Well I made it to Santiago in Chile, where it´s a beautiful crisp sunny winter´s day, after a gruelling day of travelling yesterday: 4 separate flights, 5 countries, and what felt like days in transit on no sleep whatsoever (a combination of poor time management, last-minute preparations and an early 7:00am flight from JFK). Yesterday I revisited familiar airports in New York and Costa Rica, and got acquainted with the airports in Ecuador, Peru and Chile.

Luckily, I finally ended up in a great hotel in Santiago at around 1:30am, thanks to the recommendation in the Rough Guide to South America — the Hotel Orly in Providencia. It´s clean, comfortable, quiet, friendly and relaxed — exactly what you need after a long day of travelling. I was also quite impressed with TACA airlines (and since I flew on four separate flights, I think it was a reasonably accurate sample size), with the exception of their baggage handlers — a Swiss army knife that I had in my (checked) backpack had disappeared when I retrieved my bags in Chile. Surely not a security consideration, since it was checked.

Once again, I´m repeatedly struck by the extent of cultural globalisation on my travels, and it´s not just the ubiquity of big multinationals such as Burger King or Avis; it´s the more subtle cultural intermingling I find more interesting for example, sitting in an airport lounge in Guayaquil, Ecuador, watching the BBC film “Truly Madly Deeply” with Spanish subtitles, or eating breakfast this morning in a delightful sunny conservatory in the hotel listening to the strains of an accapella and pan-pipe version of Sade´s “Smooth Operator.” It´s not exacty the Sound of the High Andes. Bizarre.

Anyway, time to sign off and check out Santiago, because tomorrow I´m heading out early to Valle Nevado for 4 days of snowboarding…

Again, it’s been almost a month since my previous posting — and a pretty bizarre month it’s been!

I left my job at ARTstor on the 23rd July, somewhat unexpectedly… It was kind of a shock at first, but I very quickly came to see it as a very positive development, because I’d been thinking about other opportunities for a while anyway.

To celebrate this life change, I’m embarking tomorrow on a 6-week trip to South America! At 7am tomorrow I’m due to catch a plane from JFK, and after several changes I will end up in Santiago, Chile, where I’ll spend two nights before heading off to the Valle Nevado resort for 4 days of snowbaording.

After that it’s back to Santiago for a night before flying to Buenos Aires in Argentina, to meet my friend Nan. We’ll soend a few days there, and then catch the ferry to Uruguay and make our way to Montevideo.

After hanging out in Uruguay for a few more days, Nan will head home and I will make my way up to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; haven’t figured out quite how, yet, but no doubt I’ll find a way!

After a week or two in Brazil, I’m planning to fly to Lima, Peru, from where I’ll do the high-altitude Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, before finally heading back to Santiago in Chile for the return flight home, and some concerted job-hunting effort.

So basically it’s the trip of a lifetime, and I need to book a taxi to come and pick me up in about 5 hours!

I went to see Michael Moore’s latest documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 last night at the Cobble Hill cinema in Brooklyn, and it pretty much lived up to my (fairly high) expectations. No real surprises, since anyone who’s followed the whole post 9-11 debacle at all will already know how corrupt, dishonest and greedy the current administration are, but it was nice to see that Moore has matured somewhat as a filmmaker since Bowling for Columbine; Moore himself is less evident as a character in this movie (a good thing, since he can be quite irritating in larger doses), and he sometimes foregoes the frenetic MTV-style editing so beloved by the ADD generation to give real people time to tell their stories properly. And as with Bowling for Columbine, he manages to take the audience smoothly from humour and laughter to sadness and outrage without really noticing the starkness of the contrast.

There’s some pretty strong footage from Iraq in the film; it won’t shock you if you’ve ever checked out the Al Jazeera website, but if your perception of the war in Iraq comes solely from American network news channels, you may be shocked by some of the imagery.

The film was well-received in trendy liberal Cobble Hill, with a smattering of applause at the end. However, it’s always easy to preach to the converted — it’ll be very interesting to see how it’s received in Middle America…

Well it’s been nearly a month since my last post, and quite a lot has happened in my world in that time.

For example, I watched England get knocked out of Euro 2004 by Portugal at the Dogstar bar in London on 24 June, which was quite depressing. At first I thought the referee was wrong in disallowing the Sol Campbell goal that would have put England through over the host nation (and I admit I may have even said “we were robbed” several times), but on seeing the replay in the cold light of the following day, I have to say that it was the right decision, and Portugal won fair and square. Basically England were a bit crap yet again, especially that overpaid waste of space David Beckham, who missed YET ANOTHER penalty!

To add insult to injury, I was staying that night with my friend Phil in Stockwell, which apparently is home to more than half the 70,000 Portugese living in London, and they weren’t shy in their celebrations!

Things improved dramatically after that, because the following day I met my friend Andrew at Gatwick airport for a 7 day vacation on the beautiful and lively Balearic island of Ibiza.

We immediately fell into a routine of driving to beautiful remote beaches in the afternoon in a convertible rental car, having drinks somewhere where you can see the sun go down over the Mediterranean (e.g. Cafe del Mar, Kumharas or Bora Bora), foraging for dinner, and then clubbing until morning. We didn’t make it to every big club on the island, but we did pretty well, visiting Eden, Pacha, Privilege, and Amnesia.

After a much-needed week of such relaxation, I returned to the UK to visit friends and family; after one night at my parents in Kent and another night in London, I rented another car and headed up to Sheffield for the final of Euro 2004, between Greece and Portugal on Sunday 27 June. Unfortunately I missed the match due to long traffic delays on the M1, and arrived to find my friend Nan and her (Greek Cypriot) boyfriend Jim celebrating Greece’s 1-0 vistory over the host nation.

The following day I met up with my two sisters Sharon and Vicki and their rapidly-expanding families for the Hunters Bar School sports day event in Endcliffe Park, where I managed to video both my nephew Rowan and my neice Madeline winning events. Nieces Jasmine and Lisa were too young to compete in the events, but did some excellent swinging on the swings in the park.

That night I had dinner with Nan before meeting up for drinks in the Lescar Hotel with friends and family, and the following day I visited school friends Anne and Sarah at their fabulous new cafe, Alfie+Bella — I even got to work the till and take customers’ orders, which was a lot of fun!

After that I jumped back in the rental car and headed down the A1 to Letchworth to visit my grandmother, who had recently moved to a nice managed care facility — she seemed very happy there, which was great.

Then it was a race against time to get the rental car back through the heavy London traffic (there was a Formula 1 event in central London causing huge delays) in time to avoid late charges, before heading back to Brixton on the tube for a final meal at the Neon restaurant on Atlantic Road with my Brixton-based friends and my out-of-context American friend Amy Stein, who just happened to have a short layover in London and came straight from Heathrow to join us.

On the next and final day of my summer vacation, Wednesday 7 July, Amy & I caught up with the elusive Dr. Lucy Norris for lunch, and then I headed to Heathrow for the long flight home — made infinitely more bearable by the fact that I was mysteriously upgraded to business class by United, despite the fact that I’d paid for the flight with frequent flyer miles.

So now I’m back in Brooklyn, settling into everyday life after an eventful, enjoyable and relaxing vacation.

I still can’t believe that England managed to lose 2-1 to France yesterday, after leading 1-0 for most of the game and then conceding not one but TWO ridiculous and improbably goals in the final 3 minutes of injury time.

I really do not understand this ongoing adulation for Reagan, but apparently this kind of collective amnesia about a former President is quite normal, especially when the incumbent is so dire.

Unbelievable — apparently there is legislation in preparation that will re-establish the draft in the United States!

In other news, Bush is apparently now having to backtrack over his claim that he knew nothing about the systemic torture in Iraqi prisons, because evidence has come to light of a memo claiming that Bush is exempt from pretty much any laws because he’s the President! Congress is demanding to see these memos, but of course Servant of Evil and wannabe crooner John Ashcroft is refusing to hand them over.

How much more are these people going to be allowed to get away with before they’re all impeached and tried for treason and war crimes?!

In case you hadn’t heard: Ronald Reagan, the President who, together with Margaret Thatcher, brought the world to the brink of a cold war era nuclear apocalypse, has died at the age of 93.

Can’t say I’m going to shed any tears. I still very clearly remember sitting in an English class at High Storrs school in Sheffield at the age of 14 when the air raid siren on the school’s roof went off. Everyone went quiet and white, including the teacher Mrs Canham, who went to find out what was happening (it turned out some maintenance workers came across it and thought they’d give it a crank to see if it still worked. Morons).

If you’re younger than about 35, you may not remember just how real the threat of nuclear war was back in 1982. We all pretty much thought we had 4 minutes to go before being incinerated by searing hot 500 mile per hour blast wave from a nuclear air burst over Sheffield.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a poster from the era that I remember very clearly, courtesy of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics’ exhibition, Graphics for the Gipper:

There was even a movie where exactly that scene was depicted: It was called “Threads,” and it was by local author Barry Hines. His children, Sally & Thomas, were also at my school, so we had all seen the movie.

I’m now the FORMER owner of a 1969 Ford Mustang Grande; she left New York for Ohio yesterday with her new owners on a U-Haul trailer.

It was sad to see her go, I had her for almost 5 years — almost as long as I’ve lived in the United States. I took her for one last spin around Long Island City in Queens; I’m gonna miss the sound of the dual glasspack exhaust.

[sniff]

Still, it was the right thing to do, and the new owners seem like they’ll take good care of her; they have another ’69 Mustang that’s all rusted out to use as a parts car.

On the plus side, I’ll never have to go to Roosevelt Island again, I’ll save the $160 monthly garage fee, and I got a pretty good price for her too: $6,400.

So this time I think I’ve REALLY sold my car, and the good news is that the price went even higher this time around: I got $6,400 for it on eBay Motors.

The buyers are coming with a trailer to collect the car on Wednesday, and will be taking it to Ohio. They seem very excited about it, which makes me happy too — I’m glad the car is going to a good home.

So… Goodbye Deathmobile!