Now's As Good A Time As Any

I’ve realized that I probably wouldn’t feel like it’s the end of the world if I sleep through midnight this year. I feel like I’ve had enough excitement to last quite a while and I’ve experienced more exciting things than the simple passage of time from one numeral to the next.

That being said, if you know of anything going on tonight, and you read this before midnight, and you know my cell phone number…hook me up!

I slept over 12 hours last night…possibly as many as 16. My apartment is still in one piece. I think I stopped my mail delivery, or I didn’t get any mail for 18 days.

I thought when I got home I would be in the mood to do all the time-consuming, boring things I have to do for school, as if they would suddenly be exciting and new. I am in the mood to: 1. Sleep. 2. Eat. 3. Sleep more.

I won’t get into the unpleasant details, but I totally got South America’d yesterday and today. I’m ready to get some Northern Hemisphere love right quick. My flight is supposed to take off in about three and a half hours.

Basically, Santiago is a little less interesting than anywhere I went in Argentina and much more expensive. It’s like a lot of other places I could have chosen to go to but didn’t, in that it’s a different country, but it’s not a cheap different country. On the bright side, by flying into Buenos Aires and out of Santiago, I avoided both the US$100 Santiago entry tax and the other, somewhat lesser but still annoying, and I forget how much, Buenos Aires departure tax. So part of that money I saved went to the cab driver who pulled a fast one on me for a dollar or two in Mendoza and the guy who scammed me into giving him about $3 for “children with autism and Down’s Syndrome” in Bellavista here in Santiago. And hopefully someone found my Lonely Planet Argentina on the bus who can speak English and put it to good use.

Oh, I think I just heard an ad on the radio for something called “Ohio National Financial Services”! Ah, a taste of home!

The bus ride over the Andes was pretty awe-inspiring. Santiago is bustling and loud and busy, perhaps even moreso than Buenos Aires. I’m a little confused with the currency…you pretty much have to divide everything by 1000 to get reasonable numbers. 1000 Chilean pesos is like $2. Stuff is more expensive here, as expected. And oh yeah, I thought there would be a time change when I crossed the border, but there wasn’t for some reason. Some kind of Daylight Savings difference, maybe? Ah, yes, that’s it…Chile observes DST but Argentina doesn’t.

My plane back to the U.S. leaves tonight at 11:40 PM.

I’m looking forward to the bus trip today and a day in Santiago, but I’m ready to wrap things up and go back to English-speaking, family land. I think when I lost the Lonely Planet guide, it knocked the snot out of me just a little bit more than I wanted to admit. I’ve felt like I was kind of flying blind since then. But cheap rooms and meals are a big part of the fun of the kind of traveling I like, and I’ve had them in spades. A word of warning, though: don’t try Mexican food in Argentina, even if you’re a little homesick. It is not very good. Right now, I can’t wait to get back to good ol’ El Acapulco and be able to talk to the proprietress in passable Spanish.

So basically, I went for this really long excursion to the CaГ±on del Atuel on Christmas Day. It was like a 14-hour trip and it was a bit long for my tastes, especially in terms of an amount of time to not be able to choose what I want to do. I even went rafting! I got soaked.

Yesterday, it was really hot. I took my laundry to be washed and went to the mall and walked around. Then I took a cab downtown and walked around pretty late at night. I think I already told you about that.

Today, I picked up my laundry, took a cab downtown again, and narrowly missed getting colossally rained upon. I ducked into the Modern Art Museum and got my art on for a while until it stopped raining.

Now I’m walking around more, walking for the Mexican restaurant to be open for dinner. I feel like a taste of home and nothing is more American than Mexican food.

Tomorrow, I take the big bus ride over the mountains to Chile.

I’ll be damned, I forgot to tell you about the trip to the CaГ±on del Atuel…but I only have four minutes left on this computer so it’ll have to wait for next time.

They’re still showing highlights from the Copa final on all the sports channels here. I keep going, “I was there! I was there!!!”

Um, otherwise…I went to another mall today and looked around. I caught some TV. Now I’m walking around downtown Mendoza waiting for my appetite to return. I probably have an hour and a half before the restaurants start to close.

Darn it, what else was I going to tell you? I have a good picture to show you, but I don’t have my USB cable with me to upload it just now. I even have the caption…darn it…

Wow, Mike Vrabel had two touchdown catches in the first half! O-H!

You can definitely tell some differences in accents depending on where you go, although it turns out Mendoza isn’t as different from Buenos Aires and Rosario as I thought it would be. In Rosario, they really didn’t pronounce their “S”s. So they would say “d’oh!” instead of “dos”.

I feel like I keep making these fascinating observations that I should really write here, but they keep slipping away, usually after another amazing observation comes to me. Yeah, because I’m just so perceptive and stuff…just forgetful, right?

An eleven and a half-hour cross-country bus trip is still an eleven and a half-hour cross-country bus trip, even if they serve you dinner and a cup of Fanta. And they seemed to not think people needed the air conditioning on most of the time. It was like an exquisite interrogation technique: they would turn on the air conditioning for about five minutes every hour, and I would just bask in the glory of the tiny vent above my seat, hoping against hope that they would leave it on this time so I could stop drowning in sweat. I would have confessed to pretty much any wrongdoing to get them to leave the #$%&@! A/C on.

This hotel is great, it’s a chain hotel with clean rooms and (wonderfully!) cold A/C, but it’s a cab ride away from anything at all. But it’s Christmas Eve, so stuff may well be closed anyway.

It was kind of hard to get a reservation for a hotel in Mendoza, but I picked the suburban chain one instead of the more “charming”, but sold-out one in the city center. The way I figure, much of the fun of that area is the side trips. I’m hoping it will be a little cooler than here since it’s at a higher elevation, but Yahoo! Weather isn’t helping me foster any illusions. I dunno…I hear there’s shade trees and stuff!

I just took in an abbreviated “pops”-type performance of the Rosario Provincial Symphony Orchestra. They played Rossini’s “La Gazza Ladra”, then skipped to the finale, the “1812 Overture”, due to impending rain. There were fireworks at the end of “1812″, plus actual lightning happening at the same time! There were two Piazzola pieces on the program they didn’t get to, which was disappointing. The highlight, though, was when a wandering dog happily walked up behind the conductor and barked at the beginning of one of the pieces. A lady next to me said: “QuГ© pasa?” and I managed to get out “un perro”. Yeah, a dog is happening!

Next, I’m on the prowl for a meal. Tomorrow, I’ll try to wrap up any loose ends here in Rosario before I hop on the bus overnight to Mendoza.Г§

Oh, my Lonely Planet guide, where are you? Without you, I don’t know how to have fun!!!

Another day, another lomo…the mozo persuaded me to only get a medialomo, but I should have gone full monty and not gotten the spaghetti with pesto. I also got some books for my niece (her folks are trying to teach her a little Spanish) and CDs for me (although I don’t have a CD player on me this trip…but I might be able to rip MP3 in one of these cyber-places and slap them on one of my SD cards).

Tomorrow night, there’s going to be a performance of the 1812 Overture and other classical favorites over at the Really Big Monument Thingy. I hope it doesn’t rain.

On the bus from Buenos Aires to Rosario, they showed this terrible B-horror movie. It was really dumb, but I could hardly take my eyes off it.