On the bus into Montevideo a few months ago, I was curled up in a window seat reading the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. It was an attempt to see how screenplays work—I told y’all, I want to write one about that magical afternoon in Bariloche—and also just a wildly entertaining read. I finished it with half an hour...
Writing from the bus to El Calafate in Argentina. I am a complete idiot (we’ll get there) and left Puerto Natales a few days later than I’d planned, but my mistakes meant that I ended up leaving Chile exactly one month after I arrived, giving me a perfectly-timeboxed life experience to reflect on. Already Argentina looks different, even though we’re...
Torres del Paine and Actual Pain: Last Days in Chile I knew Tomás actually hated me when he started addressing me as usted. (Spanish has two different forms of “you”—one for familiar, friendly relationships (tú) and one for formal relationships (usted). Many other languages have this structure; it’s called a T-V distinction, from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. English...
The Night is Dark and Full of Terrors: Bedbugs in Puerto Natales I’ve spent a lot of time so far on this blog writing about mostly wonderful things (interspersed with frustrated, morose paragraphs on how hard it is to learn Spanish, but still). And that’s because this trip has been mostly wonderful so far—amazing people, mind-blowingly gorgeous landscapes, lots of...