I’ve finally gotten around to re-uploading my India Bonanza pictures to Picasa, which is much faster than my self-hosted gallery. India was the catalyst for me setting up this blog. Woops, guess I forgot to write about my bonanzas!

This was one of my favorite things for sale that I came across. Had I not gotten sick in Goa I probably would have made a stronger effort to buy this shirt, but my illness and cheapness (he wouldn’t accept 150 rupees) got the better of me. Besides, he didn’t call me Japan.

• I’m in Santiago where I’ve been for the last three weeks, give or take the couple days I went to Valparaiso and Viña Del Mar.
• I’ve completed two weeks of intensive Spanish classes and have come out of that experience able to read and understand better, but still have the conversation skills of a kid between baby and toddler stages.
• I am, by circumstances beyond my control, now single and not so ready to mingle.
• Due to a general malaise concerning traveling (which I can now, in retrospect, partly attribute to my anti-malarial tablets), the inability to get over my hesitance of going to Peru during their wet season, and the realization that something like Machu Picchu would be an experience better off shared with others, I have decided to cut my trip short three weeks and head on home.
• I’m naively hoping going home early will make a difference in my life moving forward. If not, then at least I’ll have time to finally slowly upload photos and blog about them before people realize I’m back.
• On Saturday I will be leaving Santiago for the north of Chile, where I will roam the deserts and oases of San Pedro de Atacama and head east on a jeep tour of Bolivia’s southern altiplano. This all sounds like mumbo jumbo to me, even, as I’ve done no planning and wouldn’t even be at this stage of having an airline ticket if it weren’t for good ol’ Magdalena.
• I am really not cut out for hot weather, traveling in hot weather, or planning trips to places that are hotter. Santiago is hot. Really hot.

And that’s all for now, I suppose. More later and backdated.

Things that are greatly appreciated that one doesn’t realize until on the road, and this goes for hostels and other budget accommodation: 1) soap in the bathrooms – even if it’s the crap kind that sucks out the moisture from your skin because it sucks not feeling clean or not realizing there’s no soap until after you’ve already packed up and locked up your bags. 2) Towels – I have a pack towel but am constantly thinking about what dirty surfaces I’m putting my pack towel on to dry, and moving from one place to the other and having to think about when to shower so the towel will dry in time before embarking on an overnight bus ride sucks. Plus when there are towels that means I get to wash my pack towel for the next place that sucks and probably has no bathroom soap either. 3) Radiators or room fans – these become your best friend when you’ve done laundry in your sink even despite signs that plead for you not to do laundry in the sink. My theory is, if the sign is in Spanish, I can pretend not to understand and if it’s in English, I can also pretend not to understand, especially if it’s fobby. But anything to help dry clothes quicker before the employees yell at you for breaking their rules, or getting clothes dry before moving on so as not to have to wear damp clothes (curse you, dank fanless, radiator-less Curitiba hostel) to avoid your clothes smelling like dirty rags is great.

Anyway, because consumerism tells me I should celebrate Christmas but mostly because I’m self-indulgent and I don’t like public bathrooms, I decided to treat myself after my four night ferry ride and spend a whopping $35 US a night for my own room with private bath. This place has 1) soap, 2) towels, and 3) the freedom to hang my drying laundry wherever I please without fearing that some disrespectful hosteler is going to step on my clean underwear or knock my towel into a puddle on the ground. I’d say this was a pretty good chunk of money spent, even if I’m putting myself at risk of dying in a fire caused by wet clothes on the radiator.

Le sigh.

At my current hostel, the supermarket is much closer than any restaurants in town so I hoofed it up a road to buy a second thing of toothpaste (the first disappeared in Buenos Aires) and ended up with 500 grams of raviloi and sauce. 500 grams of anything is enough to feed a family of four – I ate it in three meals. But not before someone commented, “Buen provecho!” aka big appetite!

This was the first serving, I opted for cooking everything at once and eating leftovers so as not to have to use a bunch of containers I don’t have, or risk some of my ingredients disappearing.

Then, for lunch I partitioned some ravioli to a smaller plate out of fear that I’d be called a fatty again.

For dinner, after a jaunt in town determined there was nothing worth trying, I went to the grocery store again and bought some garlic, tomatoes, and a severely discolored zucchini aka a non-genetically modified one, and a cheap bottle of Malbec wine ($3, and I shared!) to help supplement what I felt was not a nutritonal enough meal.

And there you have it, a tiring meal three meals in a row. It’s enough to send me to a local restaurant even if it’s going to cost me more. I’ll be damned if I end up eating the same things every day or throwing away food like I’m single!

After washing my hands and commencing brushing I noticed two Mosquitos hanging out on the curtain next to me and tried in the best way possible to kill one without contaminating my hand. I failed, and one of the Mosquitos flew off. While I tracked its movement (all the while brushing) I checked the curtain and noticed the other one was missing, then saw it chilling on my thigh. Thinking it had just landed, I did a little dance to shake it off.

A few minutes later I’m distracting myself with this blog so as not to scratch like mad on the spot I now know the mosquito successfully bit. The sheet is rubbing ever so lightly against the swelling bite, teasing me to scratch it hard – something I will restrain from doing until I’m inevitably scratching through the night. And now, someone else in the room is scratching their bites and it’s all I can do to keep me from going to town. Le sigh.

So tonight was the second night in a row that I had Subway for dinner. Yesterday I gestured that I wanted the small one because my inability to speak Portuguese left me a bumbling pointer of sandwich fixings. Tonight, I encountered an employee who offered his English and I used it as an opportunity to order a f–I couldn’t say footlong because of the metric system–30 cm long sandwich. I felt like such a fatty. But yesterday’s 15cm left me hungrily eating a stale piece of bread on a dark bus at midnight, leftover from my mustard sandwiches the night before.

Too bad I still have that damn jingle in my head.

That´s when I discovered I needed a visa for Brazil. Because I had been planning on going to Chile for so many years, and not Brazil, I only knew that to fly into Santiago I would only need to pay a reciprocity fee – no visa required. Alas, such was not the case with Brazil, and my procrastination came back to bite me in the ass in the form of hefty fees. Because the Brazilian Consulate likes to be complicated and lazy, they enabled some new rules in November that limited the number of appointments per day. In addition to their “absolutely no rushed visas” policy and 10-business day minimum for paperwork, I discovered that with Veteran´s Day and Thanksgiving, I would be severly lacking in business days with my regular appointment. So, that meant I had to find a private company to file my paperwork for me, since these visa companies have basically monopolized all the appointments the Brazilian Consulate has available. This meant me having to shell out an extra $109 (I saved a meager $10 by mentioning a Yelp ad) on top of the $130 visa fee, without the guarantee that I would even have my visa approved. Yikes. Way to go with the procrastination! Already I was starting to dread Brazil.