Passing time

Antofagasta,
Chile

Well, since booking my bus ticket to La Serena for 11.30 tonight, and checking out at midday, I've been left with a whole lot of time to kill. Unfortunately, being in a city where you have not mates to pass time with (read: hang out at their place, or at the pub) has left me looking towards alternatives. That is, after I updated my diary, walked around the city again, went to the supermarket, bought a litre of yoghurt, drank a litre of yoghurt, sat a bit more, wrote in my diary, read my diary, got hassled by gypsies (I love pretending that I can't understand Spanish! You want what? Because why? her threat of no love for the next year wouldn't have worked even I had understood it ... which of course, I didn't. Cough).

So now I've resorted to my good old fashion friend - the internet. The irony is that I find it easy enough to waste hours on the internet, looking up random shit, when I don't have the time; but faced with the prospect of hours to kill, ah, now that's a little harder. I checked out blogs (buter's, a & a's, http://waiterrant.net, http://thesneeze.com, cynical-c : all the good old fashioned favourites); I checked out http://smh.com.au and even read the stupid stories that you only read when faced with a long saturday morning; I caught up on goss; I answered all my emails; and still I've only managed to chalk 2 hours off. So it's now 6pm (and still beautifully light outside!) - I suppose that's not bad, only 5 hours to go. Dinner and drinks can take up 2 (if I try really hard. Luckily, there seems to be a bit of a German influence here, and more amusingly, several pubs are called Schops, as in Bundes Schop, Schoppers Schop, etc. I'm still waiting for Plopper's Schop). Another chunk can be taken off by phone-home - apparently, my grandfather has been a little bit anxious. I guess he's still concerned about my impending kidnap and subsequent marriage to a Columbian cocaine trafficker called Pedro. I still haven't the heart to tell him that I'm not going anywhere near Colombia.

And after that? Well, we'll see. But I've now learnt that I could never be a ghost.

rr,

x el j