Sunday, February 8, 2009

Yep

Yeah, that was 1 p.m. in the last post. Gettin sloppy...

Anyway, there comes a time when one has to look at the signs and follow the message they are coming together to create, which in my case was ¨go home or die¨. Home of course, being Madrigal, Peru for the moment.
I lost my debit cards- both of them- thanks to a handy little carrying case that was supposed to help one keep from losing one of them. I´ve been all over to no avail, and being that I deliberately kept it in the opposite pocket than my money to keep from accidently slipping out when I went for it and because it was a heavy enough little contraption that I should of felt it fall out and because I hadn´t used the cards for two days I´m pretty much flabbergasted by how it got lost, and how all this stuff has been happening to me in the first place. Let´s recap.

1. Get stopped at the Chilean border because passport I´m carrying makes me look like an illegal immigrant into Peru- have to go back and retrieve the right one.

2. Buy a plane ticket to Buenos Aires that thanks to taxes (30 $ airport tax?)is more expensive that it should have been and find out that Peru doesn´t have automatic debit. Need to run from bus to bank to deposit cash into the airline account, after the deadline, but still get the ticket.

3. Said airline loses my luggage (it ended up not getting on the plane at all in Lima). I find this out during my stopover in Santiago, neatly killing the thrill of being in Chile for a brief moment.

4. Day one is sitting in limbo for said luggage, but still seeing all the Buenos sites I was interested in. Oh, and getting from the airport to downtown is hell, because it´ll either cost money or earn you a nose in the air for trying to buy something to get coins. You see, for some reason this country has a coin shortage, but most everything public is run on coins. Only in South America... Oh, and I get woken up in the middle of the night by an angry never-heard-that-accent-before dude who claims I´m in his bed. Turns out the hostel overbooked our room, and dude´s idea of saving a place was pulling back the covers and leaving a piece of scrap-paper on the bed. Apparently that is the way they do things in Unidentifiable Accentlandia.

5. Day two- email says the luggage is coming in the morning! Unchecked joy becomes listlessness and then outright anger because luggage does not come in the morning and said airline apparently doesn´t answer phone calls or emails until halfway through their regularly scheduled hours. Finally give up and go see a movie, and when I get back there´s the luggage!

6. Hey, we´re off to destinations different! Goin´ to Iguazu and finally gettin´ this trip started! Bought a ticket and just have to wait, which is cool. Rifle through my pockets and what´s this? No debit card? Well, fuck me. A frantic retracing of steps brings me not a thing, as one might expect and I go to get my ticket refunded (losing 30% in the process- but what´s money to a guy who just lost all access to it?). I then go to the international portion of the terminal and find that the only bus going to Peru leaves in three days... and passes through Bolivia. And yes, I would need a visa. When throwing my bag against a wall and then punching it until blood comes yields neither visa or VISA, I look around to find children staring at me with their jaws dropped. Nice. I decide then and there to stop giving a shit. Life is too long and horrid to try and while away the time like this.

Well, I ended up finding out that a company that inexplicably wasn´t located in the international portion of the terminal has tickets to Peru tomorrow. And since I was carrying around some Hamiltons to pay for Chilean entry fees down the road, I luckily had just enough to get the ticket. So I´m going home before I get a limb taken from me, because that is the loud and clear message I´m getting... go home or die. Should be there in three days and can´t wait.

´Nother Update

Well, my baggage ¨showing up¨ ended up being a backhanded blessing. I got the email and was extremely happy up until about 1 a.m., when ¨morning¨ was officially over. During the next several hours I tried calling LAN and emailing a few times to see what the hell was going on, but apparently ¨we´re open from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m.¨ comes with the caveat of ¨but we won´t be answering our phones or email or doing any work at all really until 7 p.m.¨ Also, their definition of in the morning apparently stretches to 9 p.m., one of the more liberal definitions out there.
So, after being pissed off most of the day I finally decided to go do something because the time had passed where I could get my luggage and hop on a bus to Iguazu. I ended up wondering up Avenidas Lavalle and Corrientes, kind of their nighttime shopping and eating district in El Centro. I ate a traditional Argentine parillada, which is a ton of meat on a plate- chicken milanesa, a meh cut of steak, ribs, a pork sausage, and , my first shot at this, a blood sausage. I had heard some pretty disgusting things about blood sausage, but after trying it I kinda liked it. It tastes like Thanksgiving stuffing a bit, probably because it has the same throw-away parts of the animal that stuffing does. After that I did the traveling sin of going to a movie to cheer me up. There are tons of theaters along this strip, all unfortunately showing the same mainstream stuff, so I caught Jim Carrey´s Yes Man and was presently surprised. Didn´t expect much but there was some pretty good writing in there and Carrey does his thing. Zooey Deschanel´s presence certainly helped things out as well.
Now I´m about to head off to the bus station to discover what other misfortunes can befall me. If all goes well today, which would a record streak at this juncture, I´ll be off on the first bus to Iguazu and have all day to explore it tomorrow.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Quick Update

Well this morning has been a mixed bag already. Last night I got woke up by a dude claiming I was sleeping in his bed. Apparently the hostel overbooked our dorm and his idea of reserving a place was pulling back the covers and leaving a piece of scrap paper on the bed. Not exactly the international way to communicate that, but we got it sorted out and I still got some much-needed bed rest.
I also didn´t get to go to Uruguay as planned. Having done the ferry thing across the Aegean, I expected that a river crossing would have stuff available day-of, but I underestimated the huge number of people that do this crossing every day. It was sold out, of course, but when I got to the internet I discovered that my luggage was found and should have gotten in last night. I´m waiting at the hostel right now for it to show up as they said they would be sending it this morning and then I´m heading straight to Iguazu. It sucks to have lost Uruguay but I gain a day this way and avoid a hostel expense, so provided my luggage actually does show up (with my current luck a less-than-certain proposition) I will have made out alright in the end. Oh, and rereading my last post I realize it is less than coherent in places (was pretty all-around pissed off at that point) and that I put thousands of years down where hundreds is much, much more correct...

Friday, February 6, 2009

Buenos Aires

Hey all,

Well things have certainly been going poorly the first few days of the trip. First off I went to the Chilean border and was stopped for having the wrong passport. I brought my original American one, not thinking that it would make me an illegal immigrant as it doesn´t have any record of me entering Peru- the Peace Corps one does. I´m lucky they let me go back for it, but I still lost a day of the trip. I then decided to buy a flight to Buenos Aires and try the trip from the opposite angle, but Peru apparently doesn´t have automatic debit so I was running until the last minute to get the ticket paid and ended up having to deposit the cash into the company´s bank account at the last minute before I would have lost the ticket.
Even then I wasn´t sure I had it until I got to Lima the next morning to fly out of there and checked my email for the confirmation. A lone speck of good luck so far was getting to spend a few hours with my host family in Lima, share a good meal and get caught up before heading off to the airport. My flight was on time and everything, but, of course, they lost my luggage. I´m beating myself up over this because I may have been able to carry it on, being a backpack and all, albeit a large one. Still don´t know how that one will turn out, but as it stands I only lost clothes, that stupid original passport, and my keys. If I don´t get the pack back I´ll need to reapply for that passport again and it´ll cost me more money I don´t have, and because of the keys I´ll have to find somebody with boltcutters in the valley to get me into my room and who knows how long that´ll take. Those are the prinipal headaches, and the need to buy a more shirts and socks for the trip and carry them in the small carry-on bag I had as well as the toiletries...
To top it all off I´m doing some final trip-planning and finding out that all those blogs are liars or idiots. Timetables they describe don´t appear to be possible and I¨ll need to cut out some stuff in Patagonia if not nearly the whole bit. I don´t even care anymore. All of this has sucked the joy right out of traveling, and this is on top of some drama before I left that I don´t even feel like remembering. I´m not all that happy with just the whole concept of life right now, and even though the one thing I´ve learned about myself by now is that I can take punches like a champ, I´ll be hard-pressed not to put a pen in the eye of the next bearer of bad news.
So, as for Buenos Aires. It does have a European flair to it with its avenues reminding me a lot of Paris. It still has its South American style, though, which doesn´t translate well really. There is inelegant, but efficient use of space everywhere, making the avenues uglier than they should be. It also is pretty dirty and traffic is a killer, giving the impression of a much more cramped city than it actually is. It has a lot of cultural opportunities from all over the world- a real melting pot- but not a whole lot of history to boast of in the form of places to see. Churches are churches after awhile, and there aren´t many buildings or sites with specific character here. One that was pretty cool was its cemetary of El Recolete. This is where the rich and famous have been buried for thousands of years and all of the mausoleums and monuments give a New Orleans vibe.
I haven´t tried the food yet, and may wait til later in the trip for the famous parillada, or smorgasbord of grilled meats. The people in general are more European-featured than in Peru, with some pretty American looking girls surprising with the Argentine-accented Spanish, which is very different from pretty much everywhere else and hard to understand at first. Well, I´ll throw down other stuff as it occurs to me. I´m off to Uruguay for a brief trip tomorrow and after that Iguazu Falls. After that, unfortunately, is the Heart of Darkness. Hopefully I won´t get stuck down there because I have few vacation days to spare as is...

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Quechua Week

Hey all,

Been awhile. There hasn´t been much to report in site- just counting down the days until vacation. Nobody did show up to the English classes, which is pretty consistent for rainy season. Pretty much everything but the occasional party is suspended. But I did have an interesting week this past one with quechua classes.
Quechua is the indigenous language here, as well as the language of the Incan empire. Although it´s more like quechpañol now, with all of the spanish influence. It´s a different languge, with Germanic grammar- all the suffixes as well as sentence order, etc, and several sounds we don´t have in English, some of them arabic sounding or like an african language with bit-off consonants producing clicking noises.
We had class twice a day for about 5 hours total. Our teacher, Dario, came to Chivay to teach and brought his guitar, which was cool. It was kind of like primary school in some ways- learn by singing, but it did the trick. I need to sit down and study some to firm it all up in my head, but I think I can get along a bit now. We´ll have another week of classes to polish up our knowledge the last week of February, or right when I return from my big trip.
As for the big trip I´m leaving the 5th, so not too much more time to waste and the Superbowl tonight, if we find a place it´s on, will help with that. I unfortunately missed a town party due to class, but caught the end of it yesterday. I was just stopping in to grab something I forgot, but still ran the drink gauntlet to get to my house. Transportation was out of commision due to excess partying as well so I ended up going back on the back of a beer truck, which was cold but an interesting experience.
Outside of that, nothing else to report. Keep tuned for travel blogs, as I may do it during or a big one after...