Yesterday morning I though of checking my Chilean entry stamp as my 90 days visa was about to expire. Squinting at the stamp I noticed that I had day and year confused and therefore my visa was not expiring on the 10th, but this very morning. I was hours away from becoming an illegal immigrant. I went to the busstation right away, but they had changed the schedule and the next bus was this morning. So today around noon I was standing slightly nervously in front of the border official, who looked at my stamp, frowned, looked at his watch, looked up at me and said "es un día de retraso". I looked back at him with my well practiced, slightly confused "I don't know what is going on, I don't speak your language, please bear with me" look.
He decided he could not be bothered with this and stamped my passport.

This reminds me of one of the many perks of being a foreigner, always having an excuse for my habitual confused way of being.

Oh, and formality, especially, but not restricted to digital conversations. I find it soothing to be able to play the "it is my second language card". Being email or chat or anything, it is nice to know that misses in tone will probably be overlooked.
Which is probably one of the reasons I find it more relaxing to write and speak English than German.

I am sending at the moment from a hostel in Mendoza, occupying the one bed in this dorm, which has a plug next to it. On Thursday this blog will be off for another eight hours, when I will going back to Valparaiso.

with your "your mind controls reality" ideology.
And your pervertisation of the placebo effect and quantum theory. You will be in for a surprise when your spirituality will not cure your cancer.

You are not any better than creationists.

... are not the countless human rights violations Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden revealed...

...nor that whistleblowers are incarcerated and tortured and journalists are threatened...

What really scares me is that there are no riots on the street.

Erin is gone and I should have time now to write more posts, but I have been knitting diligently as I was close to running out of gloves to sell. (Un)fortunately when I set down my stall today the just finished gloves where ripped out of my hands, which means a) I had money for a nice bottle of wine and b) that I spent another evening knitting. Anyway, tomorrow I should finally release a beta version of version2 of the blog *proud*, and sometime this week there will be posts on the travel blog about Erin's and my journey, highlights include us sitting in a wooden boat on the pacific with Orcas playing around us and me not throwing up.

I'm currently all alone in the flat , yesterday the guy who always randomly shows up showed up to clean the apartment as someone was coming to look at a room, but they didn't. But I have a clean kitchen now, so no complains. Sra Luz also happened across my small and beloved electric heater, which means now there is a paper with house rules on the wall forbidding the use of electric heaters, which I make a point of ignoring.
There is still the possibility of Spiderman becoming my new flatmate.

Erin and me fell out off character this Saturday and actually went out. Rodrigo and his band were playing a concert in the house he used to live in. A crazy place it feels like it has just been nailed together according to how much rooms are needed. His band is good, they should not have ended with Coldplay, actually they should not have played any Coldplay altogether, but their own songs were good and they did some nice covers as well. Somehow, for some reason Erin and me started making a list of concerts we would go to if we had a time machine.

These were:

Bob Dylan in New York beginning 60s when he was young and cute
Bob Dylan 66 Manchester Free Trade Hall

Queen

David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust persona

We were divided about Woodstock, Erin first wanted me to just take her 10 year younger self, but I pointed out that, considering she does not remember me taking her, we would logically destroy any chance of ever finding it if we agreed to it. So she requested to have a shower built into the time machine instead.

A Beatles concert in order to SCREAM with the other girls.

At this point we noticed that we should really visit a hair dresser in each of the time periods we go to.

As we were running out of ideas for concerts we decided to become extras in movies instead.

We are going to stand in the crowd in the town square in Princess Bride

I'm going to be in the background of a flower girl scene in City Lights

Erin is going to have her own Hitchcock moment in all of the Hitchcock movies.

After planning all this we noticed that none of out time machine plans include killing Hitler or any other dictator. We will be busy getting a haircut.