My Head Hurts

OK, so its the 31st of March. I´ve been in South America since last...Friday, and my head hurts now. Some of you have asked how it´s been going so here´s some of the highlights:

1. Aaron K. dropped me off at the airport today. he´s gone now. So sad...so very sad. But he finished off the Chris Thornberg paper (hopefully he´ll accept so I can graduate). Aaron, thanks for picking up the slack, I was fading hard by the end of last quarter, I´m such a fucking loser! Aaron´s gone back up to the Bay to work for Namco (living the dream) and we´re all very proud and will miss his horribly retarded jokes.
2. Nadya said she would pick me up but then emailed me to say she might not. LIAR!
3. The flight to S. America was not nearly as painful as I thought it might be. I spent most of it isolated from the others in the group, they seemed to be on one side of the plane while I was on the other. The group includes:

• Dave F. and Kelly S. (engaged). Dave is a low-talker. Super nice guy, but a low-talker. Kelly is a bold and brassy blonde whose personality is reminiscent of one of my new favorite people, Teri M. (whose breasts are real) - they call ´em as they see ´em.
• There´s the "nice girls" who would not say anything bad about anyone, regardless of my relentless attempts to bait them into doing so (a little more about that later): Eleanor H., who was mock upset about Ben calling her from a whorehouse in Holland (what´s the big deal), Barbara C. who lives with me in Weyburn Terrace, and is the only person in the group who is truly fluent in Spanish (thank god - its been a real experience and awkward at times being in a truly foreign place, with different customs and currency and language). Ooh, who´s the other part of the nice girls trio...hmmm....Oh, Amy C., who I keep forgetting is married (she seems so young, so it´s weird to think of her as married; also, whenever I see her, I keep thinking that she reminds me of someone I know, but I don´t really remember who it is). They will not say anything bad about anyone, even...
• Wendy C. who brought her boyfriend on this trip. We started calling him "Maurice" because we thought it would be a funny name to call him and also being able to talk about him in front of him without getting caught for it would be fun. I had this odd feeling about Wendy before I left for the trip, because she kept looking at me like she was angry, especially when I inconvenienced her mildly. It got worse, because "Maurice" is a bit of an arrogant, no-volume control-on-his-voice Napoleonic tyrant. Let´s just say some of his behavior consistent with some of the sterotypes floating around out there about Wharton people. If he´s representative, I am glad I didn´t get in! So... some of us really can´t stand Maurice. I am able to sit with him and have a civil conversation, but I don´t think he has a real understanding of how he´s perceived by a majority of the group. When we were sitting around in the Diamond Bar in Palermo last night, I asked: would you rather be trapped in a room with Jan N. for 20 hours or Maurice for 5? Many opted for Jan. Another situation: would you rather be trapped in a room with Maurice for 20 hours, or $10K out of your OWN POCKET to a charity of your choosing? The vast majority opted for the charity. One sample incident: we were leaving the Holiday Inn Express (Buenos Aires) to go to dinner on our first evening here. We were meeting in the tiny lobby of the Holiday Inn Express when Maurice, ever the organization Nazi, loudly announced "Alright everybody, let´s go to the ATM" to get cash for dinner. When we left the lobby, three of the girls went to the left when the rest of us went to the right. When Maurice realized this, he yelled, "Hey, where are you going, we´re going this way!" The girls were going the other way because they didn´t want to be part of a large group of tourists which had just announced to all of Buenos Aires that they were tromping to an ATM. The funny part was that by this time, Maurice´s reputation and the group´s general dislike for him had already been internally widely known. So one heartbeat after Maurice yelled, I mockingly yelled in as Maurice-like a tone as I could, "YEAH! GET BACK HERE!" I got some in-group chuckles from those that realized my attempt at parody. To be honest, Maurice isn´t so bad, I´ve met far FAR worse. But he´s developed a bad reputation that isn´t helped by the fact that he and Wendy do not really talk with or seem to have any inclination of hanging out with the other group members which has only gotten worse as the trip has gone on and Wendy bickers with they well-liked Amy C. over control of group activities (ooh, power struggle on the LABA trip!). Basically, a complete lack of emotional intelligence on their parts - but at least they don´t seem to be lazy. Ooh, another gripe, we spent $70 bucks on a Tango show - US dollars, which may not seem like a lot by US standards, but given that when I came here, I had a filet mignon which was about four-fifths the size of a pringles can, at a very high-end restaurant that cost only 70 argentine pesos, which is about $23 US - to give an idea of the purchasing power on food, an admittedly extreme example, but to give a sense. Well, anyway, the Mean Girls who have just joined us from their own S. American jaunt, Amy Ch., Leslie C., Jen Ch. and the last girl who I don´t know, spent 23 argentine pesos on a smaller scale tango show with a far cheaper and better dinner...well, I wasn´t happy about it. I should have done more homework, but Maurice set it up and gets the blame.
• Linda S (A, you were right across the board).
• Julie S. and Jesse R., who only grow on my list of favorite people. But then again, I saw them fondling each other in their hotel room, who they were sharing with Jeff K, and that was a bit of a disturbing sight. Jesse is very easy to amuse, because he laughs at most of my jokes. People like that are truly, truly precious.
• My roommate Jeff K. - Jeff seems like a nice guy, sarcastic like me. He´s a bit hard to read, and normally I would reserve judgement on him because of that, but since he has the Jesse R. seal of approval, he´s good to go. Also, he and I are sharing a room for the second half of the trip in Buenos Aires. It would have been better if he did so in Santiago, because I´ve been sick for part of the trip here (more on the food poisoning later). One kind of odd thing, he wouldn't contribute towards tipping the maid who had been cleaning our room in the Buenos Aires Holiday Inn. That struck me as kind of cheap - I mean, I actually handed 3 dollars to the maid on the way out (one for each day), and her eyes lit up like an Xmas tree. I'm torn between thinking it was extraordinarily cheap and yet, his right to not tip if he didn't feel like it.
  
• Mari K. - she explained to me the whole legend of Evita Peron when we visited her website, because I missed the movie and couldn´t access wikipedia. God damn, it´s global around here!

• There was a channel in Santiago on the cable called "I-sat" which had on the TV one evening after returning from fun a documentary which was some kind of primer on sex, I think. There was a woman performing fellatio on the strap on of another woman. It was extremely graphic by US standards, and I was shocked that it was on the TV. Of course, I turned the channel right away. I was highly appalled and may write a letter to the FCC.
• Latin American keyboards are a pain in the ass.

More later, gotta run to lunch, Hiro´s got a beat on a japanese place...