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Day 0 - New York, NY - The trip begins ...
As some of you may know (but most probably don’t), I’m currently sitting in the communal area of Hostel Don Santiago in Santiago, Chile, and today is day 2 of my 6 month sabbatical. Well strictly speaking, my sabbatical is actually now a 165 day sabbatical after a somewhat stop-start start. I was supposed to leave NY on May 1st but it quickly became apparent that the amount of work I had to finish divided by the number of hours left pre-departure was not a number I liked the look of so a revised departure date of May 11th was considered more reasonable all round - and also allowed for a couple more rounds of leaving drinks/dinners 😊
So as May 11th approached, the list of things to do didn’t seem to get shorter, nor the list of people to say goodbye too - and on top of all that, a bout of suspected swine flu had me feeling like death on the evening of the 10th as I was in 300 Madison clearing out my office. I decided that another postponement of the start date was
in order as I didn’t much like the idea of my first experience of South American hospitality being, pardon the pun, a Santiago hospital. With my utter lack of Spanish, I decided that the risk of me leaving said hospital with a leg mistakenly removed cos I didn’t know the word for “stop cutting” was high and so a quick call to NWA resulted in a remarkably simple change of flight to the 14th.
The next three days flew by and with the swine flu in remission, I managed to get everything in order (well at least I think I got everything in order but I’ll leave it to David and Tim to let me know if that is an accurate statement) and arrived at La Guardia a comfortable 32 minutes before my scheduled flight departure on Friday afternoon. Fortunately good old reliable NWA, well actually it was Delta, were experiencing delays, so I managed to check in, pass security and board without actually having to break into a sprint, it was just one of those speed walks people do when they’re trying not to look as though they’re running, but really they kind of are.
And so
there you have it. A short 13 hours later I landed in Santiago, the capital of Chile, at 7.30am, dazed and more than a little confused.
I pulled the piece of paper out of my jeans pocket, which had the detailed instructions of the combination of buses and subways I needed to get to my hostel, together with some useful phrases I thought I might need, read it through diligently, promptly threw it in the bin and went and hailed a taxi. I realize this is an extremely weak start to my third reincarnation as a backpacker, and immediately broke about 3 backpacker golden rules (namely 1. Never get a taxi, 2. If you do have to get a taxi never get in the first taxi you see and 3. Never wait till the end of the journey to ask how much it is going to cost) but it was early and I had a runny nose so I can be forgiven!
Anyway, apologies to those of you who really don’t care, but then I suspect that those of you that really don’t care probably haven’t got this far in the email, so this sentence is really only
wasting the time of the people that do care, but you care so I’m sure you’ll bear with me 😊
Right, so now to the thankyous. I arrived in New York on October 31st 2005 and over the last three and a half years I’ve had some amazing times and met lots of amazing people, most of whom are hopefully on this email. Thank you to everyone that came to my leaving drinks at Brass Monkey two Saturdays ago, and particularly to Neeta for organizing and to Jake for providing the lime green speedo jacket which featured so heavily in the photos, thanks to Krish for taking a valuable day off work to help me move my stuff out of my apartment and thanks to Richard for kindly providing very low cost storage for the vast majority of my stuff - I promise I’ll be back to get it some day!
For those of you that this blog has not bored senseless, you can follow my exploits over the next 165 days by subscribing to this blog so you’ll get an email every time I update it which I hope will be every couple of weeks
I
will also be periodically checking email (joools@joools.com) and will probably be on facebook more than is healthy.
Anyway, thanks again to all of you, have fabulous summers and I’ll see you hopefully when I get back to NY at the end of October.
Adios amigos
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Marissa
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My Comments on Comments
Jules, you were undoubtedly the most regular provider comments on our (sadly not so) recent blog. I can't promise to offer the same dedication but I thought I'd start as I probably don't mean to go on. I'm looking forward to the pangs of jealously! Let the adventures begin!