¡Feliz día de....!

I have been pleasantly surprised by the plethora of Valentine's Day names in Spanish that I have seen. From what I can remember, in good ol' US English we just say Valentine's Day (maybe slip a St. in there sometimes) and presto, voila, there is the day that everyone (minus those in love or fooling themselves to be) loves to hate.

At any rate, I have seen such variations in ads down here such as Happy St. Valentine's Day; Happy Lovers' Day; Happy Affection Day; Happy Day of Lovers; and so on and so forth. Cute.

Not cute, however (although bien amusing), is that my roommates have begun a campaign to convince me to attend this: Sensation White, i.e. a very expensive, dress-coded rave some weekend in March. I will repeat that: My roommates want me to go to a Chilean.... rave.

Aside from having absolutely no interest whatsoever in going owing to my extreme apathy toward rave culture and sheer boredom of that genre of electronic music, the "cheapest" ticket is running a price of approximately $30.000 CLP, or roughly, $65 USD. Right.

Despite their assertations that this will event will be "super cool!!!!" (super being everyone's favorite adverb in these parts), I just don't buy it. Unfortunately, I don't have the heart nor the Spanish prowess to adequately express my sentiments of "lame".

I can construct a long list of "better investments" for the precious little money I have to sustain me here, but chiefly, at the top of that list right now, is a nice new bicycle. (The roommates know this.) So, yesterday, I was brought out on a shopping expedition with my two female Chilean roommates, who now I refer to as the two P's, as they looked for a new bed frame. We ventured out past the City center (further than I have ventured before) toward the Franklin metro stop, region of warehouses and slightly sketchy but endearing street vendors. I felt right at home as if I were back in a Guatemalan market, except everything was a bit fancier and all the stalls better-established.

We wandered the Furniture sector looking for their bed item. Then, to my happy surprise, we went looking for the "Bike street", Calle San Diego. What a glorious little surprise that was! An entire I don't know-how-many-blocks stretch of Bike shops all along the same street. It never ceases to amaze me how, honestly, you can find entire item regions. I have lovingly begun to call this type of one-stop one-item shopping -o-landias, ie...We're going to Bicyclandia; We just came from Furnitureolandia; I am from Gringolandia (this particular phrase was not coined by me, but deserves mention), and so on.

At any rate, they had everything from very legit and nice looking bikes to expensive Trek road bikes to crap mountain bikes with shocks/suspension shooting out of anything you could imagine. Much to my chagrin, they were kind of expensive. But, I got a few quotes and went along my merry little way, and all signs point to a self-given Birthday present this weekend of bicycle, which means for a much happier me. The only problem will be maneuvering the bicycle into the elevator to get up and down from my apartment. But, there is always a solution (vertical)...