Feeling lucky.

From the air, 9 de Julio looks like the strings of a tennis racquet with a series of streets that run parallel, adjacent, perpendicular, congruent with an element of 90 degreeness.  Almost like the opening scene of the Dick Tracy cartoon.  The streets are all one-way and alternate direction, with two-way avenues every five or so streets.  So far, the only traffic lights we have seen are the ones on the four intersections surrounding the main plaza in the centre of town.  All the other intersections follow the give way to the right rule.  Wait, fresh news has just come in…  The intersections follow the, “I was here first and you’ll have to skid for me,” rule.

our street

There are no town buses so many people drive cars or motorbikes and scooters.  People are very relaxed with the number of passengers and things you can carry on a scooter.  So far we have seen a lady riding pillion with a chainsaw in one hand and a tank of fuel in the other, a man with a whipper-snipper, a toddler wedged between two parents (both were texting) and a couple with their dog.  It’s nothing to see a family of four on a scooter riding round town.

The Harper Family Miming Quintet is now performing in your local stationery store looking for thumb tacks, sticky tape and a diary – noises optional.  Perfectly normal everyday items but not part of the HFMQ vocabulary yet.  Once these items have been found, ensure that you line up at the correct place.  Not close to the cash registers but in a slightly awkward central part of the store.  So awkward in fact that it requires a worker to direct people to this location.  During the transaction the cashier will ask a series of questions or the same question in several different ways until Indiana is finally called over to translate, “She wants to know if you want your receipt.”  Well, if she had mimed it I would have understood.  She must have been more flustered than us because she handed my money back as my change with my receipt that was now printed.

We have been made very welcome by the school community as they have spent a lot of effort to prepare the house for us, a lady we have not met yet dropped off some vegetables from her farm for us, one of the parents invited us around for a swim in their pool yesterday and the school principal picked up the girls to take them to meet some children their own age.  The school community is also on the hunt for some bicycles so we can move around town more freely.  We are feeling luckier than a limerick writer who moved from a town called Orange.