Fun Stuff

This is Lenna posting again.  We've been looking for fun ways to fill our time, and we came up with a silly game from a book I brought with us.  Geof and the girls had to get down on the floor and use straws to blow different items from a start line to a finish line.  Laura won the contest, and they all had sore knees by the end of the game.  But it was quite hilarious and involved a lot of laughing (not to mention a little hyperventilating!).

Lots of huffing and puffing and laughing

 

Then we decided it would be fun to attemp to make our own pizza, thinking the girls would enjoy helping me in the kitchen.  So we went to the store and tracked down all the ingredients, which is not an easy thing when everything is packaged differently than at home and of course is all labeled in Spanish.  For example, we spent a very long time looking for milk a few days ago and finally had to ask someone for help.  He pointed it out to us, and then we realized why we could not find it.  Milk is not sold in the refigerated section here.  It is packaged in plastic bags and sold on the shelf.  We were never going to find it on our own!  A lot of liquids are packaged that way here.  It's just not even something we would ever expect. So we tracked down flour, yeast, olive oil, and cheese.  By the way, they don't sell cheddar cheese here either.  The only types of cheeses we can find are white and usually very bland.  But they have Mozzarella, so we got some of that, along with our toppings.  We had to buy a cheap pizza pan and a cheese shredder as well.  It gets complicated...

 

Once we got all our ingredients together, it was time to start...except I had nothing to measure water temperature with (don't want to kill the yeast!), not to mention I had no measuring cups or spoons.  And the oven is measured in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.  But we improvised and it finally worked.  It took awhile, so what started out as an attempt at lunch became an early dinner.  We never really did eat lunch.  Oh well, dinner was delicious!  Here is a picture of the leftovers.

Yummy.  Packed and ready for the fridge. 

 

A friendly competition.

 

The green striped building is "Carrefour", the store across the street from us.  This was taken from our balcony.

 

 

Also taken from our balcony, the little red awning below marks the location of our favorite lunch place. Notice, not only the cars, but the many motorcycles--hard to see, but they are there.

 

 

I took this looking straight down from our balcony.  I included my toes, in an attempt to add perspective. :-) As mentioned previously, we are on the 5th floor. The swimming pool is at the top of the building, on the 7th floor.  It, too, offers a phenomenal view.