New Digs in the Old Country

There is no internet in my new house because the house is so old that the cable lines do not exist close enough to the location to have internet.

I love my internet. I love my cruddy late-night Grooveshark dance mixes and my pirated t.v. Project Runway marathons. I love calling my mommy on Skype whenever I want to. I love wasting several thousand hours of my life on Facebook. Oh, and I love blogging.

You think I would have thought to ask if an internet connection existed at my new place, but I found myself falling into the Chile trap - thinking briefly that Chile is as technologically pimped out as the U.S., and forgetting it actually isn´t.

So, resigned to my fate, I will be spending the last two months in Chile internetless, excepting forays to Starbucks and the internet at my school. I will also be spending the next two months without: a fan or air conditioner, a washer, or an oven (luckily I have already resigned myself to lacking a dryer, hairdryer, hot water, dishwasher, microwave and any semblance of affordable prepackaged food).

After so much time here I´ve just kind of forgotten how much harder it is to do simple tasks in Chile. I´ve reached the ¨meh¨ phase of my trip, where it doesn´t really bother me to spend two hours standing in line at a bank, six weeks to fix a washing machine (lucky there was one to fix), or ten thousand hours cooking completely everything from scratch.

I´ve grown to enjoy the rusticness and simplicity of some of these activities. The physical labor acts as a calming force in my life. I like that I´ve learned how to fix broken pipes, use a sodering iron, bake from scratch, construct a makeshift mop, and do my laundry by hand (in a bucket with one of those funny-looking scrubbing boards). I kind of feel like I should be milking goats or something, or composting my trash.

It has definitely inspired me to live more simply when I return to the States. There really is just so much you don´t need. So internet, schminternet. I´ll be alright getting it when I can. And maybe I´ll spend more time outside in this beautiful weather...