Pre-Pucón

Last weekend was our last free weekend together, so a bunch of us decided to plan another adventure. Earlier in the week, Adrienne and I went to the bus terminal to buy tickets to Pucón, a smaller city in the south, and were disappointed to find out they cost about twice as much as we had anticipated. A guy working there told us it would be cheaper to buy a ticket to Santiago and take a bus to Pucón from there since the Santiago terminal is a lot bigger and there are more buses. We decided to take a chance on that and bought 8 tickets to Santiago leaving at 6 pm on Thursday.

Before leaving on Thursday, I skipped out of Grammar class to get a yellow fever shot in preparation for my Argentina trip after my program is done. The nurse’s office that my university directed me to was a little sketchy – the lady didn’t use gloves and brought the injection needle in a little Rubbermaid cooler. I figured whatever diseases I would contract from the sketchy conditions would be better than getting yellow fever. I planned on paying with my credit card but it turned out they only accepted cash. The people were trusting enough to let me go find an ATM to withdraw cash from. I walked a few blocks to one, but it didn’t work and said my card had problems. So I walked to another ATM – it did the same thing. Great... I have a $50 shot in my arm and I have no way to pay for it. I went back to the nurse’s office and attempted to explain this in Spanish. The lady seemed to understand my dilemma and said I could come back and pay next week when I have my credit card straightened out. Seriously? I’m pretty sure they would have never just let me walk out without paying in the U.S., but I wasn’t about to argue. It would have been so easy for me to just never come back but, yes, I eventually did go back and pay for it.

After that crisis, I ran home to pack and met up with everyone at the bus terminal. We got to Santiago around 7:30 pm and luckily found some decent priced bus tickets to Pucón that left at 9:45 pm. We ate supper at the bus terminal and I had Barros Luco, basically a Chilean Philly cheesesteak. So good. Te overnight bus long was even longer than the last one we went on – 11 hours. Before sleeping, we watched “Men of Honor” dubbed in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. The bus was incredibly uncomfortable and, due to the lack of space, I ended up sleeping crunched over with my head in my lap. It wasn't a fun bus ride.