Week 4 Domingo

Augustina and Manuel and their four children come for lunch, which proves to be a novel experience for all. Rather surprisingly they turn up on time after church, but thankfully they are happy holding Daisy while I get the dinner ready.


Once again I have bought no tortillas (will I ever learn?), but the family insist they are ok without. It’s only after we sit down to eat our lasagne that I realise that they don’t really know how to use cutlery, because they eat using the tortillas at home.

A somewhat comic moment when they go to wash their hands before dinner, and Manuel announces that there is no water. I panic, before realising that he has never seen a tap with a lever on it before. The water is flowing just fine.

I cook banoffee pie for pudding, which is about the sweetest, gloopiest thing I know how to do, and it goes down an absolute storm. Mexicans have the sweetest teeth of anyone I know – their cakes are basically cream with cream on them.


In the evening we settle down to watch telly in our new lounge, and enjoy the third Harry Potter film – in Spanish. I get most of it, but am bemused by the adverts, which seem to be beset with health warnings.

The ads, and there are plenty of them, are mainly for foodstuffs, credit cards and shampoo. Any advertisement of foods seems to have to carry a warning saying “eat well” or “eat fresh fruit” on the bottom of it, while the shampoo adverts carry the baffling “Health is beauty” slogan on the bottom of them. Toothpaste ads say, “there is no substitute for visiting your dentist” on the bottom.

Rather disappointingly, the credit card adverts do not carry a warning saying, “Don’t spend what you can’t afford”, which I can’t help feeling would be more useful.