Well I’m now 23! It’s a bit strange having my birthday in autumn instead of spring, but it’s quite nice! I love the autumn colours, and it’s also great to see a different place in autumn. Unfortunatly, it’s been very cloudy these last few days though, so I missed getting a photo of the yellow leaves against the blue sky, but this should do for now! It was a really nice birthday, although any post from England still hasn’t got here - so it’ll be a long birthday :).

It’s suddenly got cold here in Salto! I’ve gone from walking around in shorts and t-shirt to wearing a fleece and jeans. We’ve had to put the 2 blankets on the bed rather than just sheets as we’d got used to, and last night we decided that we could do with a hot water bottle. So we used Sprite bottles filled with hot water - which actually did the job quite well!

This morning at Escuelita some of the kids were terribly behaved! It’s been a long time since they have been, but I guess this week with it having rained a lot, and there being a lot more kids there it probably made quite a difference. We were looking at the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, and how they had a contest to prove which god was real. They each prepared a bull to sacrifice and then put it on the altar and prayed.

Jon told me to: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. From the NIV translation of the Bible: As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?" > >

Just a recipe I cooked for tea tonight! Ingredients chicken pieces (1/2 chicken breast cut into bit size pieces) 100ml double cream mustard 2 garlic cloves 1/4 green pepper 1/2 small zapallito (or courgette) sweetcorn few leaves fresh parsley sprinkle of oregano dash of cumin fry the chicken and garlic in olive oil, after a few minutes, add the mustard and mix in well once the chicken is cooked, add the cream and the herbs

This morning we took the kids from the Escuelita upto Parque Solari as an Easter treat. It was a really nice time, as it was cooler than it has been - so not too hot for running around. A lot of them had home-made kites with them, made from plastic bags and sticks- which flew very well. It’s a common thing for Holy Week here in Uruguay, for people to fly kites.

We went to the local Zoo with the youth group today, as they’re on holiday from school. It was nice, but quite a contrast to seeing the animals up at Iguazu. They all seemed to be in really small cages, apart from the deer, �andu and goats. The peacocks all had had their feathers cut off - possibly for selling for carnival costumes. The kids all seemed to enjoy the trip and have lots of fun, and we finished off with a ride on the spinning swings (don’t know what to call it!

We arrived back in Concordia on time, even though there had been some problems with the bus causing us to have to change buses at midnight. As the bus doesn’t enter Concordia on the way back and just stops at a road junction outside of town we had been worried about how we would get in, but fortunately there was a remisse there, and we could get a lift in to the bus station (10 pesos) after dropping off one of the others sharing it on the way.

Today we checked out of the hotel, and headed back down to Foz ready for me and Laura to get the bus back this evening from Puerto Iguazu. We took a few detours along the way to look at a bit of the scenery, and the edge of the forest before heading back to the [Carima Hotel] where my parents had booked their last night. Surprisingly when we got to the room, the brochure had had the price of the buffet changed to the 19 real that they had charged us the previous time - don’t know if this is because they knew we’d check or not though ;).

We had an early start today, and headed out through the town to a place called Santa Helena, on the edge of the reserviour We had a picnic lunch there and then went to have a look at some of the artificial beaches along the edge from there before heading back. In the evening we had dinner at the hotel, which was nice, although the ‘Brazilian wine’ turned out to be a not to nice Uruguayan wine, and the food seemed to cool off too quickly with the air conditioning But the food itself was really nice.