This and that from Martha

Juvenal – Frank’s motor accomplice - has a car, in Tacna.  Hopefully it arrives tomorrow, unless he drives off in it.  We aren't celebrating yet.

Spanish lessons for the boys are sorted, we think.  We have tried two ladies.  The first, Elvira, plays games with the boys and they don't think they are learning much. The word for 'cat' is what Titus learned the first lesson.  She talks very fast, too fast for me to understand, and there is no structure to her lessons.  The second, Miluska, came yesterday.  She was fun, very slowly and clearly spoken and sat down with the boys to conjugate the verb 'to be'.  At the end of the hour they were making up sentences such as: my brother is mad, my father is English, you are my teacher, they are big etc. The boys were thrilled with their progress and bounced into school afterwards.  Of course, Frank and I are now wishing we had started this process in March, not at the end of April.

We have both resumed our Spanish lessons too.  I need a lot of revision, and my teacher is being patient. Frank has a new teacher, a very jolly, smiley lady who makes him do the talking.  He finds her less interesting than his last teacher, but he does more work which is, after all, the aim of lessons.

We are also preparing for our Ausangate walk.  We walked up the hill behind us on Sunday which took 7 hours door to door. Zu fairly ran up where Titus used the airport as an excuse for endless stops.  We had to watch and discuss each and every take-off and landing.  And now we need to know how long a threshold is, and are all thresholds the same length worldover?

We climbed over 1000m in height, almost the equivalent of climbing Ben Nevis, so the boys are pleased with themselves and we no longer have any doubts at all about Ausangate.  The worst day has an ascent of only 500m.  But then we will be doing that at an altitude of 5000m so it will seem harder. (Our house is at about 3,300m so we are not worried about acclimatisation.) 

When we were on top of the hill, we bumped into some friendly European girls who were taking 'crazyeee' pictures of each other and we decided that our pictures were a little boring.  So we took some crazyeee pictures too. 

We are truly settled with the boys happily walking a couple of hundred yards to school where they are bored in Maths and English because they find it so easy, and bored stupid in Spanish because they don't understand a word of what is going on.  But they have made friends and are wonderfully enthusiastic about most aspects of their lives here.

We bought new boots for Titus, feeling that his 'sturdy' trainers would not do on the Ausangate walk. He is a pig in butter. He so rarely gets new things it is a really special treat for him, and he is soooo grateful and happy. I told him he had to wear his boots into school to soften them up a bit, and he said, as only Titus could, 'Of course, Mum, I'd love to. Anything.'