Futrono

 Mr Tabubil and I, along with Mr Tabubil's parents, sister and brother-in-law, have come south to spend the week between Christmas and the New Year  at a parcela just outside the small village of Llifen on Lago Ranco (Lake Ranco), deep in Chile's southern Alpine Region.  
Enjoy!

The village of Llifen is about 20 km of dairy herds and twisting mountain roads around the lake from the town of Futrono - the center of local life.  On the afternoon of our second day, we drove into town for provisions.

Ye local fruit-and-veg-ery:

Ye friendly local grocer:

The males in our party scoped out the row of amen-beard chairs in front of the supermarket and sent us ladies off to find ice-cream.  We walked for miles.  (More or less.  Distance is hard to calculate when you're suffering from a lack of ice-cream.  It might have been only blocks.)  And went into every single shop.  But the men had been exceedingly specific in their requests, and it seemed that all of Futrono was supplied by the one (and wrong) ice-cream truck and eventually we ran out of town to look in.

Potential ice-cream-eria:

Is there any?

How about in this restaurant?

Or here?

Probably not:

But the flowers were awfully big and pretty:

We walked for MILES.  It was a torment.

But there in the very last building on the road out of town, in an old and cranky freezer case three inches deep in condensed frost, we found what they had asked for.

So we walked back - miles and miles (or possibly blocks) with ice-cream melting down our forearms and when we got back to the supermarket, we saw that those solidly ungrateful men had found the same thing that we'd been seeking all over Southern Chile right  in the supermarket right behind their backs.  And were half-way finished with eating them.

And we were not very impressed with them at all.

And they were not at all repentant or remorseful.

And there was nothing to do except lick ice-cream off of our hands and go home and go swimming again.

(Aren't holidays AWFUL like that?)