"Did your handbag get stolen recently, by any chance?"

Thus spake an old school chum I hadn't heard from in ages, who phoned me out of the blue last night. As you may imagine, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Apparently, a friend of hers has a house in La Floresta, and this house has a bread oven built in the garden. People being what they are, this oven is seldom used, so they never even looked inside during February and most of March. They did so this last weekend, and imagine their surprise when they found a burgundy leather handbag.

They deduced what had happened immediately, so they looked through it to determine who it belonged to. Since my date book was there, and I had my name and contact info on the first page, that was pretty easy to figure out. Again, people being what they are, they couldn't resist looking through my "contacts" section (to see just who this Rosario person was, I suppose, and who she knew, something essential to who you are here in Uruguay), where they ran into my friend's name. They handed it over to her and she called me, so that I could pick it up.

Except for the cash, everything's there, it seems, even my wallet. Glasses, driver's licence, ID card, credit cards, house keys... At this point, to tell you the truth, I'd almost rather it hadn't showed up. I mean, I've spent lots time and money replacing all that was stolen (we even changed the locks at my house less than a week ago), and now it turns out I needn't have!