My adventures begin!

After finally and officially deciding that neither teaching nor London are for me, the flood of relief I felt firmly assured me that leaving London was the best & right decision.  Also, closing my life in London was 100 times easier than starting my life there, which is another indication I am moving in the right direction.  Everything about my crash landing there was difficult and annoying - mostly annoying.  From sleeping on a friend’s floor for a month cause the flats in London are overpriced and shit, to supply teaching at equally shit inner-city schools (where on my second day a 5 year old shouted at me, “Suck my nuts!” while gyrating his hips in my direction), to crazy amounts of paperwork for everything, to not being eligible for a phone cause I don’t have British credit (hello?! I’m a foreigner!), to their also shitty recycling programs, to the annoying London accents of 30 5-year olds calling out daily, “Miss, Miss, where you from Miss?”  If life is a matter of perspective, then my perspective on things - negative - told me that perhaps I never really wanted to be in London, and had gone there for all the wrong reasons in the first place.  So... to London I say, “Cheerio, ol’ chap - my life awaits!”

On my way back to Canada to “figure things out” (apparently practice does not make perfect in this case cause I’ve been trying to figure things out for awhile now!), I was intercepted by my parents’ and their crisis of the “we’re too old to be backpacking through South America” variety.  Since they don’t speak any Spanish, and had endured a mugging and an earthquake all in the same day, their confidence and nerves were shot.  They asked me to come down here to help them out, which means a free trip to South America in exchange for being their translator/booking agent/travel guide.  Not a bad deal for the opportunity to return to possibly my second favorite place on earth (after Japan, of course) until I realized that backpacking with your middle-aged parents is not quite the same as backpacking with your 20-something friends.  

Yay, there they are!

I flew to Mendoza, wine capital of South America, to meet mis padres and commence the wine drinking.  I was dying to get on a bike and ride around the countryside visiting beautiful bodegas, but it turned out to be a little less like Napa Valley, and a little more like dirt biking around some farms with grapes.  And cows.  Plus, we got lost on the dirt roads, only made it to one vineyard and lunch, so didn’t even get complimentary drunk!  Maybe being surrounded by the Andes was supposed to make up for that.  We also visited a friend of mine from high school, Sam, who owns some land south of Mendoza in San Rafael.  He took us to Valle Grande, where Mom and I did “Cool River,” a sort of inner-tube white-water rafting experience which naturally had Mom panicking as we got pummeled in the face by water and her contacts fell out.

Doing what we do best!

Sam and his friends also invited us to an asado, or barbecue, which was amazing, even for a non-meat lover like myself.  After all, the evening consisted of all of my favorite things: friends, conversation, eating and drinking.  Only being in Argentina for a week, I didn’t get too much of a chance to mingle with the locals, but from what I can tell, Argentinians like the following: ice cream, fancy shoes, making out in public, barbecues and babies.  There was a lot of all of the above. 

There's the meat, including sweetbreads, yum.

The asado crew!

Our next stop: Santiago, Chile which is 183 kms, or a 5 hr bus ride, from Mendoza, not including the hour and half border crossing.  I pretty much ate my way through Santiago.  The first day I took a bike tour of the city, which included a stop at the market where I tried mote con huesillos (dried peach nectar with cooked wheat) and sopaipillas (fried pumpkin flatbread/tortilla things) with salsa.  Mom ordered the same dish everywhere we went, pastel de choclo, a blended corn dish baked with meat, chicken, olives, raisins and maybe even an egg!  My favorite was porotos, beans with pureed pumpkin, corn and basil, which you sometimes got with a big ol’ sausage  plopped on top, and at the fish market I ate chupe de mariscos, seafood stew.  Now Mom and I are both chomping at the bit to host some Chilean-themed dinner parties!

Amazing street art in Santiago

After Santiago, we set off for some R&R in the beach town of La Serena, which is apparently the place to be if you’re Chilean and on summer vacation.  Since we were in Chile, and it was summer vacation, we were surrounded by thousands of babies and ice cream cones and teenagers making out (Chileans are much like Argentinians in this respect).  Luckily, we operated on an “early bird schedule” and due to a combination of me traveling with people who fall asleep while reading at 9pm (Dad) and us being North American, we generally did everything about three hours earlier than anyone else in town, so avoided any kind of high-season rush.  By the time restaurants even opened at 8pm, we were usually waiting outside, starved, watching everyone stroll around with coffees and ice creams to tide them over until 11pm when it was actually time to eat.

The kids in La Serena are just getting started

Because we are on our way north, we made a little pit-stop in San Pedro de Atacama before heading into Bolivia.  Aaaah, now San Pedro is my kind of place!  Plenty of hippies sporting the legendary dreadlock mullet and busking on the street with homemade instruments for their dinner and probably lodging.  Luckily I made friends with a girl who knew some of these characters and I got to spend an evening swilling 40oz beers while watching an impromptu marionette show and attempting to follow along a conversation in Spanish with 8 South Americans.  It sounds like I’m joking, but I actually love these bracelet-seller types, with their abundance of free-spirit, if not jobs.

Anyway, next stop Bolivia!  I’ve tried to adequately prepare my parents for the craziness of it but I have to ask myself if anyone can actually be prepared for Bolivia?