My god! Did you see the price of those shoes!
My father gave my three children a jar of pennies, and they were thrilled. We’d just opened bank accounts for each of them, and the credit union gave them a bunch of paper rolls, each to hold 50 pennies. They set out to count and fill, and soon they had $3 in pennies each. We went to the credit union and made the deposit, and they’re now watching their savings grow with the interest.
Mind you, this all happened at a credit union in the U.S., my homeland where we were recently on holiday from where we now live in Argentina. You give a bunch of pennies to a U.S. bank like Bank of America or JP Morgan Chase and they’ll charge you a couple of bucks or more to accept them, hold them and then withdraw them. Many credit unions don’t have monthly fees or heinous charges. The costs are for your own mistakes like going overdrawn.
All of this also happened in a country where inflation is pretty tame at 2.2% annual. [continue reading…]
…and it will have all the food he can eat.
We recently drove to Big Sur on holiday for a week in California, where I grew up.
A lot has changed since I left Los Angeles to move to Argentina in 1994, from politics to the economy and culture. The landscape, however, remains pretty much as is, bar a rather more crumbling Pacific Coast Highway at spots along the cliffs of Big Sur. It was hairy enough at points for my youngest daughter, who is four, to close her eyes and say, “I want to go home.”
More change can be seen on the menus at some restaurants, not your Denny’s and In-N-Out Burgers but at a host of joints like on Fisherman’s Warf in Monterey that cater to my seven-year-old son. And in style.
My son not only has a milk allergy diagnosed a year ago but also an intolerance to gluten, a protein composite found in wheat and other grains as well as hundreds of processed foods. This makes shopping at the supermarket a chore and finding a take-away meal even harder. So we didn’t expect to be shown a gluten-free menu at a random restaurant or at a bunch of others on the Fisherman’s Wharf. [continue reading…]
Yeah, them trees seem so much sturdier these days.
We’re on holiday on the Central California coast.
This is my old haunt, at least the southern half from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and a bit less the central coast of Morro Bay, Cambria, Big Sur, Monterey and up to San Francisco.
It’s a coast swelling with sea life, hidden beaches, coves and lagoons with ducks and high grasses. There also are pine trees and big redwoods.
I took a deep breath in Cambria and it smelled much like Pinamar on the Argentine coast where we once lived and now spend the summers. A difference is the kelp and the seaweed that emits an aroma that I grew up with and still cherish. There’s no such smell in Pinamar.
We checked into a hotel in San Simeon near Cambria and headed down to the beach for a walk as the sun started to set. My three children ran ahead and carefully walked over beds of pebbles and larger rocks, the sand too easy for their eager feet and legs. They picked up driftwood and explored the kelp. They looked for starfish and sea anemones at the bottom of a cliff that barred further progress up the beach as the tide pushed in. [continue reading…]
