Alone at the beach

It rained here on the Argentine coast most of the night and into the morning. The weather is still gray and wet. There’s not a lot going on in a beach town when it rains. I guess there’s not a lot going on in a beach town ever, but that’s because everyone is at the beach.

Well, I’ve been in South America for a full week now. Today is my eighth day. I can’t say I’ve done a whole lot. And I can’t say that bothers me either. But I am getting restless. It’s hard to adjust to being a traveler again. I got so accustomed to being busy when I was in Colorado. There was constantly something happening and I always felt like I was going to be late.

Now, here I am, with all the time in the world. I’m not exaggerating. All I have is time. I couldn’t imagine, just a few weeks ago, not knowing what to do with myself. But every morning the time stretches out in front of me like the longest road through a flat stretch of farm land. The days are long here because it’s summer. They seem so very much longer coming straight from 4:30 p.m. sunsets in Colorado.

The vastness of my time comes mostly from a lack of people to fill it with. In Colorado, I felt so rushed and pressed because I had so many people to see and spend time with. I complained that I was never alone except when I was driving or in the bathroom. Here, I am alone.

I spent my first three nights on the beach at an old inn along the shore called the Hotel Hispania. There was a very nice man running the place, Hugo Rodriguez. He rented me a room to myself with two twin beds and a shower head in the private bathroom for 80 pesos a night. My budget for a day is 100 pesos.

I ate fruit for lunch and empanadas, like tiny calzones, for dinner. I still demolished my budget. But I enjoyed the time to myself for a bit. I fell asleep at 8:30 one night. The sun was still setting.

Hugo spent some time chatting with me one afternoon. He had read in a 1961 Reader’s Digest that General Lee had had to think on whether or not to lead the Confederate Army. Hugo asked me where General Lee was born. I said I thought it was Virginia, but we could check. I looked it up on Google for him and he was so grateful, he transcribed a famous poem about a woman in a green dress for me. I was wearing a green dress. All of this was in Spanish and I have decided I only genuinely understand about 45 percent of what people say to me. In context, I understand about 80 percent and the other 20 is just lost. The numbers go down the longer I’m speaking and the more tired I become.

I thought I would have to leave my quaint little beach town in order to find a hostel where I could spend less money and where I could meet other young people. But then, wandering around aimlessly one afternoon, I found a hostel. It’s 40 pesos a night, plus 5 more if I want breakfast and get up in time. Much better.

I had a nice coffee that same day and the waiter was so intrigued to meet a foreigner that he invited me out the next day. I met Daniel at 11 a.m. and he took me to the forest along the beach on his scooter. I told him about my boyfriend over lunch and he still paid. We walked around a bit and decided to meet up the next morning to ride bikes. I waited for him about 20 minutes. I kinda think all the time I spent telling him about my boyfriend may have dissuaded him from showing.

But I have made a new friend in the hostel. His name is Peng and he’s from China. I’m afraid to say his name. I’m afraid I’ll say it wrong and it will be offensive. I don’t know why. He's told me a lot about Chinese culture though and now I am thinking about taking a trip there one day. We rented bikes yesterday and rode all day. We went into the Bosque Energetico. It’s an amazing cluster of pine trees, growing so tightly together that the sun can’t come through and nothing grows on the ground below them. The trees themselves seem to be dying from the bottom up, though they are very much alive and green at the top. The branches rub together as if the trees are talking to each other and whispering secrets.

It’s so strange how lonely the forest looks with nothing growing on its floor and how decidedly not lonely the forest seems for the closeness of its trees.

People believe there’s an energy in the forest. And certainly there has to be, because the forest has survived this long in strangling closeness. Apparently NASA conducted a study here some years ago. Some people believe the forest is a center for extraterrestrials. Deep in the forest, they say it’s as dark as night and the tangles are so tight, no one can get through. Daniel told me there aren’t even any animals living in the forest.

Peng and I didn’t go that deep into the woods because we had our bikes. We rode through tall willow bushes and pushed the bikes up sand dunes to the beach, where an eerie fog covered the water.

It was an awesome day. We planned to finish it off with Parilla – as much Argentine meat as we could eat. We rode out to the suggested place. But it’s closed now that the off-season has started. We went to another spot in the heart of the city. It was 40 pesos a person and we decided to splurge. But they don’t even open until 8:30 p.m.
The people who eat at 8:30 in Argentina are the same ones who eat at 5 p.m. in the U.S. They are senior citizens and families with young children and the occasional people who missed lunch. The crowds don’t start showing up until 10 p.m.

The Parilla restaurant was basically a buffet. But it was a buffet where all of the vegetable dishes seemed freshly prepared with fresh produce and where the meat came straight off the grill and onto your plate and the fish was cooked in small sauce pans moments before being served. It was delicious and absolutely worth the $12 it cost.

Oh, I bought strawberries at a fruit stand yesterday that were the size of berries—the way they were in the US before we “improved” them. They were delicious.

Tomorrow I will take an overnight bus to Bariloche, where I will stay with the same family I stayed with four years ago and will go to the same language school where I first learned Spanish. I look forward to having a built-in purpose and a built-in social network. I also hope that I can get up to 60 percent or so of genuine understanding and maybe lose less than 20 percent.

There’s little talk here about the earthquake in Chile. I wonder if they will need help. I may see about going over there in a month or so. I feel, right now, that I would be getting in the way. That, and I want to speak better Spanish before I insert myself into what I imagine is such a fragile environment.

That’s it for now. Forgive the length of this entry. It’s a rainy day.

Viajando

I haven’t been gone long, though it already feels like forever.

I left late Sunday, early Monday after having my friends and family gather at a brew pub in downtown Denver for one last hurrah. My parents met my boyfriend’s parents for the first time and I think it went rather well.

Once I arrived in Atlanta, the baggage people thankfully agreed to store my giant backpack for the day and I set out into the great city that hosted the 2000 Olympic Games. The public transportation was simple, cheap and fast. I was pleased.

Having no watch and having relinquished my cell phone in Denver, I knew only that it was early when I disembarked the MARTA train at the CNN center. I walked through the darkened center, where people sat quietly eating Chic-Fill-A breakfasts in a massive food court, watching a massive TV in one of the most confused building interiors I’ve ever seen. Hotel rooms from the Omni hotel gazed down on the food court filled with Burger Kings, McDonalds and Starbucks while newsrooms and CNN office spaces were labeled in big neon lighting. I knew TV news was commercial, but it seemed disconcerting to see all that together.

I walked into the city center in dreary fog and found a bazaar diner with multiple levels and a mix of night club and 50s diner décor. Since it seemed certain it would rain, I decided early on to forego the Segway tour. I figured I’d go to the puppetry museum after my CNN tour.

I shared my tour with a gigantic group of fifth graders, which has its benefits and downfalls. Fifth graders are a curious bunch and they ask a lot of interesting questions that I enjoyed hearing our guide, AJ, answer. However, fifth graders are a curious bunch and they ask a lot of questions.

During the tour, AJ, pointed out that there were no dividers between the desks in the newsroom.

“Back when newspapers were big, that’s how they did it,” he told our group. “They did it that way so people could talk to each other in the newsroom. That was before IM and facebook were big; people don’t really need to talk so much anymore.”
Not joking. CNN’s newsroom is organized in homage to its ancestor, the newspaper. It’s sort of like how humans were made in the image of Apes, you know?

We also got to take a look at the Headline News offices. It’s now going by the nickname HLN, AJ explained. I imagined a tour in a few years where the guide asks a group of fifth graders what HLN stands for and no one knows. “Headlines,” the guide will explain were what people called the title of an article in a newspaper. An article is like a story on the TV news, but written. So the headline told people in a few words what the story was about.”

Anyway. It was an interesting tour. I like CNN. I wish I could have come away from there feeling like they actually cared about news.

It probably didn’t help that I was so tired I just wanted to lean my head against the window of the newsroom and take a nap. By the end, I could hardly hold my head up and decided I had to go back to the airport and look for a place to sleep. I checked in six hours early for my flight and found an empty section of waiting area with two chairs connected by a table where there were no armrests, curled up and slept for almost three hours.

It was almost as early when I got to my hostel in Buenos Aires. I left my clothes, took a shower and wondered the city until I couldn’t stand it anymore. The sun was out, the weather was warm. It was a great day. I had a Napolitano pizza. I swear. I’ve had pizza in Italy and I’ve had pizza in Argentina and I’m not really sure which is better. The pizza here is so amazing and so ubiquitous. It’s on every single corner. Probably more popular than Starbucks in California or New York. The Napolitano has thick layers of fresh Mozzarella with fresh slices of tomato, visible chopped garlic, oozing olive oil and a couple green olives just for color. Yummm. I’ve had a few already.

Then I took a four-hour nap and sat around trying to decide what I, as a traveler, was supposed to do that night. I wandered up to the rooftop deck hoping to make a quick friend. I hung out with a couple Australian guys and more and more people joined us until we were playing drinking games and planning a big night out at the clubs.

The alcohol seemed to have a dulled effect on me, thanks, I’m sure, to coming from altitude. I was definitely glad later that night/morning when my bunk mates wandered into the room at about 6 a.m. after a night at the club and I’d been cozy in bed for hours.

I walked around town the next day and visited the famous Reccoletta Cemetery where Evita Peron is “buried.” I didn’t get to see her tomb. There was funeral in progress that day and I suspect the services were near where she is. But I know I’ll have plenty of chances to go back.

I went to a fancy dinner with Miah, my new Israeli friend, one of the Australian guys from the night before and an audacious American Army guy. They drank and wrestled after dinner while planning for a big night out. I chatted with a Dutch computer genius and convinced him to answer an online personal ad.

Deciding that I don’t quite have my travel legs yet and need a little time on my own before exposing myself to hardened backpackers with alcoholic tendencies, I asked the travel guide at our hostel for a tranquil beach recommendation. She suggested Miramar, which is not in my Lonely Planet guide.

I was almost the only person on the bus and nearly got off in Mar del Plata, a bigger and more popular destination, out of fear that there wouldn’t be a place to stay or that it would all be too expensive or dodgy. But I decided that if it was no good I would still have time to get a bus back to Mar del Plata. And if I didn’t go to Miramar, I could be missing out on not only a great experience, but the experience I was actually seeking.

I found a nice female taxi driver who put me at ease immediately and told her I was looking for cheap hotel near the beach. She said she knew one. The first place was absolutely charming, but they had no rooms. We stopped at two others, one with no vacancies and one that cost $50 a night. Then we stopped at a place called the Hotel Hispania. It’s not the nicest hotel in the world. It costs about $23 a night. I have my own bathroom. Breakfast is included and the older gentlemen who run it are wonderful.

I burned myself on the beach today and found the cutest downtown ever this afternoon. I will stay one more day. This hotel is a bit rich for my blood. I’m trying to spend no more than $30 a day. But I’m so grateful to the travel agent for recommending Miramar. I’m not sure I’ve been any place that wasn’t in a guidebook except for San Simeon in Mexico. And there I had my own personal guide.

Here, I am a rarity. Nearly everyone is a tourist. But I am the only foreigner I’ve seen and I get a lot of glances because I suspect I’m the only woman traveling by herself that most people have seen around here.

That’s all for now. Hasta luego

Gateway to the Universe

I have always loved the airport. It's a magical gateway to the universe. On long layovers, I like to walk up and down the concourses looking at the names of exotic destinations like Akron/Canton and Omaha. I look at the people waiting to board planes to Los Angeles and compare their fashion to those waiting for flights to Dallas or Detroit.

I often found myself surprised by how much alike those going to London Heathrow seemed to those going to Indianapolis. I would look at the names of the destinations above the gates on my way to Chicago or Denver and wish I could shift gears and jump undetected onto a plane headed for San Jose, Costa Rica instead.

I've always taken mishaps in travel in stride because I've never minded long waits in airports. There's no better place on earth for people watching, I thought. And the airport was always so much more diverse than my typical surroundings, especially in small mountain towns where the number of people representing most minority groups didn't even reach into the double digits. There were people with accents and different colors of skin, wild fashion, bad fashion, no fashion and new fashion in the airport.

Now that I am spending more and more time in the airport and examining the people who travel through it carefully to measure the likelihood they will part with their personal information in exchange for a fuzzy blanket with penguins on it and the dim hope of a free flight in the future, I'm rethinking the way I look at airports.

They're not nearly as diverse as I once thought they were. I work on the Frontier wing and nearly every Frontier flight in the country comes through Denver. The concourse also hosts a number of international flights from carriers like Continental and Lufthansa. With travelers from all over the country and all over the world, you would expect to hear more languages and see more colors. It struck me recently that the population in the airport is not at all representative of our overall population. It's not a whole lot better than the little mountain towns where I have lived. And there are definitely fewer Latinos in the airport than there were in Jackson Hole.

I know travel is a privilege and especially air travel. It's not something everyone can afford. It's not something everyone can even imagine doing. I've talked to hundreds of people on their first flights ever or their first flights in more than a decade. They never sign up for a mileage card. Never. It's as sure a sign they won't fork over their social security number as a sweet tea request was a guarantee of a bad tip when I worked in the restaurant. But they are interesting people to talk with. They're usually traveling for really big, life-changing reasons. A lot of people are hoping for a new job and a fresh start. Some are coming back from weddings or funerals or honeymoons.

The bank tells us we have a 90 percent approval rating for our credit card. I don't believe it. That's simply unbelievable in these times of limited credit. I told a woman who was applying about our hard-to-believe approval rating. She and her fiance were on their way home from Costa Rica. She agreed that the number seemed outrageous.
"But then it could have to do with the type of people who fly," she said.

This has certainly been an interesting job. I walk through security some days and imagine I'm there for my flight to Buenos Aires. I leave on bad nights wishing it was on my plane. I'm anxious to get going when I'm there yet a little reluctant when I'm in my real life with my friends and family. Four months seems like a long time. I went for four months the last time I traveled. But I'm older now. I wonder if I'll be able to make friends in the hostels the way I did four years ago. I wonder if I'll be able to tolerate dorms and long bus rides the way I did the last time I traveled. I hope my money will hold out.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing the airport as a gateway to the universe again this Sunday night. Working there has made it a bit more like an ugly limbo world between worlds, a place where my coworkers and I make inexplicable money getting people to sign up for credit cards, a place where angry travelers vent their hostility at me. I believe in mileage credit cards. I use mine and fly free all the time. I think I typically get more from them than they get from me. But the bank has to be making major dollars off most of the people we sign up or it wouldn't pay us so generously to do it.

Well, this was a little scattered. But this is what's going on. I'll write again before I board my flight.

Irregular

I am going to South America. I know I’ve already told you that. But now I have proof – a confirmation e-mail from Delta Airlines.

Since I’m sort of long on time and short on money, I opted to save $250 by purchasing a ticket that forces a 14-hour layover in Atlanta. I will arrive there at 6 a.m. and depart for Buenos Aires at 7:45 p.m. Rather than dreading a long boring wait in an airport, I’ve decided to welcome this as an extra leg of my adventure. I’ve never been to Atlanta before.

I’d love advice from those of you who know the town. For those of you who don’t, did you know that Atlanta is home to the world’s biggest puppetry museum? A quick visit to Atlanta’s Web site has given me 50 fun ideas for a day in the phoenix city. If I can squeeze it all in, I’m thinking I’ll do a Segway tour of the city, visit CNN and, of course, the puppetry museum. A Segway tour, that’s right. I know you’re jealous.

I do need to be careful not to spend the $250 I saved by getting the cheaper ticket. So I’d still love some help planning my big day in Atlanta.

I waited quite a while to buy the ticket for a few reasons – I wanted to make it possible for a friend to join me when she gets out of school in June. I wanted to give my knee a little extra time to heal and the medical bills time to arrive. I also wanted to spend some good quality time with my family, friends and that boyfriend I mentioned before. I’ve also frivolously planned a couple domestic vacations.

Delaying my departure has had a few side effects. Because I’m leaving later, I’m still in this country. This country is significantly more expensive than the ones in South America. That means the savings I built up to sustain me during four months in South America was at risk of dwindling rapidly.

So I have this job to keep the whittling to a minimum. I’m not waiting tables, but there are a lot of similarities between waitressing and getting people to sign up for Frontier Airlines Master Cards at the Denver Airport.

As in waitressing, there are good sections and bad sections and everyone wants the good section. There are also those people you work with who always make more money than you. It’s inexplicable. When you’re waiting tables with them, you wonder if they just turn their tables faster, talk sweeter, flirt more or trick their customers. You wonder what magic potion they’re taking. And how you can get your hands on it. The same is true in the credit card biz. There are those stand-out people who get twice as many people to sign up as I do and I don’t know why or how they’re doing it. I’m charming. I would sign up with me.

The airport, like a restaurant, is full of interesting people who are a delight to talk with. There are also a few rude folks. At least in the airport, the rude ones just walk past in a flurry instead of sitting in your section and complaining endlessly before stiffing you.

The feeling of working at the airport is also similar to that of working in a restaurant. I start the night worrying that I won’t make any money at all, that I’m wasting my time. I get to a certain point and know that I’m Ok, but still worry I won’t make enough to really make it worth it. Then I reach that magic number and start to wonder if I could leave at the end of my shift with a fortune, but usually end up falling a little short .

The biggest difference is that people go to restaurants because they want food. They don’t go to the airport looking for a credit card. That makes it a bit of a tough sell. Good thing I can handle rejection. Thousands of people walk past me shaking their heads every day. Only a few say yes. It makes me LOVE those people who say yes.

Another side effect of my late departure is that I’m homeless a lot longer. One of the most confusing questions people ask me right now is, “where do you live?” Nowhere, everywhere. In my car, maybe. At least when you’re traveling in a foreign country no one asks you such complicated questions. I spend a few nights on an air mattress in my friend’s house in Denver, another with a friend in Littleton, a few with Joe in Colorado Springs and some days with my parents. It’s exhausting.

I’m almost never alone except when I’m driving or taking a shower. And I know that when I’m traveling it won’t be much different. I will be in a different bed every few nights and on the road every few days, constantly moving. Though I will likely never be alone, I’m sure my chances of getting lonely will be a lot higher as I’ll be among strangers most of the time.

By the time I come back and try to settle down, I will have been without a regular life, without regular work or a regular place to live for eight months. Eight months. That’s a long time.

I’m not complaining though. Even though it’s exhausting, I’m loving this irregularity.