Hunt and Peck

Okay, I am going to give this typing business another shot. If I hold my right arm above the keyboard, I can sort of use the fingers on my right hand. We will see how long I can hold it up - this cast is heavy!

It´s Saturday afternoon, a beautiful day, and my friends have gone off on a two day hike up to a refugio and back, and I am stranded here. We decided that it probably was not the best idea for me and my cement arm to attempt it. I had a brief meltdown yesterday, when I realized I am going to be excluded from almost all activities for the next two weeks, but I felt much better once I got a little frustration out of my system. And, as I told my pops yesterday, God forbid I be stranded in a beautiful resort town with nothing to do for two weeks. If I can find a problem with that, I will never be able to make myself happy doing anything!

So I went out this morning and bought a new book ($20 US for a paperback - a price I am willing to pay), and if all I do this weekend is sit by the lake and read, it will be a weekend well spent.


But how did I get here?


Well, my week was off to a great start. Monday after classes, we had a brief city tour, followed by beers and peanuts at a local brewery. Bariloche is a town of about 100,000 residents, and it has grown quickly! The town has really only been here for about 100 years. It´s situated between the very dry "step" area to the east, and the wet mountains of Chile to the west, so this makes for some interesting weather phenomena, apparently. I am told that it snowed here about a month ago (very odd because it´s the middle of summer here), and that the weather can change drastically overnight. And indeed, the extremes in a day here are amazing. The first few days, it felt like it was about 85 degrees in the middle of the day, but about 50 after the sun went down. And, the sun doesn´t go down here til 10:30 pm!! How amazing is that? For nine months of the year, Bariloche is one hour behind Buenos Aires, but for three months in the summer (now), they set the clock forward an hour to save electricity. It is a bit disorienting to eat dinner at 9:30 pm, while the sun is still out, and then have time to go for a walk after dinner before sunset. A bit disorienting, but I like it!


Tuesday, we hiked up Cerro Campanario - only about a 30 minute climb, but straight up, and I was wearing my Chacos because we had been told we were just going to ride up the ski lift to the top. But, of course, when the option to walk presented itself, I took it. The paths to the top were covered with slippy slidy dirt, so by the time we got to the top, my feet were brown brown brown. The view from the top was incredible - hopefully that was obvious from the pictures. You can see seven lakes from up there, as well as the mountains bordering Chile, and all of Bariloche. Just beautiful.


(As a side-note, I have been thinking about the word beautiful, and how it´s the only word to really describe things here, but it doesn´t feel strong enough because it´s so overused. All words for beauty feel trite and obnoxious. Breathtaking seems dramatic. Gorgeous seems silly. Simply beautiful. The most perfect kind of beauty - totally natural.)

The way back down the mountain was a mess for me. I might as well have laid down on my stomach and rolled down because that´s about what I looked like when I reached the bottom. I had a little tumble when I started running down the hill and couldn´t put on the breaks with my little Chacos. A little scrape on my left ankle, but otherwise, just a bit dirty. That was not to be the last time I would walk the hill up to my house covered with dirt and getting funny looks from passers-by. Oh, no.

Wednesday afternoon was mountain biking, and I was really excited. We were going to ride part of Circuito Chico, a 60 km loop through some of the most beautiful areas around Bariloche. I´d never been mountain biking before, and I think my most recent previous experience on a bike was on a beach cruiser in Sanibel about three years ago. So I am not sure why I was so confident that I could go mountain biking (in the mountains) without having an accident.

We were on the bikes for about four hours, and the first 3.5 hours were amazing. It was a perfect day - blue skies, green trees, lakes, mountains, breezes. We hadn´t been given any kind of lesson on how the bikes worked - I suppose the folks at the rental place assumed we weren´t inexperienced ninnies - so it took me about an hour to sort out the gears and whatnot.

With the exception of an after dinner walk every now and then, I have not done any intentional exercise since I left the States. It was, therefore, exhilarating to get on that bike and to feel my muscles working again. The first few hills were challenging, to say the least, but it´s the kind of challenging I like - physical and mental. I love getting my head into a little meditation place during exercise - when things start to physically get hard, I focus on my breathing and count, in two, out two, in two, out two. Eyes glaze over, mind empties, and before you know it, you´ve pushed yourself through, forgotten about the "I can´t". That, for me, is the reward of exercise. The mental challenge - telling myself I can - is always greater than the physical.

And so it was on this little bicycle. I´d come around a corner, and see a long stretch of road ahead, a steep climb, and I´d think to myself, you´ve got to be kidding me... But then, my mind would click over to challenge mode - "I will not let this hill get the best of me!" - and I´d just push push push, breathe breathe breathe.

The downhills were a different sort of challenge. The others in the group (there were 7 of us, I think), would go flying on ahead, and I´d sort of cruise on down, taking my sweet time, riding my brakes, clinging to any bit of control I had over that bike. I was formulating this little metaphor in my head while I was riding - something about riding the brakes. I was thinking that on the bike, as in life, it´s so terrifying to let go of the brakes and just let yourself go, let yourself be carried on down the road. It feels much better mentally to have that hand on the break, slowing yourself, proceeding with caution, but you are losing out on quite a ride that way.

After an hour or two, I loosened my grip, and let myself fly. It´s an incredible feeling to reach the top of a hill that you were certain you couldn´t climb, and then just let yourself go, let yourself savor that downhill reward.

I loved every minute of it. I sang songs to myself, thought to myself, and always, always marveled at the beauty of my surroundings.

In the last 20-30 minutes of the trip, we took some sort of short cut down a long dirt road - I think we were trying to avoid a heavily trafficked road. The road was relatively flat, maybe a slight downward slant, but I was the last in our line of bikers, and I could not see anything on the ground below me because of the clouds of dirt the wheels had stirred up. I was thinking about the dirt, thinking about these brown clouds, wondering if this was considered dirt bike riding, when all of a sudden, I was on the ground. I really don´t know what happened. One second on, the next off.

I fell off on the right side of my bike, and my right arm went down first, absorbing my whole body weight. Elisabeth was maybe 50 feet ahead of me, and she heard me yelp as I went down, so she came back to check on me, and then went ahead to get Matias, the "activities coordinator". I felt okay - no blood, nothing dramatic. More just shocked and startled than anything. But that arm was not feeling quite right. Matias and Elisabeth and Eric arrived, we took a few deep breaths, Matias insisted on some photos, and then I was back on the bike.

The arm was feeling worse and worse as I pedaled onto the rental shop. The pressure I was having to put on it to steady myself on the bike was becoming more and more painful, but I did make it (though not without fighting a lot of tears).

We had a thirty minute bus ride back to Bariloche, and by the time we got off, I was certain I needed to get the arm checked out. So translator Matias walked me up to Bariloche´s private hospital, and within just a few minutes, I was in front of a doctor, and shuffled off to the x-ray room.

It was certainly a few (or many) steps down from a hospital in the States, but it was a hospital, and the nurses were smiling patiently and speaking soothingly, though I couldn´t understand what they were saying. Matias had to wash my arm off because I guess that´s somehow not the responsibility of the hospital staff, so that was pretty amusing - he´s this 26 year old laughing hyena of a person who clearly has this job because he´s mr. social, mr. party man. I was in and out in 45 minutes, and it only set me back about $80 US (maybe that´s why they didn´t wash my arm for me).

Matias then walked me up the hill to my house and presented me to my appropriately concerned padres, who were just finishing up dinner. So dramatic, so silly, so pathetic.

Everything is going to be fine. This cast seems like a bit of overkill to me, but what do I know? My arm does feel much better in the cast, though. And I am learning to brush my teeth with my left hand, wash just my left hand, take off my clothes, put on my clothes, and all of those good things. I felt a bit lost that first night, because all I wanted to do was take a shower, but I didn´t have my mommy or a best friend to help me and laugh at me. Ana Maria, mi "madre" here, offered to help me, but you know, it´s just not the same, and there´s that pride thing, too. So I settled for a bath, and showed up at school the next morning still feeling revolting, but at least I showed up, right?

What an adventure.

I have decided to stick with the group classes for next week, even though the writing is, well, impossible. My friend and classmate, Elian, from Switzerland, has been so sweet and helpful, and she´s going to make copies of her notes for me every day. What a dear.

The doctor said I need to come back on the 29th to get the cast off and have some "rehabilitation" (that seems a bit dramatic, yes?), which has sort of thrown things off since I was loosely planning to hit the road next weekend. So...one day at a time. We will see. The parentals are no longer coming, so I am free to do what I like.

Okay, yowsers. I have written this in two sittings, and this little arm of mine is getting very irritated with me. It´s asking for ice cream, and who am I to say no? Off we go!

More later...mañana perhaps.