Stuck in the Andes!!

Well, I've been pretty busy for the last week or so. Mostly just going to classes, figuring out the bus system and meeting my new classmates. After a couple of weeks of this, I decided I needed to go skiing. So, three friends and I made plans to meet at a metro stop close to the place where you can rent gear and buy transportation. We agreed on a meeting time of 7:30 am on Sunday, but I quickly realized Sunday morning that the metro did not open until 8:00 am! I was sure that no one was going to still go but I decided to go check it out anyway. After walking around the outside and inside of the metro station I was about to head home with my head hung low in despair, but there they were!

With newly renewed optimism for the day ahead, we forged ahead to SkiTotal. On the walk there I noticed again how cloudy it was and thought that it might rain in Santiago, I was actually hoping for a little snow fall up on the mountain since it had been so long since I'd last seen fresh snow. Little did I know, I was in for more than I, or anyone else, expected.

At the equipment rental place, SkiTotal, I rented a snowboard, ski pants, and goggles. After we all had our gear and van tickets in hand we set off for the mountain. We decided to go to a resort called El Colorado. The drive up there was interesting to say the least. The actual distance from Santiago is not all that far, but the vans have to go around hairpin curve after hairpin curve in order to get to the resorts. Still, the ride was uneventful and provided some good views of the mountainside.

Once at the resort, I tried my hand at snowboarding. Luckily, Justin, one of the friends I went up with has been snowboarding for a while and taught me the basics. Then, it was trial and error from then on, mostly errors to be honest, but the times I did manage to put together a couple of turns without falling felt pretty good. Each run down the mountain took me quite some time, what with the constant falling and all, so I only managed to make two runs. It certainly didn't help towards the end when it started heavily snowing and visibility plummeted. This forced me to stick to the side where I could see the fence. Still, the fresh snow did soften my fall quite a bit.

After a long day on the mountain, we were all cold, wet, and ready for a hot shower and steaming food. After piling back into the van that would take us back down, we were told that there had been a lot of rain and parts of the road down had been washed away! What! That's ridiculous! But unfortunately is was very true. Our driver took us down to what I'm guessing is a ski hostel. It was just one large room and two long hallways with dormrooms on either side with a bunch of bunk beds in each one. So, we quickly tried to stake out a few beds for the night to come before they were all gone. After a few minutes we were called for a meeting where everything would be explained to us. Basically, we were stuck for the night, and we could stay in the hostel for free or go to a hotel for a $100. I obviously went to the hotel. Just kidding, all the cool kids stayed at the hostel :). There were people from all over the world at the hostel, and with nothing else to do we got to talking. I met a bunch of very nice Chileans and plenty of Americans. This was all well and good, but I was still wet, cold, and hungry, and there in our room was a gas heater taunting us. There we were, a bunch of supposedly smart student trying to figure out how to turn on this little heater. After a few minutes of poking, prodding and hitting the thing like the monkeys with the computer from Zoolander, our new Chilean friend, Pedro came in and turned it on in all of about five seconds. Heat! Yes! Beautiful hot heat! We spent the next hour or so in front of the thing trying to dry off. Well mostly me, since the others didn't spend most of the time lying in the snow.

After becoming relatively dry, we wanted some hot tea. We scoured the hostel and found a semi-secret basement kitchen where a nice old lady gave us all some hot water to go with our tea bags (kindly provided by our friend Pedro). Now it was time for food. We didn't want to join the mad dash for food in the beginning so we waited around for a little bit. Unfortunately this was a little bit too long. The only place with food was the bar up the road and by the time they got there all they had left were three small empanadas. We split these between the five of us, but were obviously still hungry. Well, the only other thing the bar had was beer. So we had to drink our calories, plus it helped with the cold ;). After filling our stomachs somewhat, we were still hungry, we decided to make the best of the situation and got a snowball fight started. It was really fun and reminded me of my childhood in New York. After that it was off to sleep, or at least try. It was still cold in our room, even with the gas heater and two blankets each. I slept off and on and awoke without feeling rested.

In the morning we had another meeting where we were told they didn't know when the roads would be fixed and that we might need to stay for another night. That sucked, I hadn't showered, brushed my teeth, or changed my clothes for over 24 hours. Still, no point in complaining about it right? They took us back to the resort for breakfast where I had a ham, cheese, and tomato crepe. It was good but I was too hungry to care. We stayed at the lodge for a few hours until finally they told us we could go home! We eagerly gathered our things, fired off a few celebratory snowballs at each other and got in the van. In the van, we were able to watch the news while we went down that showed us how bad it was. Apparently the water from the rain and melting snow caused a lot of damage to the houses and people in the area, even killing two.

But finally we were back were we started not too much worse than when we began. The shower, lunch, and nap after were amazing. Check out the Picasa pictures (link on the left) for what the hostel looked like.

P.S - Completely unrelated but check out the NPR Live Concerts from All Songs Considered for great live shows from awesome live bands.