It’s Just Poison…

I´m writing this out of order (I haven´t talked about Rio yet), but while we were in Chile, there was an earthquake that made over 15,000 people homeless, and killed I don´t know how many. One of the worst they´ve ever had. Now I´m in Ushuaia (see map below), and there was a cruise ship that sank around here going to Antartica. Ushuaia is the southern most city in the world and really close to Antartica. It even made news back home (http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/11/23/antarctica.ship/index.html). This has been a crazy trip so far.

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5:00am, I wake up in a frantic knowing that I’ve probably missed the hike because the alarm never went off (not using that again, Nicole bought a little clock that we’ll be using from now on). I threw on all my gear and ran out the door. About 3 blocks down, my feet started to hurt…a lot. I then realized that the hiking people had already left (thankfully, you don’t pay until after the hike), so I walked back to my hostel to crash out. About a block before I got to the hostel I wanted to just walk in my bare feet. That short distance of walking created a blister on my foot. I couldn’t imagine what would have happened if I would have forced myself through the hike. Next time, I’m bringing my own boots.

10am, I wake up again, and pack up my backpack, and go outside to see if there’s anything I can do today before we have to leave back to Valdivia at 4:30pm. I checked in with a different tour group to see if they had any Canopy (really long ziplines above the trees, go about 70mph down a mountain) groups going out at 11am. Unfortunately there weren’t enough people signed up for the 11am trip, so it was cancelled. There was a 2pm trip, but then I may not be back in time for the bus, so I had to skip it.

I met back up with Nicole at the hostel and we went out for some brunch. We found a nice spot with outdoor seating. I had a “Paila Huevos con Queso / Pile of Eggs with Cheese” (Scrambled Eggs), and a pisco sour. Their pisco sours were pretty strong, so I got two =).

In Pucon, the sun is really hot when it’s out. It’s almost like a magnifying glass is on you. The surrounding temperature is nice and cool, but it feels as if you’re being baked. In Valdivia, the weather was so random that it got annoying. There’s the saying in Michigan, if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute and it’ll change.” In Valdivia it’s a literal statement. We would leave the house with three layers, a hat, hood up, gloves on and still be cold, but by the time you got to the end of the block, you strip down to just a t-shirt, then a couple blocks more, it cold again this time with rain, then hot again a couple blocks further. I have no idea how people dress for the weather there.

Anyway, after brunch, we walked around town and looked through the little shops, bazars, and other trinket shops until the restaurants opened for lunch. Pretty much all of Chile eats and sleeps on the same schedule, so stores and restaurants aren’t open regular hours. Around 2pm, we sat down at a nice place for lunch. Nicole had baked trout with a salad, and I had the largest hamburger that I’ve ever seen. It was ridiculous.

I only ate half of it, but the half I ate was so delicious! It’s definitely in contention with the hamburgers from Ma Ruby’s in the Bahamas. There’s only one reason that it doesn’t beat Ma Ruby’s, the hamburger didn’t like me as much as I liked it. Let’s just leave it at that, I’m sure you can use your imagination to fill in the blanks. Oh yeah, and in Chile (well, most of it)… no TP. Bring your own. Not something that you think of when you’re running for a toilet.

When the lunch fiasco was over, we grabbed our bags and left for the bus terminal for our 4:30pm ride back to Valdivia. We showed up, no bus. Apparently, the return ticket that was sold to us was for a return from the first stop past Pucon. Meaning the bus was in Pucon about 20 minutes earlier. I begin to freak. Why? Because, we have a 9:30pm bus ride back from Valdivia to Santiago which will put us in Santiago in time to get to the airport to catch our flight to Rio De Janeiro. We wound up hustling tickets on the next bus (6:25pm) to Valdivia, which is set to arrive at 9:20pm. Ok, I begin to calm down, but that’s cutting it a little too close. 6:25pm arrives… no bus. Turns out that there was an accident, so the bus “is running a little late”. I begin to panic. There’s no other bus back to Santiago that will get us there in time for our flight to Rio.

The bus arrived around 6:30pm and we jumped on board. As we got closer and closer to Valdivia, I checked my watch more and more. We arrived at 9:25pm and Nicole jumped out of the bus to find our next one while I grabbed the bags. After I got the bags, I turned around and Nicole’s host family was there! Surprise! How nice of them =). I went to find Nicole, and it looks like the Santiago bus was running late as well, so we had about 10 minutes to hang out with the family, exchange hugs and goodbyes, and we even received a couple gifts! I hope the come to New York, so we can return all that they have done for us.

We boarded our bus to Santiago on empty stomachs, knowing that we’ll at least get some cookies and cheese sandwiches on the way. This bus is the same style (size and comfort wise), but a little worn in. My seat chooses when it would like to recline (sometimes it’s a total surprise… it’s like a game we play). There were no cheese sandwiches, instead, they gave us little bags of french fry things. Oh, and they’re showing a movie where in the end, 8 dogs die. Nicole will love that. Maybe she’ll fall asleep before it happens, or maybe just not look up from her book. Well, I’m going to pass out. Hope Rio is fun, we’ll be there for 4 days!

Here’s a couple neat pics of Pucon (Nice scenery):

Tags: Travels by .: Adam
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We had to get up with enough time to pack and get to the bus station by 12:30pm for our trip to Pucon, so the night before I tried out an alarm program on my computer to wake us up. Didn’t work. We woke up around 11:30am by the lady we were staying with to ask us if we wanted breakfast in bed or at the table (yep, she made us breakfast =). Nicole jumped in the shower first while I packed, and then we traded. Well, almost… They had an interesting device used to heat the water for the shower. It required pushing a number of buttons in order and a pilot light. It’s kinda like lighting a gas grill, except more buttons and all the instructions are in Spanish. There was one match left, and when Nicole was trying to show me how it worked, it didn’t work the first time and she blew out the match. So, no shower for me.

We had a cab pick us up because we were running late, and made it to the bus station in time for our 2 and a half our ride to Pucon. The ride wasn’t that bad, and we accidentally got off at the wrong stop. Thankfully, the guy that we were trying to get our luggage from knew where we were going and corrected us. We arrived in Pucon around 3pm and immediately located a hostel to drop our bags off into, so that we could run around the town. This village is amazing! I really like it here a lot, reminds me of the little island I visit in the Bahamas, except instead of the beaches and climate to attract visitors, they have an active volcano, white water rapids, fishing, and a ton of other awesome excursions to go on. The people are very friendly, everything is moderately priced, and is a great place to kick back and relax.

After taking way too many photos of the volcano (I’m still fascinated by it), I headed into a Tour shop to see what things we could partake in while we were in town. There were really only two things that we could do, an evening trip to the hot springs, and a morning hike up the volcano. I said yes to both and Nicole was down with going to the hot springs as well. We left the shop and went to grab some grub. Nicole got this crazy gigantic sandwich thing, and I got a hotdog with way too many toppings, and some grilled chicken.

Now was time to prepare for our night excursion to the hot springs up in the mountains… I didn’t have a bathing suit =). We found a store that was selling some canvas-ish material pants half-off, so I bough them and took half-off… with a pair of scissors =). Voila, instant bathing suit!

Around 7:30pm, I had to go to the tour place to try on all the hiking gear for the next day, as the trip starts at 4:30 in the morning and we weren’t getting back from the hot springs until after midnight. Everything seemed to fit fine, so i packed everything up and we jumped in the van with a bottle of wine and headed up to the hot springs. It took about 45 minutes to get there, and at some points, I felt the van wasn’t going to make it up the mountain. Once we got there, we had to walk down about 200 “natural” stairs to get to the base of the hill to the hot springs.

There were 5 pools, each with varying temperatures, from “ok… this is seriously hot” to “just above bath water” With a little bit of wine, and some hot water under the stars, it’s very easy to relax out here. We jumped from pool to pool, and snapped a couple quick photos of ourselves before we left, and then shivered back up the stairs to the van.

I don’t know who’s idea it was to make a bunch of people walk up all those stairs after sitting in hot water for a little over an hour… not funny.

We got back to the hostel a little after midnight and I started to pack everything that I would need for the hike I was to go on in a little over 4 hours. I set my alarm again on my computer, convinced I knew why it didn’t work last time, and then passed out.

Tags: General by .: Adam
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I was woken up by the bus attendant about 20 minutes before we arrived to Valdivia. I gathered up my things, and got prepared for another days adventure.

We pulled into the station about 9:30am, and decided to hike to Nicole’s host family’s place (Side-note: Nicole lived with a host family and went to college in Valdivia for about 5 months her senior year).

On the way to their house, we stopped by a fresh sea food market where there were a few pelicans and “Lobos Marinas” (Sea Lions) chilling behind for some free scraps of whatever would be thrown away. I snapped a few photos, and then finished our walk to the house.

Nicole’s host family was very happy to see Nicole again and was extremely kind to me. I felt as if I was visiting friends or family that I haven’t seen in a long time. We had some snacks, and Nicole chatted it up for a while, while I sat and smiled (no habla espaneol… or something). Nicole’s host-mother told us that they would be making us lunch and to make sure we come back around 3pm or so. In the meantime, we walked around Valdivia, checked out the new mall, visited Nicole’s favorite blind bum that plays an accordion, and then trekked back for some lunch.

Lunch consisted of cheese empinadas(sp?), bread things, and a little dessert of strawberries in sugary water stuff (yummy). When we were done eating, Nicole’s host-father worked out a place for us to stay at for the night at their neighbors house (they’re hosting another student, so they didn’t have any space). There neighbors were extremely friendly, and welcomed us as family (more nice people!). We dropped of our bags, and then went out to meet up with one of Nicole’s friends from school, Fabian (a Chilean hippie that likes metal). Fabian had to finish up work, so we went to a chocolateria, yes… a place that serves all kinds of gourmet chocolate. We had some hot chocolate (Chocolate calente) and this tripple layered chocolate cake (…so good). There was a trick with the hot chocolate though. The waiter placed an empty cup on a saucer with a spoon and a bar of chocolate wrapped in gold foil in front of me and then stared at me with a pitcher in his hand (which I thought was the hot chocolate). Nicole showed me that you have to unwrap the chocolate, break it up and then place it in the cup. Then the waiter pours in the hot milk, and gives you some sugar to add to it. If she wouldn’t have done that, I would have sat there forever waiting for the waiter to get frustrated enough to do it for me. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.

Around 4:30pm we finished our chocolateria experience and went to McDonald’s. I had to try the fries to see if they were the same. They were. Fabian met us in the plaza shortly after and took us to his place where we hung out, had some drinks, shared our favorite bands, and talked about music (well, I did more gesturing than talking. Probably looked like an air guitar competition =). Around 8pm, the sun started to go down, and we headed back to Nicole’s host family’s place for dinner, mini-hotdogs mixed with french fries.

We also had some bright green pisco sour. Nicole’s two host-sisters, and one of the boyfriends also joined us for dinner. One of the sisters and the boyfriend spoke English fairly well, so it helped with a little more translation going on. Once dinner was over we all had some cake thing with a meringue on top (delicious!), and then headed to the bar, Bunker, for some after dinner drinks and chat. I’m not sure how late we were out, but I think the round of tequila shots did us all in. We said our goodbyes and then headed back to the house to crash for the evening.

Tags: General by .: Adam
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We woke up monday afternoon, jumped in the shower, packed our stuff and then checked out of the hostel.

We left our bags at the hostel while we walked around town, because our upcoming 12-hour bus ride to Valdivia (land of rivers) wasn’t until 10pm.

Yesterday, I read about a part of Santiago which was referred to as the Bohemian / West Village area, so we headed over to Brasil street to check it out. We found a great hostel there, which we’ll be using when we come back, and a lot of food / stuff to do, BUT it was siesta time, so nothing was open (noon to 3pm, pretty much all the food / bars are closed). At the hostel I got 2 guide books pretty cheap (used) on Buenos Aires and Rio De Janeiro.

We got lost again, and the finally found a place to eat, I had grilled chicken and Papa’s (french fries). Then down to the subway to head out to this huge old cemetery with massive family sepultures. I got scolded about taking photos inside, and not because it was rude. I didn’t pay for a permit to do so. So i just put my camera away and snapped some shots when no one was looking.

After walking around in the hot sun for a few hours, you get pretty thirsty, and here’s where I came to appreciate the red/blue labeled waters and “Sin Gas” The blue labels were “with gas” (ie. Carbonated water), and the red were without. I can’t stand carbonated water, and apparently not even when I’m really thirsty and I accidentally purchase the wrong one =).

The last thing that I wanted to do before we left Santiago, was to check out a couple tattoo parlors. We were given two places to check out, the first place was called Zafa Tattoo. The paintings out the outside of the building were awesome! Lots of Giger-esque work.

When we went inside, Nicole decided to get her nose pierced. She found some bling and then got prepped for the procedure. It was actually pretty interesting to see it happen, because they do piercings a little bit differently than in the states. They still autoclave all materials (unlike some places I know), show you the bags with the labels that prove they’ve been sterilized, then after the placement is chosen, they use what looked like plastic needle thing. I hope i have a photo, if not, I’ll head back there to get more info, and maybe a tattoo =). Once the needle (oh yeah, they’re disposable) is through the skin, they just cut it right above the entrance point and then use the jewelry to push out the remainder of the needle. Throw a little A&D ointment on it, talk a little about aftercare (no touching!, and use saline to clean), and the adventure was over.

After leaving the tattoo studio, we still had some time to kill, so I suggested that we jump on the subway and head out to the other tattoo studio. Once we got there, we were in for a little surprise. It wasn’t a tattoo studio, it was a whole min-mall (4 or 5 floors) of tattoo studios, CD shops, clothing stores, video game stores, and comic stores. All the music / clothing stores were all Metal / Rock oriented. One of them was called “The Goat” lol.

The placed looked like somewhere all the deviants go to hang out after school. Pretty cool place. I picked up an Alien t-shirt, and Alien (DVD) in Spanish. I try to collect a version of the movie from every country I visit. So far I have Spanish, Italian, German, and Polish. Hopefully I can find it in Brazil for Portuguese.

Once we were done looking at the 20 or so tattoo shops, we headed back to the hostel to get our bags and then jump on the subway to get to the bus station. Once there, we grabbed some quick dinner and waited for our bus to show up around 10pm. I was a little worried about the upcoming 12-hour ride to Valdivia, but pleasantly surprised at the accommodations. The seats reclined into beds, so far to where I could almost lay straight. Super comfy, and they gave us little snacks.

I think, somewhere around 1 or 2am I passed out.

Tags: General by .: Adam
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On our flight to Santiago, I had a bulk-head seat, so it was moderately comfortable, and it was a night-time flight, so there wasn’t much to look at out the window. I turned on my ipod and crashed out listening to the new High on Fire (amazing album!). I woke up briefly during the flight once the sun was up and saw a pretty view of the Andes mountains as we were flying above them, them passed out again almost immediately.

When we landed in Santiago (about 7am), we gathered our things and headed through customs. There was a special surprise for me. I got to pay a $100 tax to get into the country. I forgot the term used, but basically, I think it was a, “we know you have money and you’re a foreigner, so pay up” tax.

After we got through customs, we headed out to grab a cab and find a hostel. I’m not going to go into details to protect the innocent(ish), but we got a “great deal” on a cab and a free Fanta Orange Pop and was off to a hostel that was recommended to us by the cabbie. We got to the hostel, dumped off out bags, and then passed out for about 4 hours (i think, we didn’t have a watch, so all times were guesses up to this point).

When we woke up, it was mid-afternoon Sunday, and we grabbed our day-bags and went out to see the city.

Our first stop was as a bus station to purchase tickets to Valdivia (where Nicole’s host family lives) on Monday (aka. Tomorrow). Getting to the bus station was simple. The subway took us right there and the bus terminal was connected to the subway station, so it was easy to find.

After we got our tickets, we attempted to walk about towards the city center. I say attempt, because we got lost in this giant clothing bazaar and exited the wrong side and took a nice scenic route through a more impoverished area. Realized we (aka I) made a mistake and headed back. After some more walking around, we found a main shopping strip outdoors with a lot of street performers, art sales and other such stuff. Nicole bought me a watch as a present so we’d have some kind of clue to the time. While getting lost, we found a really cool old church / park / thing that was higher than most of the buildings around it.

We hiked to the top and saw some amazing views of the Andes mountains and all of Santiago. This was my favorite part of the day =).

We then hiked back down and then stopped for some food. I had 2 hotdogs (which were awesome! Something with the bread they’re served on) with Aji(??) sauce. It’s like tabasco. And Nicole got me an empanada (also very tasty).

We walked around some more, and bought a couple patches from a street vendor (2 Slayer patches, and 1 crazy bad English satan patch), then headed back to the hostel where Nicole took a Siesta and I did some research on the other places we would be traveling to. Our hostel roommate, Carol, was from Rio, so she gave us a lot of helpful information on our upcoming trip there.

We left the hostel around 11:30pm to go find some dinner and drinks. Unfortunately, people in Santiago don’t really do that on Sunday’s that late, so our choices were slim. We stopped at the “red bar” for a couple pisco sours, then went to the “green bar” for some food and more pisco sour. I had a $4 steak which was a very thinly sliced Chicken-Fried steak thing and we split a Ham, Cheese, Olive platter. Quite tasty. When we were done with out meal, we headed back to the hostel to crash out for the night. We had to make sure that we got up in time for the noon check-out, because we were only staying the one night.

Tags: General by .: Adam
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This was the first day of the trip to South America, but really it all started the day before. Before taking off, we decided to have a a couple friends over for a kind-of impromptu going away party. We had some drinks, and hung out until about 4am. At about 5am, our car showed up to take us to Laguardia. Our first flight was at 6:40am to Ft. Lauderdale Florida.

We didn’t have any hassles at the airport, so we got right to the gate, and waited about 10 minutes before we began to board. Lucky me, the exit row was already taken by people that didn’t need it, so I got to sit in a standard coach seat with my knees in my face for about 3 hours. I was pretty tired and the buzz from the alcohol was wearing off, so I drifted in and out of consciousness most of the way.

Ahhh, Ft. Lauderdale. I have a new favorite airport to hate now. We landed around 9:30am, and because the next part of our trip (Ft. Lauderdale -> Lima, Peru) was in a different terminal, we had to get our boarding passes and go through security again. I never would have expected the line just to get our boarding passes. Because pretty much everyone that flies out of here is going international, the “check-yourself-in” kiosks were pretty much useless. The line literally went outside of the airport checking area and around the corner outside about 200 feet. This obviously isn’t anything new either, as they had permanent canopies outside for shade for all the people waiting in line. To add to the fun, they were calling out flights that were about to leave to get everyone onboard in time. Well, our flight didn’t leave until 4:30pm, so needless to say, everyone wound up getting called ahead of us. We waited in line about an hour - hour and a half just to get our boarding passes. On the upside, when we got to security, all the other flights had already left, so there wasn’t any line =). While we waited for our flight to board, we planned out and purchased our tickets for the remainder of our trip (everything but Lima). We decided to figure out sleeping arrangements for each leg of the trip once we arrived there. For the flight to Peru, I got the exit row, so I was pretty comfortable the whole trip. We landed in Peru around 10:30pm. The airport was really nice and new. I celebrated being south of the equator for the time with a traditional Peruvian meal: Sandwich Mixto (Ham and Cheese =) and a coke. Now that we had food in our bellies, we headed to our gate to wait some more for our flight to Santiago, Chile that was to be boarding at 1am Sunday (roughly 2 hours).

Tags: Travels by .: Adam
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Woo Hoo! This will make updating my blog / journal waaaay easier on BMod! =) I’ve written a little windows client-side application that allows BodyMod.org members to add blog entries from their computer without having to launch a browser!

I’m going to try and clean this thing up so that I can release it to the masses before I take of for South America on saturday. Hope nothing breaks while I’m gone :o)

.: Adam

Here’s a screenshot of the app (BlogIt):

Tags: General by .: Adam
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This is seriously a great browser and I’ve only played with it for about 5 minutes. If you’re a fan of firefox, and you’re a fan of the internet, get <a href=”http://www.Flock.com”>Flock</a>!

Tags: Browsers by .: Adam
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Here’s the code:

select * from information_schema.tables;

Could come in handy if you do a lot of work in a sql editor / query tool (like i do =)

Tags: General by .: Adam
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