Thursday, June 17, 2010

there's no place like santiago *click, click, click*

So to refresh the memory, I am in Sucre, I just found out that I have to wait another day for a bus to go to Argentina, I have very little money, and I have just met a woman that will let me stay with her for free.

We walked to the market because she needed to buy some corn and cheese to make humitas (kinda like tamales only drier and just with cheese inside). I got to see real market bargaining in action. Now, I am normally all for bargaining. But this got to be a little bit ridiculous. She was buying from an indigenous woman sitting on the street with all of her corn strewn around her. And she was almost yelling at the woman to give her a better deal as she went through EVERY single piece of corn to make sure it was big enough. We were buying 50...needless to say, we were there for awhile. But we finally made it back to the home of her parents.
(this is a random picture of me on an eiffel tower-like thing that was in a park in sucre)

I was feeling really sick, so after peeling lima beans with her dad and having some tea, I slept the rest of the day away. I woke up that night and sat with the woman who invited me to stay (i've completely forgotten her name...oops. let's call her Maria.) and her mother. Let me just give you an idea of what this looked like. The grandma was laying in bed obviously in pain from her cancer, María was talking about her grandma's great pain and about how the doctor should have been there hours ago, the grandpa was sitting playing guitar and singing to himself by the window, and I was sitting uncomfortably watching images of the earthquake's destruction in Chile on the news. It was kind of strange. And then the grandpa brought me a wall calendar of sucre to remember my trip by which was really cute. Only he didn't speak to me at all. He literally, WHILE I WAS IN THE ROOM, asked Maria and his wife if they wanted the calendar...if they had anyone that they wanted to give it to at all. When he found out that they had no use for it he then continued to ask them to tell me that he was giving it to me as a gift. And he handed me the calendar. It was a nice gesture...but i can understand spanish...and had just been speaking to him earlier that day. huh.

Luckily, Maria told me that her kids were going to come by and pick me up so that we could go out that night. Little did I know this night was going to turn even more awkward, but I started to get the feeling when her kids showed up and one of them was literally my dad's age. SUUUUUPER AWKWARD. Ok, to be fair, he was actually only in his thirties and the daughter was 29, but still. And then it got weirder when we went out and got in a tiny sports car...in bolivia. Going from seeing tons of indigenous people everywhere, to sitting in a sports car? weird. I'm not going to lie and tell you the night ended up being a lot better than i had thought. Picture a young traveling poor girl wearing a llama fur sweater sitting at a table with working age professionals in leather jackets and even one guy in a suit. I can't stress enough how weird this was. However, we ended up going to two different bars and the most popular discoteca in sucre, so culturally, it was an experience.

The next morning I woke up in a huge house that was decorated really nicely. It even had a garden with all kinds of fruit trees. I spent the day writing in my journal and talking to a different grandpa in the beautiful garden (he actually talked to me). I tried an igo which is a fruit that looks like a little eggplant, but tastes...sweet. It was really good. I reveled in the fact that i had, most likely, just happened to come in contact with one of the richest families in Sucre. The dad is a doctor, one of the sons graduated and is a banker, another daughter is studying to be a doctor, and I haven't even mentioned all of the cars they had in addition to their sports car--an old-fashioned volkswagen bug, an suv, and one other I can't remember. It was interesting to see the other side of things and I was really grateful that they let me stay with them. I just couldn't believe that, even when escaping from Chile to Bolivia, I managed to end up on the wealthy side of town when all I really wanted to see was how the normal, everyday person lives. Oh well.

That day I left for Mendoza and at the border early the next morning. Upon crossing into Argentina, I was worried that I would be made to throw away my coca leaves, but the customs guy lifted the flap of my bag as he was asking me where I was from and put the flap back down. And that was argentina's customs. Really strict.

When I arrived in Mendoza later that day, I was unsure of what I wanted to do. I didn't want to ask my dad to send more money, but the bus tickets had also cost more than I had bargained for and I only had 40 argentinian pesos left (about $12). I had been saving my money and since the previous day had only eaten a bag of animal crackers and water from a bottle which I was only able to refill when I was willing to pay to use the restroom. I figured out that I could order bus tickets online using my dad's credit card and then even be able to spend a bit of time seeing the city. Just having arrived in Argentina, I was still unused to the prices, but I was definitely not expecting it to so closely resemble Chile. I spent about 2 hours walking around downtown looking for a place to stay, but was unable to find anything for less than 40 pesos aka everything i owned. I decided to buy a ticket back to Chile for that night and after frantically using every form of contact that I have with my parents (email, facebook, my sister's fb, best friends that could possibly call my parents from the US' fb), I finally got ahold of them. I hurriedly put the information in online to buy the ticket as it was getting dark outside...but it didn't work. I literally entered it about 10 times and it didn't work. I went to the bus terminal and asked for help, but evidently they don't run the website and couldn't help me. I went to every company that had buses going to Santiago, but none of them would take a card without having the physical card.

So now it is almost midnight, I am sitting outside of the terminal in a city that I barely know, and I have enough money to buy food OR a place to stay for the night. One, not both. And to top it all off, despite all of my hard work and budgeting and not eating, I was still going to have to ask my dad to send more money. fml. This was probably the lowest point of my entire trip.

To make a long story short, I stopped feeling sorry for myself on the bench outside of the terminal and decided that no matter how hungry I was, the terminal was not a good place to spend the night. I ended up going to a hostel that I had found earlier that day and was happy to find the nicest hostel I had stayed in on my trip along with free homemade wine and a nice, fat, talkative man who offered me potato chips. (Come to find out later that these were the potato chips of a group of Europeans that had gone out on the town. They came in and found me eating their chips...whoops.) This was actually the first real hostel that I had stayed at my entire trip where i had to share a room with 6 other people, but I didn't mind it. It was actually nice because I was able to hang out with other travelers my age and I met a lot of cool people.

The breakfast at this place was amazing--homemade bread out of a bread machine with butter and strawberry jam and as much coffee or tea as I wanted (or potentially wine...which was always available in a big barrel on the counter). It, along with hearing about other people's traveling adventures at the breakfast table, rejuvenated and made me ready to explore Mendoza, stress-free.

I was really happy that I was going to be able to enjoy Mendoza a bit, because the day before I had walked past so many cute cafés and restaurants, but had no money at the time. Mendoza was nice. It had a lot of plazas in the center which helped me to orient myself and, as always, they were full of people with artesania (hand-made jewelry, etc.). Another interesting tid-bit that I learned is that the McDonalds in Mendoza sell little bottles of wine with meals. No lie! I hate McDonalds, but I've got to give it to them...changing their products to fit each country is a good idea. (In Chile the McDonalds sandwiches have avocado on them.) But despite how much I liked Mendoza, to me, it was just a stop on my way back to Santiago. Nothing more. I hung out with some people that I met at the hostel, but at the same time, I was just ready to be back in my own room. Not to mention the fact that school had already started back in Santiago.

Before catching my bus, I met up with one of my good Chilean friends, Seba, who had just arrived in Mendoza, and we shared our ridiculous stories of our travels. It had been over a month since we had seen each other so it was nice to catch up. He told me that he could tell that my spanish had gotten better which is like the best compliment i could ever receive (i mean, i'd better improve after 2 weeks on my own in a spanish speaking country).

And then I got on the tiny bus to drive through the Andes Mountains and back into Santiago.
It was one of the most beautiful bus rides I've ever had and we only had minor glitches (a woman had to be written up because she was bringing in ridiculous amounts of hair products. obviously to sell them.) and then I was home. I arrived to find my room filled with cracks from the earthquake, but I was happy nevertheless.

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