Mild Amusement

A couple of weeks ago, a buddy of mine had an extra ticket to the Cal-Oregon game .  For those of you who don't follow college football, Oregon was ranked #1 in the country at the time.  They have an offense that is scary good, and they've run up the score on more than one team this season.  Also, Cal isn't exactly a powerhouse this season.  So, the potential for a blowout was definitely there.  Put it this way: Oregon was favored by 20 points by the odds makers in Las Vegas. But surprisingly, the Cal defense hung tough against that vaunted Oregon offense.  Now, I'll readily admit that Cal cheated .  Still, they played well above their usual level to even keep the game that close.  What's more, the Bears (that'd be Cal, for those of you who REALLY don't follow college football) looked like they might take the lead at the start of the fourth quarter. Couple all of this with the fact that the Bears were playing at home, and the fans in the stadi...

I mentioned in a previous post that the Spanish I speak is slightly different than the Spanish that most people speak in Argentina.  There are always regional differences to the way a language is spoken, so this wasn't surprising.  And other than blowing my cover as a local, the diction wasn't a problem. There was, however, one case where this resulted in a bit of amusement.  To me, the word "chicos" has always meant something akin to "kids" or "young 'uns."  I'm not alone in thinking this, either; I'd say at least part of the Internet agrees with me . So imagine my amusement when the driver on our very first cab ride kept referring to my travel companions as "chicos."  The Mild Ex was also pretty amused, as she likes to give me a hard time about being older than she is.  I was a little surprised, to be honest.  I'm not usually mistaken for the oldest person in a group.  In fact, most people who don't know me ver...

The way I see it, there are generally two ways to travel: you plan everything out in advance, or you play it by ear and figure it out along the way.  I wouldn't say one way is necessarily better than the other, but obviously the method you pick makes a difference in how you spend your time in your destination.  In the case of this last trip, we decided to go with the second option. Now, that's not to say we completely avoided any planning.  We had a rough idea of where we wanted to go, and how to get there.  In the spirit of having an adventure, though, we didn't book any hotels or buy any tickets in advance.  This also gave us a little bit more flexibility in case we had to change plans mid-trip.  All in all, we felt fairly comfortable with this plan. And then we landed.  Argentina's previous President passed away a couple of days before we arrived.  We actually had heard the news, but we didn't think anything of it other than that it was a ...

As part of my Argentina excursion, we went on a trip to Aconcagua .  Mind you, we didn't actually climb the thing, but we did get close enough to see it and basically do a day trip up there.  The really interesting part of it for me was that for the majority of this trip, I was one-eyed.  Yup, I was the one-eyed man. First, a little background.  I assumed the sun was going to be out and I'd need some sort of sunglasses to deal with that occurrence.  I don't have prescription sunglasses, so that meant that I needed to wear my contacts.  I'd already brought them and all of the associated gear (contacts case and solution), so I was all set.  And for the first hour or so of the trip, everything was coming up roses. However, we were walking around, and I rubbed my left eye.  It's not like I was gouging myself, but the motion was enough to disturb my contact.  If you've worn (soft) contacts before, you know that this occurrence isn't a very big...

As some of you may already know, I was on vacation to Argentina recently.  It was a good trip, but even before the trip started, we realized that I was the only brown person.  Why is that important information, you ask?  I'm the only one of the three who speaks "fluent" Spanish. For those of you who are astute or curious readers, you might wonder why I used quotes for that last sentence.  After all, I was born in a Spanish-speaking country, I speak castellano  (read: Spanish ) at home, I took enough classes in high school to bone up on my grammar & general literacy, and I've been known to use it when communicating with coworkers in Spanish-speaking countries.  So why the quotes? Well, seeing as how my job was to translate things to English while on this trip, I kept doing so.  Often times, I would do this in front of someone who was speaking Spanish to me.  And then a few seconds later, that person would magically start speaking English to...