Home again

Couldn't resist writing one more entry sitting in my computer room here at home. Such a shock to leave the land of a bidet in every bathroom ( including some restaurants...couldn't quite figure that one out) to the land of " what's a bidet?" , from almost 40 deg in the Argentine heat wave where any clothes are too much to the soft falling snow and "long johns under jeans" attire of Guelph.
Our taxi driver who took us to the airport was a young man who wanted to learn some English. He pulled odd words out about the good things in Argentina and pointed to some of the sites we passed on the drive. We understood where the slums were when he equated them to the Flavellas of Brasil, we comprehended the references of "caliente" when we talked about the weather...but one word we couldn't get..he referred to Bariloche and cena ( that means dinner) and kept trying other Spanish references...felt like charades. It wasn't until he hit on "Forest Gump" that we realized he meant had we tried "chocolates"...Movies are so international!

The flight home was comfortable..Lan Chile is a good airline and even served a hot breakfast. We hung around the Santiago airport for 7 hours..it has lots of floor to ceiling windows with a view to the foothills around the city. We even found a great restaurant..Ruby Tuesday's..that had a salad bar- I gorged my self on vegetables. We finally reached JFK airport in NYC early Friday morning. This was a transit stop before we reboarded the plane for Toronto. At least we thought that's what it should be; the Americans see it as a chance to create jobs, ferret out terrorists and make sure tourists don't ever want to take a plane that transits through the US.
We had to go through immigration ..which meant standing in a line for an hour, getting our finger prints and pictures taken ( when we objected, the immigration officer said he couldn't remember whether he was supposed to do that for Canadians or not as they were always changing the rules), re-enter through security where we had to take off our shoes and send everything thru x-rays and metal detection ( surely shoes could be sniffed by a dog). I had wondered why they had allotted over 2 hours for the landing. Even the shopping in the transit area sucked.

So now we are at home and back to a comfortable routine, mostly. Our car wouldn't start yesterday..CAA came and replaced the battery right in the driveway. We went to the market this morning, met good friends and headed off to Diana's for breakfast. We have shovelled snow ( or at least Jurg has) and I had a flu shot. We picked up our skis and found out Blue Mountain opened yesterday. According to the papers, people are mad at the politicians, just like in Argentina. But I thought we really have no idea how good our lousy politicians really are. Our trip has changed us at least in that.
We both said how much we love Guelph and are glad to live here. And Jurg is talking already about the next trip to Switzerland!