I'm Not in Chile Anymore...

But I do have some cool stories I still want to write about. Hopefully soon.

I dunno if I'll write about all this stuff, but here's a list of a few subjects

My 21st Birthday and staying up all night sleeping on the beach when the sun came up

Seeing Manu Ginobli in the Buenos Aires airport

Seeing Phantom of the Opera in Spanish in Buenos Aires

Staying at the Hilton in Buenos Aires

20 hour bus rides in fancy Argentine buses, getting harassed by drug dogs and police on these buses

Sleeping in the Santiago airport twice, in a restaurant booth

Getting stuck in the Clan hostel

Renting dune buggies in Uruguay

Peru / Bolivia

Taking 23 hour bus from Lima to Cusco

Taking the back way to Macchu Picchu and staying with some cockroaches and roosters along the way

Offering to lead home some Chinese-Americans to Cusco

Bolivian nightclubs with some Bolivians / NOT with an Australian girl

Getting robbed trying to go into San Pedro Prison

Biking down death road to Curico

Partying in the bus back to La Paz

Riding in the front of the bus from La Paz to Potosi, con drunk bus driver and crazy man

Crashing a motorcycle in Copacabana, shipwrecking a sailboat on Lake Titicaca later that day

Dinner by candlelight in Copacabana

Witches Market in La Paz

Altitude

Buying an armadillo guitar and the problems this would cause...

Getting stuck in a sandstorm in the Atacama desert

My 40 hour trip home

Being barred from ever returning to Peru

These will come shortly.

I fought the law ......

Dear mom, don't read this one ... I'm spending all my time in school and being really safe etc. Promise.

Everyone else: It's been a while I guess ... I have a few things to write about but they will have to wait because THIS WAS AWESOME. This past weekend I went to Pichilemu, which is South America's surf capital ... I went surfing but the waves sucked so it's not much to write about.

Anyways, at night they have huge bonfires where everyone parties and has a lot of fun. When I say huge I mean there are tons of people there. At least 500 people, probably more. Here's a picture to show you how many people ... sorta


Check out my sweet Peruvian hoodie / hat combo and my trademark gesture.(Happier Times) ....

Anyways, the bonfire was cool, lots of people ... some people playing guitar (covers of shake it up baby and nirvana) and stuff when suddenly ...


LA POLICIA ... about 1/3 of the people ran away but I was not feeling like moving so I just sat there, then joined in with everyone chanting insults at the police. Then people started throwing beer bottles at the police and telling them to leave us alone ... I turned around to look up the hill for a second and got crushed in the face with a bottle. It was plastic but it was still badass. Yelling at the police is cool enough, but then a bunch of kids took the firewood from the fires and started chasing the police with them.

Then the police started firing shots into what I hope was the air or ocean. I'm assuming it was the ocean because I didn't see anyone die ... Everyone retreated slightly up the hill but we all kind of stood our ground and kept yelling at the police even after the shots. I was with some Chilean people who told me it would be ok. After a 10ish minute standoff of yelling at them, the police got back in their cars and drove away. And the party kept going. STRENGTH IN NUMBERS, man.






If you look closely you can see people throwing stuff...

Fantasilandia

So I haven't written in here for a while and that's because it's a lot of work and we all know how I feel about that.

So last Saturday I went to this place:


Fantasilandia, a Chilean theme park. It was like $13 to get in which is pretty cheap I guess. It had good rides. Anyways, I got there at like 3 in the afternoon because I was hung over. So I really only rode like 4 rides. One of them was this:



Anyways, the line for it was like an hour long, at least. But we made friends with a clown at the park earlier in the day who came and found one of my friends again and started talking to us while we were standing in line. He snuck us around and got us in through the exit line with no wait whatsoever. It was awesome. As they were strapping us in, he told us a quick story about one of the rides that was closed, a wild mouse roller coaster.

The ride was closed because the day before a car FELL OFF THE TRACK at the top. No one died, but the guy in the car SNAPPED HIS LEG IN HALF. Luckily he told us this as the ride was starting and I gotta say it wasn't really one of my most confident amusement park rides. I lived though, in case you couldn't tell.

Tonight I'm going on an 11 hour bus ride to go into an active volcano. Hopefully I come out looking like this.


I have a story about some Peruvian illegal immigrants and maybe a couple other things but whatever. Peace out

wire mummys

Saturday night I was out with this girl Kristin and we were going to a bar to meet up with some other people ... so we hopped on a somewhat sketch bus, and all the sudden the road was blocked off like pretty far from everything (actually, in front of la Moneda, which is where the president works, but it was far from where we were going)

So we got off like 4 metro stops before we were supposed to, which is like a 25 minute walk at one in the morning. Anyways, as we're walking there's a HUGE crowd of people and we're like what is this for?? There's this large structure on wheels and people are pushing it. So we join in and also start pushing it until we're yelled at - then look up at what it is. It's like this huuuuge thing that looks like a mummy and is covered with a cloth.


Then I see a CRANE .. This thing was some sort of art / theatre show, they were practicing it Sat. and performed it Sunday. Here's what happened - lots of weird trance music, someone gets attached to a crane, goes up on this large bed like structure and pulls off the sheet. It's this girl made out of metal wire and he attached something to her. The crane grabs her and like brings her to life by pulling her off the bed. This thing is huge. Like ... a crane is necessary to pick it up, so you know it is big. Probably like 30 feet long. The crane lifts her and drags her around a little in the air and brings her to life I guess. Then everyone claps and leaves ... we left too since everyone else did but I'm really not sure what the purpose of this was. Also, we were "backstage" because we weren't supposed to be there and we tried to join in on the parade procession. When we got kicked out we just walked behind, where we weren't supposed to.


Some guy on the street said was some theatre group from Spain that does this once a year. Apparently it is called Festival Stgo. a Mil. I dunno. It was weird and bizarre. Here are pictures.

dame mas gasolina

I just got back from Siete Tazas, which is a series of seven really pretty waterfalls that look like this:

Really cool. To get there we took a train from Santiago to Talca, 3 hours south of Santiago, then a bus to Molina, some dinky town an hour east of Talca. Here is where things got fun - the 2 1/2 hour bus ride from Molina to Siete Tazas on a bus that looked like this:


Anyways, that's all fine and good, looks aren't everything, right? Who needs paint or a working engine or anything like that? I mean it IS a Benz ... Maybe we should have shopped around at the bus stop in Molina, instead of going with the first people who came up to us. Because before we got on this lady who worked for another company told us that our company crashed one of their buses the day before, and that her company, which costs the same, was much safer. And they had really nice buses, made post-WWII.

So we board the bus and go to the back where our luxury seats awaited us (at least we didn't have to stand, like a few of the Chileans on the bus). Suddenly, a pungent smell hit me - GASOLINE - flammable, highly toxic gasoline. Luckily, the floor of our bus had a nice layer of gasoline on it - the entire bus. Part of it was being soaked up using an advanced cleaning method consisting of newspapers.

Surprisingly no one decided to light a match, or rub some wool together or something like that, which would have easily killed all of us on board, especially with the joke of an "emergency exit" they called an escape hatch (it was welded shut). All I suffered was some dead brain cells, and the drunk Chilean dude who gave us a beer and the mildly-hallucinogenic dreams made it all worth it.

There's nothing like the constant fear of going up in flames to make things a little interesting...

TRAVEL LOG #1, featuring Franklin & really awful videography.

we are brothers of god

I don't know what it is, but weird people like to talk to me I guess. I was walking home from this restaurant like five minutes from my house the other day, right before the sun set, probably like 9 p.m. It was still light out. This guy wearing a suit asks me where the metro is (always with the metro directions, it seems).

I actually know this time so I tell him and he proceeds to get on his hands and knees and grabs my hand and kisses it. He asks me if I'm Chilean and I say I'm from the U.S. and he says I speak very good Spanish and thank you. He won't really let go of my hand so I just kind of stand there. Meanwhile, a bunch of people walk past us, no help from them. I keep saying no problem no problem, cya. He doesn't really let go and then he asks me how you say "corazon" in English. I tell him it's "heart." He puts his fist to his heart and says "you are a man with many heart." I tell him thanks and he says "I have many heart too." Then he pulls my hand to his mouth and kisses my hand and then puts his hand out to my mouth and I think maybe if I just get this over with I can leave.

So I kissed his hand and then he says "somos hermanos de dios" which means "we are brothers of God." and then he says thanks one more time and goes to the metro.

i won an argument in spanish

They party hard here in Chile. People don't get trashed really like they do in the U.S., but they don't go out until about 1 am and a lot of people stay out until the sun comes up, eat breakfast, then go to sleep. Some places' happy hours are from noon until 1 in the morning.

Anyways, I met the one other girl from Maryland Friday, and we decided to do a shot of tequila to celebrate our shared homeland.

Being drunk but coherent, I asked for 2 of their cheapest shots of tequila - the bartender tells me it's 4,000 pesos. I pull out a 10,000 note and give it to him, watch him put it in the cash register, and pull out a 1,000 peso note. Here's what the conversation went like:

him: you still owe me 3,000 pesos
me: I gave you 10,000, you owe me 6,000 pesos and 2 shots of tequila
him: no, you gave me this 1,000
me: I'm not stupid, I saw you put it in the cash register (except i don't know how to say cash register so i just point to it)
him: you owe me 3,000 pesos
me: forget it. i get it, i'm american and you can do whatever you want. keep my pesos and keep my shots, i don't even care anymore

Then I stormed off outside back to our group ... a couple minutes later a manager comes up to me and apologizes. He tells me that they're bringing out my shots and here was my money back. I'm awesome.