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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.