Día de Zapatos—Shoe Day!

Today was great!  A really fun and full Saturday!

The discoteca at the winery is really gigging right now (Saturday night, ya know) and they've got colored lights going and the music pounding at full volume, but I'll do my best to concentrate.

All ready to head to Ensenada!

Juanita taught me how to roll and cook flour tortillas this morning!  She said she'd teach me to make the dough next time.  They were so delicious!  I ate two at breakfast.

After we finished breakfast, we all loaded the vans for Shoe Day in Ensenada!  Mark said this is his twelfth year going to Shoe Day.  It's a long-standing Ranch tradition: they take the kids to a zapatería (shoe store) in Ensenada so the kids can pick out shoes for the school year.  Depending on what the kids need, they are allowed to choose either a pair of school shoes, church shoes, or both.  The school shoes are supposed to be functional and black (Mary Janes, oxfords, etc.), and the church shoes can be more stylish. 

In the girl van (Doug and Mark provided machismo up front)

It's about 25 miles to Ensenada from RSM.  I rode in the big passenger van with Doug, Mark, Peggy, Trish, Kayla (the dorm mom), and all the girls.  Eddie B., Eddie Everett's son, drove the black Suburban with all the boys (rolling high with their windows down and their sunglasses on, ha-ha!).  When we got to the shoe store, Zapatería Tres Hermanos (Three Brothers), we were met by a church group who came down for the day from a church inland from San Diego.  They have supported RSM for years and always send a group down on Shoe Day to help pay for the shoes and help the kids pick them out.  It was a bit of a challenge and it took a while to get all the shoes selected and in the right sizes and colors, because the people in the group didn't know sign (or much Spanish) and the kids of course couldn't speak audibly in Spanish or English.  But in the end it got done.  I decided to buy a pair of new sandals.  No, they're definitely not high-quality, but they only cost me $11.50 US and I usually take pretty good care of my shoes, even cheap ones, so I'll make 'em last. 

This is what the zapaterías look like. All windows . . . pretty appealing display!

The girls waiting for their zapatos to be bought

The group came back with us to the Ranch for lunch, which I guess is the tradition.  There were somewhere between 10 and 15 people in their group.  A lot of them were on the more elderly end, but there were also a couple of parents and pre-teen or teen kids.  We got back just in time for lunch.  Juanita served enchiladas with red sauce (different from Janet’s recipe, of course—these were made with corn tortillas and served with sour cream, which in Mexico is thinned out like a sauce).  It was humming in the chow hall compared to how quiet it’s been all week!  After the meal, the group took a picture with the kids and their new boxes of shoes, and then Luke Everett took them on the tour of the Ranch.  One elderly man stayed behind in the chow hall because he had a cane and I think he wasn’t up to doing all that walking.  He asked me a question while I was supervising the girls finishing the kitchen cleanup, and I answered at first just to be polite.  I was planning to try to get out of the conversation with the excuse that I had to clean the linen room, but I sort of felt bad leaving him to sit in the empty dining room all by himself while he waited for the tour to come back.  So I stuck around and kept chatting, and it turned out the tour went longer than we guessed it would, so we ended up conversing for probably an hour and a half!  And I think it was the best part of my day—we both ended up so encouraged!  His name was Verle, and he hasn’t been down here to visit for ten years, but he used to come a long time ago. He said his wife used to come too, but now she has Alzheimer’s and she can’t go out and do things anymore.  I told him about my grandma who used to live in the rest home, and the conversation sort of went from there.  We talked a lot about being good witnesses, about living for God, about family getting saved, and about Hal Lindsey and Billy Graham and C.S. Lewis.  He told me about his Aunt Mabel from when he was a kid, who got saved at age 87 and lived to be 97!  And I told him about Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, and Dad getting saved and how those things came about.  It was so cool.  When he left, he gave me a hug and I told him I’d be praying for him and his wife.  (Tait, if you’re reading this, he reminded me a little bit of how you might be at age 85, except I bet you’ll be crazier.  Hahaha.)

After that I cleaned the linen room for a while.  It’s looking a lot better!  Then I took a half-loop walk and then went to help Peggy serve dinner.  It was stewed vegetables, mostly zucchini, in a tomato sauce with leftover rice and salad from lunch.  Everybody was sort of sighing when they saw it . . . I guess the squash dinner is one that gets made a lot and that most everybody is really sick of . . . but to me, the veggie girl, it tasted yummy.  Sort of like Mexican ratatouille.  Anyway, Peggy decided to redeem the dinner by making baked apple-and-raisin dessert with an oat crumble topping.  Doug decided it really needed ice cream with it, so he made a special run down into town to get ice cream from the store.  It was a 20-minute wait, but well worth it when we had the ice cream over the hot apples, raisins, and cinnamon!  Yum! (Note to self: Must go on a stricter diet starting tomorrow.  I think Josefina is making pancakes in the morning though, so naturally I’ll just start that diet at lunchtime . . . )

Found a really cool lizard in the dining room after dinner cleanup!  He was about a foot long counting the tail, with super-rad brown, black, white, and red zigzag stripes along his back.  I tried to chase him out the back door, but he skittered the wrong way and went under the refrigerator. 

Ended the day in a really fun way!  Trish borrowed the movie Princess Mononoke from a friend, and over the course of conversation a couple of days ago we discovered that neither of us had seen it but both wanted to.  So she invited me over for a movie night, and we watched it together.  Wow, talk about a crazy story!  And just because anime films are animated doesn’t mean they are kid-friendly, because I would have been terrified by it if I were a kid!  But it really was a nicely done movie.  I enjoyed watching it from a cultural and artistic standpoint for sure.  Who knew I would come to Mexico to learn Spanish and sign language and end up learning about a little piece of Japanese culture too?  Might as well soak up as much as I can!

Oh wow, it’s late.  Gotta sign off.  I’m supposed to go to Juanita's church in town tomorrow, and I confess I’m nervous.  The Spanish immersion is bound to be intense!  I’ll get through it somehow . . . my brain might be oatmeal, but it oughta give me some more good cultural exposure . . .