I thought I was finding myself. It turns out I'm not. It turns out I have no idea what I'm doing. My days in the hostel mostly consist of talking to German girls and trying to swindle the guests into giving me food. Giving me whatever. It's amazing the amount of alcohol you get offered while working in a hostel. Everyone is always offering you wine and beer and pisco. It's because they're all on vacation. They have nothing better to do. And I don't really have anything better to do, either. I probably check the hostel email to see if new reservations have come in about 6,000 times a day.
Right now there's a girl speaking Danish next to me on Skype. There's a group of five people from Dallas who are in Chile for less than a week because their friend works for American Airlines and had a bunch of passes to kill off. There's a Swiss girl surfing the internet. Patty is in the kitchen getting ready to cook the arroz con pollo we'll have for lunch. And there's a British kid from somewhere in Southern England, I have no idea where, sleeping in one of the cabins outside. And me, a bearded gringo (heavily bearded at this point), typing away furiously on the outdated Apple computer inside, waiting for it to be 1pm so he can leave the hostel and go to the bank.
I think it's almost definite that I will be going back to Seattle soon. But going back to Seattle means I have to go back to Lima, which, for lack of a better way to put it, sucks. I just came from Lima. And between here and Lima there is nothing. There are rocks. There is sand. There is a town that recently got devastated by an earthquake. There is all of Southern Peru, which in a way is wonderful because the food is cheap and there aren't too many people, but which is mostly just wretchedly boring.
Every time I think I'm "finding myself" it turns out I'm wrong. But this makes me extremely happy. It means I've already found myself.
And most importantly, it means I'm not a hippy.
Right now there's a girl speaking Danish next to me on Skype. There's a group of five people from Dallas who are in Chile for less than a week because their friend works for American Airlines and had a bunch of passes to kill off. There's a Swiss girl surfing the internet. Patty is in the kitchen getting ready to cook the arroz con pollo we'll have for lunch. And there's a British kid from somewhere in Southern England, I have no idea where, sleeping in one of the cabins outside. And me, a bearded gringo (heavily bearded at this point), typing away furiously on the outdated Apple computer inside, waiting for it to be 1pm so he can leave the hostel and go to the bank.
I think it's almost definite that I will be going back to Seattle soon. But going back to Seattle means I have to go back to Lima, which, for lack of a better way to put it, sucks. I just came from Lima. And between here and Lima there is nothing. There are rocks. There is sand. There is a town that recently got devastated by an earthquake. There is all of Southern Peru, which in a way is wonderful because the food is cheap and there aren't too many people, but which is mostly just wretchedly boring.
Every time I think I'm "finding myself" it turns out I'm wrong. But this makes me extremely happy. It means I've already found myself.
And most importantly, it means I'm not a hippy.
Seems like we've come to similar conclusions about ourselves. Come back, I'll get you a job at an olive oil store in Pike Place for the time being, and in Fall of 2015 we either crew my buddies boat from Baja to the French Polynesian Islands and up to Japan or we hit Eastern Europe and backpack through Ukraine to Mongolia. See you soon.
ReplyDelete-Historicus