Surprise

Had an unexpected but most welcome surprise tonight: the staff at Hostal de Sammy decided to throw a free BBQ for us! Great first night in Santiago: lovely home-cooked dinner of steak, salad, and chips; and an esky (or, as the kiwis working there called it, a "chilly-bin" — sorry Honour! :P) full of cold beers. The barbeque took place out on the back patio of Sammy's, where the guests and staff alike were able to sit and shmooze, in the pleasant (although slightly chilly) atmosphere of the Santiago evening.

Not sure if I mentioned this before: but everywhere you go in PEB (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia), you have to put your toilet paper in the little bin, that's always provided in the bathroom for you. I haven't dropped my toilet paper in the toilet for about 5 months. Today, I did it again for the first time. Because this is Santiago, and it's not some backward banana republic, and you can do things like that. And once again, I was surprised at how surprised I was. It felt really, really weird! Not only am I going to have to acclimatise to Western life again — I'm going to have to learn how to go to the toilet, like a Western person does, all over again.

Yesterday morning, my friend Patrick left Baños for the town of Tena, which is about 5 hours east. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I walked into a bar in Baños this evening, to find him sitting down and waving at me! "Patrick?" I said, puzzled. "What the hell are you doing here? I thought you went to Tena!" Well, he said that he came back: they're only offering easy rafting trips in Tena (due to the weather, same as here in Baños), and the road from Tena to Quito is currently flooded — meaning that there was nowhere else for him to come, except back here to Baños. Anyway, I think that when I saw him, I looked like I'd just seen a ghost. Big shock!