Sunday, February 10th, 2013

I was served an interesting drink at Aunt Blanca’s yesterday.  If I remember correctly it was a combination of water, milk, and brown sugar but it was tasty.

It apparently rained last night and is still at least misting.  One interesting thing I just realized.  I haven’t experienced a windy day.  It has always been still even on the day a sudden rainstorm came up with thunder and lightning.

I sent an email to the company that made the umbrella that stopped working the other day – Shedrain.  Of course I no longer have a receipt for my purchase.  I hope they can give me some tip so I can fix it myself.  If not, Reina says she knows a man who repairs umbrellas very inexpensively.

About 1pm we took out from the refrigerator the large birthday cake we had bought on Thursday.  It was quite an experience carrying it on the bus going up and down hills, over speed bumps and braking and accelerating at any second.  One lady took pity on me and, since she was seated and I was standing, offered to hold it in her lap which was very nice of her.  When we were almost there we stopped for some ice cream and then at 2pm when another store opened we also picked up a large container of ice cream.  The cake and ice cream were our contribution to the party, Aunt Helen would be supplying the food.  We finished the trip by taxi.   

After we got to her mother’s I blew up about 20 balloons and they put them up with a Happy Birthday sign.  About 3pm guests started arriving.  Aunt Helen wasn’t there and no one could reach her by phone so the 87-year old grandmother blew out the 2 candles and they served the cake and ice cream.  Then they had a small piñata grandma was supposed to pull down with a string but the string broke.  All the women there then jumped in and broke the piñata. There were only a couple of very young kids there so lots of adults also got candy.

Finally around 5pm Aunt Helen showed up with the food.  What we had was served similar to a shish kebab.  On a stick there was skewered a small arepa, a small potato, and a sausage about the size of a hotdog.  

One guy there knew a few words of English but one thing he and a couple of other guys kept repeating was 69.  They would look at Reina and I, say 69, and then laugh.  Not sure what that was about.  Do Americans have a reputation that I'm not aware of?

At one point in the evening one of the young neighbor boys backed up to me without looking and climbed onto my lap by putting his legs on both sides of mine.  He was occupied looking at something else for a couple minutes.  I tapped his mother on the shoulder so she could see what happened and everyone had a good laugh until the boy finally realized what he had done.

It’s 8:45pm and I hear the security guy still outside blowing his whistle.