Buenos Aires

One week in Buenos Aires and we´re incredibly happy to be here. Between Brent´s friends and some good luck, we have an apartment in a really nice, safe part of this enormous city. Furnished apartment, I might add. With adequate heating. No sleeping with fifteen blankets or cooking on a hot plate, people.

It´s actually more expensive here than it was in Chile, and that will take some getting used to. We´re scouting gyms today, having already rejected two for their outrageous, by our humble standards, prices. They were nice gyms, though.

There will be more to share when, well, more stuff happens. For now, what I´m saying is, for the first time in two months we have an actual home, so you can safely purchase plane tickets to BA.

Blizzards and tear gas: Adios, Chile.

On Wednesday, we arrived in Valparaíso, a very cool city on the coast that we rather wish we could stay in. First, it was all business -- Operation: Luggage Retrieval.

You might remember that most of what we own was still in Santiago as of Wednesday. We could have taken the bus to Santiago, metro-bus-walked to the suburbs, expensive taxied it back to the bus station with all those suitcases, and then taken another bus to who knows where. Or, we could rent a car. So we rented a car, drove to Santiago, gathered our things, and were back in sunny Valpo by lunchtime.

We´re relieved. Finally, officially, we are done with those people who turned our lives upside down from the day we got here.

It was snowing in Santiago. This is a very rare event, and we drove through it. Luckily, it was not rush hour.

We got back to our hostal to see on the news that ít was snowing in Santiago, and also that there was a big protest going on in Santiago -- and right here in Valparaíso, as well -- about higher education in Chile. This was not the first of them, as it´s been going on pretty much since we arrived in the country, but this was a big one. As we walked home, the cops were shooting water cannons and, as we discovered later, rubber bullets and tear gas. It had been hours since the tear gas, but as we walked down the street our throats and eyes were burning. Even this morning, people were still walking around with their mouths and noses covered.

And with that, we bought bus tickets to Argentina. We´ll be in Mendoza by tomorrow night, and then it´s off to the gigantic city of Buenos Aires. How´s that for a change of plan?

Conspiracy theories.

Not to be all dramatic and self-centered about what has been going on here, but...we´re pretty sure we´re being plotted against. Examine the evidence:

Our #1 contact in Valdivia is good friends with the enimiga mentioned in previous posts. This contact is a wonderful woman who had introduced us to lots of Valdivians who were either excited about chiropractic, able to help us get legal to stay here, or both.

After the negative event in Puerto Montt a few weeks ago, we wondered if our Valdivian friend would still speak to us. She did! And she was still very nice! We thought she was able to see the event as something that was between us and her friend, a very unfortunate misunderstanding.

And then the phone stopped ringing. Appointments for adjustments were canceled. People who said they´d call us back didn´t call back. It´s like they all disappeared -- and the one thing they all have in common is our #1 contact in Valdivia.

I mean, what would you think?

We´re unsure at this point if we´re being patient or inactive, but we can´t take it anymore. So we´re leaving Valdivia tomorrow, getting on a bus and heading north to see what happens. Look out, Buenos Aires, you might be next.

¨So far, Día del Niño...sucks.¨

Brent´s words, around 4:00 pm on Sunday. August 7 was Día del Niño, a holiday we gathered is basically like Mother´s Day or Father´s Day, except for children. Like they need another one.

It looked about like any other day at the mall, except the kids hopped up on ice cream were also wearing cardboard crowns and carrying balloons. The food court workers were all wearing costumes, and the movie theatre had 14 screening times for Los Pitufos.

Which is another conversation entirely. ¨Smurfs¨ is a made-up word, is it not? Did the word ¨Smurfs¨ exist prior to the creation of the little blue creatures? Because here, the Smurfs movie is called Los Pitufos, and we couldn´t figure it out. How do you translate a made-up word? What is a pitufo?

So we looked up pitufo in the dictionary. It means, ¨Smurf¨. Really.


We went to Capitán América. Dubbed.

Which reminds me of a couple of expense report items I missed. Movies only cost about US$5 (slightly higher on weekends, at least at this particular theatre), and popcorn is even a little cheaper, too. Laundry, however, costs about $12 per load.

Expense report.

We had characterized all Latin American countries as being relatively inexpensive, but we´ve found that Chile is more or less on par with home. The good news here is that we´ll be able to charge prices for our services that are similar to what we charge in the States. The bad news is that we´re not working yet.

Restaurants are slightly more expensive, although most of them offer great set lunch menus for US$5-7. Produce is much cheaper than at home, but most other groceries are comparable or more expensive. City buses seem reasonable, though I have no basis for comparison.

We´ve asked around, and it seems rent is quite a bit cheaper, but we´ll find out how it comes out after the water and electric bill when we get our own place.

Our most important purchases so far, in order of awesomeness and survival necessity, include:

1. Hedgehog slippers
2. Space heater
3. Raincoat

In other news, I am making consistently stellar cookies, which are not only delicious but provide for an excellent excuse to stand over the oven, which is the warmest place in the house.

Making a grocery list and tearing it up.

Something that reminded us of home -- at first glance -- were the giant grocery stores. With names like Jumbo, Bigger, and Lider (Leader), we were pretty sure we would eat happily ever after.

Then we shopped in them. Granted, right now our main shopping trips occur at a store with a much less promising name -- UniMart -- but I´m thinking they´re probably all about the same. The size is grossly misleading.

There is an entire row of flour, an entire row of sugar, an entire two rows of wine. There is an entire row of rice -- but no brown rice. There is an entire row and a half of milk -- but no soy or rice milk. There is an entire row of mayonnaise, for heaven´s sake. That one is probably my favorite, because there aren´t even different brands of mayonnaise. It´s the same brand in the same size container on every shelf for half the row. And they don´t have jalapeños, either.

Not that we aren´t eating well. We´ve found some fantastic restaurants and cooked some wonderful meals, even without jalapeños, and part of moving to a new country is abandoning some of your old favorite things (jelly beans) in exhange for finding new ones (dried pears, porotos y fideos, rosehip tea). I can´t say I´m not a little disappointed in the rice situation, though.

At least it isn´t boring.

I´ve been thinking for the last three days about how to make this long story short.

We came down here to meet a friend who was going to help us with a lot of the moving-to-another-country stuff. From the day we arrived, something seemed a little bit off, and it went steadily in that direction over this past month. We´ve spent most of our time waiting, because even though nothing was coming through, there was never a solid indication that it wouldn´t if we were just patient.

Until Friday. It was ugly. But now we know, which is all we have really wanted since the beginning.

Now we´re starting over, which is made somewhat more difficult by the following:

1. Most of the people we know are connected by two degrees or less to our amiga-turned-enimiga.
2. Three-quarters of our luggage is a 10-hour bus ride away in Santiago, at the home of this woman´s brother.
3. It´s still cold.


More difficult, but not impossible, and in a way we´re rather relieved. Now we can just get on with it, whether here or in Argentina or whatever.

I´ll admit, this kinda sucks. But I still wouldn´t trade it.