annnnd CHICAGO.

i'm back now. if you want to see some pictures, email me. i have them posted and can send you the link.

OJOS ROJOS=CHOCOLATES

today is our last full day and we splept in until about 11. now we are in some 24 hour locutoria or however you spell it and all of the computers are japanese based so i can´t really tell what i am doing. i´m surprised i have made it this far.

we´re staying in the boedo neighborhood with elaine. this neighborhood seems pretty cool...kind of like a mix of logan square and the less pretentious parts of williamsburg. but everything is older looking and all of the locks on all of the buildings are so strange. they involve these huge skeleton-key type keys that everyone carries around on huge key rings. they all look like prison wardens with these things...

i was talking with one of her roommates last night about how the microcenter of the city is strange in that there will be full blocks devoted to one type of store, like guitars or watches or gold. he said the entire city of buenos aires is like that. he used to live in palermo, in the baby clothes and pet stores area. i kind of really like that idea. yesterday when me and emily were walking to pick up our laundry we passed literally 30 stores that all had the same sign, "compro oro".

today a man at the cafe gave me an extra chocolate because of my ojo rojo. he said he didn´t believe it was a bike , that it was either my novio or papa. i guess chocolate, and probably coca cola, solve all domestic problems around here.

today we´re going back to san telmo, and then to some vegetarian resturant to please me because everywhere i go, even when i say "no carne, no pollo, nada..." they still give me steak or something, with a smile. then we are going to the harbor and then hopefully to hear some music. san telmo is awesome...it´s where we ended up our first day here. there are lots and lots of antique shops and warehouses.

ok we are off....

we found her.

we found her.

elaine, where are you?

as i write this i am about 2 stores down from elaine´s apartment. we are waiting for her to get back from her school. we have already been upstairs without her knowledge. we were let in by harold, her landlord. i have no clue how we will meet up with her or when but it will happen...her block looks like logan square, but like 30 years older. plus, her street has a bike lane...a full lane of traffic is a bike lane. not just some measly quarter lane. there is also an ice cream shop and a candy shop.

BAILA CONMIGO

well, we made it to another country. it´s our second part of the vacation...argentina. we got into buenos aires around midnight and spent another 5 long, hilarious-turned-freezing and not so funny hours in the airport until it was late enough in the morning to check into a hotel and sleep some. our hotel is beyond description. hotel chile. there are two miniature beds (the apparently theme of this vacation) with towel-like bedspreads. it smells kind of gross in there but it´s kind of awesome too. there is also a radio built into the wall by the bed with three little protruding circles that you only need to lightly touch to change the channel. this might sound very futuristic but trust me, it looks like something made in the 60s that was really never very successful and just never caught on. i´ll take a picture because i am kind of facinated with it. also, right next to the radiobuilt into the wall is the remote control also built into the wall.

buenos aires is huge. we just ate some really bad eggs that made us feel a little ill, but i am not going to assume all of buenos aires has such disgusting eggs. i mean, we just got here. one thing that i love, worth mentioning about both chile and argentina, is that no one has cell phones or internet so there are phone booths and internet cafes EVERYWHERE. and the phone booths are super high tech and way cool. they have totally surpassed the phone booths in the united states because we all of the sudden got too cool for them. south americans didnt and in return they got progress. woo!

ben´s wedding was great, especially because we were 2 of 9 americans amongst 177 chileans. the language barrier was embaressing at first but then after a glass or two of wine or piscola (pisco and coca cola) this was not an issue. emily found a chilean boyfriend who wouldn´t leave her alone. some people would come up and ask me to dancebut i think the eye scared them off. so i danced with elizabeth, ryan and emily a lot to some really bad american hits and some really good ones too. we were also the only guests without dates. there was some spanish song that had the phrase "baila conmigo" sung in a really really sassy way. that was a good one.

the wedding itself was in a really small old church and it was a very short ceremony. joyce´s dress was amazing. again, pictures really would help...

i am very excited about just having gotten to this city because we have almost 4 full days to explore it. i am also very excited about shopping here. everyone in these two cities look so COOL. they have the coolest clothes, straight out of the back pages of cosmo...those outfits that you think people don´t actually wear in real life.

i don´t want to leave. i have said it once...but i truly mean it. everyone should forget about vacationing in europe for a minute and come down here.

A CHILEAN SHANIA TWAIN & PAPAS PUREE

me and emily are living the high life. i am totally wondering, too, if she is gonna be writing about the same things as me because we are both writing in our blogs right now. but anyways, we are staying in the providencia neighborhood of santiago with our friends ryan and elizabeth who went to wooster too. they got this apartment that we are staying in now too. it has heat! and hot water all the time! and i think you are allowed to flush toilet paper down the toilet! we´ll have one more night there tonight...the day of the wedding! then tomorrow is off to buenos aires...

some things of note that i may or may not expand upon later:

-our bus ride back from valparaiso was so completely easy for the entire ride. we were feeling so cool and collected...until there was a stop on the bus when almost everyone else got off. emily thought it was kind of weird but i was like, ohhh no way it´s totally fine. this isn{t our stop! so the bus kept going, and it kept going, and the mountains got closer and closer and the neighborhoods looked more and more like, as emily described it, "pueblos". we started freaking out, especially because the bus driver assistant guy seemed to think it was kind of funny. luckily it all worked out and we were dropped off at a metro stop. but still! we were kind of freaked out for a minute there. and we were, in fact, at the very end of the line. way off of the maps. 11 stops away from where we were supposed to be. and we made it out fine!

-that night we ate more sopa de pescado. it is seriously the best thing ever. i would give anything to eat it on a regular basis.

-i also got really mad at the phones that night. really mad. i thnk emily avoided converstaion for a little bit after the phone experiences. but after eating that sopa everything is ok...

-met up with ryan and elizabeth and saw ben & joyce for about 10 minutes before they had to go off picking out bible verses and things like that. if you know ben, that,s really funny.

-next day...or...yesterday i guess....the four of us walked to the santa lucia area to see this art instillation that joyce´s friend had made right in the middle of downtown. it was a big train car looking thing that you stepped inside, with 3-d glasses...and inside were 3-d trees and some (semi creepy) bird noises. after that we ate and had some coffee outside. all i can eat here anymore without geting too freaked out is seafood, crepes, bread, and cheese. so i got some crepes con queso. 4 types of queso. ryan pointed out another person with an eye patch and that made me happy for a little while about the ole red eye (that isn{t getting any less red by the way...cool huh??)

-went to the museum of contemporary art and i snuck a bunch of pictures so i don{t ahve to describe too much. some things of note though....there was a huge chubby horse sculpture out front and lots of the rooms inside the museum were lit with natural light. it seemed really strange because almost every room was like this. windows in art musuems? wacko.

-then we walked to bellavista and were going to take the ascensores there, but i remembered seeing these eggshell type things in some travel guide that were also at this hill (the hill with the virgin mary statue at the top) and so we all agreed we definately had to find the eggs. we walked and walked, asking person after person where the egg shapes were. "12 blocks!" said this guy, even though this was a mountain and there are no blocks on a mountain. we walked down this curvy road for about 15 minutes and then all of the sudden the highway was there. ryan wanted to walk down this creepy path which we all realized was a horrible but kind of hilarious idea. joyce would definately have not approved of this. after some more asking and walking, we found the right way to go and walked those "12 blocks" up the mountain and got to the eggs. they are sooooo unsafe feeling because they are tiny, on these small wires that take you up the mountain, and to top it off...the doors totally don{t shut! so you have to just, you know, make sure you don´t fall out. mom, if you are reading this, don´t worry! but i also got tons of pictures of this, which will not completely do it justice because you are traveling in this little tiny eggs thing with three other people and all around you are mountains, below you are trees, and you are traveling up to the top of this small mountain with the virgin mary statue at the top. also,they sell peanuts all over this mountain so we had some peanuts to eat.

-when we were done with hanging out at the top, elizabeth decided it would be fun to walk down. we had walked kind of far up so we figured we could easily make it allll the way down the mountain....which seems totally hilarious at this point. we walked for about 2.5 hours so however many "blocks" that is....that{s how far we walked. luckily, throughout our tired times and throughout the increasing darkness filling this mountain road, a trusty stray dog stayed with us the entire time! we all hated it at first but it grew on us. then eventually we lookd and it had disapeared.

-we ended this insane mountain adventure with dinner at some totally grossly hilarious restaurant where the three of them ate a huge plate of meat and i had some mystery fish (they were out of salmon). oh, and elizabeth got a plate of papas puree...it took us a while to tell the waiter that we wanted mashed potatoes. they were playing all of this red robin-ish music which was kind of disgusting but also kind of hilarious because it was all in english and all about 30 years ago....then this woman singer came on who was impersonating celine dion, blondie, shania twain, etc. it was a very bizarre ending to a really really strange day.

now me and emily are nerding out at an internet cafe, hopefully finding breakfast, looking for some wedding shoes for me and then getting ready for the wedding tonight....the wedding where there will be 9 americans (including ben´s family) and 177 chileans. it will be awesome. we might have to show these chileans the electric slide...especially because joyce told us the theme of this wedding is classy.

VALPO-Day 2-ASCENSORES

my feet are freezing and all of my clothes are wet, but everything is still magical. emily and i woke up this morning, opened our very tall and very skinny bedroom doors (with glass panels painted pink so when there is a light shining behind them,they glow pink), and noticed two place settings at the table with some bread, fruit, marmalade, butter, tea & instant coffee (apparently the only kind of coffee they drink around here...otherwise it´s espresso or cafe con leche), cheese & ham. at first we didn´t think it was for us. then the man who owns this house came in while we were doing something in the other room and asked, "quieres desayuno?" well, of course we want it! so we sat down to the beautiful place settings, in this little dream dollhouse-like house, and ate our breakfast.

a little while after this, it became painfully obvious that i must have eaten some sort of bad vegetable last night. and i have been dealing with it ever since.

speaking of last night: emily and i were HUNGRY. we had only eaten a little breakfast and had walked a lot all day. so we walked around the twisty streets of valparaiso trying to find some food. we started out looking for something "cool" but then ended up settling for some place even though they were burning incense inside. we got some panqueques and split a big beer. these girls sitting behind us got up to leave and then gave us the rest of their big beer. that was nice. however, 2 panqueques each was not enough. so we decided, why settle for one dinner? why coudn´t we just go have another dinner somwhere else? so we walked down the street and went to a corner cafe. we ordered two good sized pizzas and some coffee whiskey drink because it was warm and had lots of whipped cream. little did i know this pizza with the tomatoes would be the death of me the nxt day. but at the time,it was good.

we came home early and watched whatever english speaking channel we could find...which happened to be the WB. woo!

exploring here is overwhelming. so is trying to take pictures. because seirously? everything is cool. we rode the ascensores up to this cool higher up neighborhood with lots of slippery windey brick streets filled with murals. one way of describing this, which only some people will understand i guess, is that this city reminds of me the gameboy zelda game. you´ll either get that or you won´t.

tomorrow we´re taking turbus back to santiago to hopefully meet up with ben and joyce and a couple of others from wooster. i want to try and get a picture of something i saw on the bus ride here. up in the mountains, set up sort of like a billboard - but not a billboard - was this house-shaped flat sign cut into about 4 different geometric shapes, all in primary colors. i have no idea why this was sitting up in the hills but it was.

alright, back to vacation. we bought some postcards today so watch for them...