There’s an unusual form of advertising here in Uruguay - the little trucks and bikes that drive round and round the same block every few minutes all day long! They play the same advert through a speaker on top of the vehicle as loud as they can manage - or it seems that way! So we can here it right from our flat on the 6thfloor. Today we were treated to the Pink Panther theme, with random Spanish voices that we couldn’t make out as it was so distorted!

Yesterday at church they lit the first advent candle on the wreath, and changed all the green coverings and decoration in the church to purple (apparently the liturgical colour for the season), and stopped singing songs containing Alleluia, or saying it in the liturgy of the service! Which is a bit different and seems strange -particularly avoiding songs containing Alleluia. But the idea behind it is that Advent is a season of preparation for Christmas.

Yesterday we went to a talk about the early church over at the Methodist church based on the book of Acts. It was really interesting, and surprisingly I managed to follow most of what the guy was saying (in Spanish) which was cool. Although I found the people asking questions difficult to understand, and when we were in smaller groups it was difficult. A very tiring day in all, but well worth it!

We just got back from Concordia, after spending a couple of days there to renew our visas and have a bit of a break. It’s amazing how different it is to Salto, there seems so much more stuff in the supermarkets (mainly in the line of cheap booze) and it seems much busier. We also felt a lot less safe there than we do in Salto - but nothing happened. We stayed in a cheap (-ú10 for a double room with breakfast) but lovely hotel, and wandered around the sites there.

This explains the gap in blog entries - we were without a power supply for our laptop for quite a long time since being in Salto - so we’ve been just about keeping up with e-mails using Gilberto’s computer, and the internet cafe. But I’ve not got round to updating this - hopefully I’ll be able to fill in a few of the major events, but things should get more interesting from now on!

Today we went to the ‘double service’ at Espíritu Santo, which is a service in Spanish, followed by a service in English. It was really helpful to be at both, and interesting to see the differences. We then went for lunch with the Carters. After lunch, Steve taught me how the guitar chords are done differently here. All the chords have different names as follows: C is DO, D is RE, E is MI, F is FA, G is SOL, A is LA, B is SI.

In the morning we went shopping at Montevideo Shopping - we found it this time with the map - it was much easier by foot. In the afternoon, we watched Bad Boys 2 at the cinema there. It was really empty and we thought we were going to be the only people in there, but another couple came in part way into the film. It was so different watching a film in such an empty cinema!

Today we went to Colonia (an old town opposite Buenos Aires) for the day. It was a really nice place to visit for a day, but there wouldn’t have been much more to see if we’d been there much longer. The sea views were really nice.

We went to visit Heather in the hospital this morning - she still seemed to be quite weak, but should be going home tomorrow. Then we tried to find one of the other shopping centres nearby - either Portones or Montevideo Shopping. We caught a bus, which was going to one of them, but missed the stop, and ended up at the Rambla. We then walked along for 3-4km before we got to a bus stop where we could get a bus back home.

This morning we had a time of prayer in the chapel, which I found very difficult. After this we went for a Spanish lesson with Gerry, which was really helpful and we did a lot. We then helped him to get things ready for the Alpha course. We stayed for the start of the Alpha course and then went home. It was interesting to see the way they ran it here - they started of with the food, then had a couple of songs before the talk and afterwards split up into smaller groups to discuss things.