In the case of death, discontinue use immediately.

Yesterday Isabel made marble cake with dulce de leche frosting. I´ve eaten a lot of delicious food here (because Isabel is a superb cook, not because Chile is a gastronomical paradise) but I haven´t eaten cake since my birthday. Well, unless you count cheesecake as cake. I think it´s a misnomer. In fact, I didn´t eat cheesecake for years because it didn´t sound like something I would find tasty. At the time, I didn´t even eat cheese on my hamburgers, so mixing cheese and cake was unthinkable. Cheesecake reminds me of the "Coffee Talk" sketch on SNL with Mike Myers ("Rhode Island - neither road, nor island. Discuss.") I haven´t thought of a better name for cheesecake yet, but if you can think of one, please post it as a "comentario" and I will announce my favorite in the next entry. The next time I see the winner, I pledge to treat that person to a huge piece of (insert your award-winning name here).

Isabel made delicious cake. And it figures that my stomach blew up on me yesterday. Isn´t it ironic? (Completely intentional reference to that song whose music video I saw last week on VH1 in the Bravissimo ice cream parlor.) I´ll skip the specific details and just say that before bed I ate Imodium tablets like candy - they taste a lot like wintergreen LifeSavers actually - and still woke up at 3:45 in distress. At that point, craving sleep - I will explain later why I didn´t sleep on Sunday night - I turned to Ciprofloxacin. I haven´t taken many prescription medications in my life, and this was the first time that I carefully read the "patient prescription information" - not because I was worried about side effects, precautions, or drug interactions, but because I wanted to take as many Cipro tablets as my body could possibly handle. The indication read, "TAKE 1 TABLET BY MOUTH EVERY 12 HOURS FOR 3 DAYS FOR SEVERE DIARRHEA." I took one tablet, and for fun (because it doesn´t take much to crack me up at 3:45 am, even when my rectum feels like I´ve been living on a diet of jalapeño peppers smothered in wasabi), I read some of the Side Effects. Here´s my favorite part: "Nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, lightheadedness, headache, or trouble sleeping may occur. Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects." Wow. What good news! Since I´m already having diarrhea and trouble sleeping, why not add nausea, dizziness, lightheadedness, and headache? Then maybe I´d get some sympathy. Plus, diarrhea with a lower case "d" sounds way better than "SEVERE DIARRHEA". It was a trade I was willing to make.

I´m not sure what caused the trouble. When I lived in Chile five years ago, I was obsessively careful to avoid tap water, ice cubes, uncooked vegetables, and other things they say will make you sick. I even used my SweetWater filter to purify the few drops of water that wet my toothpaste each time I brushed my teeth. This time I have not exercised any caution. And that worked fine for three weeks. So I suspect that my lifestyle between 1 pm on Sunday and 6 pm on Monday might have been the culprit. During those hours, the brief visit of my friend Chris, I didn´t sleep and I consumed a café helado (basically a coffee ice cream float, and the reason I didn´t sleep), fast food pizza, a McFlurry, and a nectarine we bought on the street. The most suspect food though was Monday lunch. We ate at one of those restaurants where the food arrives too quickly, suspiciously quickly, and there are no real napkins, but those slippery white things that feel like wrapping paper and just push the grease around. The thirty hours were like a scavenger hunt where we had to "collect" everything they tell you not to do and not to eat. On Sunday night, we climbed Cerro San Cristobal to watch a spectacular sunset over Santiago, and got so lost in the moment that it was a dark night by the time we thought about leaving. The funicular and teleferico had stopped running. This left us with two options for our descent - the completely unlit, wooded trail or the occasionally lit, twice as long, and relatively dangerous - due to traffic, especially bicycle traffic - road. With visions of hooded men, waiting in the woods for tourists, I had no interest in the foot trail. It took us over an hour to descend on the paved road, during which time my attention was divided between listening to Chris, checking the dark woods to our sides for muggers, and watching our back for cars and bikes.

Reading Thomas Merton´s "Thoughts in Solitude" has become the last thing I do before I sleep each night, and his chapter on bells recently answered a question I asked rhetorically in the entry Taxi Don Miguel, "Last night I slept in a town with two churches. And two church bells. I think that the albergue was between the churches. Or inside them. Very close to them. Why I wonder do the bells ring all night?" Merton responds, "Bells are meant to remind us that God alone is good, that we belong to Him, that we are not living for this world. They break in upon our cares in order to remind us that all things pass away and that our preoccupations are not important." The bells reminded me, hourly, that sleep is fleeting, transitory, ephemeral, and that I should not become attached to the sleep of this world. I still wonder if the reminder could have come every four hours instead and at least let me complete one sleep cycle. But obviously the human memory requires a lot of external reinforcement. If not, I would have learned the coffee lesson for good a long time ago.

Mallrat

If you read this entry backwards while watching Married with Children, a great secret will be revealed. Yesterday, I was surprised to overhear my favorite Icelandic band, Sigur Rós, playing on the television. I turned away from our game of domino to see what the occasion was. It was playing as the soundtrack of a montage on a program called “Amor Ciego”. This is a show where a dozen men in their twenties live together in a mansion and compete for the affection of a 24 year-old blonde model. (If you sat down to watch Chilean television without the sound and were forced to guess what country you were in, any country in Scandinavia would be a perfectly reasonable guess.) The men prepare food and presents for Carolina, who then – without knowing which food, gift, etc. belongs to which man – eliminates the worst. The responsible party then reveals himself and has a chance to say sweet parting words to Carolina before he is dismissed from the program. Hence, “Blind Love”. In the dismissal scene, which apparently occurs at the end of every episode, the men wear black tuxedos and gather by moonlight in the garden below Carolina´s balcony where they anxiously await her arrival. She eventually emerges in a white gown accompanied by another woman who does most of the talking. Sometimes, a lucky man gets to spend time one-on-one (“a date”) with Carolina, and to choose the Valentine´s Day date, viewers voted by cell phone text message.

If this sounds a lot like an awful show you accidentally saw once on American television five years ago, that´s about all you need to know about Chilean television. It´s the worst of American TV with a five year lag. Oh, actually, there´s one other thing you should know about Chilean TV. Chile loves “Married with Children” so much that it has its own version, “Casado con Hijos”. It´s the same show only with Chilean actors, who oddly resemble their American counterparts. That “Married with Children” is the show – the only one I´m aware of anyway – that inspired a remake strikes me as some important insight into Chilean culture. At this point, you might be wondering how much television I´ve been watching, and the truth is as little as possible. But I´ve been hearing a lot. Both because it´s common conversation material at the dinner table (translated excerpt: “Oh poor Edmundo, he´s so sweet and sensitive. He actually loves her. Poor thing. He´s so sensitive.”) and because the television is on all the time. I´m staying in an apartment with Guillermo and Isabel – he a retired policeman and she a real estate owner and house wife extraordinaire. They are not yet married because Isabel is separated and divorce only became legal in Chile in 2004 (and though it´s now legal, it´s still not easy). When Guillermo is awake, or at least out of bed – because he sleeps sitting on the sofa sometimes – the television is turned on. From noon until the middle of the night (I haven´t stayed up late enough to know exactly when) the soundtrack of the apartment is whatever´s on. Because the apartment is a kitchen-dining-living space separated from the bedrooms by thin walls, there´s really no escape.

I have found one escape. The mall. It´s an easy, thirty minute walk to relative freedom. I say relative because obviously I´m just trading one irritation for another. The mall is so busy, its assault on the sense so complete and consistent that it becomes like silence. The environment is so replete with distractions that – for me – they cease to be distractions; they cancel each other out. One wave cannot rise above the great sea of commotion, and I sit still in the midst of apparent chaos. While the television in the kitchen-dining-living space dominates the entire house, the televisions in the mall (for some reason playing a VH1 show in English) have to compete with babies screaming, that alarm that goes off whenever someone tries to shoplift (which seems to be often), the 80´s ballads that characterize the music taste of the mall DJ (do malls have DJs?), and on and on. I sit in the middle of it all – the Starbucks’ lounge under the escalators surrounded on all sides by pedestrian traffic – and write with a focus that I haven´t found outside of the cabin I rented in Vermont for a weekend of uninterrupted peace and quiet. I know that travelling around the world to sit in Starbucks is… well, if I want to write a classic travel narrative, I´ll have to take some creative liberties on this chapter. Starbucks in Chile is a funny thing. Chileans don´t really drink coffee, especially overpriced gringo coffee. And then there´s the size issue. As many of you probably know, Starbucks calls its sizes “tall”, “grande”, and “vente” instead of the more traditional “small”, “medium”, and “large”. This is confusing in Chilean because, as many of you also know, “grande” means “large” in Spanish. “¿Usted quiere el grande grande o el grande mediano?” Umm… sí. The barrista indicates the model cups and, using the universal language of the index finger, I tell her which size I would like.

Isolation

Last night, on the Chilean evening news, a report on the first “cyber-school” in Chile caught my interest. The tone of the story was one of progress – The Future is Here, Now, in Chile! The correspondent interviewed various cyber-students and their parents, all of whom praised the school and stated a preference for red Kool-Aid. Parents expressed an appreciation for the flexibility of the curriculum and its ability to meet the individual needs of each student. The students – interviewed while “in school” – seemed thrilled that math class looked a whole lot like Tetris. Towards the end of the report, in what felt like a peace offering to the gods of journalistic integrity, the reporter interviewed a psychologist. Because apparently it takes years of graduate studies to understand the link between social interaction and healthy emotional development. The psychologist explained that for this reason, the absence of peers is one drawback of cyber-schools.

As a pedagogue, I think the cyber-school is an absolute disaster. As an animal rights appreciator, however, I see the glass half-full. In the 1960s, the controversial research (monkey torture?) of psychologist Harry Harlow produced conclusive results linking isolation to psychopathology. In the words of Harlow (from no less an authority than Wikipedia…), “No monkey has died during isolation. When initially removed from total social isolation, however, they usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by autistic self-clutching and rocking. One of six monkeys isolated for 3 months refused to eat after release and died 5 days later. The autopsy report attributed death to emotional anorexia. The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.” The research confirmed the importance of social interaction, but of course, the monkeys were not asked whether or not they wanted to participate in a study designed to induce psychopathology (Harlow called the isolation chamber “the pit of despair”). I suspect (though wouldn´t place a bet) that the performance of such tests on unwilling human subjects would provoke a public outcry. But if the subjects were not only willing, but paying to participate in the tests and calling it “school”… well, that´s a victory for monkeys and science.

Today, on a two-hour inter-Santiago bus ride from one Chilean host family to another, I put pieces of plastic in my ears and turned on my handheld boredom alleviation device. I chose “Falling Slowly” from the Once soundtrack and turned the volume up to a level that my ears would never tolerate in a quieter ambient, but which just barely managed to rise above the sonic landscape of car horns, construction, the diesel engine, and the ice cream vendor pacing the center aisle and shouting, “helado heladito helado heladito chirimoya piña mora-crema naranja helado helado”. Shut up, shut up, shut up! I don´t want an ice cream. Especially not a fruit-flavored ice cream. That´s a popsicle, not ice cream. Shout in my face when you´re selling something with chocolate in it, ok? Now shut up so I can listen to my music. You´re completely ruining this song. Wow. The voice in my head thinks that all of you people are interrupting my enjoyment of life. Isn´t that interesting? Which part of me thinks that life is my movie theater and you better turn off your cell phone and not talk during the show?

About half way through the song, I looked up to notice that a new noise I had been trying to ignore was the music of a woman and a man – she with a guitar and he without arms – singing a duet. Almost as common as the ice cream vendors on Santiago buses, are the tough-luck troubadours – usually an unkempt man with a guitar or a wooden flute playing for coins from the passengers. This was the first time I had ever seen a couple playing together on a bus. As hard as I tried to be oblivious, I couldn´t miss the odd synchronicity of events. (Once, for those of you who haven´t seen it, is the story of a man who plays his guitar and sings on the street for money, and then meets a woman who makes music with him.) Once I acknowledged the ironic situation, I had a choice to make. I could continue to listen to my hBAD or I could turn it off and listen to live music. If I continued to listen to “Falling Slowly”, I would no longer be choosing a beautiful duet over traffic noise and shouting, I´d be choosing a recorded duet over a real-life duet. The same person who hours earlier had scoffed at the absurdity of cyber-school, I almost chose the former. In part because I noticed my own inconsistency and didn´t want to be hypocritical in addition to isolated, I took out my earphones. The music was so beautiful it moved me to contribute every coin in my pockets (200 pesos). Then, feeling better about myself, I returned to my aural isolation.

If it looks like vacation... and smells like vacation...

In Chile, every pack of cigarettes is branded on both sides with black warning labels courtesy of the Ministerio de Salud (Department of Health). On the pack I´m studying (Pall Mall – Krystal Frost), the black box of doom entirely covers half the surface area. On one side, for example, the top half – white with green lettering – reads “Si de pronto te inunda una sensación fría que no conocías, estás bajo el efecto Krystal Frost. Más que mentol, frescura instantánea.” (If you feel a rush of cool sensation like you´ve never known before, you´re under the effect of Krystal Frost. More than menthol, instant freshness.) Directly under this declaration, the schizophrenic cigarettes warn, “El humo del tabaco se impregna en todo tu cuerpo y te mata día a día.” (Tabacco smoke penetrates your entire body and kills you one day at a time.) Wow, mixed messages, right? How do I know which part of the pack to trust, the top or the bottom? Since the color black often represents pure evil and is generally worn by the bad guys (Darth Vader) and green is the color of trees and life and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I´m inclined to believe the part about freshness. Oh but wait, there´s more. The other side of the pack has something to say, “Estos cigarillos te causan cancer, infartos, enfisema, dañan tu boca, tus dientes y todo tu organismo.” (These cigarettes give you cancer, heart attacks, emphysema, and hurt your mouth, your teeth, and your entire organism.) Here´s the kicker though: the photograph of crooked, yellow teeth and brown, receding gums. If you´ve ever been to the dentist, you´ve seen this cautionary horror show – headless mouths with the smiles of pirates and witches, silently shouting at children, “Brush your teeth, little one, or I´ll be visiting you every time you look in the mirror! Muwhahaha!” It´s really frightening. I tried to photograph it for you – words just can´t quite do it justice – but my camera would not focus properly. I have owned this camera for five years now and never had this problem before. I tried many times and with various lighting schemes, and each time the photo came out blurry. Do you realize what this means? My camera is alive. The so-called “auto-focus” feature is not some soulless computer built to do my bidding. My camera chooses when to focus and on what. And its strategy for coping with obscene images of oral health is exactly the same as mine – blur the sight.

My feelings on the campaign are mixed. While my lungs are pretty tired of all the smoke in public places, I doubt that the warnings or image have much of an effect; who starts smoking by window shopping? Furthermore, I don´t think that anyone – with the possible exception of criminals committing crimes related to teeth or oral hygiene – should be subjected to this image. I´m not sure what the exact definition of torture is – we´d have to consult Donald Rumsfeld for clarification on this – but repeated exposure to images of rotting mouths meets my definition. I guess my takeaway from all of this is a newfound appreciation of the laws back home that ban smoking in bars, restaurants, and other public places. Oh, and on a related note, here`s an interesting statistic: according to a book (presumably researched), breathing Santiago air is equivalent to smoking 60 cigarettes a day. In all fairness, that number is based on the air quality in winter - the worst of the year thanks to a lack of wind. Still, if I worked for the Ministerio de Salud, I know what my priority would be...

If you read the entry titled “A Departure”, you´ll recall my ongoing struggle to define this trip, to label it with one word that has a commonly understood meaning in the English language. It would make life easier. “Studying abroad”, for example, produces fewer follow-up questions than “umm, I don´t know”, which can be especially useful if you want to convince someone – like an airline official or immigrations officer – that you don´t plan to stay in their country forever. I previously explained that none of the obvious options – studying, working, vacation – seemed appropriate. Well, I´m not so sure anymore, so I´ll let you decide for yourself. The following list outlines, with the percent probability in parentheses, what I might be doing if you chose a random moment to observe my life in Santiago:

• Sleeping (41.67%)
• Eating (13.67%)
• Shielding vulnerable grass from dangerous UVA and UVB rays (7.33%)
• Napping (6%)
• Doing anything that will help me avoid another nap (8%)
• Yoga or meditation (10.33%)
• Worrying about the future (3%)
  

If you checked my math – and you´re reasonably adept at addition – you noticed that the total doesn´t add up to 100. That was intentional. The percentages reflect the fact that I´m not currently living at 100%. If you´ve ever heard the old cliché about giving 110% and wondered how that is even possible, this is the explanation; it´s simply using the surplus life force from times when you were only living at 90%. I haven´t decided yet what I´m saving up for, but I´m leaning towards a week on Mocha Island. Yes, Mocha Island actually exists. I know it sounds like the straight-to-garage-sales sequel to Candy Land, but it´s actually a piece of land in the Pacific Ocean, 34 kilometers from the coast of Chile. Its size is 14 km by 6 km, which makes it just big enough for a lighthouse. Although it is the second oldest lighthouse in Chile, it apparently should have been older. Legend (and presumably scuba diving) says that the island is to shipwrecks as Saturn is to little pieces of rock and ice. Needless to say Mocha Island had me at the word mocha. My guess – educated in the sense that I know the definition of mocha – is that this magical island has beaches of pure chocolate, which are lapped by a sea of coffee (presumably run-off from Colombia). Where sand and sea meet, a foamy mocha surf forms. I can´t decide whether to bring a cup or a straw…

Freedom - $69

Pay phones. They still exist. Hoping to call home from the Atlanta airport, I almost didn´t expect to find one. Given the omnipresence of cellular telephones, the pay phone market can´t be very strong. Apparently, Bell South offsets the lack of demand with a fee of $1.25 for every call placed using a calling card. The declaration of the fee is followed by this helpful tip (which I copied word for word because I didn´t want to lose any of its unintentional hilarity), "To avoid this extra charge, hang up and place your call from a non-pay phone." Yes, of course I could place my call from a non-pay phone, but for a number of reasons which I will outline, I think that $1.25 is a total bargain given all the extra benefits the pay phone offers:

1. The complete lack of privacy. I enjoy talking on the phone in public places. Loudly. Because I have a more exciting, racy life than most people, and I want them to know it. It´s not only about scratching my ego though. I like to give back to the community. If living vicariously through me brightens the day of even one passerby, that person might spread the joy to one other person who will do likewise until the world is a better place.
2. The germs on the mouthpiece. I rarely get the flu shot, but I find that using a pay phone is a cost-effective alternative. It´s like a vaccination cocktail. The exposure to dozens of strains of influenza and colds gives my immune system the opportunity to fight them off all at once. Rather than falling ill every two weeks during flu season, I get them all at once, and then - after five days of hellish fever and hallucination - I´m healthy for months.
3. Storytelling potential. When I am older and tell long-winded stories about how rough things were "in my day", well... honestly things weren´t actually that rough. But with a little bit of exaggeration, the pay phone might make good material: "Listen here children, when I was your age we didn´t have teleportation. If I wanted to talk to someone in another place do you know what I had to do? I had to use something called a pay phone - That was spelled with a "ph" in my day. Isn´t that crazy? Nowadays if it sounds like an "f" it´s an "f", but back then, well, you can just imagine the spelling tests... brutal. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the pay phone. We had to pay $1.25 - that´s 6 of your universal currency chips - to be allowed to use a machine covered in bacteria, where everyone - except the person on the other end of connection - could hear every word you said, and we had to use it standing up... in five feet of snow!"

In the category of "all´s well that ends well", I was nearly denied permission to board my flight in Madrid. Given my customs-friendly haircut, I expected to slip through airports like a hot knife through butter. Well, I should know by now what life does when I have expectations... it provides me with opportunities to find freedom from the shackles of expectations. Sometimes that freedom is pretty expensive though. I was denied boarding for lack of a return ticket (another ironic chapter in the story of my clever purchase of a "cheap" one-way ticket...). Chile has a 90 maximum visit duration for tourists without a visa, which I knew, and without a return ticket - proof that I would leave the country within the 90 day limit - Chilean immigrations would deny me entry. I was told to proceed immediately to the Delta ticket office and purchase a return ticket in order to board my flight. The dream of total freedom - traveling parts unknown without the constraints or imposed structure of an itinerary - died suddenly, abruptly, tragically, so young, so much potential. Its wake was to be held at the Delta ticket office, and with my flight departing in under two hours, I didn´t have much time to mourn. I explained my predicament to Wade, the British man at the Delta counter, and he chuckled. I was the crazy American with the one-way ticket; he had been expecting me. He explained that I could purchase a completely refundable return ticket for - he cringed, became very apologetic, like he had just wronged me in such an egregious way that the words stuck in his throat - for, well, for ummm... he couldn´t quite spit it out. A lot. It was a number with four digits, and the first one was a two. He couldn´t quite meet my eyes. I think this is the part where he expected me to start yelling. But it´s all completely one hundred percent refundable, except for the 69 euro processing fee, he explained. Busy imaging my future as a street urchin in Madrid, I couldn´t quite hear the words as Wade continued to assure me in this "everything will be alright" tone of voice that the ticket would be entirely refundable, except for the 69 euro processing fee, that it´s just to prove to the Chilean government that I have the means to leave the country. Oh shit. The means. The means. The means are in my savings account. It´s 3:30 in the morning in my country. And the means are in my savings account.

Skipping ahead to the happy ending... I went upstairs to a top-secret office area that I needed a special badge to enter. There I was able to use the internet to transfer the appropriate funds. With a 15 kg pack on my back and a tent in one hand and a handbag in the other, I dashed back down the stairs and ran all the way back to Wade where I purchased the "magic ticket" - that´s what he called it - and only had to pay a 69 US dollar processing fee because Wade made a mistake on the computer which he then could not fix. I exclaimed, "Wow! It´s my lucky day!" He didn´t hear the irony, which I thought I had laid on pretty thick, and explained in a flat tone that yes, he had entered the data wrong and could not change it. With the return ticket in hand, I was permitted to board the flight, and about 26 hours later I landed in Santiago, Chile. I have successfully returned the outrageously priced piece of paper, so in theory the dream of South American freedom is alive and well again, but I fear that the youthful innocence of the boy who bought the one-way ticket is gone forever.

A Departure

With today being my last day in Spain, it seems like an appropriate time to address a frequently asked question. Why? What am I doing here? I´ve been asked this question by Spaniards, Germans, Americans, one Nicaraguan, and myself (plenty of times). After the question has been posed, I tend to pause in contemplation, which is universally interpretted as Time to Play a Guessing Game! Yay! "Studying? Work? Vacation?" No, no, not exactly. I don´t mind the guessing game at all because I secretly hope each time that the person will guess correctly and then I´ll know the answer. I think that I´ll know it when I hear it. Sometimes I call it a "vacation from life", but that seems to imply that what I´m doing is somehow separate from life, which clearly it´s not. In fact, using that term caused Inés (one of the Germans I met towards the end of the Camino) to refer to my "former life". I tried to clarify that while this is clearly a huge departure from what I´ve done with my life to this point, I don´t see this journey as a rejection of anything that came before it.

Before my departure from the States, I received a letter from a friend. She asked if my travels were to be a "spiritual journey". I wrote back and said that yes, I expect they will be, but I don´t really know what that will mean. I only know that it being a "spiritual journey" doesn´t differentiate it from the rest of my life in any way. The one book that I carry with me (other than the audiobooks on my iPod of course...) is a pocket-size gem of Thomas Merton writing called "Thoughts in Solitude" - an incredibly thoughtful pre-departure gift from Sara. Given how much solitude I found on the Camino Primitivo (13 days of walking alone and three total albergue-mates over the 13 nights), it has proven quite appropriate.

Oh, before I go on, I should at least explain how I am in Spain. Though I can´t necessarily say why I´m here, I do know how it is that I came to be here, and perhaps that - because it is more concrete - will be a useful starting point. My original plan - first conceived in September 2006 to satisfy my life coach´s appetite for big dreams and out-of-the-box thinking - was to fly to Santiago, Chile with a backpack and then travel north by bus and foot until reaching California. The plan was attractive not because I actually thought I would do it, but because even considering it challenged my "ego ideal" (my perception of who I am). The concept of living mostly on foot and out of a backpack for months on end was foreign enough to excite and challenge me just as an idea. I didn´t think I´d actually have to do it. But it didn´t go away. So in early October of 2007, I rewarded the idea for its persistence by purchasing a one-way ticket to Santiago, Chile. Since a one-way ticket to Santiago was a little bit more expensive (this is true) than a ticket from Boston to JFK to Madrid to Atlanta to Santiago, I decided that I would take a three and a half week layover in Madrid and spend some time in Spain for "free". I felt smug.

Almost two months passed and I started to think about my completely unplanned journey. And when I say "think" what I mean is worry. In one nightmare, for example, I rode a bus in Spain with my 5,000 cubic inch capacity backpack entirely empty. I had not packed one thing. If I had a background in psychology, I could probably explain how this dream represents my fear of death or sexual impotence. But since I don´t yet, I´ll go with the obvious interpretation... my fear of being totally unprepared. I began to think about the trip logistically. The strength of the euro and the basic costs associated with staying alive made it clear that this trip to Spain - the clever little trick I played on Delta - would not be remotely free. So what did I do? I tried to get out of it, of course. Worst case scenario I figured I´d have to fly from Atlanta to Santiago on February 5th and forfeit the rest of the trip without refund. And yes, it would be inconvenient and costly to get to Atlanta, but not nearly as costly as three and a half weeks in Spain (which I calculated might be equivalent to 2-3 months in Latin America). I called Delta or Expedia or India and spoke with somebody. The man had to put me on hold to get answers for me. When he returned his voice sounded upbeat and I could change my itinerary - good news! If I paid two fees - a change of itinerary fee and a reissuance fee - of approximately $800 total, or more than I paid for the original ticket. The weirdest part: the tone of his voice was not "we regret to inform you..." From the tone of his voice, he entirely expected me to give Delta/Expedia $800 in addition to the three seats (Boston-JFK, JFK-Madrid, Madrid-Atlanta) which they would promptly re-sell. And I thought my offer to give them those three seats for free was pretty generous...

So that is how I ended up in Spain. On the one hand, you could say that I´m here for financial reasons (first because I thought it would be "free" and later because I didn´t think it worth $800 to not be here) On the other hand, you could say that all the signs indicate that I am supposed to be in Spain. Call it God, life, fate, synchronicity, the universe, Delta... someone/something wants me to be here. And here I am. Merton writes, "All truly contemplative souls have this in common: not that they gather exclusively in the desert, or that they shut themselves up in reclusion, but that where He is, there they are. (Merton refers here to Christ, not necessarily the language I would use, but I think that language is at a bit of a loss in this realm anyway.) And how do they find Him? By technique? There is no technique for finding Him. They find Him by His will. And His will, bringing them grace within and arranging their lives exteriorly, carries them infallibly to the precise place in which they can find Him. Even there they do not know how they have got there, or what they are really doing." (I added the bold for emphasis.) I´m not sure how Merton would feel about me quoting him in an attempt to lend spiritual justification to my quarter-life crisis...

Wow. I´m trying to come to an eloquent and definitive conclusion to this entry, but I cannot concentrate on anything other than the outrageously loud voices of two twenty-somethings who are alternately flirting and fighting. It sounds like fighting anyway. Part of the problem could be language frustrations; they are speaking English which is evidently the native language of neither. She seems to be trying to teach him how to use a computer. He won´t stop talking long enough to listen to her directions, so she repeatedly loses her patience and scolds, "Listen! Listen! Listen! Just listen, ok?" Ok, ok I´m listening. I pretty much have to eavesdrop. Which reminds me of the perfect words Lauren wrote in a card wishing me well on my travels, "Go slowly and notice as much as you can." There it is. That´s what I´m doing. Thank you, fighting couple in the internet place, for reminding me.

Though I´ll probably continue to include a photo or two in my blog when a visual aid is useful, I´ve created a "flickr" account to archive the majority of my photography. At this point, it´s not very user friendly because I haven´t yet organized or labeled the photos in any way. I plan to do that at some point, but my first concern was purely practical - the need to put my files somewhere and clear the memory card of my camera. Still, I definitely invite you to browse the images if you´re interested. The address is http://www.flickr.com/photos/elgringoandante/

Where the heck are my laurels?

When I arrived in Santiago de Compostela on Thursday afternoon, the end of the journey was a bit anti-climactic. I did not follow a blinding white specter of Santiago Matamoros to his tomb. I did not fall on my knees and kiss the cobblestone plaza in front of the historic cathedral. I didn´t even buy a t-shirt of a skeleton with a walking stick that reads "el Camino me mata". I just felt hungry and tired. After consuming two multiple course meals in a span of four hours, I still felt the same way I´ve felt for the past two weeks - ready for the next one. I am not not not starving. I have eaten relatively well on the Camino, but when I heard the term "caloric deficit" while listening to the final chapter of "Into the Wild" last night, I thought to myself, hmmm... I bet I´ve got that. While I enjoy eating, a bottomless stomach is something I´ve never been accused of having. After the second dinner - well, after the hot chocolate and cheesecake after the second dinner - I went back to the hostel, ready to rest on my laurels for a while.

I couldn´t find them anywhere. I know exactly where I had packed them, remember stuffing them into the sleeping bag compartment of my pack at the last minute. They simply weren´t there. One of two fates likely befell them. Either they were lost somewhere along the way, like my headlamp... may it find a good home. Or I unintentionally dumped the laurels after the second day of walking when I feverishly emptied my pack of anything that I deemed unworthy of its weight. The following are some of the casualties of the weight purge. The list should illuminate two things: 1) How naive and inexperienced I was in the initial packing process, and 2) How severely the weight of my pack had affected the functioning of my brain in just two days. (You can play a little game here by guessing whether each item is representative of condition 1 or condition 2. I´ll try to make it pretty obvious.)

• Deodorant. This item was invented for the backpacking lifestyle (lots of sweating, few clothes, fewer opportunities to wash those clothes, occasional showers...) Oh, and if you can´t remember how much a stick of deodorant weighs, go pick yours up now...
  
• The majority of my guide book. Before leaving Madrid, I bought a very thorough guide to the Camino (one of the best decisions I´ve made in 2008). Of the guide´s 100+ pages, only about 15 pertained to my route - el Camino Primitivo - so I tore out those 15 and dumped the rest.
• Green Life is Good Frisbee. Frisbees don´t weigh much (175 grams), but they are awkwardly shaped for packing. And ummm... winter in Spain...?
• Black Paper Holder. This is a great accessory for a job interview. It´s slim and sexy and leather-esque. It´s good for holding a resumé and up to one other piece of paper. I´m pretty sure it´s why Eaglebrook hired me. Now it´s in the trash in Salas.
• Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada. This García-Márquez novel is brilliant. A classic. How do I know? Because I have already read it and own a copy at home. The day before leaving Madrid, I purchased this hardcover copy of the book from a street vendor for the very reasonable price of 4€. Now it lives in the Salas albergue with the Frisbee.
• A lock. Why? To lock things I guess. The world is scary and dangerous, so before leaving the safety of the United States I was a good consumer and bought padlocks, a money belt, and an obscenely heavy cable bicycle lock.
• And almost... almost threw away my Alf stationary. I included the photo of said stationary, so you have an idea of how awful it would have been to lose this fine item. I know that Alf is a bit overweight, but honestly, how much weight does he add to my pack? This is probably the clearest indication of my deranged state after two days of walking...

In response to my brother´s comment on the bedbug fiasco, I did not call the 24 hour taxi service. I want to clarify the ambiguity of my previous entry. After removing my clothes, stuffing them into a plastic bag, and tightly tying that bag (from which they have not since been removed), I showered and then spent close to an hour meticulously scouring my sleeping bag and removing the bugs. Because they came from the bed - and not from me! - the bugs were basically restricted to the outside of the bag and the area around my head where they had begun to enter... so getting rid of them wasn´t as difficult as it could have been. I then slept in a different room on six brown chairs that - because they lacked sides - could be pushed together to form one of the least comfortable sleeping arrangements my body has ever experienced. The hard, cold floor would have been far more comfortable (for its uniform nature), but I didn´t trust the floor because obviously that´s where bugs end up if they fall out of bed, right? I slept for about six hours, then woke up and walked to Santiago. But I can imagine how someone might call a taxi at 1 am in that situation.

As long as I´m on the subject of my least favorite albergues, I should probably give honorable mention to the one in Padrón - just outside of A Fonsagrada. It was the one albergue with a television, which I would have traded without hesitation for heat or hot water - it had neither - but because it was there, I had to turn it on. And because it received only three channels - and it was dinner time - I had to watch the national news for the fifteen minutes it took for the novelty of the accelerated electron images to wear off. During that time, I learned that the top floors of a Las Vegas casino hotel were on fire. A fire - with zero casualties - in an American hotel made the national news in Spain. For in depth analysis, they called on their correspondant in New York City, who, from her vantage point (in North America), was able to offer special insight as she watched the same footage of the fire (presumably borrowed from CNN) that we were watching. She literally said something like this (I´m not being funny), "As you can see, this hotel casino is a tall building with walls and windows, and it´s on fire. The color of the flames and the upward movement of the smoke suggest that this is a hot fire, which is behaving in accordance with known scientific laws regarding combustion." At first I thought it odd that TVE called on their NYC correspondant - surely Mexico City would be closer geographically - but then it dawned on me that New York City is closer emotionally. Only a person in the United States - or maybe one of its territories - could really gauge the emotional response of the American people to this victimless tragedy. The absurdity of this report made me consider a few things:

1. Why not save a bunch of money by getting rid of international correspondants and replacing them with correspondants in front of blue screens (not that much further from Las Vegas) a là the Daily Show with Jon Stewart?
2. Does my poor sense of world geography prevent me from realizing that this sort of farce occurs all the time on American international news reports too?
3. No wonder the internet and blogs are such a popular form of news gathering. While Constanza Martínez essentially offered subtitles for a video clip of fire, there was probably someone in the hotel updating her blog: I lost $85 in the slots but the buffet dinner was so good I didn´t even care. They had those eggs I love! You know when they cut them in half and stuff them with OH MY GOD! Why am I getting all wet? The sprinklers. I think there´s a fire in the building! I´m going to move quickly and calmly toward the nearest fire exit.
   

Sleepless in Santa Irene

Here it is. The ubiquitous taxi service advertisement. Like bunk beds, muddy boots, and cold floors, it´s a sure sign you´re in an albergue. It finally occurred to me to take this photograph on the last night I spent in an albergue. And I´m glad I did because this is one of my favorites from the whole Camino. First of all, you can see that a number of people have used the service or at least succumbed to the temptaion to take the number "just in case". Secondly, you´ll notice that the Spanish taxi looks a little dated. That´s not actually what they look like. Their cars are quite like ours, only of course smaller and more fuel efficient. It turns out that America controls the clip art market and tends to release new products domestically months or even years before they become available internationally. Hence the antiquated automobile. Lastly, you see that this service is available 24 hours a day, which means that no time is a bad time to quit the Camino. But are there really people who wake up at 3 am and give up? I got into bed pondering this ridiculous notion and feeling anxious to turn it into a joke on my blog. Soon enough the universe would give me my punchline.

I couldn´t sleep. My roommate, Renet - a Czech man who has been travelling Europe by foot and exclusively by foot since the second of last April (!!!) - snored so loudly that I could hear him over the trucks that shook the albergue as they thundered past it on the massive highway that doubles as the front lawn. In addition to the noise, my nerves were buzzing on caffeine (apparently 11 am is too late in the day for me to drink coffee...) and the excitement of the eve of my arrival in Santiago. I lay in bed listening to "Into the Wild" in audiobook format on my iPod and sleep alluded me. After close to two hours of sleeplessness, frustration began to set in - my body started to feel hot and itchy and claustrophic in my mummy-style sleeping bag. I pointed and flexed my feet to pass the time and channel the restless energy. Still not asleep nor even tired, I felt intensely awake, felt like I wanted to get out of bed, put my boots back on, and walk the final 21 km to Santiago immediately - by flashlight in the middle of the night. Even my ears - confined by the tight fit of the wrap-around earphones for almost two hours - itched with restlessness. You know how once you feel itchy in one place, you start to feel itchy everywhere by some psychosomatic trick of the mind? Well, sometimes it´s actually bedbugs. This was one of those times. My mind kept saying, I´m not doing anything! This isn´t my fault. There´s really something there. Come on. I wouldn´t do this to you. Ok, for a few minutes maybe. But then I´d get bored and bother you in some other way. You know how distractable I am. This is real. You really itch. By the time I found the courage to turn on my headlamp, I already feared the worst: that my mind was right. And it was. Bedbugs aren´t big (about deer tick size) but they are quite visible. And this was a plague of biblical proportions. I kind of freaked out. I took off all of my clothes very quickly and then paced around the albergue naked trying to figure out what to do while my mind screamed, AHHHHH!! Bugs! Bugs! I was right. I told you. Bugs! Not me. Bugs! Burn your clothes. Take a shower. No, no time. Leave the albergue now! Run naked to Santiago. And then it hit me... 24 hour taxi service. I laughed. I actually laughed. Stark naked, barefoot on the cold floor, skin taut and goosebumpy, and my stuff full of bugs, I stood there and laughed. Because the universe is funny. Life gave me a way better punchline to the 24 hour taxi service joke than I ever could have dreamed up with my brain and pen and paper. Thanks life!

I have arrived safely in Santiago de Compostela and want to share many more stories of my adventures, but I think I´ll stop here for tonight and return tomorrow to continue the saga. I need to spend time living too or I won´t have anything to write about.