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.