I got myself up this morning at a quarter till seven so that I could go for a walk and see the sunrise in Cañar. I did not sleep all that great last night, I was very restless. But that probably means that I am no longer so exhausted that I cannot stay awake.
I got dressed and did a little walking around town. Not a long walk. I went down to the playground where the girls played yesterday and checked that out. The view from there is nice. There were some older folks out and about in town. Mostly just hanging out on one of the streets. Probably a lot of people just gather in the mornings to visit.
The valley below us and the mountain beyond are just gorgeous any time of day. So amazing to get to see it. It was very cold this morning, just about forty degrees when I went out. I did not stay out for very long. I did do a little walking of some streets that I have not been on yet and figured out where the other bar in town is. Maybe we will get to try that one out tonight or tomorrow. Dominica plans to start cooking soon but we will have to see if we manage to go shopping and what we are able to procure. Not having an ATM in town, as far as we know, is very limiting. There is no means of getting cash or doing banking. I have no idea how the local deal with money unless they are leaving town all of the time to do so. We are pretty sure that a lot of the locals never leave.
Dominica was awake when I got back shortly after seven. We hung out for a while. We made coffee and went up to the terrace but it was too cold for Dominica, she needed to come back into the house after a few minutes. She decided that she needed to hang out in the lounge which was very warm instead of even the kitchen. For me, the kitchen was a much better temperature.
We heard the bread delivery van come so Dominica and I went out to the market and picked up some simple supplies. More bread, yoghurt, frozen cheese pizzas, local cheese, fish fingers and such. Nothing extravagant. We are trying hard to find food that the girls will eat. It seems to be working, they have been trying lots of new food and mostly liking it. Getting them to try things is hard, but they like them as soon as they try them.
After hitting the market, Dominica went to the lounge and worked on her Rosetta Stone Spanish class for an hour. She is trying hard to spend an hour a day working on it. This is her second day. After that she fell asleep for a while. She has been very tired.
I worked on getting SGL updated with everything up to this morning and even started working on today’s post. Writing is a major part of what I am going to be doing while here so very important that I keep up with it.
Liesl got up just after eleven thirty this morning, Dominica was still asleep. Luciana got up just ten minutes later.
Dominica ended up sleeping well into the afternoon and then, even after she was awake, she spent the rest of the day in the lounge where the heat was on, wrapped in a blanket on the couch reading. She is getting hit very hard by jetlag and can’t keep herself warm or get enough rest.
We had the power go out two or three times today. Never for long, just a minute here or there. We almost wouldn’t notice if the Internet connection didn’t go out when that happened. And if we were using the 3G on our mobile phones then we probably would not even notice that. Using all natural light and having windows just everywhere makes it easy to not use electricity. We have no television on today, not even for a minute. Only appliances that we really used all day were the hot water heater and the oven, both of which are pretty transparent to short power outages.
We decided that today would just be a “hang around the house” day. We needed some time to catch up on things. Rest, primarily.
We had a but of Internet issues today which we are working on. I had to contact the ISP down in Orgiva to have them look into the issues. Hoping to get that corrected soon as it is making doing anything here rather difficult. Downloading software, working on the corporate VPN, uploading pictures and videos are all struggling quite a lot.
Possibly related to the Internet issues today, this afternoon we suddenly got some extreme winds. I mean really extreme winds. And for about an hour, even though the air temperature was in the low fifties registered in Orgiva and probably very high forties here since we had the windows open still – we got snow! Apparently snow blowing off of the high mountains around us.
By late in the hour the snow got really strong. I went to the window on the landing to take a video of it and caught Luciana in the background discovering that it was snowing and snowing way into the house. The snow was blowing off of the plaza through the window I was standing in and making it halfway through the kitchen! That was very surprising.
I worked all evening, first from the kitchen, then from the guest bedroom and then from the warmth of the lounge. I actually had a very productive day at work today and felt really good about it. I ended up working until nearly midnight even though I had signed on around eight in the morning.
It was eleven when Dominica went to bed and still before midnight when I did. It was a mostly quiet day today. It looks like we will be driving down to Orgiva in the morning and maybe exploring the region a little bit. We will have to see when everyone gets up and what the weather ends up being like. In theory we are going to be well over sixty degrees tomorrow which will be a nice change. It has been a bit too cold since we arrived.