10 things we miss the most

Just thought we would share those with you all. After all, there are good things about the UK and not travelling!

1/ Friends and family
No comment. That´s all of you guys..

2/ Cheese and dairy products
Cheese is a dry tasteless affair in the countries we visited. Yogurts are not kept in fridges, seating on shelves in the sun, so not so tempting. We eat so much dairy products normally.. Nothing here. Really craving for a fresh ball of Mozarella and a Longley Farm yogurt!

3/ Proper Music
You can get decent Andean music as reported in our post about Otavalo. It sounds however repetitive. The worse we experienced is the music served, hours on end in buses. Take the worse of american / european pop (think Celine Dion or Eric Clapton), add spanish lyrics to it preferably using the word "Corazon" as often as possible and cheesy instrument for the melody. Eurgghh! Horrible. Really miss UK music and radio. We caught the Ting Tings "Great Djs" this morning on cable tv: I nearly cried!

4/ Proper coffee
Can you believe it? Despite most South American countries being major coffee producers, it is hardly possible to get a decent cup here! Mostly, the coffee served is in fact instant coffee and when it is not, it is brewed in a very weird fashion. Cafe natural is in fact a concentrated of coffee, as strond and feasibly possible on which you need to add hot water.

5/ Papers
Almost impossible to catch an international english paper here. Local papers are tabloid like and very local or national. Hardly any international news at all and all very skewed, almost brainwashing. Saturday Guardian -slurp- I am salivating!

6/ Being able to communicate socially
OUr pidgin Spanish does not allow us any social talk and that is very frustrating. Would be so great discussing with the people we meet.

7/ Sense of humor and sarcasm
Obviously related to point 5. Although we suspect sense of humor here is very different, very visual. I missed a step and nearly fell over the other day and managed to get a bunch of people laughing in the process. Martha tried herself to a bit of sarcasm in Spanish with an hotel clerk a couple of weeks ago, we had to leave the hotel in a hurry for fear of being thrown out!

8/ Fresh salad
Impossible to get decent stuff here and whatever raw vegetables served to you, you need to stay away for fear it has been watched with tap water and carry evil ilnesses!

9/ Sunday mornings in bed
Believe it or not, travelling is no holidays. I think we must have stayed in bed pass 9am twice since we left england with our average get up time being about 7am! We want our fresh and lovely bed with items 3, 4 and 5 above until 11am!

10/ Pubs
A good old british institution. On the plus side, I am definitely loosing my beer belly!


I won´t do a top 10 of what we are not missing, but certainly, work, stress and the tube would be pretty far high...

Next post will be on Lake Titicaca and its fantastic islands. Keep reading!

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