Sweet. Kevin recapped our summer in his blog, so I don't have to. If you're curious to see the long version of the pitiful summary I left in my last post,
check it out.
So I've been spending a fairly large chunk of my free time preparing for my next overseas adventure. It's really exciting, because it will be the longest I've ever been out of the country at a stretch, and I expect my Spanish to improve mightily. It's also exciting that K & I are skipping out on about 3/4 of Madison's winter this year. And it's pretty bomb-tastic that we're taking a semester off school, because while on balance I do want to be in grad school, it's important that I pay attention to the part of me that doesn't. And, finally, it allows me to indulge my near-obsessive love of future-planning. I fucking LOVE making schedules and itineraries, doing internet research on hiking and sightseeing, making spreadsheets to compare hostels, passing whole entire afternoons curled up in a chair at Borders reading travel guides and taking notes. I fucking love it. I'm not a type-A traveler, ironically. Once on the ground, I do like to make sure I see all the good stuff, but I don't plan out every day or stick to even the loose schedules I've made. I go with the flow. I just like to go with the flow
after I've arrived prepared with encyclopedic knowledge on all the best stuff to do. And I love planning for things I know I'm going to enjoy. So I've been making less than academically-wise use of my summer, but fuck it. I'm going to South America.
I've also discovered some interesting cultural tidbits that I'll share with you because I'm sure you'll find them more interesting than thousands of photos of gorgeous landscapes, which cause me to geek out like a lunatic and which in the spring months you'll be subjected to on my travel blog anyway.
1. Seafood is abundant and delicious in Chile, so I hear. But they eat literally everything that comes out of the sea, including things like octopus, squid, anemone, and barnacles. Yes, barnacles. I gotta be honest, until a couple of weeks ago I didn't even know there was any component of barnacles that was alive. But inside those spiny rocky fungus things on the bottoms of boats you'll find a slimy, wiggly little snail thing. They sell them in the markets still squirming. I know people all over the world eat things that seem gross to us, and I'm not trying to "Other" other cultures or anything. I just can't believe people
eat these fucking things. They look like they ought to be bursting out of people's skin in horror movies (check out what it starts doing about 30 seconds in.. gahhhh).
2. Apparently Chileans have something like a version of Hooters that is somehow both classier and sleazier at the same time. Instead of pubs, they're coffee bars, and instead of just tight shirts and short shorts, the waitresses are in their underwear. I'm not sure how Chile has managed to combine the Starbucks market with the strip club market, but they have. And I'm intrigued. They're called
café con piernas, meaning "cafe with legs." All I know is that getting my morning coffee on this trip is not going to be like it was in Bolivia, where a surly teenage boy would pour out lukewarm Nescafé in an empty restaurant. I did not come back from Bolivia with a single photo of a half-naked woman, which in retrospect seems like a real mistake.
More to come, I'm sure.
