Cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning

I lost track of which day it was yesterday, and when Enrique laughed at me I said, "Every day is like Sunday here." But I was wrong. Everyday is more like Friday - you have to work, but not too hard, and you can stay up late at night. 

Seems the start of summer rains have come. It rained a storm this morning at about 8:00. The far dorm is still leaking, even though Nico fixed the roof, seems we'll have to get a more permanent solution for it. Enrique thinks it will rain tonight and maybe tomorrow and then it will be summer.

I spent the day yesterday cleaning the rest of the house and waxing the floors made of ceramic tiles, the tiles create all the dust in the house and the only way to stop it is to wax them. Lucky it is liquid wax that goes on really easily. Even so, it took me 5 hours to finish up, and the waxing has to be done every two days for a while - until the tiles build up a good layer. I did one more layer today before moving all the furniture back inside. Nico took a photo of me on my hands and knees this morning, so if anyone doesn't believe me I can post it.

It's damn hard work, so I thought I would cheer myself up by taking a few photo's.

This is our cat, Tita - really it is Putita, which means "little bitch", but we don't call her that. She eats anything you put in front of her, from salad to live mice.

And our dog, Toto - yes, from the wizard of OZ - who should really have been called Tonto, which means "stupid" in spanish. He's still just a puppy, maybe he'll get better. The worst thing about him are the ticks he brings home, some of them are full to the the size of jelly beans, and we have to pull them off and squash them. Yuk!

These are the positions these two maintain for the majority of the day, I guess it is Sunday for them every day.

We have two new additions to the family, Nico found two small birds, on the ground, whose nest had been destroyed by the hail the other day. He's feeding them bread soaked in milk and dulce de leche, caramel.

This is the new bathroom that Nico built, we all had a hand in painting it - I did all the white today. It has a nice new shower head that works very well. I am really looking forward to a shower there as soon as the paint dries.

We spent another 3000 pesos on building materials for the new house on Wednesday. I'm slowly working my way towards paying as much as Nico has, the only problem is with getting money out here. It is costing me R30 to withdraw R900. No one seems to allow people to buy pesos with a card here, not even at the airport.

Nico leaves tomorrow night to go an tour around with a friend for a few weeks, he'll be back before christmas. So I'm on my own - sort of, Enrique has offered to help me whenever I need it - and I haven't learned any more spanish since I got here more than a week ago. Bad Nell!

I'm sure I'll be fine. I'll practice shouting and screaming in spanish at the spiders...

Slogging away

Well, as we suspected, Sunday was a complete writeoff for us. We went to Sofi's sister's wedding on Saturday and had a BIG party.

The wedding ceremny started at 18:30, luckily it was only about 30 minutes long. Then we drove to Sofi's parents Bodego, wine farm, and proceded to have drinks and hors d'euvres on the lawn outside. The wine was spectacular, made by the family, and the champagne was equally as good. There were also a lot of Margueritas being served, since it was half a Mexican wedding.

At about 21:00 we were seated at tables on the other side of the buildings, next to the vineyards. There were several courses served, each from another country - mexican, argentinian, chilean, italian, etc. We carried on drinking and eating ourselves into the ground.

Then the party started.

First a waltz, just to get everyone on the dance floor, and then the music didn't stop till after we left at 06:00 Sunday morning. The bride and groom, friends, family, old people, children, everyone stayed up and dancing till into the early hours of the morning.

Man these Argetinians know how to party!

So We didn't do any work on Sunday. I only got out of bed at 15:00.

Yesterday it hailed on us. First they were the size of small marbes, then big marbles, then they were golf balls. It wreaked havok on our poplar trees, stripping branches and leaves. It also made a few holes in the roof of the far dorm room - luckily I cleaned in there already, otherwise it would have been a mudbath.

Aparently it hardly ever hails in this area of town and Enrique says never this big.

We are getting somewhere with the new hostel.

Thought it was about time to show some photos.

This is what it looks like so far. 

The poles mark out the outside of the main house, which Pablo is building. Nico is building the two bedrooms on the one side, and Arlington - yes he is an argentinian - is buiding the kitchen using local stone on the front side.

The path you see here, leading up to the house from the driveway is going to be a set of stairs. I did that all myself, and I have the blisters to show for it. Those little wild thyme bushes are spikey bastards.

I am also getting on with cleaning the old house. It's taking a while because I have to work myself up to do one room. It starts with cleaning all the cobwebs off the ceilings and walls, and I HATE spiders. Funny enough, I don't come across any of them while cleaning, not live one's anyway, but I have killed three large spiders, one small scorpion and several other bugs since I got here - not to mention all the things we find in the pool. The house is very dusty, and I have to sweep each room about three times just to make a dent in it, with time in between for letting the dust settle. It's hot work.

We go into town about once a day, to Nico' disgust, but I am the money man now, and I have to withdraw money slowly - none of the banks or money exchange places will let me buy pesos with my card. I think my bankactually put a stop on my card the other day because I have spent so much on it here in the last few days. Got it sorted out though.

I have also used MS publisher to create a very basic website for our hostel and Enrique's horseback riding business. I have asked Pia, the expert, to see if she can fix them up a bit, and put them on the web. Watch this space for the URL.

A for Away

I have finally arrived in Argentina, and I must say that Nico has done a fantastic job here.
The old house, the temporary hostel, has had the kitchen changed so that it is on the inside of the house and the new bathroom looks great - it just needs a shower-head and it will be up and running.

So far we've had a grand total of three guests. Three Dutch girls stayed here one night after going on a hike with Nico, Enrique and Sofi - it snowed on them up in the mountains...
Hopefully things will pick up a little soon. Enrique brings his horse-riding guests over to our place after their ride for beers and we show them what Mendoza country life is like, hand them a few business cards and hope for the best.

The new house is also coming along nicely. The corner posts for the skeleton of the house are all up and Nico has started building the bedroom walls. The builder, Pablo, was very happy to see me when I arrived on Wednesday - it seems Nico had run out of money and promised him that he would get some when I arrived.

It seems Oswaldo, the property caretaker, has decided to move on. It means we save P$500 a month for his pay, but we now have to do all the watering of the garden ourselves. This is not a small feat, remember we are pretty much in the middle of a desert. We have a constant stream of water to the property, so we just move hosepipes around during the day - Nico is slowly teaching me the watering process, on both properties.

I've started giving the place a good top to bottom clean - it's been boys living here for the last few years, and their idea of clean is not exactly what a hostel should look like. I've managed to do the kitchen and the new bathroom so far. hopefully I wil be able to do the rest of the house early next week, perhaps with a bit of local help. There are a lot of spider webs, and spiders, here that I don't do too well with...

One big piece of news is that we have decided to change the name of the hostel. Seems some of the hostels in town have heard of what's happening up here and are a little upset that we may be taking business away from them. They're angry with Enrique, and we don't want him to lose any business. So the new name of the hostel is:
Los Carolinos

I will leave the url for the blog as is for now, but will change the e-mail address and the url for the hostel website - when I finally get around to doing it.

No photo's for now, will get some time to upload them next week. We're going to Sofi's sister's wedding on Saturday evening, and I think it's pretty much a write-off for Sunday - since these people don't go to bed before 5 when they party.