It’s Laura’s birthday tomorrow so I’ve been making her a birthday cake. She wanted a bible shaped one, so I did my best - the shape is ok, but I encountered problems with the icing so it didn’t end up with a verse on it! Then in the evening we went to see American Pie - The Wedding, - the cinema was the fullest I’d ever seen it here in Salto.

First Sunday service back in Salto, and it turns out that we’re going to be looking at John’s gospel in the Sunday services -which is cool especially after having looked at it in depth on the camp. The passage was Jesus at the Wedding in Cana, which Gilberto had previously referred to as showing that Mary was needed to start Jesus’ ministry - “If she hadn’t involved him here…”. However the sermon sounded quite good - no particular focus on Mary and no mention of the above - so it’s promising! One thing I noticed that was particularly interesting to me, was that Mary is only referred to in John’s gospel as “Jesus’ mother” or similar - never by name - in the same way as he doesn’t refer to himself by name. They are both only referred to in reference to Jesus, there only importance is how they are related to Jesus - The only importance we have is our relation to Jesus.

Arrived back in Salto today at 7.00 - In some ways, it’s nice to be back - but it’s been a great trip and would be nice to just keep travelling!!

Left the hotel in the morning, fortunately we could leave the bag there, so we didn’t have to carry it round all day. We went to find one of the Christian bookshops, and got some cool books which should help us with the youth group. Then we had lunch at McDonalds - one of there cool salads again, this time to share with 2 chicken breasts - Was lovely. It then looked as if it was going to rain, so we headed back to pick up our bag, as the hotel was a few blocks from the tube. We then went to the Plaza de Mayo and watched the Mothers of the plaza parade in there protest about the lack of information about the people who were ‘disappeared’. After this we had a coffee and watched Lord of the Rings part 3 before heading to the bus station to get our bus home at 23.00

Arrived at Buenos Aires first thing in the morning, left our luggage and headed straight to the hotel (Best Western Comfort Hotel) to see if we could check in - we could, so we had showers and breakfast as we decided what to do for the day.

We woke up quite early, after not much sleep as the room was very stuffy - decided to get packed up and leave the hostel as soon as possible. We tried to pay in dollars, but they wouldn’t accept it as the note had got a mark on it in pen - so we had to go to the cash machine and get more pesos for them and head back to the hostel before breakfast! We had breakfast at a cafe in one of the main streets and then headed off to try and get some dollars out of the bank to pay Jorge. We looked around a bit, and in the afternoon we went to the shopping centre to pass some time before catching the bus to Buenos Aires.

Left Santiago at13.00 - The bus journey was good, but annoyingly they decided to close the curtains and shut out the view in order to watch ‘die another day’ with sound going on and off!! We arrived in Mendoza in the evening and it was raining. Got to the hostel we’d booked, and discovered that our’ double room’ was a converted bathroom with 2 bunk beds in that we had to go across a courtyard to get to! It was very hot and stuffy. We decided to leave our stuff, and head out to get some food - but the rain was too much so we left it a bit while we checked our e-mail. A bit later the rain had stopped, and we found a nice looking little cafe where we could eat. I had a chicken breast with vegetables (sweet potato, zapallo, carrot & potato) which was really nice and Laura had a salad - We swapped a bit of each and also shared a bottle of Mendozian wine. For desert I had a lovely almond ice cream with bits of almond on it, and Laura had lemon ice cream.

We met Alf Cooper - pastor of Trinity church in Santiago, who invited us to got to their newest church plant at Cantagallo for the service. What they have lots of different activities at the main church that bring in lots of people and they let it grow till it gets too big(700 is considered a reasonable size). Also alongside there are lots of ways of training up leaders, including theology courses run from the church. Once the church is too big, they’ll take a group of people including leaders to form the new church plant. At Cantagallo - they normally have about 70 people, but they were expecting it to be less because it’s holiday season - although it seemed to be near to that number anyway! Before the service, we helped to get things ready and convert the school hall into a church, and we prayed with a group in preparation for the service. They also prayed for us, the church in Uruguay, and the youth group that we’ll be starting. After the service, we went to the bus station and got our tickets sorted out to travel to Mendoza and went for a look round Santiago. In the evening we had burgers and mashed potato, and watched Phone Booth with the others who were staying at the church

Travelled back to Santiago, the bus journey was fun!

Last day at the camp :( Was a fun day though - I played lots of table tennis! We had a nice chat with Tito (Bishop of Chile) at dinner.