The Night of the long snores

Hola, we´re in South America, aigh aigh aigh, arribbbaaa!

Before I get into once another insight to the wonderful worldly world with wagg I´m going to give you all a bit of advice, and I´m going to say it once so here goes. If you ever find yourself in a room, namely a 8 bedroom dorm with a collection of Australian and Brazlian twenty somethings and they seem to have some sort of disorder in which breathing at a volume less than that of a Airbus A380 taking off do not hesitate to suffocate them with a pillow. Infact, any soft object that will stop the insufferable and constant rumble eminating from their throat will do. Unfortunately this is something I didn´t realise till about 10a.m. this morning and I´m now facing a ten hour bus journey over night, with only a couple of hours of sleep in me. SNORING IS THE ROUTE OF ALL EVIL. Forget banning YouTube let´s start with the real issues here! Ok complaing over...

It´s was something of a funny feeling stepping off our 12 hour flight from Auckland but still managing to arrive 4 hours before we left, but hey, we were in South America and there was only a mere 8 hours left of the 40 hour 20th February we were tackling. I think my first regret of my trip hit home moments after the wheels screeched onto the tarmac and we were wandering through the arrival lounge suddenly realising, oh shit no one speaks English. Now just so you know it´s not like when you go to Greece, Spain or even America when it seems on the surface that no one can grasp our mother tongue because Chile is a whole different ball game. When I say no one I mean, no one (well maybe one or two but we´re talking needles in haystacks in fields here!)

I must say though we are starting to get to minor grips with this highly romtansised language they speak but saying that Pete did just get his sideburns abused in a hairdressers only about an hour ago. "Sideburnio...no problemo, adios." Thank god for hair re-growth (sorry Dad, Uncle Andrew, Phil P and anyone else who´s mop as a touch on the lighter side. Anyway I´m digressing here, the fact of the matter is I now know how it feels to be a foreigner in Britain. Take this for example the other day, we´re all looking for plug adaptors (adap-ta-dor in Spanish) when after about what seemed a day and a night (with snoring) we stumbled accross what seemed somewhere we might get what we wanted. Well it was but it turns out that it´s no only the English, when presented with someone who doesn´t speak their language, thinks the best way to communicate is to do one of two things. The first being repeating what they have just said but v e r y slowly and LOUDLY, and the second, the one we have found the most frequently here to just keep speaking just as fast but change what they have said. Now I know we can be thought of as quite an ignorant bunch when it comes to languages but if I ask someone for directions in really broken Spanish and the persons reply comes back at the accommpanied with a handful of sonic booms I´m going to struggle. But anyway it´s not all bad we did manage to get ourself instood, and possibly robbed yesterday, although we´re still not totally sure.

We´ve just spent the last couple of days in a nice little city called Valparaiso just north of the capital, Santiago, where we all are now after we returned here on the bus to catch a football game. Colo Colo v Ñubmense. One interesting thing about Valp though, the bus drivers of freakin´mental. It seems like they own their own buses, drive around faster than they speak and the one we met clearly took inspiration from Pimp my Ride when he decorated his cab.

We thought the best thing to do was to get to the football early, get our tickets from the office and then nip off for a couple of cheeky ones. Only thing is when we got to the ground there was no ticket office, instead about 40 Chilian teenagers bombarding us with questions with the word Boletto frequently being mentioned. Now from our recent bus journey we knew that this of course meant ticket but they didn´t want to sell, they were asking for us to buy. Thinking this was a touch odd we found some older chaps, who confirmed that you bought a ticket for the game today and was given another one for next weeks for free, take note Premiership Chairman! Now understanding why Gringo was the buzz word amongst our new adolescent friends and why we were also the most popular people at the ground we handed our tickets for next weeks game over to the highest bidder, or in my case whoever won a round of rock, paper, scissors (although at first when I suggested the game one of the kids thought I wanted them to fight for it!)

Thinking that was that, we headed of for quattro cervezas y capriña (for Claire) por favor only to be malled once agin by a younger set of Latinos. Thinking I had done my good deed for the day and I still had ambitions to go to today´s game I walked past the boy in question, mainly because I´m not quite at the level as being able to say, "Listen mate, I just gave my ticket to his over there, if you want it you´ll have to pester him instead" in search for the nearest bar. Thinking I would take one last glance at the carnage we had just left I found the same boy with a rock, not much smaller than that of a football lodged in his right arm, posing as he was about to lauch the f*****g thing in the direction which only could be described as ours. Not knowing quite what to do I remembered my last blog entry and swooped in with a bit of British charm and smiled at him to which he replied kindly to by dropping the stone, if only it had been on his foot!

Either way I don´t hold any grudges, apart from with anyone from stayed in our dorm room last night and wasn´t English and in hinsight a broken foot may have been a touch harsh, especially as Colo Colo, the team who he supported lost 4-1. We still don´t know if we were swindled though!

We´re off to Pucon tomorrow though, leaving the big city to what seems to be the Queenstown of Chile, although like I said we´ve got to sit on a bus for ten hours to get there! Oh how travelling the world is so tiresome. One last thing before I go, Pete and I are thinking about hitch hiking to Kosovo for charity later this year and would like to get as many teams of two together as possible so if your interested drop me a line.

Keep it real children of the Empire!

Tim

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