I'm back! After 3 full weeks of relaxing, I've come back to Montevideo :-( Don't get me wrong, I love my city, but after all those mornings of sitting in my porch, reading the newspaper, a cup of coffee at my elbow, only hearing the birds singing in the morning, it's tough to go back to hearing traffic noise!

It wasn't all good during my vacations though. The weather wasn't too good (luckily, the last 3 or 4 days were great, so I did manage to get a respectable tan), and the house we rented was robbed, with us inside. *shudder* We were sitting in the living room with my sister and a friend, each of us reading a book (of course!), when I heard a noise from the bedrooms next to where we were. I went to check, "Anyone there?", pretty sure it was nothing. I didn't find anything.

15 minutes later, for some reason my sister Luli went into my bedroom, which is at the back of the house (from the living room, there is a corridor going to the kitchen, at a right angle to the entry to the bedrooms I checked when I heard the noise. My own bedroom can only be entered through the kitchen, and its window opens to the same inner patio as the windows of the bedrooms I'd checked). Anyway, Luli came back asking me what I'd been looking for in her medicine bag and why I'd overturned it onto my bed and had left everything lying there.

I protested that I hadn't, and went to see what she was talking about. I couldn't believe what I saw when I got to my bedroom. The window was wide open, the blinds removed from their hinges and the screening neatly slit. Every drawer was open, the armoire had been very obviously searched, and my handbag (which I'd, very stupidly, left on the spare bed) missing. The noise I heard had come from that window, through the windows of the bedrooms I checked.

Most frightening of all was that my sister's medicine bag was, as she'd said, on my bed. It had been in her bedroom, the door of which opens onto the corridor going from living room to kitchen, not 1 metre from where we were sitting. The window of that bedroom was closed tight, so the intruders must have walked down that corridor and entered the bedroom, all while we just sat there, risking that one of us might look into the corridor for some reason and see him. Just thinking about it makes me sick.

Luckily I didn't lose much, nothing that can't be replaced, in a fashion. I didn't have much money in my wallet, and I cancelled all my credit cards and ATM card immediately, so no harm done there (only the hassle of having to renew everything). What bothers me the most is having lost my beloved eyeglasses (which I don't need to read, thank God, and only use to rest my eyes when staring at the computer screen), my datebook, with all my phone numbers and the handbag itself, a gift from my sister.

And those bastards had horrible timing, too! It was such a great night in every other respect. My parents got there from Montevideo that evening, bringing me my favourite food for dinner: hummus and taboule on pita bread, from my favourite deli in town. Not only that, they broght the mail from Montevideo, which included a huge box of books from my friend Anne in the US (I have the books I buy sent to her house, and she ships them all together in an M-Bag when we get to 11 lbs.). I could have eaten my food while looking at my new books that evening, and instead I had to spend it talking to the police. Yes, I did open the box and eat later that evening, but it wasn't the same. :-(

Onto nicer topics. I did keep my promise and kept a record of the books I read, and I read a lot: a grand total of 30 books. Not much to do in Floresta other than reading! I have lots and lots of stuff to catch up on, including my e-mail, but I'll start entering the book info later today.