Archive Page 3
I’m sat in Ruby Tuesdays in Santiago airport. I’m one table away from where I sat last time nursing my head, gulping down Sprite like there was no tomorrow and trying to get some food down.
I feel pretty good this time and in fact since I work up this morning I’ve started to get excited about Mexico. I have no plans. I want to find something to do for new years, I may well just pay into an Irish bar somewhere and stay there for the evening. I’ll see what the craic is at the hostel too. I do want to do some Aztec temples(!) and some pre-Colombian pyramids(!!) and I want to get out and take some photos. I’d really like to find some penguins but I’m loosing hope…
I have been browsing Flickr in the past couple of days and I’m feeling like I’m wasting opportunities to take photos and so I want to fix that.
So yeah photos, new years, some culture stuff and up into the US.
It’s all good.
Is it too early to have a drink? I do have a 9 hour flight ahead of me…
Ohh I’m reading Carl Sagan’s Contact and while I did enjoy the movie, the book is excellent. I’m flying through it. Handily I have 4 more handy for the flight. Also a charged laptop but I’ve just realised I didn’t put any DVD’s into my carry on…fuck.
11.50 Santiago Chile Saturday December 27th.
In a little over 12 hours I will be boarding a plane to Mexico and leaving behind Santiago and South America.
I have very mixed feelings on this.
Mexico is my last new country and pretty much marks the end of the trip. The US is just to see some old friends and because I had to go there to fly back anyway (Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to it!) but the adventure really ends in Mexico.
I will be glad to be out of Santiago, that much I think you can all tell. As to South America, well it’s been a mixed bag. I won’t deny that but altitude jokes aside, the high points here have been amongst the finest in my life. Wow that’s terrible phrasing, the finest in my life? Fuck. Alright I’m getting nowhere with this. I came back from a last drink (okay 2) in South America to sit down and try and type and it’s just not working. I had net access in Santiago airport last time and so with luck I’ll do some typing in the morning. I have to be there 2 hours beforehand, I’m aiming to be there about 4 hours beforehand…I have a window seat for a 9 hour flight. I really need to get that changed to an aisle seat and also there’s good food at the airport.
I might try typing more then.
Now my two musical discoveries for today. There was an entire album from MGMT (Climbing to New Lows as The Management) before Oracular Spectacular. Also the 4 track EP Blood Bank from Bon Iver due out in January is available online.
Finally because a phrase just connected a moment ago. I have now had a broken bottle incident, a gun incident and a knife incident. That’s gotta complete some threesome and get me a merit badge and a pass for life right?
Right, three photos from this time in Santiago and now I sleep. 2 alarms set for 8 and then I pack and I get onto a bus. This has to go better than last time!
00.40 Santiago Chile, Saturday December 27th.
From a few nights ago.
So it seems that there is a sometimes very serious flaw in Leopard. I have noticed many times along the way that when I connect to a wireless network I can be informed that I have a “self-assigned IP address” and therefore “may not” have net access. I assumed this was just a network thing until I got chatting to a fella in a net cafe back in New Zealand. It seems it’s a flaw within Leopard whereby the OS assigns itself the same IP address as the router and there isn’t a way around it. I’ve been having the problem for at least 10 months and I understand that it’s been a flaw since day one. I would have thought it was something that Apple would have addressed by now. I guess not. So despite there being a full network here in the hostel, I have nothing.
Now perhaps that’s not so bad and it might save me from being distracted and it might just let me type up a few bits. So I’m going to try now and see where I end up.
Continue reading ‘I had a walk on part in the movie of your life…’
To give you an idea of how productive today is, the keen eyed amongst you may notice that there is now a favicon.ico in place here. It’s this in case you are curious. The lack of an icon has been bothering me for a while and so I decided I’d fix it today.
On the subject of photos, aswell as uploading a few more I have done some geo-tagging and I have done a bit of group submitting and some cleaning up and I’ve added a few to my own set of favourites. Go take a look.
I faffed around online for a while which was nice and then I went out for a walk. The one thing that I do like about Santiago is that while it’s hot, it’s a dry heat. There’s no humidity to it and that’s a nice change.
It’s also nice to have seen life carrying on today. Metro and bus services were running, a number of shops and food joints were open, not only were the cinemas open but they had several new releases. I wandered for a while just faffing (sense a trend?) and then came back to the hostel where I have just watched American Gangster which I very much enjoyed.
Other things about Chile. Everyone smokes and you can smoke anywhere. I had just gotten use to not smelling of smoke in the morning, now it’s all over the place. Even here in the hostel my eyes are watering from the smoke drifting around.
Also Chilean’s definition of a public display of affection (PDA) is anything…and everything that you can do with your clothes still on. You cannot look around without seeing couples of all ages pawing over each other. Folks are just lying in the shade (to be fair with this heat you kinda have to) and are all over each other. I remember being slightly taken aback by this when I first got here and then figuring it was a South American thing but I’ve not see it much since so just Chile.
Somewhere in the background here, one of the Star Wars movies is playing. Should I be proud or dismayed that I can’t tell which one from the music?
00.57 Santiago Chile Friday December 26th
So the good thing about Santiago and the one that still gets me is almost everytime you look up, you see the Andes and they are breathtaking.
So it’s not all entirely bad huh?
13.54 Santiago Chile. Thursday December 25th
I’ve written and then discarded or left in drafts at least 5 posts over the past 24 hours. I’m sat in a Starbucks (coffee and a water cost more than dinner last night, I must watch things like that) and I’m basically trying to stop and take a breath and calm myself down.
So let me tell you what’s going on.
Sunday
71 days ago I landed in Santiago and here I find myself again and as I mentioned, in the same hostel.
I landed here and all was good, flying over the Andes was amazing, you may recall me rambling about them here before. It was nice to be somewhere at least slightly familiar. I knew where to go when I got out of the terminal and I knew where to go when I got off the bus. I was in Bangkok twice but that was back in March and since then this has been the only place I’ve known when I landed so that was a nice feeling. Also when I left here I was hungover and panicked and it was nice to not be either of them.
I have not changed my opinion of the city. It’s dirty, there are packs of stray dogs all over the place and there’s nothing nice. I don’t know what I’m going to do here. There’s a few things on in the cinema but they are mainly shite. So I’m faffing around online in my room. Handily it’s cheap and it’s an entire 3.50 extra to have a single room so having somewhere that I can faff around and watch a movie if I choose and more importantly play some music more than saves the money I’d be spending avoiding a dorm room. Annoyingly and this happened here last time too, I have to change rooms in the morning. *Le sigh*
Also annoyingly (there might be a trend here) I’m back at altitude and I’m feeling it. It’s not hugely high, certainly nothing like Peru and Bolivia but fuck me I had just managed to forget what this all felt like. Argh.
I have somehow managed to leave the book I was reading in Argentina. This is really annoying me as I was only about 20 pages from the end and very much enjoying it. It was Asimov’s Foundation, shockingly I have read sweet fuck all of his work and I thought it was time to give it a start. So on the plane I started reading Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man which is well written but has not gripped me at all and so this evening over dinner (pizza hut - boo) I started into Peter F. Hamilton’s 1225 page epic The Reality Dysfunction. I’m about 50 pages in and enjoying it alot, I’m very much in the sci-fi mood right now.
Monday:
This morning I woke up around 7.30 and just didn’t feel well. I think it was just lack of sleep, it was probably 3 before I dropped off last night, handily I went back to sleep pretty quickly and slept till my alarm went off just after 11. Much better. Then I had to change rooms…again. So not too happy with that but there isn’t much I can do. So I’m all moved.
Then I went into LAN’s downtime office. I took a number and joined the queue. I get called after 10, maybe 15 minutes and I head over to my counter. In my best Spanish I wish her a good morning and ask if she speaks English…she doesn’t. She indicates that I should sit anyway, she’s spotted my ticket and I guess she figured she could look it up and hopefully figure out what I need. So I sit down and hand her my ticket and in my best Spanish I tell her that I cancelled one of the flights (Rio - Santiago) and I changed my booking for the second flight (Santiago to Mexico) to be tomorrow, December 23rd. Now I think she’s on the same page and she certainly gets that I was on the phone to LAN to change the tickets but she can’t find a single thing in the system. So she looks up a few things and then she makes a call to someone else, I can’t understand anything out of the conversation except that she tells whomever it is that I can’t speak Spanish. Then she says to me to wait a moment.
So I wait and I have visions of being stuck without credit cards trying to get to Mexico city. I took a scoot at prices last night, they were around US$2500. Ouch. Anyway she comes back to me and she says to me that she’s very sorry and I guess my face must have said it all because she quickly hands me a piece of paper. She explains to me that she can’t get me onto the flight tomorrow but she’s booked me on the same flight leaving on Saturday! You can only imagine the relief.
So the bad news is that I’m stuck in Santiago for an extra 4 nights which I really don’t want to be especially when it looks like I have to go into a dorm so there’ll be less time with me able to sit around faffing online to avoid spending any cash. But I guess that’s not so bad and she didn’t charge me a penny (or a peso) to change the tickets and so I’m all set. I’ll do New Years in Mexico city and then I’ll spend some time searching for penguins and then I’ll be off to DC.
So that’s where I am now. Once that was done I extended my hostel stay and then I took a ride out to the airport and back to change the rest of my money and now I’m set. So I have no plans, I don’t know what’s going to be open around here. Just to be safe I’m going to hit a supermarket tomorrow and make sure I’ve got some food and drink to keep me going for a few days. Other than that I suppose it could be worse and I’ll quickly remind you (but I know that it’s pointless and you’ll ignore me) all that I’m not a Christian so the 25th of December holds no special meaning for me and I don’t care where I am! I’d rather not be here of course but that’s pretty much true for anyday!
I was faffing last night and noticed that and it reminded me to mention it again this year as some people never learn. I also realised that just over a year ago I saw Springsteen in the O2 and he blew me away with a massive Because The Night and so I’ve been listening to that today (which by the way was only ever released on Live 1975 - 1985 which I really got into thanks to my friend Dave)
Recently On The Record offered a free download of Adrian Crowley’s Long Distance Swimmer. I had been looking out for this album for a while, it had not been seen in iTunes and I’ve not been in Ireland to look for it for a good while. I wanted something new today and have slightly fallen into a bit of a folky mood (or perhaps mindset) and so I pressed play when I jumped onto the bus to the airport. It’s excellent. His voice is hugely familiar, though it could just be the Irish accent but I’m still trying to place it with someone else. Anyway one song has really struck with me and I’ve been listening to it over and over today, it’s track 5 Walk On Part. I don’t know why. Anyway I doubt that many of you would like it, maybe Stu and Andrea…
Tuesday.
So I’m all moved and as it’s quiet(ish) I have managed to get a room to myself for the extra few nights. It’s the same room I ended up in the first time around here. It’s stuck away in the basement and is actually a 4 bed dorm but it’s all for me and I can just chill a bit. I have now gone out for some lunch and there’ll be more over the next few days as and when I find net access.
13.27 Santiago Chile Tuesday December 23rd.
Bah. I lost two posts. Shitty internet here.
Still in Santiago, stuck here till Saturday oops I lost the post where I tell you that I´m flying to Mexico on Saturday. That one will follow but yes I´m flying to Mexico on Saturday. It´s okay I guess. I read two books today and I´m about to start on the third. Updates soon, shitty internet abounds here. I´ve typed alot in the past two days, close to 20,000 words but there´s some major editing required to get them up here, I may do that tomorrow I have some more things to type out tonight and then hmmm. I can´t believe I forgot how much I enjoyed writing.
Finally a quick reminder to you all that I´m not a Christian so this time of year means nothing to me!
Now to the pub.
18.42 Santiago Chile Wednesday December 24th