Last days in paradise

Wed/Thurs/Friday March 7^th-9^th, 2012

While I don’t want to say we just sat around and did nothing, our last 2 days in Bariloche were pretty relaxed as we were short on cash and all three of us were going in and out of being sick (very strange…). We shopped around for souvenirs, ate MORE helado and chocolate, went to a chocolate museum, enjoyed the sun and walked around the streets browsing. Looking back, I wish we’d done one more excursion type thing, but being that I left with $8 pesos in my wallet and in debt $20 pesos to Angela, I guess I can’t have too many regrets.

For our last night we met up with Toshy and Elan who had managed to make their way down after a week of camping in San Juan de los Andes. Once again we met up in the plaza and took the bus to Cervecería Blest, which is a small local brewery. The ambiance was exactly what we were hoping for as we were greeted by a chill waitress who didn’t judge us for ordering 2 pizzas. After trying the beer sampler, Toshy and Elan got a pitcher of the red while I enjoyed my cider beer. It was truly nectar of the gods status. Hands down the best beer of my life. It was pretty much just juice, though…We took in the fresh air, full moon, sparkling lights and succulent final colors of summer and felt like the luckiest SOBs in the world, because not only we were enjoying some of the best brews and pizza around, we were friends in Patagonia, and that warrants some warm, fuzzy feelings.

But all good things must come to an end and Friday we headed back to the bus station for our 20 hour return trip. I kicked off the ride with some cool liquid drum and bass as I stared into infinity, watching Bariloche disappear from my sight…

At some point during the ride, we had to stop for a small mechanical fix and I didn’t get pissed off. Normally, I would have thought “omg are you serious we have to stop this is stupid get me outta here I’m gonna kill someone if this takes more than five seconds why is it broken didn’t they check it before we left how stupid it’s not that hard just fix it so we can go just GOOOOOOOOO” (note the non-use of commas).  But as soon as the announcement was made, I calmly got off the bus and thought back to the text I’d sent Juan about how I told him I’d let him know when we arrived in BA—not a big deal to say in English—but in Spanish, I had to use the subjunctive and now I realized why. I heard a cracking sound come out from somewhere and assumed it was a metaphor for my mind opening itself up to the subjunctive mindset. It felt so good. Now only 12 hours to go!

And in case you’re wondering, they showed the exact same movie line-up that they did on our trip to Bariloche. So that’s right—I saw Grown Ups twice. Don’t worry, I already hate myself enough for it that you don’t have to.