The car search that I have rarely talked about seems to be winding down. I had four cars in my narrowed-down second round:
Mazda 3 hatchback
Pontiac Vibe
Honda Fit
Ford Focus
I want to buy all four. The Mazda3 was my ideal until I realized it got the worst gas mileage of the four. another problem with every car I've looked at is the limited colors. The most exciting is red in most cases. We have looked at entire lots of gray and silver cars. I really liked some of the Ford colors until I realized that the Focus is not being made as a hatchback after this year so new options in color are not even available.
It has been fun seeing the car salesmen try to sell me on a car and not Martin. They always want to talk to the man about torque and crank shafts or whatever. I am really looking for a car that has the reliability of my Toyota; basically something that never needs the hood up on the side of the road. And it has to look fun too.

There is probably not a chance in this lifetime of me ever quitting my day job to become a potter. There will never be a chance of me experiencing whatever is going on in this picture and keeping my clay centered:



Funny thing is I absolutely love playing with the pottery wheel ( Even if ninjagirl helps me keep it centered!!!) and unlike most things where I get aggravated and want to quit if it's not working out (Persians just declared war on your county while you're playing Civilization? Just quit and start over!)I keep wanting to make pots, or bowls or whatever they end up being.

I also found out that most people in my class have done this before. Not really cool since it is a BEGINNING class, but I forgive them now that I know how much fun this is!

I still think that I will stick with the paper crafts and just dabble in clay. Plus it's less expensive since clay involves tracking down a kiln.

Speaking of Kiln I jsut remembered this odd trip I took to the hometown on Brett Favre - Kiln, Miss - with my grad school roommate #2 who was from Indiana and wanted to drink beer in a can and almost ended up being the truck cab buddy to some random redneck. Good times.


Also, my favorite line from the Blues Brothers movie has a shirt to go along with it! From Luck Threadz

I am taking a pottery class. It involves a pottery wheel. I am probably the most disastrous potter ever. Most of my stuff falls apart or ends up lopsided. The funny thing is, I love it. It is really fun and can be really messy. There is one woman in our class who never has an ounce of clay on her. Anywhere. I don't like her because I do not think she is doing it right. So far I have made one lop-sided bowl. I'm thrilled with it. I also have a longer history of becoming immensely hyper in art classes. This goes back to high school and all through college. I get giddy, I laugh a lot and probably talk too much. this could be because I love creating things and I just get so excited. Or I could just be lame and annoying to everyone else in the class.

Other interesting things about Uruguay:
*A lot of dilapidated but gorgeous buildings
*they really like dogs
*everything is closed on Sunday too
*people were really nice once you started talking to them
*they have some of the most beautiful handcrafted knit items I've ever seen
*there are entire stores that sell nothing but caramel.

The longer we were in Uruguay the better my Spanish got. (Thanks Senora McDowell!!!)I could talk to people on a minimal level and order food and ask directions and tell the taxi driver where to take us. Everyone was very patient with us since Spanish is a fast language, I don't care who says otherwise!

The rest of our trip we kind of decided not to bother with the creepy Old City and spent Sunday wandering around the Tres Cruces area and the Sunday market that sold everything I could ever imagine. The market itself was on a shady street lined with antique shops so if you didn't like the wares of the vendors you could look at the antiques in the surrounding shops. We tried to take an English tour ofthe beautiful Teatro Solis but were informed that there was no such Monster on Sundays. We were disappointed since earlier in the day we had understood that there would be an English speaking tour. Fortunately they took pity on us and showed us the interior of the theatre. It looks like something out of Europe but much smaller than we expected.

On Monday we took a walk to the Pocitos neighborhood. It was a long walk but we had a delicious meal and got see several diverse neighborhoods, the Russian embassy and oodles of doggies. Some of these dogs were obviously for protection or to guard against robbery but a lot of them were beagles. Can beagles protect your house? I'm not sure. Most looked like they would lick you to death!

Walking through the old city or Ciudad Viejo in Montevideo on a Saturday had to be quite possibly the creepiest place I've ever been. Most cities I have been to are usually somewhat open on a Saturday and we thought that the city's main attraction would be at least somewhat open on a Saturday. Nope. Nothing. Closed up tight. We traversed the streets, zig zagging across the area until we came to the Mercado del Puerto. The Mercado is an old railroad station that was built and never used for its intended purpose. It is now filled with restaurants and bars and huge grills cooking every kind of meat you can imagine. What amazed us was the building looked like it would collapse at any moment and what had they put inside it? Huge wood-burning fires! Talk about tempting fate.

Martin & I both finally figured out how to sit down and get service (instead of waiting for someone to seat us). We ordered huge steaks that were both about the size of my forearm. hey were like butter! Service was slow, but with that much meat to digest it wasn't a bad thing at all. We ordered dessert. I had a yummy, flan with dulce de leche and Martin had tiramisu. We had seen one go by earlier that looked lovely. Martin's was kind of lop-sided.the meal was probably on par with Ruth's Chris Steakhouse or something similiar here in the U.S. The meal only cost us about $25. For everything.

The creepiest thing about the Old City was that no one was around anywhere except for the occasional stragler or begger. Everyone was eating at the Mercado but every store was closed and the streets had no cars anywhere. We were beginning to think this was the wrong place to be in the South American autumn. We took a look at our map once we got back to our hotel and saw that there were several shopping centers in Montevideo. We then found out that all shopping centers are opened until 10PM. We took a cheap taxi to the Punta Carretas Shooping Center that is housed in an elegant old prison. I found this great shot of the interior of the mall on this guy's website:

It looks like a normal mall until you read the name of the Store on the left.

Before I fill everyone in one the trip to Uruguay, I wanted to show some curious people this. I have always loved the music from the opera "Carmen." I even had the music at my wedding. This is one of the reasons why. It's kind of freaky to look back on it but I loved it when it was on Sesame Street.

Success! We had some difficulty even getting to Dulles and it involved a trip through Roanoke VA, but I won't go into that part of the story other than to say that Roanoke of today is nowhere near the old colony place with that "Croatoan" mystery attached to it. We reached Dulles late and after much running through Dulles (I know I have mentioned repeatedly how much I loathe Dulles) and almost missing our flight by mere seconds we got our flight to Buenas Aires. We sat in coach and I thought my tailbone would never recover. There is something about South American airports and how they force you to go through the Duty free. On our lay-over in Buenas Aires, we had 2 hours to peruse the perfume and liquor we can get at home and then I spent a good amount of the time staring at this girl dressed in Hooter's-style hot pants and a furry vest advertising some perfume. Matin and I also looked around for a Spanish-English dictionary since I couldn't find either of our estimated two dictionaries at home. There wasn't one visibly available at either bookstore in the duty free/gate area in B.A.

The flight to Montevideo is only about 40 minutes flying time from B.A. We loaded the plane and took the quick flight over. We got what we soon learned was a luxuriously huge taxi from the airport to the hotel. For future reference, the huge taxi was a newer model Corolla. I have no idea what type of car the rest of the taxis are, let's just equate them with something you would see a dozen clowns at the circus getting out of. So, in a word, tiny. thetaxi driver took us to the hotel via the Rambla, a road that runs along the waterfront area of Montevideo. It was quite scenic with large houses facing the water and parks full of bicycles, dogs and joggers along the water side.

As an aside, I have been hearing the word: Montevideo for a long time. We learned this really cool rap rhyming song in Freshman Spanish class that listed all of the capitals and countries in Latin America. I always remembered Montevideo. I always thought that Montevideo would have a view of the mountains or be on a mountain or something similar. It is flat and very different than I expected. Expect pictures to be loaded tonight!

This morning, I have been moving like a speeding train. We are getting ready for a trip and this usually entails me getting a bunch of stuff together, double checking that we have said stuff and returning numerous times to the house to retrieve said stuff. This morning I had to go back upstairs four times to get: passports, bank deposit slip, watch, toiletries, toothbrush, sweater and dry cleaning. After all of that was brought downstairs I had to take all that to the car. Then I had to return to the house for: a banana (mid-morning snack), cell phone, magazine for M. to read, and to deposit extraneous credit cards that don't need to be going to S.A. Then I double checked the doors to make sure they were locked and secure.

Actually the whole adventure started at about 6:22AM this morning when I decided to run around my yard chasing a huge rabbit away from my tomato plants. I have no idea if bunnies like tomatoes. And I can't quite remember if it's bunnies or deer that don't like marigolds. So I ran around the yard in my nightgown clapping my hands and yelling at a rabbit who thought that if it just sat really still I wouldn't see it. I might be big, but I'm not a T Rex. It eventually disappeared through the hole in the fence. A hole I have been vowing to cover with chicken wire of something similar for about 2 years now. M. watched the whole thing from the upstairs window. I think he enjoyed the show of me looking like a fool.

So a lot of nervous energy that now has to sit at her desk and write emails to people who probably shouldn't even be in college. What else might I be doing today, you ask? I will go to the bank to get some cash, get some light sandwichesque lunch, teach a class, drive to the parking lot where my car will be for the weekend, take a taxi to the airport with hopefully everything one might need for a long weekend in Uruguay and hopefully get on a plane to Dulles to get on a plane to Buenes Aires that continues on to Montevideo. Whew!