Last night, we took the kids to the embassy for happy hour. I had read in a recent CLO (Community Liason Officer) email that there would be a happy hour, but I had ignored it. I'm a Minnesotan; happy hour is where single adults go to drink and meet people where I am from. But when the kids came home from school, most of them (without even hearing the others tell me) told me that their friends were all going to happy hour, and could we go, too? After our youngest daughter, age 6, asked, we finally realized that there must be more to happy hour than drinking.
Sure enough, the soccer and basketball courts and the playground were full of kids, so we stayed a couple of hours and let the kids have fun. DH and I talked to other parents, and while we were there, I received an invitation to go shopping to a market out of town with another EFM (Eligible Family Member - what all of us spouses and children of people in the mission are called). So, this morning, we took off at 9am and arrived in Paranoá about 20 minutes later.
I finally felt like I was in another country. The town looked a lot more like what I had seen in Santiago, Chile, a couple of years ago. The stores we went two were little, crowded shops, with incredible pricing. I spent the equivalent of $35 USD on groceries that would have cost double or triple if I had gone to one of the local grocery stores. I'd say that the prices were even better than in the U.S. I got 8.25 lbs of apples, 2.25 lbs of bananas, one large avocado, three ripe tomatoes, and several pounds of baking potatoes at the produce market. From the butcher, I got 4.4 lbs of ground beef, and on the street there was a rotisserie chicken vendor, and I got one large chicken from him. $35 total. I'm going back every Saturday, now that I know about it.
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