Worth The Cost Of Entry

On Sunday afternoon Ken & I walked about an hour to a bar downtown to watch March Madness with a bunch of other expats (mostly Americans). We arrived home in the evening to find the wi-fi in our apartment was down. We tried the ethernet cable as well, to no avail. Our Spanish school has internet access but it's painfully slow. I managed to read my email during a break on Monday only to learn that my BFF Sirrah! might already be in labour - 10 days early! - with her second bebé. We arrived home on Monday eagerly hoping to have everything all fixed so that I could call Sirrah! (using Skype, natch), but it was still down. I tried to distract myself with a half-hearted attempt to read my latest acquisition, "Becky prepara su boda," part of the "Loco por las compros" series. (Yes, I'm reading a Shopaholic book in Spanish. Borges can wait.) After much internal debate about whether I really *need* the Internet (...I do), I finally called our flat's management company to tell them about the problem. They assured me it would be fixed this morning. I then had a minor breakdown in which I felt extremely disconnected, somewhat unattractive, and badly wanted to eat a cookie.

Several sympathetic hugs and a good night's sleep later, I felt better. Still web-less, this morning before class we finally went to buy vegetables from a verdulero, thus staving off scurvy another day. An aside about vegetables: While the grocery stores near us are mostly great, the produce sections are terrible. There are, however, many verduleros (vegetable sellers) nearby, who sell excellent produce. We bought a bunch of beets, a package of zucchini stuffed with other chopped veggies, a generous package of crudités, 2 apples, 2 tomatoes, and a great-looking bunch of basil for only 13 pesos (around $3.50 US or $4.40 Cdn). We've been kind of intimidated to tap one of these places because of our inadequate vocabularies. Anyway, fear conquered! And I ate more healthily today than I have in 2 weeks.

Tonight our internets are still down, but we're chillin' at a groovy little wi-fi-equipped resto-cafe-bar a few blocks from our flat. I'm washing down my web-surfing with a 10 peso glass of vino tinto that's totally worth the cost of entry.

P.S. I miss you guys.