San Pedro is a nice small town in the Atacama desert a few kilometers from the mountains. Volcano Lincanbur looks a lot bigger from San Pedro. The streets are all dirt and the houses adobe, which is very pretty. It is a tourist town too. I am always excited to be in the first town of a new country. I went to a coffee shop and was surprised at how much a sandwich was. The woman there seemed more smug than the Bolivians. I was there for a couple hours and went to Calama.

The drive from San Pedro to Calama was beautiful. It was all desert, nothing was growing whatsoever. It was like being on mars. In the distance I could see snowcapped mountains. Calama was a nice town. It had a nice walking path, and you can see the snowcapped mountains in the distance. There were sand dunes just outside the city and places you can rent sand boards to ride them. It was here in the walking path in Calama where I first noticed some of the stereotypes of Chile: That they love ice-cream, and junk-food in general, and they have a well rounded worldly culture. They have a lot of the same clicks in Chile as in America. I was walking down the mall and I saw some long haired and dread-locked guys sitting outside a movie theater drinking coke with wine, which they call Jota. They asked me if I liked Reggae music and said there was a reggae concert that weekend.

The next place I went to was Antofagasta, the third-largest city in Chile. Antofagasta is between the coast and the steep hills that lead to a high plateau. We descended until we got there.

Then I went to La Serena. I went there because it had a nice beach. La Serena is a nice college town, but there was nobody on the beach. On the bus from La Serena to Vina del Mar I sat next to a German girl who was teaching German in a German school for Chilean kids.

Vina del Mar is a very beautiful place with well kept gardens and a central pedestrian street. I stayed there one night, the next day I went to Valparaiso to stay for a night. Valparaiso is an interesting place because it is wedged between the bay and hills. The downtown area that is wedged between is quiet small, and the way to get to the upper part is by elevators that areon rails. On the upper part of the city is the neighborhood part. I spent one night in Valparaiso. Then I went to Santiago which was exciting because I had planned on living there.

The drive to Santiago was nice. You climb out of the city up a hill and past forests with pine trees and past a couple of villages and through two tunnels. The second tunnel is on the top of a small pass, and when you come out of it you see the valley of Santiago and the snow-capped mountains on the other side. You can see the smog though. When I got to Santiago I went directly to the hotel Valparaiso which is right in the center of town right two blocks from the central pedestrian street. I happened to be there for the end of September week of independence, and I went to an outdoor festival along the parque Forestal which is against the river. Every hundred meters there were rock groups playing music. It was interesting how right when you get out of the scope of one band's music, you enter the sounds of the next. There were street performers too. I smelled marijuana every couple minutes. I was watching one group and saw a guy with a wife and two small children rolling a joint so I walked up to him and was watching him smoke so he and his wife offered to share their joint with me. Then they asked to have some of my beer so I shared that with them. I got really stoned and it was cool to be stoned again after going almost a month without smoking. There were lots of people selling and drinking beer at the park, I had a bottle of cognac with me. People were constantly asking me to share my cognac with them, and I guessed correctly that this is a culture of sharing. One girl who asked for cognac from me wouldn't go away and followed me for a bit and told me to sit down on some steps so we could finish the bottle together. While we were drinking it people were still asking to drink it, and she was trying to tell them there was none left. Then she kept saying "que onda?", which means "What's up" in Chilean slang. I got annoyed because no matter how I answered her all she could say was "que onda," so I left. I was in Santiago for three days, one day I went to the top of the hill San Christobal, which is a hill about 400 meters high that has a ten meter statue of the virgin Mary. It is a very beautiful view from there.

After Santiago I went to Chillan for a night. I walked around that town for a little bit, seeing the central plaza and the central shopping mall.

Then I went to Conception for a night. The drive to Conception was very beautiful because the road was along a thick and green pine forests that looked very similar to Colorado. It was raining when I got to Conception. The bus station was not near the center of the city, so I had to take a bus to the center, which was about a fifteen minute bus ride away. The city center was similar to Santiago because it had a large central plaza that was connected to two pedestrian streets that branch out in two directions. I walked to the train station, but it was abandoned.

Then I went to Temuco for a night. Temuco was on the highway in the forest. It's city center was surrounded by some nice looking sky scrapers.

Then I went to Pucon. Pucon was a very beautiful small town on the edge of a lake that is surrounded by hills. Pucon is twelve kilometers from Volcan Villarica, which is a beautiful active volcano that when you climb it you can look into it and see bubbling red lava. From the top is a beautiful view of the surrounding mountains and the lake and the town. I didn't climb the mountain though. When I first got there I went to see the beach with the lake. It was a beautiful black sand beach. While I was there I saw a guy holding a lot of didgeridoos and bamboo saxophones. Knowing that artisans almost always know where the weed is I walked up to him and asked him, so he led me across town to a cheap restaurant where one of the cooks sold us a joint. I got stoned with him and I invited him climb the volcano with him, and he wanted to. But the next day when I woke him up he said he wanted to do it with crampons but he didn't have the money for them. One day I was there rented some skis and went to the hotel where the buses leave for the mountain but couldn't go because that was the first day that the ski resorts were closed. I could see the ski lifts from the town. I rented a bike to climb the mountain one day.

The next place I went to was Valdivia. At the bus station a German man approached me and asked me to stay at his hotel. This man lived there with his Chilean wife and had a couple of children. He led me to his house and gave me a room. It was a nice house and the upstairs had a nice TV room. There were two other guys staying there. An architect from Los Angeles and a computer dude from Australia named Paul . the guy from L. A. had just been in Argentina checking out the architecture which he liked, I think the said it was like Swiss Architecture. Valdivia is a very beautiful city. It is at the confluence of two rivers in the forest. It has a nice plaza near the river. On the bank of the river there are sea lions eating fish. I walked to the college campus which is on an island in-between the two rivers. My first night there I went out for drinks with the two guys staying at the hotel and the German owner and his wife. His wife could speak English and German. The American guy left the next day but I spent four or five nights there because Paul kept asking me to go to the discos with him and I couldn't get up before the 11 o'clock check out time the next day. Paul was fun to go to the discos with because even though he knew no Spanish he was always picking up on the hottest young girls ands calling me over to translate and then leaving and hitting on another girl. One night we were at a disco just around the corner from the hotel and a girl grabbed Paul and started dancing with him. Then her friend grabbed me. We were dancing for an hour or so and I got really drunk and the girls took us outside and said they wanted to take us home with them but we discovered they were with about seven or eight guys. After we got into the cab a couple guys got in with us so the girls took us out and we got in another cab. While we were changing cabs I noticed one of the guys was very angry and had his fists clenched and was yelling and a couple of guys were holding him back. There was another guy there who said he was one of the girls brother and he lived with her abut was trying to convince us to come back with them. And another guy kept asking us if we liked to box. We got into another cab with the girls and I locked the door but one of the guys unlocked it and a couple of them got in with us and the rest of them got in another cab that followed us. We drove around the block and the guys in our cab were talking to the cab driver like they knew him stopped and the girls got out and were standing outside. Paul said he was nervous and wanted to go home so we got out and walked to our hotel which was only a couple hundred meters away.

The next morning I went to Puerto Mont, which is another very beautiful town on the edge of the sea facing south towards the Chiloe island. Almost as soon as I got out of the bus station I noticed that this town was crawling with grumpy drunk guys and I didn't feel entirely safe as I was walking around the town looking for a place to stay. A girl who approached me at the bus station took me to a hotel, but they couldn't find the key to my room after about twenty minutes so I left and searched higher up on the hill for a place I saw on my lonely Planet book but it wasn't there so I started to walk away, and at that point a boy of about 12 approached me and told me his house was a hotel. But it looked more like a house to me. I had a room on the second floor, but the woman who owned the place let me watch TV in her living room. My room had a beautiful view of the bay and the city and the snow-capped mountains to the east. The next day I b ought a ticket for the boat ride to Puerto Natales. On my way back from the dock to buy the ticket I walked into a kiosk that sold random decoration -type things and there was a really cute well-endowed young girl there. A couple of minutes after I left I decided I wanted to talk to her so I went back and we talked until her place closed and then we went for coffee for a couple of hours.

The next day I got on the boat on the boat I met a 20 year old dread-locked French dude who was staying in my room named Jean-Charles who was studying in Argentina and was on a little vacation from school. There was a Spanish woman named Cynthia sharing our room with us too, but after an hour or so we discovered that the boat was like a fifth full so they got their own rooms. It was great having my own room and shower for the trip, and the food was absolutely delicious. For the first three days I was hanging out with Jean-Charles and Cynthia, and the last day a Spanish couple, Juan-Jose and Patricia were hanging out with us. The boat ride was nice. We went in canal-looking waterways between rocky islands that had evergreens. In the background there were snow-capped jagged hills. On the third day we went out in the ocean for about four hours, most of it was at night, b but some of it was in the day. The boat was rocking a lot and I couldn't study my Harry Potter vocabulary without getting an eye ache. On the last day as we were making our way into the bay of Puerto Natales the boat had to squeeze through a very narrow area that was about 400 meters long. We had to slow down and maneuver it around in order to not hit the rocks. At one point we saw a ghost ship that had struck a rock and was just sitting there for the last 20 odd years. The final approach to Puerto Natales was beautiful. There were snow-capped mountains on all sides.

The town of Puerto Natales was quaint. When we got off the gang and I went to a hotel that was recommended to one of them. that night we went out and had a fun karaoke night. the next day they went to do a boat ride to the glacier at Torres Del Paine and I stayed back and relaxed because i wanted to hike around there later. the next day Juan-Jose and Patricia rented a Pathfinder and gave ;me a ride to the park. On the way we stopped by the road a few times to watch the animals. There is a large flightless bird there that looks like an Emu except it is smaller about as big as a dog, that is brown. They weren't very smart though, when we drove up beside them they would just run back and fourth against the fence that lined the side of the road seemingly trying to get away. There were tons of Eagles flying all over the place and perched on the fence. There were also herds of wild animals called (?) that looked like a mix between a Llama and a Camel. When we got to the park after we signed in we drove across a bridge that was so narrow we had to push the rear-view mirrors in order to fit. After we had a picnic in the grass at the first camp sight they left and I set up camp.

It was cool camping again. I felt like I was back home in the cool air. The next morning I hiked up to the camp sight at the base of the famous Torres. The next morning I hiked up there to the base of the towers. In front of them was a small frozen lake and then the rock shot straight out from the back side of the lake and split into the two tours about half way up. From suing my altitude watch and how high my book said the towers were I figured the Twin towers of the world trade center were about a third as high if their bases were at the lake. Then I hiked around to the other side of them along same beautiful lakes with mountains in the background. That night I slept at the base of a huge mountain that was covered in glaciers. And throughout the whole night I hears the crackling of falling ice every 3 minutes. the next day I hiked to the last camp sight before the hike to the glacier, but the next morning I just took the boat back because I figured I would just see the bigger glacier Moreno. The boat went across a lake that had neon blue water from the algae.

The next day I took the bus to Chile's southern-most city Punta Arenas. Near there was a colony of small Penguins on a nearby beach, b but I couldn't go on it because that week the Penguins were breeding.

When I looked out of the window of the bus when we arrived in Santiago, I immediately noticed how much different it was from Buenos Aires. I had forgotten how dry it was, kind of like a desert. I noticed again how much more similar the landscape of Chili was to Peru.

I had a huge backpack and a bike with one wheel so I decided I would take the taxi to the hotel instead of the subway. I knew where I would go, Nuevo Valparaiso, the hands down best choice for the budget traveler in Santiago because it is only two blocks from the central paseo (mall, or walking street), is only three thousand pesos a night, has big rooms with high ceilings and big windows, a kitchen, and a cool common area with a cable TV.

I remember not really being in the mood to hang out with anyone and meet people, because I really wanted a job and had been traveling for so long I just wanted to settle down. But unlike the year before, this time the hotel was full of tourists. I met an Australian couple the first two nights I was there, and then almost at the same time, three more people, Dave, Jonathan, and Rick showed up. Dave was a computer engineer from San Francisco who grew up in New York, and had been traveling through South America for the last few months, Jonathan from Dublin, had been traveling a few months and was looking for English teaching work also, Rick was an older English guy who was very interesting, but talked forever in a monotone voice. He was talking about teaching English also. I Immediately was hanging out with those three guys a lot, watching TV, and sharing the weed I brought from Argentina with them. After a couple days I noticed there were three other gringos staying there. Julius, a 24 year old computer marketer from San Francisco who lost his job when the technology market bottomed out and had been traveling off unemployment in South America for a while, and for the last two months, been working on a non profit computer educational project for the last two months with Eddie, a 43 year old (although he looked 33) computer programmer who was also from San Francisco. There was an English girl there also named Corrine, who I didn't see very much because she had a job as an office manager and a Chilean boyfriend.

It took me about two weeks to start looking for a job, because I wanted to move into my room first, organizing stuff and settling in. I was also totally unmotivated because of being too used to just traveling and smoking too much pot. But when I finally looked in the Yellow Pages and looked on Dave's Cafe to see which institutes were recommended, I decided to go to a place called Polyglot that was close to my hotel, as I was planning on staying at that hotel for my entire time in Santiago. The place was owned by an old German guy, but the guy that did the hiring there, Jose, said that he had some classes for me because a Canadian guy who had the class for a month suddenly got his dream job at home and had to suddenly go. Jose was very nice, and said I should just do my best to just make them happy, and if I didn't mix with them that was OK because teachers don't always get along with the students. He asked me to call the teacher to ask him what he was doing in the class. He didn't say much, just that the students had their good days and bad days, that they were shy, and the last thing he had taught them were contractions. It was a pretty good schedule, eight to twelve thirty Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, with another class Mondays and Fridays way out on the outskirts in the same general direction. Jose was dressed immaculately, which I couldn't help but notice, so I asked him if I should wear a tie to the classes; but he said it was unnecessary. I rode my bike out to the class and found it was divided into three consecutive classes, from 8-9:30, with the boss who could speak English well, so we just talked, then from 9:30-11:00 with a group of three, two very basic women and an intermediate man, then two women who were intermediate until 12:30.

I immediately found that teaching Chileans was a lot different and more difficult than Argentineans or Koreans. Not only were they more basic, but they seemed to not have any personalities. They didn't seem to have opinions about anything, I had to totally lead them like they were young obedient children. The final group of two women I had was a nightmare; they had their grammar down well, but they absolutely refused to speak any English. The book we were using, New Interchange, was designed to urge the students to speak, by asking personal questions, and questions asking them to explain specific things, but they would just look at me and answer them like they were yes or no questions.

The next class I had on the outskirts were for a young banker who could already speak English, so we just did conversation, which was pretty much the only way I knew how to teach advanced students at the time.

Around the same time Jonathan got a job with an institute called Executive Business Solutions with an American owner, and for the first week or so seemed to be enjoying it. He said he was teaching powerful executives who were very good at English and showed me a big collection of materials they gave him to work with. Jonathan had taught English for three years in Barcelona, so he was experienced in teaching and living in a Latin society; and he didn't like Santiago at all. He said his students were always late and had no personalities. Jonathan was a very boisterous, loud Irish ex boxer with a lot of personality; the kind of guy who yells your name when you come in the room. So when we out on the town he would yell greetings and crack jokes, but the Chileans didn't really respond and never laughed at his jokes. So he started complaining about how Chileans are the dullest and dumbest people around, and started to get grumpy about working too much and decided he only wanted to stay there a month. Later when he was leaving he got in a big fight with his boss over being paid late and other unfulfilled promises, and the guy threatened to call the cops on him if he didn't get out right away.

I had a good time hanging out with my hotel buddies for a couple of weeks, then Dave went traveling to Israel and Europe, and Rick went to Argentina to travel with his friend and never came back.

Then a few days before Jonathan left an American kid, showed up at the hostel, and was talking about teaching skiing there for the winter. At that time I had hardly even thought of the fact that there were ski resorts right there, but I got more excited about it the more he was talking about how good of a year it was going to be because of all the rain.

A huge rain storm came, the biggest in years. It was raining heavily for like a week. It was so bad only the buses could get through bits of it because the road had turned to a river. At one point trying to get to work, I had to wade through a hundred meters of water that was above the seat of my bike. When I arrived at the company where I give the classes, I was soaking and my students looked at me like I was nuts and said they didn't want classes and they thought they didn't have to call because there was no way I would come. This is an example of how lazy Chileans are. But we wouldn't have been able to have the classes anyway because the inside of the building was raining too with constant drops of rain falling on the desks and entire rooms having to be evacuated. The building was obviously not built with rain in mind. Then I went to my other class and got the same reaction from my other student. It was raining so much the river was only a couple feet under the bridges, which says a lot considering just a couple days before they were building a new road in the place of the river because the notch they made for it was way too big for it to ever be able to occupy it, or so they thought. I could tell this was very unusual for Santiago because Chileans everywhere were laughing in amazement as they were running through the streets trying to get away from the wetness. I remember my friends commenting on how it seemed to have brought personality out of the Chileans.

We had made it a habit to go out to the discos every Friday and Saturday night. It seemed like my friends lived for Friday and Saturday night and I was almost as excited too. I had gotten accustomed to drinking Pisco, the national alcoholic drink of Peru and Chile which is a hard alcohol with a strong taste that has a similar effect on me as Tequila, except makes me more aggressive than any other drink I have ever had, but gives you a pretty bad hangover the next day. One day I got totally sloshed on that stuff before going out and was yelling at Jonathan just because he didn't believe aliens built the pyramids and I though they did, then we got a taxi and I yelled at the driver because I thought he was driving us in the wrong direction so he kicked us out so we had to take the bus to Suiza, the smaller Disney land-like disco section. Just as soon as I stepped in, all I remember is a Chilean girl grabbing me and dancing all dirty like with me and kissing me, so I kept grabbing her hand making her grab my dick and her immediately pulling me in the back where there weren't many people. But buy then I wasn't horny anymore so I was just dancing. So after a few minutes she would pull me back out into the open and I would get worked up again and make her grab my dick, so she would pull me in the back again. I remember this happening over and over again the whole night until the place closed at 5. Jonathan and he went home, but I noticed the tall English dude Jim was still there and had found a hot young girl, but he didn't leave with her because he couldn't speak any Spanish. I left with him and this girl and we walked a few blocks up and saw the England verses Sweden world cup, which was a tie. Then we got in the bus to go home and she kept telling me she wasn't going to go home with me, not like I was asking her, but when the bus stopped at our place, she got out with me and came into my room. She made a comment about the messiness of my room and I said we should take a shower, but she said I should take one first and then her, and I said no together, and she said no you first, so I said ok you first and she said no you first and I said no. Finally she said, "What's the problem, you don't trust me?", and I said no. So she left and I walked her to the bus stop.

A few days later I went out with him and he met a girl Sandra. She came up to him and said she saw him in the subway that day and they started dancing. When the place closed at five they left together and she was with a friend Paula, who I started talking to when I noticed he and Sandra were kissing. Next thing know this punk knocks my feet out from under me, so I got up and grabbed him and was about to throw him down but three of his friends ran up and told me to back off. We figured they were jealous. Then we got in the taxi and I immediately noticed that Paula was nuts and drunk as hell, babbling at the top of her lungs. We got back to the hotel and I was still really drunk so I grabbed Paula to take her to my room, but she didn't want to, so we went to his room and Paula continued to scream nonsense uncontrollably for a couple minutes until Matt, a computer programmer from Sydney busted in furious yelling at us to "Shut that girl up". So I walked her home, which was only about four blocks away, and she bought me a hotdog.

So now he had a girlfriend and we went out a few more times and hung out at that girl Paula's' (who now we called 'crazy Paula) a couple times. One time with Julius and a Japanese girl who could only speak Spanish who I had given a Thai massage to earlier. When we left the Japanese girl was sloshed and babbling nonstop, which was a total 180 degree change from when she was sober. The next morning he asked me, "Did you fuck her, did you fuck her, she was so drunk, did you fuck her?" So I started to have the feeling he was cheesy. But it was at this time he had gotten a job at a ski shop fixing skis and giving ski lessons four days a week, and because he also had a girlfriend he felt like he was on a roll and wanted to get an apartment with me really close to his work so he could use it to get more girls and not have to travel too far to get to the ski shop. I told him outright I wasn't interested because the area he wanted to live was too far from the center that I liked and was too expensive, in the rich part of town. But he was a manipulative kid and kept pressuring me and repeatedly asking me to, telling me how cool it would be and not really that much more expensive and he could hook me up with ski rental deals and rides up to the mountain. So after a week or so I thought, what the hell, I have never rented an apartment in a foreign country before, and maybe he could get me a hookup for the skiing. So I agreed to just look around with him, and on the first day we found an apartment on the top sixth floor on the corner of the building with a porch that faced the virgin, and a huge window facing the mountains with no obstruction because the Japanese embassy garden was just in front. Plus it had a big garden outside of our window and was just four blocks from the Suiza discos. I instantly fell in love with the place, so I agreed to get it.

I never felt like I clicked with this kid because he just seemed like another uneducated, dumb, American hippy-bigot hypocrite. But he had an energetic personality and was always sharing his feelings and telling stories and was fun loving. About the same time we moved in Jose called me and said the boring students I had called and asked for a Chilean teacher, which I agreed with, so I decided it was time to look for more work at some more institutes. I went to a place called Sam Marselli, which was only two blocks from my place and offered a predictable full time schedule so figured I would take that. But Sam said I had to start working immediately, so I gave Polyglot one week notice on the two hours a week I had left with them, which was all I could do. But when I went in the next Monday I asked to see one of their classes and they said they didn't let new teachers watch classes before hiring them. That sounded wacky to me so I left and went to another institute, Class Center, which immediately gave me six hours a week at seven thousand pesos an hour which was really good, and all the classes were in the IRS building right in the center of town. But it wasn't a full schedule so I had to keep looking. I called up Polyglot, but they were moving that day so I left a message on their machine telling them I could take that class back. But they never called me back. I felt guilty giving them only a one week notice so I didn't call them back and decided to look for hours at one of the other 70 institutes in town. But it was at this time I noticed that the English teaching market is really competitive, both for the institutes and the teachers who work for them. A lot of institutes will hire anybody, but the ones that can fill up your schedule and pay well only take really experienced teachers, and I quickly realized that I wasn't that experienced as far as teaching basic adults was concerned; so a lot of institutes didn't want me. After a month or so I got a job with an American guy Doug Day, who lived in Boulder Colorado for twenty years. He gave me a class to substitute for another teacher, but for the first class I forgot to bring my backpack, and the woman freaked out and called him and everybody made a big deal out of it, then a couple weeks later I forgot the class altogether, which, according to him caused him to lose his account with the whole company so he fired me. I got hooked up with another institute, Mitfurd, that is right in the center of town only two blocks from the IRS building. Right now I have a great schedule, all of my classes are with Class Center at the IRS building. I have a guy from 9-10 five days a week, and then, 12:30-2:00 and 5:30-7:00 Monday-Thursday, and they're all groups, which never cancel, and a private, which means I have about 15 hours a week 9 of which are groups, which is awesome. And they are all close and pay better than anywhere else. so I'm happy.

Just about as soon as we moved in to the apartment his personality changed and he stopped acting like a happy go lucky good hearted guy and started basically being a pain in the ass. Mainly the classic shit like not doing his dishes and blaming me for not doing mine. When we first moved in he was telling me about how the Chileans he worked with were all coke heads and he could tell in their personalities how they were always talking shit about each other and freaking out. And that his brother wasted his money and driven to insanity from cocaine and he was never going to get into it. But he got into the habit of coming back every night at 10:30 or 11:00 and getting up at six every morning, so he must have been doing cocaine.

But we where getting along fine for about a month, when one night my friend Roberto called me and said he met an English girl who was looking for English teaching work and wanted to know if I could help her out. Roberto is the Chilean friend of mine who I was hanging out with in Pucon for a few days a year earlier. He was selling his instruments one day in the fish market when he saw me sitting down eating and we recognized each other and started hanging out again. I happened to be near when he called me so I met him and he took me to a blond 27 year old English girl named Joanna Bell selling jewelry outside at a McDonalds table. She had been traveling around the world for five years and had been in Latin America for like three years so far, and had supposedly been paying for it by selling jewelry. She said sometimes she made more than ten dollars an hour doing that in Latin America. I suspected that wasn't her only gig though. I think she was also prostituting herself because she was staying with Roberto in his tiny room in exchange for free rent. Roberto told me he had slept with like 20 American and European girls and even had an Australian girlfriend who he was going to visit. As soon as she moved in with us she didn't want to talk to him anymore which I thought was weird. Later I realized it's because she sleeps with guys for free stuff and then leaves them all angry with them for defiling her or something like that. She told me that when he slept with her he was spooning her and poking her all night which was annoying. When I was telling her about the English teaching scene I offered to take her to my apartment to give her a bunch of my English teaching material to look at and she looked at me in a creepy distrustful way and said, "But that's ALL we're going to do, righ"? I remember thinking to myself, "What's wrong with this girl? I'm an American. I'm not some creepy horny Latin guy". Then she asked me if I knew a kid from Montana, I said "him?" and she said "yes!". They had been hanging out a couple years earlier in Guatemala city working at an orphanage. He had told me about her before and I had already said it was ok for her to stay with us and I invited her to come over. So she excitedly got her stuff and came over and we waited until about 11:00 when he came back with a young American college girl. He and she talked among themselves, so Roberto and I talked to the girl for a half hour or so.

The next morning I took her to an institute I had interviewed with the day before that was only a couple blocks away from the house. I didn't take the job there because the pay wasn't that good, only 4300 an hour, but it was a good place to start out. Then I gave her directions to another place that teaches kids that was only a couple of blocks away which is what she was looking for. And also at this time there was an opening for a class at the place I worked for because the girl went on vacation without telling the people at the institute so they needed a replacement fast. And through this class she got two more privates. So she was doing well which made me happy for hooking her up and helping her get on her feet to be able to get her own place before too long. She arrived in Santiago with nothing and was living in the local homeless shelter for a few days until my friend Roberto invited her to stay with him for a night. She has been traveling for the last four years in Latin America buy hitch hiking and selling jewelry, which at the time I thought was a pretty cool way to travel; until I realized that she is just an ungrateful user. I welcomed this girl with open arms hoping there would be no problems because I was cool for letting her stay there for free. I even let her stay in the living room where I lived and continued to let him sleep in his bedroom by himself. But as his personality began to deteriorate I think due to the cocaine, he began to act selfish, greedy, and paranoid. Now, according to him, it seemed like it was he and she who lived there and I was the third wheel. And being a third wheel happens to be a real pet peeve of mine. He apparently was angry with me because I hadn't been buying enough weed. But I didn't have any money to buy weed, I didn't really want to buy weed because I was trying to get the English teaching going, and I only bought weed in dollar fifty packets, and buy the time he came back I never had any. But even though he only got me high about once a week, in his paranoid mind, I was holding back on him. And it didn't take long for her to notice this, so she began to have an attitude with me also; trying to tell me that I was in fact the ungrateful user and not her.

It didn't take me long to realize that she was just a user. When she first moved in she told me she was a massuese so i told her that I was a Thai Massuere and we should do a trade. So i gave her a Thai Massage but then she didn't want to give me a massage. At first she said she would only do it if I got this certain kid of creme, so I went out and go that and brought it back. But she flat out refused to give me a massage. I asked her every day for a few days, but then we had the falling out and I never asked her again. I guess she just told me she would give me a massage so she could get a free Thai Massage and then chince out on me. Or maybe she wasn't really a massuese and just gave guys massages to guys she used to get free stuff as part of her prostitution gig and just didn't feel like she could get anything more out of me than she already did. At the end he had finally realized what she was all about. I was surprised one day when he actually told said something like, "I noticed something about she that I didn't notice before that I didn't like. She just puts her hand out". I didn't say anything. This girl was a classic Vixen. She came from a rich family with two much older brothers. One was a race car clutch engineer in Australia and the other bought and sold houses in England, and her parents had a bar/hotel. They must have been giving her a travel allowance at least intermitently because she flew from Asia to Latin America. But who knows, maybe if you work hard enough you can make that kind of money selling jewelry on the street. When I talked to her briefly the next winter she told me she had just returned from a two week vacation in England and there's no way she could have afforded that on an English teaching salary in Chile. Untell of course she was living rent free with her new boyfriend Rodrido which was entirely possible. I was on speaking terms with this girl for about the first week and a half that she was squatting at my place and I remember her telling me about a couple of Peruvian guys she worked with in a bar in Cuzco who hated her and how she made her dad cry a day beforehand because she refused to talk to him on a call to her mom because she was pissed that he wasn't happy about her traveling or something like that; and she said it in a really weird way. Like it was a victory for her. I saw her kind acting kind of abusively towards him one day but I don't remember what she said. She was snapping at him about something. I just remember him standing there. At this point there was no way he was going to become angry with her because he was using all of his energy hating me. The next winter I saw Rodrigo angrily yelling at her as she was checking tickets for people, so I guess he was getting sick of her by then. At the end though it was clear to me that she really needed a break from whatever kind of squalid existence she was living in and probably needed to go skiing more than I did.

The whole thing was weird. I though I was being really cool for allowing her to live there for free. She was there for two months and only paid us like $50 and gave us a small bottle of dish washing detergent. She didn't even buy weed once, which only costed a little over a dollar. At first she was talking trash to me about him, saying that she caught him smoking dope by himself in the closet and that was "sad" he didn't share. They were going out to eat and stuff and not inviting me which didn't bother me, but one nigt before they went out I was sitting there working and she goes, "What's your problem Kyle. Why did you ignore me when I asked you if you wanted to come out with us"? I told her I didn't hear her but she didn't believe me. One day I heard him tell her about a laundry room in the building where she could wash her clothes. I remember telling him that I had been using a laundry service the whole time and complaining to him that the ladies there mucked up my North Face jacket and he never said anything about the laundry room in the building. He just didn't want me to know about it. Then one night they were out on the porch hanging out and I walked out there and for some reason completely mysterious to me they seemed to be scowling at me, and I asked them if they wanted to smoke weed and they didn't answer me. They just ignored me. So I told them I was going to the disco area and look for weed for us to smoke and they didn't say anything. I didn't find anything and when I came back a few minutes later I walked out on the porch and there was all this Marijuana smoke in the air and I saw him put his smoking pipe under something and they just sat there not talking and waiting for me to leave; so I said, "Ooohhh Kaaay," and closed the door and went back into my room and layed on my bed. Then he opened the sliding door. It was in the middle of winter at night and was cold out and I was in my shorts so I told him I wanted the door closed because I was in my shorts and closed it, but as soon as I layed down he opened it again. I got up and told him that it was cold and I really wanted the door closed but he kept opening it and we had this back and forth a few times until he finally stopped opening the door. After they were done smoking their weed they went into their room and I heard them talking trash about me. I should have listened exactly what they were saying so I could remember all of it, but I snapped and opened the door and told them I could hear them and pretty much told them off and said "you too girl". They started laughing at me and I told them to stop laughing. That they were ganging up on me and it pissed me off. They didn't argue with me. All I remember him say was that they weren't ganging up on me. Then I went to bed. But the next day things were totally different because now both of them were totally furious with me and completely ignoring me. One day she printed a page about Rastafarianism and was showing it to him, because they were into that and he liked Reggae. I picked up the page and was leaving the room and she said, "Hey where are you going with that?" and I told her I was just going to the copy place to copy it si I could read it and she goes, "Hurry up!".

It was about this time that I was getting together with my girlfriend Paula (not crazy Paula, another friend of Sandra's). The first time I met her was when I went out to a bar in Suiza with him and Sandra, and met her with her boyfriend at the time, a 40 year old Norwegian mathematician who comes down to Santiago regularly. A couple weeks later when her boyfriend had gone back to Norway, Sandra brought her friend over, and Paula and I hit it off and she slept with me. One night, which was the first and only time the four of us (he and Sandra, and Paula and I) were together, Paula and Sandra came over and we were drinking and hanging out, and Sandra gave him a small glass pipe used to hold joints, but what I thought was a one hitter. I asked him if I could hold it, but in his anger (which I can only assume is because I hadn't bought my share of weed) said no. This made me really angry so I yelled at him to "Just let me hold it", until he finally did to shut me up. I proceeded to pack weed into it to pass it around, but he grabbed it from me, I guess he wanted to de-virgenize it, which in retrospect is understandable, but this infuriated him. He went in the other room with she to talk shit about me and came out and screamed "No respect!" at the top of his lungs. I felt it was time for us all to get stoned so I offered to pack a bowl for everybody with his glass pipe but he was still furious with me and refused; so I asked she to take out her pipe but she too refused, so I got my pipe, which traditionally had always been a pop can, and until then he had refused to smoke out of, and thankfully he and she accepted and smoked it. Sandra seemed to think all of this was rather funny and said she wanted to take a picture of us "angry". After we smoked my girlfriend took me aside and was telling me I looked really sexy, this was the first time she had really come on to me in a provocative way as we hadn't had sex yet. And curiously enough, she had no clue there was bad energy between he and she and I. I wasn't too bothered anymore as I was drunk and stoned, and when he and Sandra went to bed in his room and tried to have a friendly conversation with him but he was so furious he couldn't even talk. And I had a ominous feeling that our friendly relationship was over.

About a week later, he announced that his English snow boarding friend Dan was going to stay with us for a while. A couple weeks before my friend Dave from hotel Valparaiso had come back from his European tour and was staying at the hotel. He was lonely as there were no tourists there and his Spanish wasn't that good yet. I originally didn't invite him to stay with us because I figured that four people staying in the small apartment would be too much, but now that he had two friends staying there for who knows how long, I decided to invite Dave over. This really pissed him off and he immediately said we should start making our guests pay. But I said, "Barter man, that's how its done here". His friend ended up staying there for two weeks, but they didn't hang out much at the place to avoid me. That's one reason I think he got even more pissed off when Dave moved in, because Dave and I were spending more time there than he and his gang where, and he may have felt jipped Even though I had bought 100 percent of the furniture, 100 percent of the cleaning, and paid 100 percent of the bills, which I had to go to three different places all over town for each month.

I remember it got real bad the first day she went snowboarding. They came back one night with his snowboard friends and they were laughing and talking about their day at the mountain and completely ignoring me, and I was thinking "Oh man this is bad. I haven't even been up once because I haven't had the money. And now she who is staying here for free has gone up before me." In the end I only went skiing that year once and it wasn't with them. She got to go like 30 times because this other English guy Dan was invited to stay there for two weeks gave his season pass to she when he left. He announced he would do it right in front of me after I said something in frustration to him, and he said "You do that!"

When Dan left two weeks later he didn't pay anything, but bought him a radio. And when she finally left after staying with us for more than two months, she offered to pay us about fifty bucks. Which worked out to 454 pesos a day, there are 720 pesos to the dollar. So I worked this figure out and said that Dave would therefore pay 454 pesos a day to live with us, which he and she tried in vain to argue. She wasn't living there anymore but she was still hanging out there. For some crazy reason they were trying to get Dave to pay more than she paid. She and he were acting hostily towards Dave also. Neither of them ever talked to us. One night Dave tried to strike up a conversation with her by asking her how the day of skiiing was and she snapped, "It's not skiing, it's snowboarding!" and that was that with the conversation. That was the only time I actually remember them exchanging words.

It was really weird because there were five of us living in a one bedroom apartment but two groups who literally never spoke with each other. It was a tiny living room and a bedroom with one bathroom and a tiny kitchen attatched to the living room that was so small it didn't even had a regrigerator or a stove. she was using my camping stove and cursing it every morning. I remember one really strange episode when he came over with Ariel, who was actually a really cool Chilean snowboarder friend of his. He was there getting his stuff ready to go somewhere with him for like 20 minutes and we literally didn't say one thing to each other the whole time. No hello or goodbye or anything, and Ariel was standing there looking kind of freaked out. I saw Ariel the next year when I went skiing and he said in a disgusted tone that he wasn't keeping in touch with him "at all". When I went skiing that year I saw her there. She had gotten together with his friend Rodrigo and I think she was staying at his apartment and working at the ticket checker on the bus he drove to the ski resort every day. I was curious if they would let he ride up for free because I let her stay at my apartment for two months, and Rodrigo for nine days, but they charged me. he and she had done a good job of turning all of their snowboard friends against me. When I went skiing that day I asked Rodrigo if you could ski down this certain face on the mountain and he just scowled at me that I should ask someone who knows and walked off. He sayed with us for nine days the year before and deliberately broke out a huge bag of weed for him and he and she to smoke so I could see they weren't going to share it with me right as I was leaving the apartment. One time we were all there and Rodrigo asked me if we were "Friends or enemies," and I asked him why he asked me that and what he and she told him but he didnt' want to answer me. Sandra told me he was telling all of them that Dave and I were gay, which in Chile is considered a big insult. One night he, she, Rodrigo, Ariel, and a Chilean woman who worked with them came over to do Cocaine in the bathroom with Dave and I in the living room just boggling over how they could totally ignore us like that. At one point the woman closed my bedroom door and locked it so we started knocking on it and Dave took out his credit card and sliced it open and she was standing there on the other side grinning at us. They were making all this noise. Every time someone took a sniff they would all yell as loud as they could and we had the impression they were trying to make us jealous. That was when Cecilia was staying with us, who was Sandra's friend. Cecilia told us they were acting like total assholes and walked into their midst and was trying to get them to share a joint they were smoking with us but they didn't want to invite us over, but they shared it with her and when she had it she walked it over to us in the living room and let us have a hit and they all stopped talking and were watching us. The next day he was telling me he hated Cecilia and wanted her out of the apartment. She stayed with us for three days. His girlfriend Sandra brought her back one night at four in the morning after dancing at the disco to sleep with Dave but she got in bed with me instead and screwed me for three days. She claimed that she screwed him too but he never said anything. That doesn't mean he didn't though because we weren't speaking to each other at all. She was doing a whole lot of trash talking about me also because my girlfriend Paola told me that she told her that I was a total asshole and was trying to get her to break up with me. She was also bragging to us one day about how the English guy Dan gave her the season pass. Bragging about how much skiing they were doing was pretty much the only thing they said to me. I never took the bait though. After it became blatantly obviouse that they were after me I just threw up my arms and decided to just let them run as wild as they wanted without confronting them at all and just play it cool. I wasn't really that upset at the time because I was hanging out with Dave and Paola and Dave and I were spending a lot more time at the apartment than they were. As time went on and I looked back on it I was angrier with myself for not confronting them more though. They were just so out of their minds that even though they were going snowboarding every day I kind of felt sorry for them. she had told me her travels had been "screwed up" until then and he was a total emotional wreck. They were doing some really weird stuff. One night they were smoking a joint on the porch, and I think it was hers because they actually let me take one hit off of it right before it burned out. He never said a single thing to me the whole time but as I was about to put it in my picket and she says, "What are you doing?" I told her I was going to save it for later but she goes, "Throw it over the porch. You have to give back". So I did that to make her happy and just pick it up later but when I went down there it wasn't there which kind of pissed me off at myself for listening to her. Any normal person would have said something like "Look who's talking, the biggest user in the world". But I was acting nice and looking right at him to see if he noticed, but he was just staring at the distance looking angry. He didn't even look at me the whole time. He would also have these crazy flair ups at me. Tne weirdest episode was one day I was taking a shit and he started trying to get in the bathroom and was shaking the handle and banging on the door and screaming at me, "Get the hell out of the batroom you fucking asshole right now! Get out get out get out!" So I calmly said, "Dude I'm taking a shit. Shit is coming out of my ass right now as we speak, which was the truth". But he just kept hysterically screaming at me. One other time he completely flipped out on me. He was hysterical. I don't remember exactly what he said. At I remember is he screamed "Asshole!" at me and told me I was a complete mental case, which I thought was kind of funny at the time because he was so out of his mind. Another time I was on my bed reading or something and he was on his cell phone and with his shoes on and walked onto my bed right next to me and was looking out the window that was behind me and I asked him to please not walk on my bed with his shoes on and he started jumping up and down on my bed going "Fuck you! Look I'm jumping on you bed, I'm jumping on your bed!"

Another weird situation I had with him was one night I went out for pizza to meet a mutual friend of ours from Hotel Valparaiso where we were all staying before because he wanted to stay with us while he was visiting Chile on business. While we were eating he was bragging to me about how all of the Chileans were so amazed with how good of a skiier and snowboarder he was and they were all going "Who is this guy?" and then almost in the same breath goes, "Hey Julious can't stay at the apartment with us". So I said, "Dude I just talked to him, he's going ot meet us in five minutes and he has all of his stuff and he's only going to be here for four days. He's your friend too. Are you really going to turn him around now?" And he just said, "Yeah we've had too many people staying over at our apartment and I want peace and quiet. I didn't argue him on it. When Julious came the first thing he did was thank us for allowing him to hang out with us and told us that he was going to try to hook us up with a free night at the ski resort hotel through someone he knew and offered to give him an extra cell phone he had, but he just said he didn't want him to stay there because he wanted his peace and quiet. The next week he invited his freind Rodrigo to stay at our apartment for nine days. When he moved out and wanted his deposit money from me, as I was going to stay there one more month, I charged him for the nine days that Rodrigo stayed there for the amount that Dave and she paid when they were there and he became furious with me and told me that "friends stay for free". At that point I reminded him that his friend she stayed there for two months, his friend Dan stayed there for two weeks, his friend Rodrigo stayed there for nine days, my friend Dave was only there for one month, and he didn't even let Julious stay there even though he's his friend too, he offered him a cell phone, and he was only there for four days. He got really upset with me and interupted me denying that he banned Julious from staying there. he said Rodrigo had to stay with us because his wife kicked him out of the house. Rodrigo had a couple of kids, but for the last couple of months was with her. I only know that from seeing them cuddle at my apartment and from what Sandra told me. I wasn't on speaking terms with them enough to gather any of this information from them. I think Rodrigo being with her was one reason he was so hostile towards me.

Part of all that crazyness was from the Cocaine but he was a total dick right from the beginning. When we first moved in he accused me of making a mess of the kitchen counter and that I needed to have respect for it, but all that was there was some water. He was also asking to borrow my cell phone all the time and I kept asking him to hit the hang up button once so i could see how many minutes he used so i would know how much to charge him because calls were expensive there, but he always hit it twice. I would repeatedly ask him while he was still talking to hit it once but he would always hit it twice. When I asked him why he hit it twice he would just ignore me. I even knew he was an asshole in the very beginning at the hotel when he went out for a pitcher of beer with us one day and deliberately swigged his beer before filling it up all the way again with the last of it, leaving him with two beers and everybody else with one. I was the only one who noticed and of course I didn't say anything but I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "This guy is a dick. Stay the fuck away from him". But alas, I got seduced by this promise to hook me up with his snowboard buddies free skiis and rides up to the mountain, and that apartment that I thought was so cool.

When she left he started acting really vindictive. One day Dave lost his key and asked him if he could borrow his for five minutes to make a copy, but he said no because it was my responsibility to do it. At this point he was getting more and more aggressive and it seemed like he was getting clinically schizophrenic. Sandra came over telling us that he had called her a bunch of times asking her to come over. My girlfriend was there too so she decided to hand out with us and wait for him. A couple hours after she arrived he called me on my cell phone so I immediately gave it to Sandra, thinking he wanted to talk to her. But after a couple of seconds she gave it back to me, and he yelled at me that I shouldn't have given it to her and what was I trying to play at, he wanted to talk to me. He just wanted to know if I was there and if I was leaving, I said no. Sandra waited a couple more hours and I could see she felt dejected. So we drank a little more and Dave pulled me in the other room and told me that Sandra was all over him and asked me what he should do. I said "go for it". So a couple seconds later they were passionately making out, so I started making out with Paula. At about three or four we went to bed. Paula and I in my bed and Sandra and Dave in Dave's sofa bed next to mine, although they were clothed. At about 4:30 he and a Chilean girl Jasmine came back and they went to the bathroom. I was hoping he wouldn't get too pissed off to see Dave and Sandra in bed together, but then I though, 'why should I, he just brought a girl back'. Then we heard them having loud sex in the room next door and I though, 'hell of a way to break up with a girl, if he even knows what he is doing'. After a few moments Sandra decided she had had enough and stormed into the living room and started screaming at him, telling him he was a coke head and had no respect and just wanted to fuck as many girls as he could. In the morning he was gone, and instead of it being he and Sandra and Kyle and Paula, it was Dave and Sandra and Kyle and Paula.

That day happened to be one of the days in the independence weekend surrounding September 18th. And there was going to be a reggae concert in a suburb of Santiago performed by the biggest Reggae band in Chile, Gondwana, who's manager was Sandra's' brother. And all of Sandra's' family was going to be there. The concert was great, but kind of awkward when we had to sneak away from the crowd with Sandra's sister and nephew to smoke weed and drink Pisco. Throughout the whole concert girls were climbing up on the stage and hugging and kissing the lead singer, Kiko, Paula being one of them. At the end of the concert we stood in a big line to meet the band. When we had our turn to go to the back, Kiko asked us where we were from and signed a little paper for Paula and I. Most of the groupies were kids. The band members were just sitting in the back minding their own business. I was kind of surprised they weren't getting any of the attention.

I think another reason he was so bent out of shape the whole time Dave was there was because his girlfriend, Sandra, wasn't really going along with him is his war against me. She and I had stricken up a friendship, and she (being a Chilean woman) was always a little jealous about she even though she was just a friend of his. As soon as she showed up, Sandra stopped always coming by. One night after a party night with Dave, we were still in bed (Dave and I slept in the same queen size bed because in the kindness of my heart allowed she to sleep on my sofa bed in the living room, which need less to say was an act completely ignored by she and he, and he proceeded to tell all on his friends we were gay), and were still drunk, Sandra came buy and brought one of her friends, Cecilia, who we had never met before, to sleep with Dave. But instead of cuddling with Dave, she got next to me. And in my drunkenness couldn't control myself and push her away and ended up having sex with her. In the morning I asked her not to tell Paula, who was one of her friends also, but I knew she couldn't help herself.

The next day I went skiing with the guy who I taught English for for a while, Doug Day, and his friend, the son of the German owner of the other institute I worked for. This was the only day I went skiing because of a lack of money, not being a group of his, too much partying, and a general lack of motivation. When I came back I was surprised to see Cecilia still there, and so was he. he was in a bad mood and asked me how long this nut ball was going to stay for, and if she had mental problems. Cecilia doesn't have mental problems, she is just emotional, and kind of spaces out playing with the dials on the radio non stop. But she has a really good heart and is down to earth. In the end Cecilia ended up staying there three nights in a row.

Chilean girls come on to guys more here than any other place I have ever been, including Brazil. I got a beer once with a 20 year old girl who works as a people-getter at the internet where I go, and out of the blue she asked me if I had had sex with a Chilean before, and I said no, and she said, 'you will', and then wanted to smooch me and have me feel her huge tits. But she was a little weird, she was a punk girl with fresh suicide slice marks all up her forearm. She said she wasn't trying to commit suicide, she was on cocaine, and she gets crazy on cocaine. The next thing she said was if I liked cocaine and wanted to do it with her.

I couple weeks after he and I moved into the Los Leones apartment I invited another girl I met at the internet place over for dinner. I didn't expect anything sexual to come of it because she told me she was a Catholic and went to church every Sunday and was dead set against marijuana. I met her at the Los Leones metro station twenty minutes late as usual, and we went to my place and I cooked her up a meal. Then I tried to give her an English lesson but she wasn't really paying attention. She stayed a while, the whole time telling me she wasn't going to stay over because she's not easy, but I wasn't asking her to stay over. When it got late she decided to sleep with me. Later on in the night he and two of his Chilean friends came over, and I didn't really feel like hanging out with him because the lasts time we were together I lost my temper and yelled at him for taking his shampoo away and using mine for a week, and then putting his shampoo back after mine got low. So we went out dancing at the Suiza discos for a bit. The next morning as it got late she didn't get out of my bed until I realized she wanted to have sex with me. So I went to get a condom, but she stopped me and said she wouldn't have sex with me if I put on a condom. So we continued to make out and then she tried to put my dick in her pussy again and I went for a condom and she told me the same thing again. This went on a little while until she realized I wouldn't give in so we did it with a condom. Later I realized that she was mentioning before how she liked babies and wanted to have one, and was probably trying to get pregnant with me. Jo told us an interesting story about that to. She said at the place she was staying one night she saw a bunch of old women beating up a young girl apparently because they were jealous she was pregnant. In these poor countries, when a woman has no money, all she can dream of having is a baby, and a part white baby in their minds is better than a brown baby because the opportunities are supposed to be better later in life. Any guy who allows himself to get seduced by a young girl in a poor country should be fore warned.

I met her at her house once, but soon after that I got together with Paula, so I stopped coming by the internet for a little bit and she got the picture. Around the same time I met a girl at a bar the only night I went out with him and his friends. I noticed she was looking at me the whole night but was sitting down the whole time. Towards the end of the night I noticed she stood up so I went over and she was excited to see that I noticed her. We sat down and talked for a bit. She was with her sister who didn't look like her and said she was a dancer and gave me her number and told me to call her. So I called her the next day and she said she was doing a dance show and said she would call me back when she was done; but she never did, so I didn't call her back. A couple weeks later she called me and said she was sorry that she didn't call me and wanted to go out with me later in the week and said she would call me the next day, which she didn't, so I called her. When we talked she told me to go to a disco in the subway. When I met her out there she was with her sister and a young guy. Inside I realized we were in a TV show, and seeing a live performance of a famous Columbian rock star I later saw on MTV. Then we followed the show to another disco in Suiza where we saw a live band playing a Brazilian song to a T that I had heard on the radio. I saw this guy leading a camera around kissing all the girls in the place and joking around. She said she was one of the dancers on this TV show called Mekano. At the time I didn't know what it was but looked around and finally saw it. It is a show where kids watch people dance in formation which is very popular here. At the new place she skipped off and I didn't follow her, then we left. I didn't call her back because she kind of blew me off at the place, and I started going out with Paula just after that.

Dave had some interesting experiences with girls too before he got together with Sandra. He was at a Peruvian restaurant and a Peruvian girl approached him and he went on a couple dates with her. He brought her over to the place a couple of times. The first time she brought her Chilean friend, the ugliest girl I have ever seen in my life. She had a blue tint coloring her eyelids which made her look like a monster. They were really weird, the Peruvian girl was barking orders at us about how we should live our lives, and when I mentioned Marijuana, she started lecturing me how bad it was and ruins lives. I asked her if she had ever done it and she said no, but she watched her loser neighbors smoke it and knew that way. At one point I was trying to do something and got frustrated and said 'fuck', and so she asked me what that meant. I didn't want to go into a lengthy description of what that meant so I just made humping motions on my bed to show them. At that moment her friend started screaming at me like I was evil, telling me that I didn't respect women and all that, which pissed me off so I yelled at her to shut up; which she did but she had decided she hated me. I noticed the energy was getting tense, so I went out on the porch to try to sneak a little smoke, but the Peruvian peaked out and started yelling at me telling me I was a drug addict and needed help, but I didn't care because I was already a little buzzed. That didn't really help the situation though, because her friends energy got so evil that we couldn't look at each other. We all left to go see a movie, but when we got on the bus we noticed that her friend was not with us, so we looked out and saw her walking away. That pissed the Peruvian girl off and she was talking trash about her friend the rest of the day. We saw I am Sam with Sean Penn, which was really good. She came over one more time but I wasn't interested in talking with her and all she could think of saying to me was, "naughty naughty drug user," so I just let her and Dave hang out in my room and I waited outside. When she left he told me she was nuts and never wanted to see her again. Shortly after that Dave started going out with Sandra anyway. The Peruvian girl continued to call Dave all the time though for like a month. He said she was calling him like a hundred times a day and constantly sending him emails. I saw one of them, it said that he thinks he's mature but even thought he's 33, he has the maturity of a 17 year old because he didn't want to see her again. Apparently she thought he was obligated to tell her to her face that he didn't want to see her again, but they only went out like 3 or 4 times.

Around the same time Dave and I and a couple of his friends from the Spanish school went to a friend of his party in Bellavista. His friend is in his thirties and is a wealthy mining engineer. The Chileans there seemed to be of the young rich type. They were much happier and more outgoing than the young rich Argentineans I met. I hung out with one of Christians roommates and a couple of his friends, and a hot girl of Chinese descent for a bit. Her friend was really hot, as she was walking past me she showed me her knuckles which where all bloody from hitting the punching bag outside. I was talking to her for a little but, she told me she was a TV commentator. At one point I went into the bathroom to take a leak, but when I turned around after I turned on the light and shut the door I noticed there was a naked couple making love on the washing machine, so I scampered out unnoticed. A few days later Dave went on a date with the supper hot girl, and when he came back he said that "Denisita," was Denise Campos, one of the famous Campos twins who got first and third place in the Mrs. Chili competition and were Hawaian tropic girls and were in the tabloids all the time. A couple weeks later she was at that house again celebrating her birthday party and this guy Gonzalo, one of the friends of Dave's friends roommate who I was hanging out with, and the guy whose house Dave was going to spend the independence day celebration at, was being silly and jumped off the roof onto a landing below to scared his friends; but he had socks on and slipped and fell off and died. A funny thing about that was that two years beforehand at her birthday party in Vina del Mar this girls boyfriend fell off the roof and died.

After she left I thought maybe he and I would start talking again, but he was never there. It was like the house belonged to Dave and I, which must have been one of the reasons he was so bent out of shape. Dave was only there a couple of weeks more, and moved out after living there for about a month. I had another month with him, but he was never there. He must have been out partying every night and skiing every morning, keeping it up with the cocaine. Cocaine's really cool that way, you don't need much sleep. He went out with us one night when Dave and Tony came over, but he wasn't talking to me. At the disco I started dancing with a Brazilian girl and so he came over and started dancing with her but pissed her off because he called her a Huevona. In Spanish Huevon literally means something like "egger" because huevo means egg. In Chile "Huevon" means "buddy" if used affectionately, but "ass hole" if used in anger. But in the other Latin countries "Huevon" is mainly a bad word. After he danced with her a bit she came back to me very upset and asked me who this ass hole was and that he called her a huevon. I told her it means amigo here in Chile. I left with her and her Brazilian friend, who was complaining saying she was friends with her friends boyfriend and she didn't feel right about this, so I said I had a girl friend and went home.

When I got home I had the only conversation with him that we ever had while we weren't talking. He said he knew I probably thought he was fucked in the head on drugs and had been acting like an ass hole, and that all of this screwy ness was unintentional. All I could say was that I thought he lost his mind and it was because of the cocaine; which he didn't like. Then we talked about going skiing, but it was all in vain; our relationship was dead. A couple weeks before he moved out, his snow board friend Rodrigo moved in with us for about nine days because he got kicked out of his wife's house and was looking for a place to stay. I didn't see much of them though because I was spending a lot of time at Paula's house. One night he, she, Rodrigo, and Ariel where there, which was the last time I saw them, Rodrigo and Ariel invited Paola and I skiing with them, which I was excited about, but Paola didn't want to go because she thought it would be too awkward, so I didn't want to go either. That was the last weekend the resorts were open.

When he moved out and asked for his deposit money back, I discounted the 462 pesos (about 60 cents) a day from it for the time Rodrigo was there, which caused him to blow up and yell at me that friends should stay for free, so I reminded him about the time he told me Julius couldn't stay there for three days even though he wanted to give him his cell phone, and he denied ever saying that. But at the end he agreed and smoked his last joint there (without offering me any) and left.

A couple days later the landlord came over for rent. Beforehand I told him I wanted to live there for another year and we had agreed that for a year the rent would be 180 thousand a month, but he denied ever saying that, so I said I wanted my deposit back and move out. But he said that because I already told him that I wanted to stay there longer he wasn't going to give it to me; but would give it to me in a month when I moved out, but I had to pay for another month then. I told him I would pay him the next day in the center. That night Paola came over and I told her the story, which pissed her off, so the next day she went down there with me and told him I wasn't going to pay for another months rent but live there for another month because that was the only was I would ever get my deposit back. He said that wasn't legal and he knew so because his daughter's a lawyer. Paola said she knew the law because her friend was a lawyer. Then he told her it was none of her business because I was the person who lived there, so she said she was living there with me, and at that moment he agreed, but wanted to sign a contract saying I would pay the utilities. Dave moved in with me that month, which went pretty fast. We had a puppy dog that was sick and kept shiting all over the carpet.

A couple weeks before we had to move out Dave told me that there was going to be a room available in the residential that he was going to move into the same day that we had to move out. I was really excited when we moved in because it was in the best part of town, in Bellavista just at the base of the San Christobal hill, which is right in the center of town. It's only two blocks from Pio Nono, the road that has all the discos, and it's only about ten minutes from the center of town where I give my English classes; it's perfect. My room is about 19 square meters and the ceiling is about 15 feet high; it's like a perfect square. living in my new room I have begun to explore the world of being a pet-owner. After a few days I opened my birdcage and let my canaries fly freely, which made my room seem more like a jungle.

I let my hamster run freely too, which was very entertaining because he would climb on top of everything, the tables, my bed, my couch, and dig in the plant pots. After a month or two of that though he must have realized that if he ran around too much he would get caught, so I don't see him too much anymore. He's usually gone for about four or five days at a time before I see him again, a little skinnier. Hamsters are pretty intelligent, he would climb on top of my dresser by shimmying his way between the dresser and the wall and then jump off the dresser into the pot. Hamsters aren't too good for plants though because they dig deep down and eat the roots. I had another hamster before but he escaped. I put him on the porch to get some fresh air, and he disappeared. I thought at the time it was a bird, but I found out later that he climbed away, maybe to a neighbors house, or maybe he just fell. but After about a month my male bird found a hole in the mesh in my window and escaped, so I bought another male. After I bought him I did a class, and while I was waiting for my students to arrive I opened my backpack to see how he was doing, but his bird box was crushed and opened and he escaped. I ran into the office I saw him fly into, and there were a couple of excited workers chasing him around. He escaped into the hallway and me and two others chased him down a ways. But being a domestic bird, he got tired and sat down about a hundred meters down. The woman lunged for him and missed, but I got him on his second attempt to escape. He, however, only took a couple days to find the hole in the wire mesh in my window and escape; so I bought some more mesh to plug it up. I haven't gotten around to buy another bird yet.

I had a couple water turtles too, a male and a female. Right now they aren't much bigger than a quarter, but they are supposed to get like a foot long and live about 50 years. The male stopped eating a couple of months ago, and died a couple of days ago. We had a funeral. A couple weeks ago I found my hamster dead outside. I thought I was keeping my door adequately shut to prevent him from escaping, but he must have been hiding and keeping an eye on the door waiting for his moment. I think hamsters are smarter than birds because the birds don't even seem to notice they can leave whenever they want because I leave my door open all the time. A couple weeks after my two male birds escaped the female did too. Not because she necessarily wanted to though, my girlfriends son Claudio threw a large balloon at her and the direction she happened to go to escape was my wide-open door. Right now I have another bird-couple, and they don't make any attempt to escape through my door either. I spent the first month of my time in my new house finishing my Harry Potter book number four in Spanish and studying my vocabulary. And a little after that Dave went to the states to visit his family for a couple weeks, and he brought my computer with him. A little bit later we were hooked up to 512 kilobyte internet, which was one of the most exciting times of my life.

OK, here we are much much later and so much happened that I will make it as brief as I can without leaving out any important parts. I think I left off when I first moved into the Capellan Abarzua apartment a couple weeks after Dave did and got the internet connection hooked up. I was really excited after I got my computer and got internet. We lived there a couple month or something until Tony came back from surfing in Pichilemu and moved into the place too. We were all there for a few months until Dave got a job in the states and went back. A couple months before he left though he and Sandra had a problel with Paola concerning some Jelousy issues. What happened was I went to a party over at Amos, Owen, and Ryans house with Dave, Paola, and one of Paola's work mates. We got really drunk there and when we got back to my room Dave wanted to come in with us to hang out for a little bit, but Paola pushed him out and told him to go to bed. She did it in a really aggressive and frantic way and that really pissed Dave off and he started yelling at her telling her that he wasn't going to try to make the moves on Paolas friend. Paola said later she didn't push him out for that reason, but because she was hungry and just wanted to get something to eat and go to bed, but due to the frantic nature of the way she did it, I think she probably did it with the sick idea that he might try to put the moves on her. After that we went to get some Empananas and I was looking at a hot young girl who was there and Paola didn't like that and started yelling at me sarcastically, so I left and ran home. When she came back she didn't press the issue so we went to bed alright.

The next day Dave came over really upset and told me Sandra told him that Paola told her that Dave was trying to get with her friend. I asked Paola later if she told Sandra that and she said she didn't, that she was actually trying to convince Sandra that he wasn't and Sandra made that up herself, all Paola did was tell her that Dave wanted to come in the room. I remember Paola mentioning though that it could happen, but I think she was just defending Sandra's view that Paola did the right thing in not letting Dave in my room. A few days later I was talking to Dave outside of his room and he was angry at Paola for telling Sandra that and said that "Paola was going to lose", I was about to ask him what he meant by that but Tony came up and we started talking about something else. A couple minutes later Paola walked over and said hi to Tony and Dave but Dave ignored her so we went to my room and Paola was mad at Dave for being mad at her. Paola said later that he was rude to her over the phone later so she got really mad at Sandra for telling Dave that Paola told her that Dave tried to get with her friend so she told me a lot of personal stuff about Sandra and about her being unfaithfull to him. Since Dave was going to the States in a week I decided to tell him what Paola told me about Sandra because he was about to start the expensive Visa process to get Sandra to the states and I wanted him to be sure that he wanted to do that. Dave seemed pretty startled from all the stuff I said, and wanted to talk to Sandra about it immediately. Dave mentioned a couple days later about how he was still pissed at Paola and I asked him why and he said because she told Sandra he was trying to get with her friend. I had told him before that Paola denied saying that and for some reason I was surprised that he still believed what Sandra said, and I reminded him that I believed Paola and that because we believed different people we just shouldn't talk about it. After Dave went to the states Sandra called me when Paola was there and Paola was kind of drunk and took the phone and yelled her head off at Sandra calling her a hypocrite and whore and stuff. Dave mentioned later on messenger that Sandra told him that Paola had yelled at her and was mad again. Since then until rather recently Dave and Sandra didn't want anything to do with Kyle and Paola, although Dave and I were fine and Paola and Sandra were fine. I guess they just didn't want anything like that to happen again.

After Dave went back to the States Tony and I were the only gringos there. There were another half dozen Chileans staying at that house. There was one Chilean guy who rented the room accross from me who could speak perfect Australian English. He had two kids and had a house just around the corner. I think he was separated from his wife and had that place as a getaway for a while. After he left a young shy girl who never looked at me lived there. The only time I ever heard her talk was the day after the night that I listened to loud music with Glen and the owner came by yelling at me the next morning for having the music too loud and told me all of my roomates were complaining so I asked them and they all said he was full of shit. That girl was drunk and was going on about how it is cool to party and blast the music as loud as possible. In fact, I was the only one in that part of the house at the time, and the neighbors in other houses couldn't have heard me because those houses are made with two foot thick adobe.

I was at that house for about a year and two months. From November 16 2002 to January 15 2004. During that time I did some mountain biking, but spent most of my time basically getting my shit together with getting used to the computer and teaching teaching English. I wasted a shit load of time trying to get a work Visa with the institute I worked for, Class Center. I will write about that in my Incompetent Chilean chapter. Basically what happened there was the secretary there kept writting the wrong kinds of letters to get the Visa and it kept getting rejected, but it would take like three months to find out. I had to keep going back there and standing in line and getting led around and confused. This happened until in the end it bacame clear that in the end the institute didn't want to sign a contract for me because it was written in fine print somewhere that if I wanted to I could make them buy me a ticket out of the country and they just didn't trust me to not make them maybe try to make them buy me a ticket maybe to the States. So in the end I never got it and they stopped giving me classes.

That was around April when my mom and brother Mike came to visit for two weeks. That was fun. We went to Vina del Mar and stayed a night in Valparaiso. Then we went to Pablo Nerudas house at Isla Negra and stayed a night in San Antonio I think its called. Before we went back to Santiago we walked on the beach at a nice town on a hill above the beach, whose name I can't remember now. We rented a car one day and drove up to La Parva and Valle Nevado with Paola and Claudio. The canyon below Valle Nevado really impressed Mike and Mom, before seeing that I don't think they realized how big the mountains are here. One day we took the bus up to Banos Colina with Paola, that was the coolest part of the trip. The time we spent in Santiago was cool pleasant too because I lived in a touristy part of the city, right in Bellavista at the base of the San Cristobal hill that overlooks the city center. We took the tram to the top and the gondola that overlooks the Las Condes and Providencia, the rich developed part of the city. When they saw all the buildings they were amazed by the sheer size of the city and said Denver was just a cow town compared to it which I found interesting because I hadn't seen Denver in so long and had always seen it as the big city, and forgot how much smaller it is than Santiago. Actually in area Denver is a little bigger than Santiago, just with a tenth of the people.

A couple days after mom and Mike left a friend, Sarah Kaleli who I met in Belize a few years before was passing through Santiago before going home from a six month South American voyage, came over and hung out for a little with a friend of hers who she had met there and Tony and a guy who worked at Tony's institute. Paola was there too with Claudio but was on my bed not paying attention to any of them because she was angry that Sarah was there, that was weird. That was in the early days when Paola was still kind of caught up in the twisted mindstate that Chileans have about relationships and infidelity. We went to a house party of a friend of Sarah's friend and Tony's English friend got so drunk he couldn't walk so when the party ended Tony, and I just stood around him for like a half hour weighting for him to be able to get up until we just decided to carry him to the taxi. I think he went back to England a couple days after that.

A couple days later Paola and Claudio and I went to the Franklin to see about changing my camera. Franklin is a place like thirty blocks south of the center that is like twenty square blocks of tiny stores that specialize in selling everything known to man. It is a really fascinating place to go to because its like going to a gigantic department store, but instead of isles between the different sections you have roads and instead of having to chose between brand new items, you are presented with every generation of stuff. Tony bought an old tin toy space ship from the fifties there for like a dollar that he later found for sale on ebay for like two hundred. Franklin is jam packed on the weekends because stuff is generally cheaper there because it is used and is only open on the weekends.

I had bought a used video camera there a couple months beforehand but it since the day I bought it it could only stay on for like five minutes; enough time it needs to be functioning to sell. I had brought it back to the guy who sold it to me to fix and he had it for a couple weeks, but when he returned it he had apparently done nothing because it still only worked for five minutes. I must have only checked it for like four and a half minutes when I picked it up. So this time when I brought it back I wanted to exchange it for another one that was better because I had lost faith in it. I put my camera on the counter and was checking the zoom on another camera the guy game me when I felt a guy was standing right behind me abnormally close, I didn't do anything though and just kept looking through the camera.

Next thing I know, I hear Paola gasping and faltering to find words, so I turned around and asked her what was wrong and she said, "The camera", and I said, "What camera?" and she said "Your camera!" And I said "What about my camera?" and she pointed at the counter and said it was gone. I asked her what she meant by it's gone and then I saw the owner of the place step out from behind the store and walk down the isle. I asked her what was going on and she calmed down enough to be able to tell me that a guy had stolen my camera from on top of the store counter. Then a guy walked up to me and pointed to a 19 or 20 year old guy who was standing about fifteen feet away talking to some people who were apparently accusing him of stealing my camera, and said it was him who stole my camera. I walked up to the guy and furiously told him to not go anywhere until the cops got there. I told the owner of the store to call the cops and he walked off. I was standing there with the kid and noticed that he was staring me down so I started staring him down. Then he yelled at me something like "What's your fucking problem man!" and that totally sent adrenalin up my spine and enfuriated me so I started screaming at him at the top of my lungs asking him over and over again if he wanted to fight me. I was so pissed that my left leg was uncontrolably shaking. There were hundreds of people around and I was making a scene so the security guard took the kid outside a few feet away and told Paola to tell me to go wait by the store which was like thirty feet away. I didn't want to separate myself from the kid in case he ran but Paola insisted so I went. I was there for about 30 seconds when I suddenly realized that it was ridiculous for me to wait ther so I started to walk back outside and noticed that the kid had run away and was at the end of the block like 50 meters away and was holding up a broken beer bottle to the little security guard. I ran after him as fast as I could and he dropped the bottle and ran down the block. When I caught up to him I took and breath and yelled "Theif!" as loud as I could and then picked up the pace and caught up to him and grabbed his sweater and threw him into a shiscabob stand and he fell. As he fell I tripped over his legs and knicked my elbow. Then I turned around and saw the security guard run up and kick him in the face. He didn't deliberately kick him like you would kick a ball, but he didn't try to move his foot when he ran past him and got him square in the mouth and he screemed in pain and was bleeding from the mouth. I jumped on top of him and put my right hand on his throat and cocked my left hand in the air and yelled at him as loud as I could about 15 times to not move, and he started to cry; so I got off of him and he stood up and there was a large crowd gathered around watching us. Then Paola walked up and screemed at him that he stole our camera and he said he didn't and she said he did. He apparently didn't run at the beginning because he knicked the camera and passed it off to someone else who ran for it. He must have thought that because he didin't actually have the camera anymore he couldn't get in trouble for stealing it. After like 10 minutes of waiting around the cops finally showed up and the theif told them I hit him, which I didn't. The cops had Paola and the owner of the store to confirm it was he who stole the camera and then put him in the patty wagon, but not before he tried to make a deal with Paola that if we let him go he could get us the camera back, which we didn't go for. In hindsight we should have gone for that option because he was only in jail five days and we never got the camera back. We couldn't charge him for theft because we didn't have the evidence, so the cops told us that if he gave them a camera bag and said that although he got away with stealing the camera, he didn't manage to steal the bag the camera was in, and we could use that as the evidence to book him on more charges. They also said we could get him heavier if we said he attacked us and forcibly stole the camera from us, so we told them to put that down on their report sheet. They told me if I had any marks from the roberry we could go to the hospital and get a doctor to testify that I was indeed injured and treat me so that we could charge the guy with assault also, and the knick on my elbow was bleeding a little bit so we went to the hostipal and treated me and then the theif for his bleedy mouth.

The next day I went to Argentina for like six days and because neither Paola nor I went back to the jail to update the report they let him go after five days. On the police report we had the theifs address and I suggested going to his house bus Paola said that would have been a bad idea because he lives in a super slum and just going to that neighborhood could get you killed because all the theives band together and kill people with their home made guns.

The next day I went to Argentina to visit my Mariana Ojeda, my Argentinean girlfriend and get my money from the check she sent me that I couldn't cash. I knew Paola would be jelous if I told her I went to Buenos Aires so I told her I went to Bariloche. I had to leave the country anyway because it was my fourth of my every three month trip I had to make out of the country to keep the Visa up to date. I ended up getting busted though because I didn't bring my camera even though she kept reminding me to because I think she suspected I might go there since I was going to be gone so long. When I came back she found the bus ticket in my pocket. She knew I had a girlfriend there so she got angry and threw a stool at me and it broke my brand new Sony Clie pocket rocket that mom brought over for me, although I didn't realize until later that she had broken it. After she did that I got a really bad asthma, which is what I always do when I am in or have just been in Buenos Aires, and she stopped being angry at me. I kind of blamed her finding the ticket on my smoking weed and I was sick of the asthma problems so at that moment I broke a glass pipe that I had and told her that I quit smoking; and that calmed her down and she wasn't pissed at me anymore.

For some reason I knew then that it was for real and I really did quit. The truth is that for a few months up to that I had been having bad chronic asthma problems whether I was smoking that day or not and really needed to quit. Plus I had been really loopy in the year of 2002 and needed to get my head together.

The trip to Buenos Aires was trippy because I was back in the old Buenos Aires life again. I met Mariela at a hotel door in the center and we did some errands together. She was teaching Tango in Lisbon with an Argentinian guy and wanted to immigrate there, or somewhere because she was totally fed up with Argentina.

I had a check from the institute that finally paid me that she sent me from an Argentinian bank that went out of business just after she had sent it to me. We went to an office that cashes those kinds of checks and the people there told us about how the bank went under and that there were two brothers who owned it and one was in jail and the other had dissapeared and stole like five or fifty million dollars or something, and there was no way that I would be able to get my check cashed.

I had a nice time there with Mariana. She was just visiting Buenos Aires for a month or two and so wasn't very busy so we spend the time hanging out at coffee shops. I was staying at a hotel near the microcenter that was a cooler area than the place I lived in before. Towards the end she started to get really depressed though until she was at the verge of tears. I think maybe she was bummed that she wasn't going to be able to marry me and go to the states, but I didn't want to talk about that. The last afternoon before I left we were hanging out at a plaza a couple blocks from my hotel and we started talking to a street performer she knew who was with a hot young girl who was talking to me and telling me she was an underwear model. The girl gave me her phone number while Mariana was talking to the street performer guy and when they left she started yelling at me and telling me I was disrespecting her for taking the number from the girl. I told her I didn't realize that she saw it and that it didn't matter anyway because that girl lives in Buenos Aires and I live in Santiago and she lives in Portugal, but she was still mad at me and got depressed again until we parted ways at the park next to the bus station. On the trip back on the bus I sat next to a friendly Argentinian guy who was telling me about his family. Argentinians like to talk which is cool but a lot of the time when they get talking they keep going and going on about stuff that nobody would have any interest in like the routines of their cousins and stuff and never shut up; it's not that annoying though because you can just not pay attention and let them talk to themselves which they don't seem to mind.

After my mom and brother left I didn't get anymore classes with Class Center but I was getting some private students who came by my house, and the dollar was really strong. During that time it grew up to 775 pesos to the dollar, which is a lot better than it was a couple months ago at like 510 or something. I was really scraping along financially during that time, but using all the extra time I had building up my teaching materials and making the first stages of my English teaching website.

In the month of May or June Paola went to Spain for a month. Her origional idea was to immigrate there and eventually bring Claudio, but her mom told her she was dying of lung cancer and had six months to live. That turned out to be a lie but it worked and Paola came back. Paola was able to go to Spain because a childhood friend of hers named Roberto who immigrated there a few years ago loaned her the money and allowed her to stay with him in his apartment. He helped get her a job as a waitress in Madrid Where she worked for a couple of weeks. After the first week he got in a fight with his Spanish girlfriend and beat her up and then tried to put the moves on Paola so she got scared and took off with his girlfriend. For like a week Paola and Rodrigo's ex girlfriend stayed in hostels and couch surfed and Paola met a lot of interesting people in Madrid. After about a week of that Paola went up to a town in the north called La Rioja and stayed with an old childless rich woman she had met in Santiago for the last two weeks of her stay in Spain until her mom told her she was dying of lung cancer and had six months to live. Paola told me she didn't have the money to pay some kind of airport tax or something and needed like three hundred bucks or something and so for some reason she called her Norweigan boyfriend Christian in Norway and he sent her the money so she could get on the plane and come back. I don't remember the details it was like three years ago. She kept calling me before she came back, before she left in Madrid, when she was on lay away in Buenos Aires, and when she got to Santiago so I could meet her at the airport. I wanted to but I was up late that night working on a map mantage of the mountains around Santiago and couldn't get up in the morning.

I remember when she was is Madrid she called a couple times crying telling me she was homesick. Going to Spain was a pretty big deal for her and her family because up to then the only person in her family who had ever been out of the country was her brother Hugo who went to the States but just for a week or so on business selling Jewelry.

Her family had a party the night before she left. Myrian came and another male friend, I guess her only male friend. This guy Alejandro is funny. He's a total drunk, and seems to be so relaxed that he doesn't care about anything. I like him because he brings a beautiful energy of total acceptance, but he is so oblivious to any social rule that he gets himself in trouble. I didn't like him after that night which was the first time I had met him. We were all drinking in the kitchen and Paola decided she wanted Cocaine to help her stay up for the flight the next morning after the party because she was afraid she wouldn't be able to get up if she went to bed. I went with Alejandro to find some Cocaine and he asked a guy he knew who we saw on the street and he led us to a house of a guy but there was nobody there so we went somewhere else or something like that; I don't remember very well because I was already pretty drunk. We finally scored after about an hour. Alejandro wanted to keep it with him and I kind of had to force it out of his hands and explain to him that I paid for it and therefore it was mine. As we were walking down the road back home the guy who was helping us get it was telling Alejandro that we owed him Cocaine for helping us out but Alejandro didn't want to give him any, so the guy started yelling at him and then hit him in the face so I ran away as fast as I could. They were both running after me, but even though I had three liters of beer in my backpack I was getting away from them. I ran about a half block when I ran past Paola's brother Jimi and he yelled out to me asking why I was running. I ran up to him and said that guy hit Alejandro and wanted our Coke. Then they ran up and Jimmi started yelling at the guy telling him that I'm his brother in law and to leave me alone. He was a friend of Jimmis and told him we owed him Coke, and Jimmi told me to give him some. I was kind of pissed and told Jimmi to tell the guy to fuck off and I ran back home. When I got back Paola ran up to me worried because I had been gone so long. I gave it to her and angrily told her I was getting her drug and that I would never do that again, which I didn't. A little while later I went to the liquer store with Alejandro and he told me to buy a Pisco which pissed me off for asking me to do that; which in retrospect it is interesting that I would be mad for him telling me to get a Pisco, because Paola probably told him to tell me. But I remember at the time I was pissed at him and thought he was a user, but I got the Pisco anyway.

A few months later after Paola came back from Spain Alejandro came over on a Friday night or something and was totally wasted. We were having wine and I gave him a glass and he was in a stuper drinking it when he fell off the back of the chair and through the glass halfway accross the room. At that point Paola and I picked him up and she told him he needed to get some sleep and we led him to the gate. After we let him out he tried to grope Paola and kiss her on the lips and she gracefully squirmed away and shut the door. Alejandro only comes over a couple times a year and when he does it is on special occasions like parties. One time he came over because somehow he found out about a party Kano, Jorje and Carlos were having at our place with Jimi and Hugo. He walked to the back and wanted them to give him a beer but Kano yelled at him and told him to get lost. He didn't listen so Kano hit him and grabbed him and pushed him out of the house. He tried to resist a little but gave up pretty easily and left, but an hour later he came back and wanted to join the party. Kano said he didn't like him because he owed him money, but said he wanted him to keep his money and just never talk to him again.

The morning after the go away party for Paola we went to the airport with her lesbian cousin whose name I can't remember right now and her girlfriend who was the best man (woman) for my wedding, her mother, father, Claudio and Jerry. We got to the gate about a half hour before she walked through the metal detectores, just taking photos and saying our goodbyes. Her fathers eyes were glistening a little bit, and to my surprise her little brother Jerry was totally crying. I found it strange they would make such a big deal out of it, maybe they actually thought she was going to be gone longer than a month.

I took advantage of the month that Paola was away and wrote up the lessons and vocabulary lists for my English website and figured out how to put it on the web. I wasted a shit load of time for the first two years I had that website because for some stupid reason I didn't know about the existence of WYSIWIG programs like dreamweaver and made the whole site with code which makes it encredible time consuming. I even made the Aromatherapy site that way. It is crazy to think about. That's one of the dissatvantages of living in an undeveloped country, your not as exposed to the new technological developments. At least at the time it was to me a technological development. Now I am accostomed to stay up to date on what's going on in the world with my internet connection so that I can be in any part of the world and I might as well be in the States. It is so fucking cool!!!

Once while Paola was away I went skiing at Valle Nevado. I saw Jo at the place that takes people up to the resorts. She was living with Rodrigo who was his friend from the year before and a driver. I wanted to see if he would give me a discount and he had me wait until it was all loaded and then told me to get in the back. The bus was already full but I managed to squeeze in the last row. I got dizzy from all the curves and altitude on the drive up which was weird because that had never happened to me before. When we got off Rodrigo charged me five thousand which was a little bit of a discount from the usual seven. I was hoping he wouldn't ask for anything seeing that the bus was already full and if he charged me it would be a profit to only himself and not the company, and he stayed at my place for nine days for free the year before. I hicked up to the second lift so I didn't have to pay for a ticket, and skied the upper part the whole day.

I skied one other time that year at La Parva. It was toward the end of the year and there was almost nobody there. I hicked up to the back side and tried to get on a lift but the buy asked for my ticket. I tried to bribe him for one ride but he didn't accept. I think they check at that lift because people can ski accross from Valle Nevado and the different ski resorts don't have interchangable ski passes even though they are right next to each other which is incredibly stupid. After I got rejected from the good backside lift I went to a smaller one where this didn't check and skiied that one for the rest of the day. I got some cool photos of Santiago from those slopes. I think the view from La Parva must me one of the most spectacular of any ski resort in the world, and the most spectacular overlooking a city.

While I was in Buenos Aires my bike was stolen, my third bike stolen in Buenos Aires, while I was in the bus station buying a ticket back to Santiago. I was only in there for like ten minutes and I locked it up right outside of the main giant glass door with an inch thick lock which I thought was very strong, but somebody managed to cut the lock and steal the bike. Luckily it was only a hundred dollar piece of shit, and after that I had learned my lesson once and for all not to lock up any more bikes with a lock other than a U-lock like a Kryptonite.

When I came back to Santiago Bike less I quickly realized that I couldn't live there without a bike but I didn't have the money to get a good one so I went to Franklin to get a crappy bike until I got the money to get a good one. I new I was only getting a temporary bike so I decided to go ahead and get a road bike, that way when I get a good moutain bike I would have a road bike and a mountain bike. I got a bike for 45 thousand pesos, which was about 70 bucks at the time. It was low quality but light and good as new. I had to ride around the city very carefully though with that bike because the brakes were so bad, but I got used to it. I did one 100 mile or so ride up to the end of the pavement in Cajon del Maipu, before I bought my present bike. The bike I have now is a Trek 4300 and it costed me 265 thousand pesos, which was like 450 bucks. It was great to have a real bike for the first time since I was in the states. I remember one ride I did up to the end of the valley that goes to the military area in Cajon del Maipu and feeling how new and cool it was to ride. I did some mountain biking around that year by myself - those were the days before Tony bought his. I think he was is Santiago for more that a year before he bought his bike. We did go on one ride while I still lived at the Capellan Abarzua house up Yerba Loca canyon but we only made it about a kilometer past the parking lot because Tony lost all of his energy from the altitude. I offered to push his bike for him which I did for about twenty feet but he was totally bushed so we turned around. While we were up there we saw a girl who works at the same institute as him which was intersting. We rode down a super steep special mountain bike trail which was fun for me but Tony was so exhausted he couldn't control the bike and kept going over the handlebars and cursing at the bike. We didn't get back to the city until dark, and Tony was so exhausted that he actually rode in front of a car getting off the highway. Luckily the person was alert and stopped for him. In spite of the fact that Tony pushed himself into a state of delirium he had great memories of that ride and wanted to do more; however we didn't manage that for like another year, last year, in which we actually did quite a bit of mountain biking.

Toward the end of living there at Capellan Abarzua downloaded like a thousand photos from the internet and printed them up and posted every square inch of my room with them. They were all the things that interested me: Photos of the cosmos, animals, muscle girls, crop circles, flying saucers, you name it.

A little bit after that Glen and his girlfriend Susie came through Santiago on their South American trip. I just happenstanced upon them after I bought a radio with Paola and Claudio when I was riding my bike home on Forest Park. They came over and hung out after. They had been working in the far north Canada for like a year. Glen was working as a bar tender and a mover moving people to the outback in planes and trucks. They were there in the winter where the river froze up and turned into the highway! Paola and I climbed hiked up Cerro San Cristobal and Manqegue, and Glen and I climbed the mountain just south of Ramon.

Then were here for like a week and then went off to Argentina and went home. He was there for like two months and then flew back to Santiago and we climbed Ramon, the mountain above La Dehesa, and mountain biked up and climbed the mountain behind Lo Barnacheo whose name I can't remember. One day we drove the Mini up Cajon del Maipu with Paola and Claudio towards Embalse de Yeso but it had a gas line problem and we had to turn around. On the way back when on Los Leones in Providencia the gears totally fell apart so we called Ana Maria and she and Juan Pablo came over and towed us back to my house. That was the only trip we did in the Mini. One night when Paola and Claudio were over there we drank and blasted rock music all night and the next morning at like ten the owner who didn't even live there and somehow found out about our little party probably because he was drunk himself walking down the road late at night banged on the door and yelled at me about having the music too late and that I all the other people who lived there complained. Him yelling at me like that pissed me off so I yelled at him and he told me to not "Andar como el Gringo" or something. I asked him what the hell Andar como el Gringo meant but he couldn't tell me and walked off. Paola was in the room and heard us and I asked her what Andar como el Gringo meant and she had no idea. Literally Andar como el Gringo means "go like the Gringo". So maybe he was saying something like "Don't yell like a Gringo" or something.

The family who ran that house were a pain in the ass. They were a mother and father in their sixties who lived around the corner with their two kids who were like in their late twenties. The son named Leo was the guy "In Charge" of the house, as if it even needed someone to be in charge of it. It was just a house with ten rooms in it for rent, but Leo kept finding reasons to knock on my door and complain about something. I can't remember most of the stuff he complained about now, but most of it was about Paola coming over. For some reason they really didn't like the fact that I had a girlfriend because it was like having an outside force coming in the house like she would steal something or break something or use up my electricity or something. Toward the end of the time I lived there in the end of October I bought a 1970 Austin Mini and spent a month fixing it up and lived with Paola that whole month. When I finished that project I was back at the house and he saw Paola get out of the shower so he knocked on my door and asked me to leave. He had told me before that Paola wasn't allowed to shower there because of the gas bill, and I agreed to not let her shower there. But I explained to him that I hadn't lived there more a month so I had a months worth of showers for credit and so it was OK for her to have this one shower. I asked him to confirm that he hadn't seen me for a month and he said he didn't have any way of knowing because he was never there, which is a lie. He was always there. Most of the time just standing around looking stupid. I ride my bike by that house everyday because it is on the route from my house to Providencia where most of my classes are. I go right by it because the hill funnels me along the base. I have even seem him about a dozen times just standing around on the outside of the house as I ride my bike by. For a few months he was there all the time helping a guy who must have been like 75 years old paint and renovate the bathrooms. This old guy was funny to watch because he would work for a couple hours and then sleep for and then work for like an hour and sleep again. He was there working on the place most of the time I was there and prett much what he accomplished in the better part of a year he was there was the renovation of two bathrooms and painting the inside part of the house.

I think I already talked about my hampsters and birds that ran freely in my room, but there was also a cat that belonged to the house that had a name but I called him Kitsy Katsy. He was stripped and looked like a tiger. He always came by my room and hung out with me because I was the only person in the whole house who let him in. One thing I have learned about undeveloped countries is that people don't really like dogs and cats unless they are their own, and even then they don't treat them with very much love. For example, in the states you never see people kicking cats and dogs but traveling I see it all the time. I think that observation merits an analization so maybe I will write about it later. Tony likes cats but for some reason he didn't let Kitsy Katsy in his room. That cat was cool, he could stand on his hind legs and tried to talk to me. Once I got a photo of him eating in my room with my hampster on his back.

Living in that room was an interesting experience because I had such a small space that I used so efficiently. I made a little kitchen in the corner on the side of my bed. I didn't have running water so I would fill up five five liter bottles and put them under my table, so when I get thirsty or need some water to cook with I just take my bottle and pour the water out. It's pretty much the same as having running water but you need to fill up the bottles every couple of days outside. As far as the dirty dishes go, I just put all of them in a big plastic mopping tub and brought them to the kitchen to wash all at once. When my mom came to visit me she thought I lived in a dismall situation, but I thought I set up my room pretty engeniously.

A couple weeks before I moved out, in December, Glen came back to South America for some more travelling and we climbed some more mountains for like a week. When he left I got kicked out of my house for letting Paola take a shower, and although Leo changed his mind about kicking me out I had already gotten used to the idea of moving in with Paola and started a couple week push to make her house habitable for me.

Paola had been trying to get me to move into her house for about a year, but I refused because I was sharing the internet cost with Tony and didn't want to leave him high and dry with that bill for one, but the main reason was that her house was such a disaster area that I thought there was no way I could turn it around enough to be a place I could feel comfortable enough to live in.

The main problem with her house was that her son Claudio used to be a total emotional basket case and I couldn't stand to be around him for more than a few minutes at a time. He was always crying and upset about something. He also didn't want anything to do with me which was understandable, but he was also very rude; for example when I would ask him something he would either ignore me or say that he didn't have to answer me if he didn't want to. He would even sometimes say that he would get his father to come over and hit me, although that never bothered me because he was so young and emotionally troubled it just seemed like something natural for him to say, and besides I was never sure that was what he actually said; in fact I only specifically remember him saying that once and I don't remember what it was for; I think it was for something that had nothing to do with what I said or did. Back then he seemed to revere his father because he was a leader.

Paola told me that Claudios father, Claudio Hernandez, known as "Kramer", is the leader of the poor low class soccer fanatics who follow the University of Chile soccer team, which is one of the two big soccer teams in Chile. In the 90's Chile was doing well in the international soccer circuit and even made it to the world cup which is good for them. Paola's brother Jerry told me they made it to the quarter finals of the 98 world cup which I found out later to be a lie. Even though the soccer players aren't good the fans were nuts and followed their teams all over the country in back of a hundred buses Paola said. She said at one point Claudio was more important than the president of Chile and was on all the talk shows talking about his gang of soccer fans. She said she wasn't happy with him though because he was so popular that he was always with his friends and never with her and Claudito and was always cheating on her. She said there were always women calling and asking if Kramer was there which annoyed her. She said she caught him red handed four times. The last time he never came home so she went to his mothers house and she said he wasn't there but she didn't believe him and stormed into his room and found him in bed with a girl so he threw her out of bed and told her he wasn't doing anything, but she yelled at him and so he beat her unconcious. She was pregnant with a little girl at the time and as a result of the beating had a miscarraige and tried to break up with him but he told her he would have her killed if she did it so she decided against it for the sake of Claudito. At one point she did manage to break up with him but he had one of his goons stand on the street corner all day long for weeks to make sure she wasn't with another man, even though they had already broken up. She said another time she threatened to break up with him at a party and he told her she wasn't allowed and put his gun to her head and then fired it in the air and told her he would kill her, but because of the party no one heard it and he got away with it. She never told anything about that though because she was afraid for her life.

He basically is a gangster. There was a movie made a couple years ago that was in the theaters called "black and blue", about the nineties when the gang warfare between the two soccer teams, colo colo and the university of chile got so bad that there were murders. In the movie, which is fictional, everybody ends up dead from revenge killings. I guess in real life it wasn't too far from that. Paola said the producers of the movie came by her house to ask questions about what it was like living with him, as they lived with her parents for about a year. The actor who played him in the movie looked identical to how he looked in those years, down to the scarf and sunglasses and hairdo and all. There was even a drive by against him at one point where his brother got shot and almost died. He died anyway a couple months later from an electricution coming out of the bath and stepping on an open live wire, which is common here. I even died like that once, but that's another story. Claudio was pretty violent. Paola told me of a time when they were walking down the road and a guy tried to mug them with a knife but Claudio took the knife from him and beat him unconcious and took his jacket from him. Paola tried to get help and the people there inicially attacked him thinking he was the mugger. He has been in jail for assault a couple times, one time for attacking a lady in a convecience store, and another time a couple years ago for beating a homeless man unconcious for showing his dick to his wife. Paola showed me the article in the newspaper when that happened. He was in jail for like three months that time. I have met him a couple times and he did seem a little intense to me. He's pretty big for a chilean, about as tall as me and with really wide shoulders, but out of shape with the trademark chilean male tities. Paola only has negative things to say about him because of all the abuse and infidelity she dealt with when she was with him, but also because she only gives her about thirty dollars a month to raise Claudito even though he makes enough money to have two late model cars, a new big house and a lot of new jewelry for his wife who doesn't have to work.

She said he has lots of different rackets going on that make him all the money. His official job is as a principal of a continuing educational night school that he founded with donations from the University for high school drop outs who are fans of the University of Chile soccer team. With that job he officially only makes a couple hundred dollars a month, but he makes the bulk of his money employing the kids who go there in selling black market bus and stadium tickets and Cocaine. A couple months ago they got busted for the fake stadium tickets and their school was taken away though so aparently now the only known income for him is the Coke.

Paola said even though Claudio was always two timing on her and was never around, he still never let her out of the house in fear of her being unfaithful to him, which made her life hell. The way she tells it, she seems like an idiot for staying with him as long as she did, but she said she stayed with him for Claudito.

Between Clauditos crazy father and her crazy household it is understandable how much of a basketcase he used to be, but about a year ago, about the time I finally got this house under control, he became normal and stopped having hissy fits all the time.

Another problem with Paola's house was the hosue itself. It was completely dilapitated to the point of me not even thinking I could fix it at all. There were multiple windows busted out or missing, it hadn't been painted since it was built, and that paint job was half ass at best. Chileans have a bad habit of never finishing what they start. For example, when Paola had her house built when she lived with Claudio, she would pay the worker half of the money upfront to motivate him to do the work or else he wouldn't show up, but hey just took the money and dissapeared anyway. That happened twice, one of those guys was the brother in law of Paola's sister in law, but that didn't deter him from ripping Paola off. The third guy wanted the money up front also but she refused and that's how she eventually got it built. But the problem was the way they built it was the absolute cheapest half ass way you could possible build something, and apparently is the way all the houses are built here judjing from the looks of the roofs of the surrounding houses in this neighborhood. What they do is they nail two by fours together and then nail pressed wood sheets that resemble cardboard together. When it comes time to build the roof they just place the tin panels on top and instead of nailing them down they just place bricks on the to keep them in place. This causes problems in the winter when it rains because by them they have slipped enough for gaps to appear and their are always a half dozen leaks. So every winter when it rains they have to hire someone to go up there and replace the tin panels.

Another problem with Paolas house was the area in front of her house where a garden and four trees are was completely overgrown to the point that you couldn't even walk through there because of all the dead branches in the trees and on the ground. There was also no paint anywhere and the brick wall separating her area from the car parking area was missing about a dozen bricks. The bricks making up the entire house and walls surrounding their parcel were also woefully empty of cement which made it ugly. The reason for that is because when they build the buildings here instead of adding two parts sand and one part cement like you are supposed to, they add like five parts sand to every one part cement to save money, but that results in a very brittle crumbly compound that just rots away. Another big problem with her house was all the trash around made the place look like an uninhabitable trash heap. There was also the factor of her family members always having problems, such as her father always getting drunk and yelling and her mom having problems with that and paola's brothers wife yelling at her kids. Another problem was inside her house. There was no lightling or furnature, and the flooring was ripped away linonium which made it very ugly. There was no room either; all that her house consisted of at the time was two rooms, one where she and Claudito slept, and the other was the living room. It seems hard to beleive now, but for about a year and a half, I didn't even consider ever living there; which seems weird now because I'm the kind of person who is always looking for ways to save money such as not having to pay rent.

I eventually decided to move into her house when we decided to get married, but I have to catch up to that point with the story of the massage on the tail end of my life at Capellan Abarzua:

Toward the end of my life at Capellan Abarzua Paola got a job giving massages for a small Massage office in Providencia. She got that because I was talking about how I was a Thai Massuer and had given her a couple massages so she got interested. At the beginning she enjoyed doing that, but then got in trouble with the owner of the company and quit because the girl who was managing the place was abusing her manegerial powers and robbing from the owner of the bussiness and blaming it on Paola. The way the business worked was business men would come up to the small office and het a small private room and after taking a small glass of Pisco they would get a relaxing massage. The young girl who was in charge of the place first told Paola that she was the owner and founder of of the place and even had another one in another part of town, even though she was like 20 years old and was a stoner partier. Paola found out later that the real owner was an English expatriat who was married to a Chilean woman and that young girl who managed it was his mistress. Paola liked giving massages but was annoyed with the girl always sending her out to buy toilet paper and Pisco every day which took a long tiem and cut into her massage giving availability. She should have sent Paola out to buy the stuff in more quantity once a week instead of once or even twice a day. She also robbed from the owner. The final straw for Paola before she quite was one weekend for a concert the girl went in the office and took out 20 thousand pesos and the next week when the owner found out about it she just denied taking it and said it must have been Paola. Paola said they should just look in the register book that people have to sign when they enter the building and sure enough that girl was there on Saturday, but the guy still believed her and blamed Paola so she quit. Paola was in my room when the man called her to accuse her of stealing from him and I heard her trying to explain herself to him but he didn't want to listen. When Paola quit, she left with another girl called Carola who had been giving massages and some kind of toe nail treatment for a couple years and supposedly had a lot of her own clients whe followed her around as she worked for different massage places. Now that they didn't work at that place anymore they needed a place to give masages together so I set up my room with a curtain to hide my bed and bought them a massage table and let them give massages in my room and they were doing alright giving massages most days. It wasn't much of a bother to me because when they would come over I would just go into the living room and work on my computer or whatever.

After a month or so of that they told me they wanted me to rent them an office so they could make better money giving massages but I didn't like the idea because the girl seemed really fishy to me. In retrospect she wasn't a bad girl, but didn't have a very pleasing personality. The first time I met her she was trying to convince me that she had plenty of clients but wasn't looking in my eyes as she was talking which I didn't appreciate and told her so, but she didn't seem to understand or listen to me. In the long run I didn't mind her at all though because she didn't mind me being grumpy with Paola for the various business errors she was making. It was a stressfull time for me because I didn't have much money and still had to support Paola who was barely making any and at the same time trying to get me to get her an office and throwing temper tantrums when I said no.

One time we three were having lunch in a fast food place and Carolina told me I should marry Paola so I could get a license to drive my car and so I got on my knees and asked for her hand in marraige, but I was only joking and they knew it. But about a week later while we were having dinner with her whole family Paola took me by the hand and told me that she had already told her family that we were going to get married and that they were expecting me to make the announcement at that moment. I explained to her that I was only joking in the restaurant and that she knew that and it wasn't fair to put me on the spot like that and that I wasn't going to marry her. She pleaded with me to tell them because she had already told them I was going to tell them and it would be embarasing for her if I didn't do it, but I told she was crazy and went back inside. When I went back inside everybody had stopped talking and were all looking at me expectatly. I looked at Paola and she was looking at me like I had no choice but to tell them. About ten seconds of silence went by and I thought about it and spontaniously though "what the hell", and said we were going to get married, and which point they all clapped, but not in an overly joyous way as they were still a little confused about why I was so hesitant to make the anouncement.

A little while after that, like a couple weeks, I moved into her house and we rented an apartment. I remember a couple weeks before I moved into her house Glen came back the second time and we climbed some mountains for a week or so and went for a drive in Cajon del Maipu where the mini broke down.