Elevators

So. After getting home yesterday from a beautiful bike ride, it was time to take the elevator in my building up to the 5th floor with the bike.

After holding the door of the elevator open for a man in crutches, I declined his offer of going up with him, because I didn't want to crowd him with my bike.

When I road up at last it stopped at the fourth floor where a women was waiting to go down.

She asked "down?" I said, "nope. Up"  The door closed, and then.....nothing. like. Nothing. I stood for a minute. Literally 60 seconds holding my breath. Then I started swearing and muttering and sweating, muttering some more. It had never paused this long before.

I fanned myself with a large advertisement for pizza I'd just picked up from the mailbox and then pressed the 5 button again....
Waited.
Then proceeded to press it...more!  (Think 20 times?)

What feels like 5 minutes pass which in real time is probably 1.
Then the yelling started but in an awkward apologetic way....
"Is anyone out there?  Hello? Anyone?  I'm stuck in the elevator!   Cab you hear me?!?"  A little more silence goes by along with panting...then I text my husband who happens to be in Spain..

Hi. I'm stuck in our elevator.
Whoa!   he writes back.

So it's getting pretty warm at this point. I have no idea where the heat is coming from, so I automatically assume that it's the elevator wires going out and I'm about to drop to my doom. An elevator can overheat?  Maybe!

So. I press all the buttons. 1,2,3,4.....of course the door open button doesn't work. Of course, which I also try 20 times, willing it to work with my mind.

More apologetic yelling...anyone there?  Anyone out there?  And some pawing of the door like a desperate kitten. Tap. Tap. Knock knock knock. Hello?  (Think of that scene in 6th sense where the boy is trapped in the box, and then just stops all the sudden)  that was me.

Suddenly there's a little voice of a man, probably a teenager waiting for the elevator a floor below..."hit the button lady!"

I whisper ...Oh. sure. Yeah. Ok.

Because obviously there is now a magic button I'm unaware of that I should be pushing that would get me out of this small overheating box of death.

I don't even respond. I just start pushing every button I can. I'd been avoiding the alarm button, because the Minnesotan in me refuses to make a fuss yet. I'll wait a good 5 minutes more before really losing my shit by jove.

I'd already tried the help button, which is of course disconnected. (Just so everyone knows that...yeah....help button...no help will be coming any time soon people!)

I slump to the floor.

Finally, a few minutes later, I have reached total freakout and it's time to hit the alarm button, which is how I find out, it's the equivalent to a school bell ringing, no phone call to the fire fighters, no person running to my aid. I'm on my own.   I press it a few times for a few seconds. It does absolutely nothing. Just noise. An alarm it truly is. Like your wake up alarm that no help is comng. No help, just a lot of annoyed neighbors trying to ignore me and hoping I stop ringing that obnoxious bell.

At this point in real time I'm 10 minutes in breathing heavily sitting on the floor of my personal dooms day machine sweating like a pig.  Then Rodolfo texts me a thought to ponder, he writes to just give it a few minutes and maybe it will reactivate. The electro engineer that he is, this gives me hope.

2 seconds. 2 flipping seconds later, without any noise, the doors magically open....yes, a happy ending! 

Kind of....

They haven't opened since.  The elevator doesn't work. I saw a lot of cranky old people carrying up their groceries in their carts up the stairs, not to mention the joy it will be to carry my bike 5 flights up this evening, or Rodolfo coming home from the airport with two overloaded suitcases.

No one said this move was going to be easy. Character building!  Self confidence. This is all a test of what I'm truly made of. True grit. That's me.

Monkey puzzle jungle

Concepcion

January

Two months in Chile?  That's such a long time!  What are we going to do with all that time?

Well, we got to Chile the day after Christmas, we are pretty much half way thru our trip and we already feel like we are running out of time. 

Every day we've had lunch and dinner plans and it's been such a pleasure to catch up with family and friends in a casual and relaxed way, to be able to spend a night just hanging out and talking over a meal means so much. We've also had some field trips in Santiago and spent the last few days on the coast in Valparaiso. 

We are currently planning a two week road trip to the south of Chile the two of us. In the middle, we are going to a cousins wedding in concepcion. We rented the car and we also have our tent and sleeping bags ready to go.   It's going to be a difficult decision though figuring out how much time to spend where, including spending time with our family in the south. 

Time flies when you're having fun, but it's been a joy to be here. 

Here's some pics I took with my phone of my favorite city Valparaiso:

A shout out to Restaurant Cooperativa de Pescadores

 We spent a couple of days (3 hours out of Santiago) in a region in the north near the ocean close to Los Vilos.  Imagine desert complete with cactuses, dirt roads, mountains, all with a little bit of cloudy skies, an ocean view and some wind to keep things cool.  It's been a pretty set 90 degrees here in Santiago....I'm not complaining, but it was even nicer to have an ocean breeze.

The night we stayed on the coast, like any time traveling and eating, we had a bit of a scavenger hunt finding the right restaurant to eat....

The first beach we went to was extremely touristy with only 2 over priced restaurants, so we drove an extra 30 minutes for the good stuff with rumors of delicious seafood in Los Vilos...we spent another 30 minutes driving around town, but we found the hidden gem of a restaurant and it delivered, complete with a hippy gringo satisfying name!  (Who doesn't love a cooperative?)

A fishermans cooperative with a view of the bay and the best pisco sour (A lemon juice and sugar cocktail with pisco - a sort of sweet liquor grappa) I've ever had in my life!  I don't have a picture of it, but he shook it table side in a cocktail shaker and poured it into each glass fresh....the pisco was top grade, as were the lemons and sugar used...it all makes a difference in this drink.

The bread was served warm and made from scratch with the most delicious and slightly spiced pebre (tomato salsa)

and for $15 you can eat this:

Freshly caught that day - crab, mussels, scallops, more mussels, fresh shrimp, oh my god!  Amazing!  There was more included as well that they brought out on a seperate plate, thick slices of special kinds of mussels...imagine baseball sized mussels, so big, they slice them in strips, like sirloin!  Incredible!  

I just want to point out one small distinction from scallops in Chile vs. scallops in the USA....

Pictured - Chilean style scallop:

This is a scallop.  A real scallop.....there is a red bit attached....we don't have that in the USA.  This part of the scallop is rich and creamy and delicious and similar in texture to a sea urchin or ..non seafood...perhaps some very soft liver.  AMAZING!  Scallop is my new favorite seafood.  That red bit for me made all the difference....I'd never understood what the big deal was with that round white thing...so little, kind of chewy.  Also, almost all of this was served semi raw or very lightly cooked...the scallops don't need chewing really, and they sort of dissintegrate in your mouth.  You truly taste the sea!

This plate full of amazingness was just a starter.  I didn't get a photo of the incredible and delicious fish fry to follow that came with your choice of potato and salad...which usually aren't included in a meal like this....you pay for your meat and sides seperately...so it was also CHEAP!  

An entire meal of 3 pisco sours, 2 main plates of fish with salads, a huge appetizer for three, a bottle of water and chamomile liquors at the end all around....40,000 Chilean pesos = $60.  CHEAP!

*** just a little side note about eating fish in Chile***

Something that will always confuse me I think is how a menu is laid out in a seafood restaurant here...it's organized by types of fish...usually 5 or 6 options....sometimes not all of them are available becuase....yep....they're directly caught from the ocean that day!  Under each fish "title"...Reineta (pomfret...right...like we know what that is?), Salmon, Corvina (sea bass), etc..is how you'd like it cooked, repeated over and over again....in butter, battered, with different sauces, it's all quite confusing to me, so I've tended to sneak bits from other people's plates....the pressure is just too great to make the right decision, I want to try it all!  First I have to know what kind of fish is the right one to get...usually this includes a special kind just from that region, and then, for each type, there is a reccommended way it should be cooked....Rodolfo always gets it right of course...the connosieur that he is.  I trust his judgment to get it right.  The servings are also usually pretty huge.  It's hard to finish a plate on my own.

****just thought I'd share*****

Oh...and right....here's the view from the fisherman's cooperative:

  Those boats?  They're the ones that caught our meal!

This is the kind of place Rodolfo is always looking for when we travel and they can be difficult to find but they are out there!

So highlight of the week?  This restaurant!  NOM!!!!!  Come here and eat this!  You won't regret it!

Ripe vs. Cozy

I'd really like to write about how amazing it is to be in Chile during fruit season, I really do!  But it sounds a bit like bragging to someone reading this trying to digest a half ripe cantaloupe for breakfast, or manage to get down a hard bitter red delicious apple.  It would be cruel to go into detail how sugary sweet and perfectly ripe a strawberry can be, or the blood red color of a tomato that also, yes, tastes sweet from perfect ripeness. Melon like candy. Plums you have to eat in one bite, or they'll explode everywhere and drip down your face. 

Yes....I'd love to go into all of this in detail, but then I'm pretty certain my friends living up north will no longer speak to me, because I've been them and felt the strong desire to throw my computer across the room looking at other peoples vacation photos in the month of January while staring out the kitchen window at drifts of snow....lips chapped, toes cold, sitting at the kitchen table in my winter jacket over my pajamas, because the idea of actually taking off layers seems ludicrous...especially when I'm going to have to at some point go out and shovel snow....again!

My heart goes out to my midwest clan today. so, instead, since we always want what we can't have, here's some of the things I will truly feel like I'm missing out on in 2015 while living in....ok, I'll admit, FREAKING PARADISE! :

Sledding 

Hot cocoa

Big pots of Stew

Roasting chicken and veggies in the oven

Watching snow fall

The sound of silence walking thru fresh snow in the city

A big cup of coffee.....I always miss this when I'm in Chile. Dinky cups galore. 

The idea that I could ski or find my skis, it's a concept thing 

Same goes for snow shoeing. 

Taking pictures of trees covered in snow. 

How great it feels to get home inside the door and be instantly warm

Being cozy under loads of blankets reading a book or watching a movie 

A big tall German sized glass of porter 

(You can take the girl out of the midwest, but you can't take the midwest out of the girl!)

Hmmmm....coziness. Enjoy it for me will you!  Send me a pic and I'll ponder throwing my iPad across the room in celebration of your awesomeness, how's that?

It's 1 am in chile.

I hope this isn't too late to set my hope for the new year to bring lots and lots of writing. 

And reading. 

And eating. 

And walking.and even more biking after all of that eating. 

And lots of time doing all those things in the presence of/near/in thinking of those I love the most. 

May 2015 be a whacky one!

Let's rock this thing!!

Rotisserie Chicken

It evades me at every turn and yet it's my favorite 'special day treat food' in the whole wide world.

Just thinking about the spits going round and round as the succulent juices are falling and dripping from one little bok bok to another!

It's toooo much god damn it!

Especially when every time I go to purchase said beautiful luscious bird with crispy golden brown skin and moist delicious insides, they are SOLD OUT!

I swear to god!  EVERY SINGLE TIME!

this is not my first chicken run!

I'm talking like 6 times!

I'm not even counting the time in Puerto Rico when my friend Maria and I stopped by 10 different slow cooking natural charcoal rotisserie chicken vans on the side of a highway on the way to an afternoon on an island...but in that case, we did find one with chickens ready!  HWA HA HA!!!!  I'll tell you though, it was concerning, one after the other, "not ready" "not ready" "not ready", at least it was nice to be in a place where the people have a sacred respect and understanding of the happiness a slow roasted chicken on spit can bring to ones life!  I mean, look at that smile on Maria's face!  That's called triumphant!

But today....it's like the chicken gods are out to get me!

What?  Have I not done my part for birds everywhere by hosting my living room to a turtle dove who sprays her caca all over the wall and her food all over the floor?  Yes, yes, she looks so cute, but when you least expect it, while curled up cozy sitting on the sofa watching a quality romantic comedy...yep, that's the moment when a certain odor wafts into the nostrils....yep....even birds do it....bird fart, and for a little thing, that cloud of putridness can reak chaos for hours!

So!  I'd say that whatever gods of birds are around these days owe me one nice juicy chicken!

But NO!

I walk in at a reasonable hour!  6pm!  Dinner time!  You'd THINK THERE'D BE SOME BIRDS TO BUY!

So, while purchasing my 1 singular disapointing bratwurst instead from the lovely meat man at Jenifer Street Market, I feebly whisper what's screaming inside my cranium...

me:"Um...sir?  What time do you usually sell out of chickens?"

He looks over at the empty heat oven display window...below the spits of awesomeness.

butcher guy: Oh...we're out?  Would you look at that!  All sold out!  That was fast!  

me: "Uhh....yeah.  You did.  What time do you normally sell out?"

butcher guy:  "HEY GUYS!  What time did we sell out?!?"

guys....: no response, they obviously feel that this question is below their concern...my guy is also losing interest quickly, they don't understand my deep and unquenchable chickenless suffering.

me: Well...what time do you put them out?

the dudes son/butcher guy (I'm catching on the neurons aren't firing so fast...but he answers after a moment of silence!): 2:30!  Every day!  You want a chicken?  Come at 2:30!

me while wandering down the cereal aisle:  2:30!  Got it!  Next time!  I'm on it!  

I'm GETTING A CHICKEN!!!!!!!

 

Whose gonna be standing at the butcher window come 2:29 and 30 seconds?!?  

OH HELL'S YEAH!

You see this?  That's what I'm talkin' about!  So, tonight, that's what I'll be dreaming of....

mmmmmmm....Chicken......

Inner monologue of a percussionist with a first chair violinist

Hope you're enjoying that chair...... Sure looks comfy.....cuz I'll be back here standing and watching said comfort for the next 4 hours of rehearsal.......hmmmm......bitch. 

No.. I'm not jealous....so you get to play pretty arpeggios for two hours straight....right at the end of all that??  I get a solo!  And when I play?  My hair flies back like Thor!!  Really!!!!  Does your hair fly back when you play?  I didn't think so!

301, 302, 303....we should get an award for our incredible capacity to count measures of rests and not get lost.....accept, you know, when we get lost....and of course the count down is towards a delicate gockenspiel solo of thirty second notes at forte.   Do you ever get lost?  I didn't think so. Do you ever stop playing?

Sometimes, I feel pretty certain half the string section is just pretending. Seriously.....how would anyone ever know with all 200 of you?  

Yes. I have conductor envy. Every time he looks at you, he's all lovey dovey happy and life is perfect.  When he looks at me, his face is red, he's about to fall off the podium, his baton is about to break in half and I don't think he's breathing....and that's my cue to come in!  Enter timpani!!!!

Yeah....that's right....7 different triangle beaters for one triangle. 5 different base drum mallets.  20 different timpani mallets. 6 pairs of cymbals. How many bows you got?

While you're debating with your stand partner who is going to flip the page this time, I'm probably murmuring the words, shit shit shit as I try to flip my music over by myself while holding 50 pound cymbals in my hands and casually strolling in two seconds over to the bass drum for the thunder of god to commence!...you know, just so you know what's going on behind you.....waaaay back there in the pit..

the pit!  Percussion pit. Not a very nice name is it!?!  Like arm pit......but...eh, it's home. 

And when the rehearsal ends and you're hopping off for lunch?  Yeah, I'll be rolling around timpani and base drums for another 30 minutes just as I did before rehearsal skipping breakfast and coming in 30 minutes early....but no, don't offer to help, I got this....it's called bad ass. 

keys and beds

Back before our year traveling, I had the crazy idea that I wanted to take pictures of all the beds we slept in and what key we used to get into our hotel/motel/hostel/shack at each stop.  

I like the concept of trying to catch a glimpse at just one simple thing in all of these different cities and cultures that could be compared and contrasted.

This proved ridiculous and never happened.

As life goes, some of the beds we slept in were not the quality I'd want my mother or grandmother to witness, and the keys....kind of boring!   Or I just never remembered to take pictures of them, even from the very beginning.

When it came down to it, when I was surrounded by beauty, nature, exciting street vendors and adventure around every corner, the last thing I wanted to do when I got home to a hotel was take a picture of a bed or a key!    I just wanted to put my pak down, brush my teeth and in all likeliness, in truth, zone out playing a game of solitaire on Rodolfo's I-phone.  We fought over this simple pleasure daily...who got to play solitaire on the I-phone.

But back to my big idea....looking back.

Here's my current keys:

 

These include: House keys, work key, car key, gym scanny guy, and of course, the required in Wisconsin beer key!

When the trip was upon us, I still remember losing key after key (I had a much thicker keychain before we left to travel) as I quit my job, then moved out of our apartment and lastly left/sold our car to my mother and left her the car keys...traveling, you have no keys!  There's something cleansing about this process.  Keys are a sort of chain holding us to responsibility.  If we lose our wallet or our keys....it's a huge deal.  We know where they are at all times and if we don't, it's trouble, so not having that chain holding you down...just imagine it!  It feels fantastic!!!  Like being a kid again or something!  Responsibility free!

Something that is kind of funny about staying at hostels and hotels in most other countries outside of the States, most places attach a funny looking big thing to the key so that's it's harder to lose or forget...in that, it's really hard to carry around in big cities!  This funny looking log thing hanging out of your pocket!  Or, just a big piece of wood or metal in a rectangle shape with a number or letter on it.  Very rarely did we have those credit card type plastic cards.  Only in bigger cities in the more expensive hotels.  Thank god, because the last 3 times this past year I've stayed at hotels in the States, I've had those plastic credit card keys fail me when coming back from the free Best Western breakfast and had to ask the front desk clerk which room I was in...with a styrofoam coffee cup in one hand and a free donut balanced on my ipad in the other..because I couldn't remember and didn't want to wake someone up unexpectedly while flipping my card thru the magnetic scanner of a strangers door!

So there's a strong momento of the trip!  There's nothing like a real key with a real number connected to it!  This electronic scanner barf is bull crap.

(The same thing would happen to me in Santiago with Rodolfo's fathers door.  I would stare at it for 5 minutes before feeling totally confident that I was on the right floor before sliding the card thru the door scanner and hear that soothing click, that meant, Sarah, you're home free, you didn't fudge it up.  Go you.

Here's our current bed:

I love our bed!  Love it!  Best bed I've ever had!  A Serta mattress lovely thing purchased incredibly cheap (almost scammed really) by some lovely friends of ours who had to move out of town in a hurry....we've slept so amazing!  Nothing like what we had on the trip...or before the trip...really, it's the best sleep of our lives!

I will say I do remember the worst sleep I had on the trip.  Both Rodolfo and I had melt down panic attack moments on the trip that we can laugh at now, but in the moment it was terrifying....feeling like you're trapped in a place you can't be and there's no way out and both were related to not being able to sleep..due to horrible sleep depriving circumstances.  Things we take for granted here in our comfy bed/room/home.  

Chiang Mai.  Son kran week. The hottest days of the thai year. I'd decided that we needed to stay at the cheapest place possible of course.  The room was similar to a prison cell.  The bed was a wooden board with a thick blanket for a mattress and a sheet.  I think there was a very small sink as well.  Well...some time around 1am, I started sobbing.  It was hot, I was tired, there were loud drunken noises from a bar close by and I remember repeating over and over again, I can't do this anymore!  I can't do this anymore!  Rodolfo had to calm me down rubbing my back telling me we just had to try and sleep and that it would all be better in the morning.  The next day we booked ourselves into one of the more mid range hotels that included a lovely breakfast, air conditioning, tv and a MINI FRIDGE!  (which I used to keep Rodolfo's birthday cake in, yes...I was going to make him sleep in a shit hole on his birthday, I'm a horrible wife).  It was heaven!l

I do however remember a certain routine R man and I got into at every pit stop.

When you sleep in a lot of different places, your backpak becomes sort of like what in my imagination is a tortoise shell of many different rooms in one bag.  A Mary Poppins bag of tricks if you would...or layers upon layers of artifacts that need to excavated daily!

We packed our bag in an order of need....necessaries on top and less important further down...the hard to reach spots filled with presents or gadgets, shoes and sweaters.

The very top was always, ALWAYS pajamas, tooth brushes, iphone charger and plug adaptor so after a long day of walking and wandering, we could easily just plop down without thinking and fall asleep.  Under that would be a change of underwear and under that, a plastic bag of clothes and a bag of toiletries.  We kept the laundry detergent and scrub brush in a side pocket (to wash our undies in the bathroom sink....(praise to edificio underwear once again) and our cotton sleep saks, and pillow covers in a bottom pocket of the bag...(pillow covers were actually cotton sarongs we used on the beach as well, but were perfect for all other sorts of needs...even a skirt at times.)

So my big idea never came to fruition.  But it was a cool idea!

Other ideas included, taking a picture of: 

our breakfast every morning (in many countries, breakfast doesn't really exist) 

all types of transportation

the hotel rooms themselves

toilets

all the kinds of crazy fruit

Things that would have been cool to have documented looking back:

 - one spot of skin....I'm pretty darn certain, my shade of skin changed drastically between climates, as did my hair color

 - it would be neat to just know how much I weighed throughout the trip.  I have hunches, but we never had access to a scale.  I do know I lost muscle mass in Asia from the heat, and probably lost bone mass or something in Africa from malnutrition, but boy did we puff back up in Spain and France!

 - the signs/names of hotels we stayed at

 - the signs/names of restaurants we loved

 - the signs/names of parks and cities we loved 

(all 3 I would have used to write good/bad reviews now that I have reliable internet at my finger tips - some places should not exist, others deserve praise!  Also, perhaps some day, it would be fabulous to get to go back and see some of the places we loved the most!)

Yes!  Winter makes me itch for adventure!  Luckily for me, I have a ticket booked to Puerto Rico this coming February with my great and dear friend Maria for a ladies road trip!  Whoo hoo!!!!!

snow man snow

I wasn't aware of this very important fact until last week, when my brother in law Martin requested that he wanted to make a snow man....

There are different kinds of snow!

I think the last time I really thought about snow quality was back on the cross country ski team, running with polls down the sidewalks waiting for the first snow of the season to arrive, or melting on wax to my skis and needing to know figure out which wax to put on for which kind of snow we had....not that I remember or know any of this information now, just that there was a blue, red and yellow wax and I knew to ask my brother which wax I should use.  I still remember the smell of the wax heating on with the iron and slightly burning my fingers when I worked to smooth the wax into the skis...looking back, I believe this was my favorite part of skiing!  Playing with hot wax!

But back to this whole snow man snow concept.

The prettiest snow, the kind that falls in pretty fluffy patterns that you catch on your mittens and stare at in wonder and awe at the amazement that is nature...sucks for snowmen!

The thick tufts of snow that fall from the sky in soft chunks like cotton candy...no good for the men of snowness.

What we luckily discovered after a visit to Devils Lake State Park this past weekend is, yes, PERFECT SNOWMAN SNOW!!!!  30-40 degree weather, the snow is just about turning to slush.  The sun hitting the snow right around 2pm in the afternoon, so that the snow is just beginning to melt and forms an ice cube when you squeeze it in your palm!  That's the ticket!  I also didn't realize that not all of us are born with the knowledge of how to roll snow off the ground and pat into a ball, so I also got to share that information with a couple of my favorite Chileans!  Here's a photo of proof:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/guarac/11628386786