Save the Windows

The bedrooms, dressing room, and bathroom in our apartment flow around an "aire y luz" (less poetically called a ventilation well in English). The windows opening on to the well are beautiful examples of the French-style design that dominated architecture here in the first part of the 20th century. When we bought the apartment, Kurt vowed to restore the windows to their original beauty. Today he completed his mission, sealing the panes of the last of this set of five windows.

The job was not easy, requiring some gravity-defying contortions to remove old paint, putty, and other debris from both the inside and the outside and then to apply sealer to 24 different sections of glass in each mullioned window. (ADD 1: That's on the outside, Kurt points out. Inside work involved cleaning 156 individual sections of glass on each window.)

The project also featured several trips down to the planta baja (ground floor), where Sr. y Sra. Recondo good naturedly retrieved for us a variety of tools and materials that landed in their patios. It's one way to get to know your neighbors.

London for Less

There are some silver linings to the economic crisis. First, for some reason the U.S. dollar is up against most other currencies, including the British pound. Second, air fares are down. Both good reasons to finally make that trip to London. 

Another good reason: we very much needed to change our travel pattern from Texas - Buenos Aires - Texas to BA - Texas - BA. So on February 26 we flew back to Austin, using the return portion of our tickets that had brought us to Buenos Aires last May. (Thanks to our good friends Roger and Maria Nasr for putting us up!)

With our Texas business (tax filings, bank runs, and medical appointments) out of the way, we left for London on March 4 on an open-jaw ticket that allowed us to return from London to Buenos Aires. Of course, we had to connect through Houston on the return leg, which made for a very long trip: we left the apartment we had rented in London at 6:30 am on March 12, and arrived at our home in Buenos Aires at 11:30 am on March 13, some 31 hours later. 

London was worth it, though. We stayed in Southwark, right off the Tower of London Bridge, on the south side of the Thames, in an area of refurbished warehouses that had served the docks in past eras. We were pretty much in walking distance of most attractions: we trekked across various bridges, to Bloomsbury and the British Museum, to Westminster and Parliament and other government buildings, as well as to closer sites, including Burrough's Market, St. Paul's Cathedral, the National Theatre (where we attended a dramatic reading by playwright David Hare), and the adjacent Festival Hall area, with all sorts of enterprising entertainers performing for passers-by. Photo impressions here.