Look Mom, there's a ramp here that I can ride down and fly off of and go over that gate!" (It goes down about two stories) I just rolled my eyes and sighed, knowing I won't be bringing his bike over to the school!

So here are the pictures of our temp house:

This is the front of the house.

This is the staircase leading upstairs.

The living room.

The Parilla (I think that is what they call it),  patio with a barbecue station.

The maid's quarters. Unfortunately it doesn't come with the maid, so at this point I have to go outside of the house and up those stairs to do my laundry. The house is on the right, just on the other side of the trees.

The master bath.

The gate/wall that surrounds the property. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but there is barbed wire on top of the wall.

This house we are at is right across the street from the President's Compound. It takes up about four city blocks. A couple of times a day, we feel the house shake, and hear the helicoptor flying in or out of the compound, and we pray that she (President Christina) has good helicpotor pilots!

Adios!