Cupolas Ahoy!

OK, moving my darling cupola up the blog, because I love it SO MUCH! In fact, I will also save it as my photo, to save much scrolling up & down large blog as sure you are all as much in love with it as I am and want to see it as often as possible.

Here it is:

And here are some others - the place is smattered with them if you ony remember to look up in this city, they surprise and delight you in unexpected corners...

This is the one on Club Espanol, it is gold and has an angel on the top, sigh!:

These two face each other on Avenida de Mayo - the one on the right is loved and cared for, the one on the left rather neglected:

Just across the road is Palacio Barrolo, probably the zaniest building in town. The architect apparently studied Dante's version of heaven and hell and applied the numbers to this design, using the appropriate number of exits, entrances and levels. The cupola is extraordinary and enormous. Next door there is another fabulous building with two cupolas, one of which has been converted into a luxury flat which is available to rent (if you are rich and visiting), search for 'Mayo' on www.bytargentina.com:

Here is one a little out of town on Acoyte and Rosario:

And here is the Mummy of them all, the Congresso or Parliament building:

There is a gorgeous Rusian Orthodox church in San Telmo with a starry one but I do not yet have a picture of that. Aren't digital cameras a wonder!

pip pip!

Before Photos - Living Room

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

Daft as a Brush

Today was a day for crossing things off the big list but in the stupidest way possible.

Number one - the fridge. Everyone here has been telling me I have to go to a neighbourhood called Boedo and visit all the shops there comparing prices before I buy any electrodomesticos - super Spanish word for white goods. So off I went, out into the gorgeous warm spring day, skipping round to the Subte station on a mission. Got to Boedo and looked about the place but failed to find more than one big shop; a Hiper Rodo, so thought 'stuff it, I'll just buy one here'. I spent an age looking at fridges, deciding what I like and do not like, want and do not want and of course getting a bit dizzy about the prices.

The criteria were; taller than me, freezer with shelves in the door, no stupid snappy-off handles, plenty of shelves & compartments inside; shiny and easy to clean; made in South America; not super-pricey.

I narrowed it down to three and, after a chat with the salesman, settled on an Electrolux. He said to be honest they all come from the same factory in Brazil but this brand has the best quality control. They had it in stock but could not deliver until Tuesday so he suggested that for an extra 2 pesos (40p) I could hire a chap who was waiting outside with a pick-up truck, so I agreed and he went and sorted that out for me.

There are usually at least two stages to buying anything here but electrodomesticos have especially bizarre systems - probably to put you off wanting to bring anything back. First the salesman puts your details on the computer and enters the order; then you have to go and wait in a queue for the cashier, who needs to see your ID all over again; then once all that is done, you go to another desk that exists for no good reason and have your receipt stamped. Then, you have to drive seven blocks (!) to the warehouse, have the receipt taken off you, hand in a voucher, get everything stamped again and get a few bits of paperwork back. Then you wait for somebody to find your fridge and bring it to you, watch them unwrap it so that you can inspect it before it leaves the premises, wrap it up again and hand it over to the delivery guy.

As soon as I saw the thing, I started to doubt my choice. It was huge. Diego, my delivery chap, had had some trouble getting into the driver's seat of his van and it turned out he worked alone, so how was he going to manage the wretched thing? Is there a lift, he asked. Yes, but there are a few steps too, I said. No problem, he said.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

We got back here and he took one look at the front door and saw the steps and announced it could not be done. Did I have any friends who could come and help? Was there a porter? On a Sunday evening at the drop of a hat - no!

After a lot of measuring and humming and hah-ing in the street and telling me about some operation he is going to have which I gather was for a hernia and repeatedly telling me that the fridge was very big, a mate of his just happened to call on the cel phone (starting to suspect I was set-up here!) and agreed to bring a big strong lad and carry the fridge up to the fourth floor for me for an extra 30 pesos. Not bad business for them and to be honest it is less than six quid so I am not really complaining.

So they arrived, reeking of alcohol, picked up the fridge and carried it all the way up the stairs as it was indeed to big to go in the lift. They lugged it into the kitchen, after first claiming it would not go through the door. Then on the way back down, they said the lift was like something out of Castle Dracula - cheeky buggers! Anyway, I paid them and they tore off in their rickety old van, most likely back to the pub to toast the daft cow.

Back up in the kitchen, it was clear that the fridge really is far far too big. Why did I insist on the shelves in the freezer door and not go for the nice wide, shallow model - why? So I moved it across to the other side from where I had wanted to place it and realised that the doors open the wrong way and are not the type that can be taken off and reversed. So I have a huge fridge that I will have to walk around every time I want to get anything out of it. Well, I am not about to get Laurel and Hardy back to send it back to the shop, so tough. At least I will have a clean and safe place to keep food.

Then I went out again, smug that I had found another branch of Easy on this side of town simply by looking it up on the internet. So off to the tube & across to Constitucion, a vast old railway terminus, which seemed to offer the closest public transport.

Why, when taxis are so cheap?

Of course, there was not a taxi to be seen at the station to go the rest of the way, so I set out on foot and regretted it within minutes. What was I thinking - walking around behind an old railway terminus? In any city in the world that's a dangerous thing to do. It was pretty bleak and stinky and dimly lit but I walked with purpose and happily nothing happened. It is not often that I feel spooked but there I really did.

On the plus side, if any visitors ever need to know where they can find hookers, I will be able to tell them very precisely!

Bought a great chariot-load of stuff - tools, paint stripper, shower curtain, cushions etc. etc. and left it all with the car park security guard while I went to hail a cab. Cabbie very sweet and security guard ditto, so I got home safely, no thanks to me.

I have started putting up the shower curtain rail and realised why there wasn't one there before... also started ripping up the cat-stinky carpets and found wooden floors underneath. Hurrah! This is very hard work as in fact the carpet is firmly glued to ANOTHER CARPET, which is in turn firmly glued to the floorboards. Sigh. My plan to use these carpets to protect the living room floor during painting will most probably be abandoned as I hack them out with knives and spatulas. Getting the glue off will be a nasty job too.

In short, it seems I have bad a busy and expensive day without really hitting the mark. To top it all, there was nothing open this evening to get a meal, so I dined on cheese triangles!

So, enough blogging and back to the carpets before whatever nutritious value that supper contained evapourates.

Got My Mojo Risin'

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Saturday night, home alone in new flat:

one happy bunny, it took a while to sink in and stop feeling overwhelmed by space and filth but oh, what bliss now;

sitting very comfortably on my purple beanbag in my ridiculously huge and largely empty living room, listening to some heavenly tango waltz music on the iPod, taking the word ‘laptop’ a little too literally and probably setting myself up for thigh cancer;

had a lovely long chat with my Daddy on the phone earlier and still amused by his lunatic humour and darling desire to help, even after 40 years of being my Daddy;

French windows open and balmy air oozing around, untrammelled by furniture or other obstacles - slowly, slowly taking over from cat-stinky, fag-ridden atmosphere bequeathed by previous incumbent. Buses occasionally rumbling past (can’t complain about the noise, the bus service here is excellent!) ;

just eaten my first steak in the new home, brought to my door by very nice lady for all of 8 pesos (a quid and a half!) with the best chips I have had since I got here. They had clearly been potatoes until about half an hour ago and maybe sitting in the package for the half a block walk from the restaurant made them taste like chip shop chips so I savoured every one! After a week of pizza hot for supper and cold for lunch, it was extra fab;

not planning on dancing tonight as tomorrow I really must go and invest in some white goods. I was going to do that today but after a silly amount of time responding to emails and an astonishing amount of time hoovering up the cadavers of a thousand and one cockroaches (had the fumigator in yesterday - v.effective!), the day was as good as spent.

The kitchen here is beyond cleaning (I have tried with mucho elbow grease and an increasingly toxic and abrasive array of products but it is too encrusted with decades of grime), so it all has to come out as soon as I can engage the services of a plumber. Very sweet friend Carmen is working on that for me. Meanwhile it is take-aways and tepid bottled drinks all the way. Must measure the lift to see how big a fridge I can get in there, though delivery people probably won’t argue about carrying it up 4 flights of stairs as they would in England.

Ok, the listing thing isn’t working as a literary device, so I shall just revert to ordinary sentences and paragraphs.

Sensibly, decent mattress was at the top of my urgent shopping list, so I have been enjoying the sleep of the just, even if the lack of fridge or indeed washing-up facilities has deprived me of the food of the gods! Still, after a disgruntled week and a half on unsatisfactory bedding in the temporary abode, I was painfully aware of what a sleep person I am. Sure Mrs Thatcher with her 3 hours a night or whatever it was would not have cared, but something tells me that is not the only difference between the two of us!

Hoover next on the list and hurrah, I love it. I hoover in the morning, I hoover in the evening, all over this flat! If Moulinex want to bung me a free mixer for advertising, I will happily tell you that their Boogie is a powerful and rather cute new friend. What the hell, I will tell you that for nothing - and it is a bit purple! It really sucks - in the sense that sucking is what a good hoover should do. It has a bag already full of cat hair and cockroach cadavers, so I won't be recycling that one!

I did eventually manage to get out today but not very far. I went over to Okko on Santa Fe, a sort of Habitat but with lots of oriental furnishings. It is odd here that there is little middle ground when it comes to shopping. Stuff is either cheap and looks it, then falls apart, or it is very expensive and often falls apart anyway - so there are huge gaps in pretty much every market you care to think of for reasonably-priced, functional things. Anyway, all I was after was a drainer so that I can finally wash up the many glasses I had rather craftily bought in anticipation of well-wishers, champagne etc. but now do not actually want coming into contact with the filthy sink! Of course, am now in possession of a plastic bowl and a drainer but still there are about 30 glasses and half a dozen used mugs awaiting attention… well blogging is so much more important; it will free me up from writing half a dozen long emails every morning. Yeah, right!

As if I am up in the morning!

Actually, I discovered last week that the French have cunningly spotted the gap in the market and sent over Carrefour hypermarkets to make a start on filling it, so I got several super things there and will go back for more. Otherwise kitting this place out is going to be either insanely expensive or insanely wasteful & short-term if I buy cheap. Did I mention the flat is huge?

The ceilings are three and a half metres high. I was standing on the little balcony today and realised that here on the 4th floor, I am at eye level with the 7th floor of a building across the way. Yikes! So will need lots more paint than in the London flat!

A friend is coming round next week to get going on the painting. We will get the living room looking decent at least. My plan is to do a fairly cosmetic job initially, then strip things down and do it properly over the next couple of years. That way, it can be presentable and functional sooner. Belen has a good craftsman who can work on restoring the mouldings and that sort of thing but he is quite busy just now.

My cleaner from the old flat is coming over too to catch up and I hope she will be in a position to take on some rolling-up of sleeves etc. She is such a sweetie, very practical and a total perfectionist, even if a little prone to moving things about the place for no apparent reason.

Ambitiously enough, I am planning to have a house-warming party on Friday coming, so had better actually start planning it, rather than just asking people! Need a table and a couple more places to sit. If I have no working kitchen, I will at least get rid of what I can and buy in empanadas & cake. Also need to clean inside bedroom & bathroom cupboards so that I can actually bear to unpack bags currently still in vestibule on ugly but easy-to-clean-and-disinfect ceramic tiled floor. The vestibule is about the size of my living room in London, by the way. Here is the vestibule, replete with worldly goods and Julie-Anne's fantastically helpful (nearly all gone now) cleaning equipment:



I feel inspired to measure the living room now… it is nine and a half metres long, so what is that, about 30 feet? The fatter half is four and a half metres wide, the thinner half is three sixty. Pretty big anyway, and it has a beautiful varnished wooden floor which everyone tells me is very valuable. Well, if we can dance on it, I will be happy. Here is some of it, freshly relieved of some ugly concertina doors in the middle:

The panelling in the arch has windows in it, as is the case all over the flat, and at some point much of this has been painted over. The doors and frames are also rather nice wood underneath layers of chipped and filthy paint. So there will is a fair acreage of paint-stripping to be done.

Thank heaven for rubber gloves and lethal chemicals!

The cockroaches will most definitely not be invited on Friday - if they turn up, they will be trodden on by some of the fanciest shoes on the planet! Actually, maybe I should ban an Comme il Faut shoes in case of stilletoe marks on the floor.

Glad I am not a Buddhist or in any sense worried about grand scale insecticide. In fact, should I not be congratulated for sending them on up the ladder towards nirvana rather than castigated for killing the little buggers? I did think about taking a picture of the massed cadavers but it is an image I would rather forget and you dear people never need see.

I will invite a couple of the guys I dance with at my beloved Club Español, though they will most likely take it the wrong way. They were so sweet on Thursday - pointing out that I looked different and quite radiant, so I told them about the flat and to a man they were warm and congratulatory, even excited about the cupola. One wrangled the address out of me and sent round a lovely big white azalea on Friday morning with his congratulations. He wants to dance with me next year in the campeonato. Maybe I am still naïve about all the compliments but I have never had a problem brushing off unwelcome advances and on the whole I love the charm and ease of it all. I danced like a demon on Thursday with all my favourite people - fab. Left exhausted with huge smile on face. By the way, I do go on about Club Español, and how gorgeous it is, so here is a pic. If you know who to look for, you can see Susan and Julie-Anne dancing:

Well, now I must go and crawl into my big, comfy, cotton-sheeted, feather-duveted bed (thanks Carrefoure!) and hope to get up in time to buy a fridge tomorrow. Maybe a stereo too. Very happy to live without a TV though as there is so much else to keep me occupied.

I only wish the dear friends who have coaxed me through some unhappy times on London could loll about in the mood I am in now. I am, as I said at the start, one happy bunny! If I get hit by one of the frequent and enthusiastic buses here, you will know that I had a smile on my face, even if the wholesale cockroach slaughter - or a judicial holiday, some idiot intermediary or industrial action at the Heaven Registry - bars me from reaching a better place in the hereafter!
Oh go on, scroll down and take another look at the cupola!

Who needs drugs when there’s Buenos Aires?

Cheers!

New Home

Very exciting day yesterday; finally, after months of just the weirdest problems, I signed the papers and handed over the money for the new flat. When I say 'handed over the money', I did quite literally hand over the money, in cash, which had been brought into the country for me by a finance company. It was odd indeed to be handling such a vast wad of cash. I wanted to take a picture of it but a hideous last minute argument erupted and the whole deal almost fell through, so it didn't seem quite right to be taking out my camera. Anyway, a wad of ten thousand dollars is only about an inch thick - which is not quite as impressive as I had hoped. I should have asked for it in small bills!

Natalia, my lovely estate agent, had arranged for me to stay in an empty rental apartment out in Palermo for the last ten days or so. It was a bit miserable to be honest - noisy, uncomfortable & cold - but I am so grateful to her for doing that. The cute place in town where I had been since April had been let to someone else, so I had to move from there before I had my own home to go to. Natalia also arranged for a nice man with a van to schlep all my stuff out there and then back again yesterday afternoon. Mostly, it is all still sitting in the vestibule as I will not unpack until some serious cleaning has been done. The place is thick with filth.

I am now sitting in my pyjamas in the back bedroom on a carpet thick with cat hair, surrounded by unbelievable filth and wondering where to start.

Oh what joy though - I have my own place in Buenos Aires! It is quite huge and has the cutest cupola on the roof (see below for picture).

My first visitor was Romina, who comes to me once a week for English conversation. I took her up and showed her the cupola and she said "How pretty, but what purpose does it serve?". A very formal sort of phrase that made it sound as if she was questioning the cupola's right to exist, when really she was just a bit curious. So I said that it is just there to be beautiful, though in fact it also serves as a sort of shed.

I had had to run out and buy my first bits of furniture before she came as the kitchen table and chairs that I was expecting to have been left were gone. Round the corner here is Avenida Belgrano, which happens to be the furniture district, so I traipsed up and down and in & out of likely looking shops to see if I could get a couple of chairs. It dawned on me that I was likely to end up with something really crappy if I bought in a hurry, so I changed tack. Amazingly, just as I was thinking that I had better get back and that surely Romina, who is very young, would not mind sitting on a suitcase, I saw a gorgeous pink beanbag hanging in a shop with a sign on it saying $100, which is a little shy of twenty quid. I went in and found they were leather and available in all sorts of colours. A very nice man pulled one down off its hook and let me sit on it and I almost went to sleep on the spot. I told him I was going to carry it back up Belgrano and he nodded to the van outside and said he'd give me and the beanbag a lift home, so I said I'd take two! Delighted that my first bits of furniture are a pink and a purple beanbag, though the standard of furnishings will have to improve if I am to rent the place out ever! Here are the beanbags and Susan's bed which is pressed into service as a sofa (yes it does have a mattress, what kind of a hostess do you think I am?!). Makeshift coffee tables include Julie-Anne's box of precious stuff that I am - erm - carefully storing for her:

Then later Linda came and toasted the place and after she left a few other friends popped round with thoughtful offerings like wine, champagne, a dreamcatcher, a huge cream cake and a chair - so we sat and drank and ate cake and chatted about all sorts. They had some good leads for workmen, which I must follow up as there is a huge amount of work to be done here. Spot the amazing cream cake Miguel brought over...

Belen stayed after the others had gone and we chatted on until after one this morning. She seemed impressed with my Spanish and we laughed about our first meeting last year and how we had struggled to communicate.

When she had gone & I was on my own, I skipped around the flat again taking it all in. Then after failing to talk to my sister in LA, I spent a couple of hours emailing before getting the single mattress off the bed I bought for Susan when she came out in July and arranging it on the antique bed frame I have bought with the flat. The last owner helpfully took away the mattress, which is a blessing if it was anything like as filthy as everything else here. I find it hard to believe that anyone could live with this much filth. Oh, she also took most of the light fittings off and didn't leave replacements, so that's a job.

Hhhmm must buy a huge ladder, these ceilings are so high.

But first: proper mattress, hoover, bucket for Sugar Soap Michele so kindly sent over, heavy duty gloves & pliars for ripping up foul cat-stinky carpets. I have a hammer & will probably also need a crow-bar of some sort for pulling out the bizarre concertina doors that have been put in the middle of the double living room. Yay, tools! I went to a shop called Easy at the weekend, which is a sort of B&Q / Home Depot, and got quite excited at the prospect of buying tools. What am I like?

This afternoon I have some important paperwork to file, so I will go and disinfect the bathroom and find out whether the shower works...