Underlay, Underlay!

What a week of fun it has been, and how transformed the flat already. Well, bits of it of course: I haven‘t touched the maid‘s quarters yet.

You will have to excuse the headline for this post. I spent many tedious dusty hours ripping the cat-stinky carpets up from the small bedrooms. The back bedroom was not too bad; the carpet came up without much of a struggle and I was able just to roll it up and take it through to the living room to be reincarnated as a dust-sheet while the painter did his incredibly messy stuff with the horrible cheap paint.

Oh but the front bedroom - the horror, the horror. The filthy blue carpet in there turned out to be glued tight to a filthy beige carpet underneath, which was in turn glued tight to the floor boards. The two carpets would not come up together as they were too dense to manœ vre, so I had first to rip them apart.

I can tell you now that if you ever need to stick things to each other or to the floor, go straight to Argentine carpet glue, it really works a treat! One of my friends happened to call me three times over the course of 2 days, and every time I came to the phone panting and saying I had been struggling with the carpet. I was not believed and have suffered some merciless teasing as a result. Anyway, from time to time, I would sit down on the floor to catch my breath, bemused that of all the things I could be doing in South America, here I was wrestling with a filthy old carpet.

So the silly, silly thing that lifted my spirits and made me take up my pliars and start ripping afresh…. You guessed it, I would say aloud to myself “underlay, underlay, underlay, yee-hah!” and I am simple enough that each time it made me laugh out loud.
Here you can see, I am half way through the second layer:

Now it is all up, a lot of the lower one especially had to be pulled thread by thread off the glued boards, as the backing had deteriorated and came away in my hands.

I am delighted to find potentially decent floorboards underneath, though in both cases they have been horribly abused and will need some sympathetic handling if they are to face the public.

In the front bedroom, before so helpfully doing the two-stinky-old-carpets-better-than-one trick, somebody had had the bright idea to paint the floorboards black. Deep sigh. So now I have to remove the remains of the super duper adhesive as well as a layer of black paint. To be fair, where the adhesive did actually come up with the carpet, in some places it pulled the paint with it.

There are also spillages from the oil-based paint on the wainscot to contend with. Much of this has to come up before anyone can go in there with a sander and level it for laminating. I bought some ecological paint-stripper at Easy last week and have tried an experimental square foot but conclude that I will go back to Easy and get some of the serious chemical stuff I fondly remember burning my little fingers to blisters with as I spent my childhood stripping banisters. (Note to all friends who are now parents - yes, you can scar them for life!)

In the back bedroom, some very messy painters have had several goes at the floors and walls and cupboards without recourse to a dust sheet. The result is lots and lots of paint sploshes on the bare boards. Happily in this case, there was not much in the way of carpet adhesive, so I should just be able to get it sanded and laminated. There is a bit of woodworm in some of the boards though, so I have to cross my fingers that some more lethal chemicals and a bit of stopping will be all that is necessary. Thank heaven we do not have the EEC interfering with the lethal chemicals trade down here in South America!

What else?

Oh last week I was bemoaning my choice of fridge - well it turns out fine, it is a perfect fridge and I have taken it to my heart. I love it almost as much as I love the hoover. I can keep any kind of food I like in there, even the sugar, safe from the cockroaches - hurrah! Also, I had a housewarming party on Friday evening and found the fridge an excellent size for catering.

Very Englishly, I bought a stupid amount of booze for the party and went only a little over on the food. So I now have a couple of dozen bottles of wine, half a dozen of champagne and a crate of beer, all of which I must hide from the decorator, who insists he works better when a little merry. He certainly sings more and is cheekier - and since in fact the standard of the work is no worse, I should probably humour him. Nonetheless, I will hide most of the booze.

The food was mostly supplied by an artisan baker around the corner. She made fabulous empanadas - small pasties that are popular all over South America and everyone claims as their own local dish. They were so good. I ate about ten of them during the course of Saturday and was deeply disappointed to swallow the last mouthful. Must go back there. She also made me a couple of trays of pastries, dry ones and custardy, creamy ones. I wasn’t so impressed with these but then I am never much of a one for the puddings. I am highly likely to go back there tomorrow for empanadas!

The only thing I actually made for the party was chocolate refrigerator cake, inspired by Julie-Good-Housekeeping-Anne, who made it a couple of times when she was here. It is so scrummy and so easy to make. Everyone was very impressed with it too and sadly they pretty much scoffed the lot, so I shall have to make more. I served it on this wild plate I bought in a sort of yard sale the other day. It is an oval serving plate painted with fish that stare out at you. It really caught my eye and only cost me a quid. When I got it home and cleaned it up, I saw that it was Welsh, so maybe there is just something comfortingly British about it.

As I type this, I am finishing off the gorgeous juicy black olives that Sam and David brought to the party. I must ask her where they came from. Also finishing off one of the open bottles of wine, so typos & howlers may be more populous even than usual.

I got such a huge thrill walking into my living room and seeing lots of people I like, getting to meet each other and being wowed by my good fortune. The friends who had been here the week before saw quite an improvement, with the removal of the dividing door and the mostly white-painted living room. We hadn’t been able to finish the woodwork but it was done enough to transform the place. So very much more elegant and suitable than that ugly, dirty orange paint with all the picture ghosts imprinted on it.

In fact, all weekend, I have been walking into that room and marvelling at it.

Carlos and Romina, my lovely tango teachers, came on Friday and got incredibly fired up about the whole place. They are so sweet and generous and really happy for me. Carlos wants to lend me some antique furniture he never uses as it will fit well with the style of the flat. Apparently it is in the French style, rather like my bed. I will go over to their place and take a look at it. They are also planning to whisk me off to look for stuff to put on the walls. At the moment I have a few things but there is a fair acreage of wall space that could be livened up.

Kikki and Eduardo came too, so I was delighted to have two professional dancers here to christen the floor with. I chose a beautiful Francisco Canaro tango and started off dancing with Eduardo, then he passed me on to Carlos, who passed me back to Eduardo - it was lovely and people bothered to applaud. Then everyone danced for a while, so the floor has been put through its paces. It is such a great space. Must have more parties! Here I am dancing with Eduardo:

and with Carlos:

And ten with Ed:

Oh and I now have a key to the roof, so was able to take everyone up to look at my darling cupola: the demented pepper pot, as Elizabeth so aptly called it. On the second trip up there, at about three in the morning, there were people doing something which may well have been perfectly innocent by the light of a mobile phone. That’s Argentina for you!

Just in time for the party, I bought a kitchen table and chairs, so had increased my furniture ownership sufficiently for people to sit and chat. It was a really nice evening and when the last people had gone and I had cleared away a bit I called Susan in London, who I had really wished could be here.

The new furniture - table & chairs plus little hall table which is at this moment serving as my desk and saving me from hunching over computer from a beanbag. Spot lovely roses from Kikki ans Susan's straw hat on the wall; v.decorative in absence of framed pictures!:

Got to bed by five, which wasn’t bad really. Then was woken by the doorbell at 2 on Saturday afternoon by one of the milonga guys who had not been able to come to the party. He thought he would just drop by and wish me well but as I looked like a hag, I told him on the intercom that I was sleeping and he said he would drop by another time. Must retain some mystery with these people!

Earlier in the week I had my list of things to organise, people to call etc and walked away from it several times on account of the fact it is so hard to speak Spanish on the telephone. Eventually, I had a stern word with myself: this is my life now, and a lot of it has to be in Spanish! So I picked up the phone and called the estate agents about removing the ‘for sale’ sign from one of the balconies, called Carmen’s plumber about coming to price up all the work, and called the café on the corner for some food.

Amazingly enough all of these things happened, which is such a thrill - I can make things happen in Spanish! I have also found out about getting broadband and cable TV, though I haven’t ordered that yet. There is so much to do that I will put it off until my enthusiasm wanes and I start longing for old episodes of ER and CSI to fill my evenings. I had quite enough of that while I was treading water and worrying whether this purchase would ever come off.

Hurrah, hurrah, it did!

My lovely and helpful, generous estate agents Natalia and Mina came to the party with their husbands. I hope now we have so bonded over the hideous purchase that they will remain friends. They had to leave early for babysitters but made sure everyone stopped to toast me and the new place first - and Natalia enjoyed the chance to correct my Spanish when I said thanks to everyone of coming (sic). She has been stretching her English the past couple of months to make sure I knew what fresh horrors were holding it all up, though it transpires she held back on quite a few details so that I would not run away screaming. It seems I was not as tactful as I had thought when I tried to help with her English! Hey ho.

I have yet to get the electrician to come and OK the wiring. In fact, I have myself already ripped out a few of the clearly dodgier extensions that have crept in here over the years without blowing myself up at all. There are at least three different types of socket in Argentina, though now they seem to be trying to standardise as all the new things I have bought have the same type of plug. There is a roaring trade in adaptors of all descriptions, as I discovered when I dropped in to the electrical store down the road. There was a lot of mime involved and eventually I got the ones I needed.

Now I discover from the neighbours that there is a plan to get the electricity supply to the building changed, so I should wait until that has been done before re-wiring the flat. As I am largely doing cosmetic and practical alterations for now, it should not really matter if I later have to get plaster and tiles ripped up to embed modern cables in the walls.

My first piece of proper post arrived yesterday morning and how lovely that it was a wedding invitation from Michael & Oswaldo - people I love - for January, so something to look forward to in London.

Today was a very lazy day - fair enough! - lots of hoovering and mopping of vast floors but more interestingly, cleaned and painted inside of one of the cupboards in my bedroom. I am determined to eradicate DNA traces of previous occupants sufficiently that I feel I can unpack my suitcases without contamination! No, it really is that dirty here. Spent some time - yet again - pondering over the anticipated cleanliness of the homes of murder victims in CSI… How can there possibly ever be so few people’s fingerprints, hair, skin cells? Anyway, now have one section of many-sectioned-wardrobe bright red inside and almost ready to receive clothes. Yay! Also spent huge amount of time on the phone catching up with Sarah and all her exploits as a parent to two stroppy little girls and partner of no-nonsense Yorkshireman.

The other thing this week was that my cleaner came on Tuesday afternoon and was simultaneously disgusted by the hitherto unknown level of filth and excited by the challenge that it presented. She had said that she’d need to be away by six, as she lives miles out of town and has a strapping boyfriend to feed of an evening. I had to throw her out at half past seven when I was going out myself, although she suggested she could carry on working until I got home… then she tried to under-charge me! She also tried to find other slots in her week when she could come back and I could see she was just itching to have a go at the condemned cooker for the sheer satisfaction of getting it clean. I told her she wasn’t allowed to go near it, it is too disgusting. Still, she could not help herself chipping the grease off the kitchen walls with Cillit Bang. How lovely to have a vocation. Next week, she may bring like-minded friends.

So, that is the shape of my week. I did go to Club Espanol on Thursday and had a lovely,lovely evening. It is the only place I have been to dance in the last couple of weeks as generally knackered and unwashed.

Last night I took Linda to see Carlos and Romina do a show downstairs at Confiteria Ideal. They were great and there was a super tango singer on the bill too. Unfortunately, there was also the most extraordinarily bad couple performing for the tourists. They were an absolute travesty. They could have been runners up in 1982 for the Wilmslow ballroom dancing league, still believing that meant something in the world. Unbelievable. Obviously and badly choreographed so that they covered all the steps that might be expected of them but it was done so deliberately and painfully and way off any of the beats available in tango music. They had the Come Dancing cheesey grins on too and kept doing that stupid head-flicking thing people always think is the tango. Now THESE are the people the government should be drugging and throwing out of planes. (sick I know - and I should point out, they don’t do that here any more!)

Anyway, it is half past one - I have been up almost twelve hours, so will post this and try to embellish it with a few pics, then get back to my heavenly, snuggly bed. Maybe I should sleep on Susan’s bed - aka the sofa - to avoid gloss paint fumes from my wardrobe. Tchah, the hell I will! Now, where’s that wine bottle?

Adios amigos,

Raquelita

Actually, that is worth a PS - with all the undisputed richness of the English language, I regret
that we do not have a little suffix for making things little. They have it in German - you can stick -chen on the end of a word to make it a little and hence darling version of the actual noun - in fact it is doubly useful as it renders the noun neuter and solves all sorts of conjugation problems. They use it even more in Spanish in the form of -ita/o to really lovely effect. I think the closest we get is maybe ‘little old man’ which is quite sweet but nothing like the ability to make a word affectionate by extending it. So Raquel, which is my name in Spanish, becomes Raquelita and surprisingly often, people will use that. To go back to the little old man, one of the guys I dance with refers to himself as a viejito - little old man - in fact he is boasting that he can still dance up a storm, butit is a lovely and simple linguistic device. If somebody has something to ask but doesn’t really want to bother you, they will say “una preguntita” which is a little question, rather than una "pregunta" which would be a plain old question. ‘poor thing’ is ‘pobrecito’ from pobre meaning poor. I could go on for hours with examples - but I just wonder why that hasn’t emerged in English.

nighty night