PHEW! I can breath the sigh of proverbial relief (or is that....? Oh never mind) My pa and step mum and niece have gorn after a tense two week stay. To say that my old man is a difficult person would be quite an understatement, he doesn't continually WHINGE in a whingey whiney way, he continually COMPLAINS and everyone has to know about it. Here's an example: night at Simon's, after being served: "I don't like the way they pile up the plates (...) a lot goes to waste."; the following day, we went to another bar for lunch: "They don't serve much on the plates here do they." And so on ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Also a great number of his conversational phrases start with, "When I was in the Gulf..." (in the 50's).
On the other hand my niece was a wonder, 13 years of energy and naughtyness. I learned some new English vocab which I shall be passing onto my students, such as:
"Wowoza?" normally (but not necesserally) followed by another word such as "noise".
e.g. "Wowoza noise?"
to which a possible reply could be "Dunno, probably a car back-firing"

On the day WALES BEAT ENGLAND, please to be assured I'm talking about RUGBY, can't get TV coverage here so we followed the progress through the BBC internet site, I had to click the update button every two minutes.

We had already arranged to go to a gaucho touristy barbie restaurant, not having any alternative celebratory venue. Ate lots of big drippin' chunks of dead bulls and watched a guy doing an impressive show swinging his bolas around at a very high rate of knots.

Took 'em to the airport this morning (my folks, not the guy's bolas!), must confess, despite being a might fucking difficult fella, he's me ol' da, and I love him, I felt sad to see them go, don't know when I'll see him again, 2 years, 3, 4, 5, maybe never.
Time for bed now.
Nighty night.