Putting my Spanish to the test

Wednesday April 9th

I woke up with a hangover of sorts. On 3 pints I can only assume I was more dehydrated than I thought, even though I had bought water on the way home. I knocked back the remains of my water and it all seemed to clear up very quickly.

Anyway today I had to get ready for my upcoming trip. I had signed on to an organised tour through Argentina and Bolivia leaving at the end of the week, mostly because I wanted someone else to organise buses and hotels for a while. But it does have a bit of camping, so I needed a few extra supplies. And because I remembered the cold from the Tongariro crossing, I needed gloves and a scarf.

But the most challenging thing of all for my fledgling Spanish was going to be getting a haircut. But actually it turned out to be pretty easy. As I was walking through one mall, on my way to the hairdressing mall (I kid you not - there is a mall here with about 60 shops, and 50 of them are hairdressers), I passed by a hairdressers. The guy in the door said something, which I guess was do you want a haircut, or maybe you need a haircut (I didn't think it was that bad looking). So once I'd figured out afeitar dos (2 shave) it seemed to work out. Of course it still frightens me when I see that amount of hair come off, or to be precise the little amount left. I'm still not used to my hair that short.

My spanish still hasn´t really progressed to a point where I could talk to the barber though. Again I got out I was from Ireland, and that was about it.

I then went to get the rest of my bits and pieces, and then again with the football. Its a handy way of breaking up the day, having a sort of siesta. This time there was no belly dancing in the hallways, just yoga.

I decided I wanted a pizza for dinner, so went to a pizza place in town. The pizzza here are a bit strange, the meat on them tends to cover the entire pizza so you can't actually see the base. As I was concerned at my lack of vegtables I took a veggie pizza option. Actually I took one without olives, it just happened to be a veggie one. When it arrived, there were olives on it. I wasn´t too happy, its probably the most disappointing meal I have had since I got here.

I then decided to do some net that evening, so I headed back to the area near my hotel (there is no net access in the centre of town after 9, you have to head out to the suburbs). There was a nice pedestrianised street I´d seen but not gone down, so I headed for that. I noticed there were a lot of leaflets littered on the ground as I got there, I think they were calling for free education, but didn't really pay attention. So I walked round the corner onto the street...

... and straight into a big politcal protest by what looked like students. It was quite loud, so I decided it probably wasn't the best place to suft the net (or have an ice cream - my other task for the night). I turned off the street with the protest and ran straight into the riot police. In fairness they weren't tooled up, in fact they were just standing around smoking, but they were there in case things got out of hand.

So I decided even finding a net cafe on another street might be a bit of a problem, and I just headed back to the hotel to watch TV. I don't think there was any trouble, but the Lonely Planet did say one thing about Chile is that they are a placid people, yet protest marches can spring from nowhere and get quite agitated. I thought that was some sort of weird stereotype, but it seems to be true.