El Calafate, Argentina

We´re pretty much at the bottom of the planet. So cool. We took a 3 1/2 hour flight on Aerolineas ($200 roundtrip) from Bs As into El Calafate today. Not much has happened since the last post, but we are in a fancy-shmance hostel (El Calafate Hostel) with free internet access IN our room, so why not take advantage. Tomorrow we head out to the Perito Moreno glacier. Not yet sure if we are walking on it (in crampons nonetheless - how pads appropriate), or just staring at it. If it is the former, we might be dangerously close to sinking it as we have just ingested yet another enormous, delicious meal for under $30. The middle aged couple sitting next to us at the restaurant was celebrating a bumple and shared their flaming tiramisu with us. Tomorrow is Jen´s bumple. Yet another excuse for a fat-ass meal. More tomorrow.

PS - We leave the country for 5 days and all hell breaks loose at the Scientology Center? Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes?? WTF. His star has officially fallen. Ande called that two years ago.

PSS - Um, is that Ashley Simpson singing that Led Zeppelin song? Maybe that song will only get released outside the US.

PSS - Jen is lying in her bed simultaneously trying to mainline dulce de leche and find non-Spanish dubbed Titanic on the TV. We have a TV. So fancy.

¡Feliz Bumple!

Yesterday was Ande´s birthday. We celebrated with dinner at a fancy restaurant on the water front of the Rio de La Plata in Buenos Aires (Cabañas Las Lilas - $25 US pp) After the meal, Jen pulled the old ´going to the bathroom trick´ and secretly told the waiter (ín spanish! after 5 yrs of high school and college spanish, she was so proud!) that it was Ande´s special night and wink-wink, was there anything he could do. A few minutes later, he showed up with 2 glasses of champagne and a delicious blob of chocolate on a plate decorated in chocolate icing to read ¨¡Felize Bumple!¨ Two Argentine naval officers looked on approvingly (no doubt admiring our fleeces), and we chalked up the Bumple to ¨Argentine¨ spanish being different from the ¨Mexican¨spanish we had learned in school. (The bus boy later enlightened us that it´s just hard to write in chocolate and ¨Bumple¨was in fact ¨Cumple¨ and perhaps we were just thrown by the whole missing ¨anos¨part.) Ah yes, just like the time Ande and Kirstie (full name Kirstie Linda McCarter) were traveling through Vietnam on Kirstie´s birthday and the old ¨going to the bathroom trick¨ resulted in a cake that said ¨Happy Birthday Linda Carter¨and a rousing rendition by the Vietnamese waiters of the ¨Wonder Woman¨theme song in place of ¨Happy Birthday¨.

Back at the Virtual Tourist-recommended Milhouse Hostel, a party was in full swing. By party we mean 18-yr old Polish Edward Furlng DJ spinning the latest electronica circa 1999. (Earlier in the hostel´s events del dia, Beer Bong Challenge at 7pm; Remembering Jacques Derridas at 9pm. No joke, Chandra!) The typical grungy backpacker crowd was in attendance, chainsmoking and trying to get into each other´s pants. After only interacting up until that point with one other person in the hostel (an Israeli guy who popped by our room looking for an iron for his wrinkled Seder shirt), Ande struck up a conversation with a couple cool American guys. She jokingly (we thought obviously so...sorry, Ande) told them it was her 21st birthday. But after numerous missed 90´s references...¨Hey, doesn´t that guy look like he stepped off the set of ´Singles´?¨...Ande revealed to the young, blank face staring back at her that she was actually 29, not 21. The blank face then morphed into one of horror, as if he had just seen Large Marge herself (not, of course, that he would get that Pee-Wee´s Big Adventure reference). Clearly no one in a backpacker´s hostel contemplates the fact that life goes on after...23?

So here we are, day four of our trip. Buenos Aires is a cool, friendly, large and very European city. We´ve been getting around using the tagteam approach to Spanish - Jen speaks and Ande interprets the response, relying on her life long skill she has acquired growing up around incomprehensible Israelis. We´ve had fun doing typical tourist things like visiting the Casa Rosada, touring the Teatro Colon and shopping for antiques at the San Telmo flea market, bouncing among all of Buenos Aires´ distinct neighborhoods - Palermo, Recoleta, etc.

Despite our horror at being forced to run around in a stupid fleece, we´ve been trying to fit in as much as possible and have taken to eating dinner at 11:30 pm and polishing it off with a bottle of wine. The fleece is really our only complaint. Jen looks like an Outward Bound leader and Ande in her white fleece looks like a polar bear that has lost her way. Needless to say, the fleece will not be joining us on leg 2 of the trip.

All is good. Ande has opted to stay the veggie course and has not partaken in any famous Argentinian beef. But shortly after our arrival she was slipped a ham roofie in her tomato y queso tortilla. Jen was a good friend and swears the jambon was not actually in the piece she put in her mouth.

We´re off to Patagonia on Thursday. Perhaps we will have a new appreciation for the fleece.

So, are you flying directly to Antarctica? (The Itinerary)

Well, not exactly. But the itinerary does have us tackling glaciers near both the north AND south poles. Pretty cool for one trip (and, yes, somewhat surprising for people who have built their lives around wearing flip-flops year round. Really, you should have seen us trying to buy fleece.)

So, after much deliberation and many visits to Keponi the wonder travel agent (STA Westwood: 310.824.1574 – complicated trip planners, he’s your man!), the bare bones of our itinerary are finally settled. Most of where we’ll be going and what we’ll be doing will be planned on the fly, so things are likely to change, but the itinerary below should give you a rough idea of where you can picture the Noodles over the next 4 months. (Click on the link for “Interactive World Map” on the right for visual aids).

We’ll be updating this blog regularly with stories from the road instead of sending long trip emails. Hopefully we’ll even be hi-tech enough to post pictures. So bookmark Noodle Talk and let us hear from you on the comments pages. Even better, pick a leg of the itinerary that looks good and come meet us!

Here goes…

WEEKS 1-3ish (April 22 – May 17): Argentina and Uruguay (Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Punta del Este, Patagonia (El Calafate, El Chalten, Parque Torres del Paine, Usuaia, Bariloche, Mendoza, Salta, Jujuy)

WEEKS 4-7 (May 18 – June 6): Bolivia and Brazil (Salar de Uyuni, La Paz, Falls de Iguazu, Florianopolis, Curtiba, Buzios, Salvador?, Rio de Janeiro)

WEEK 7 (June 7-11): Los Angeles (3 days for laundry, Mommies, and burritos!!); Baltimore (Welcome to the world Jill Madison Keehan!)

WEEK 8: (June 11 – 16) Reykjavik, Iceland (Blue Lagoon, glaciers, whales, clubs, Bjork worshiping)

WEEK 9: (June 17- June 22) Scandinavian highlights (Copenhagen to Stockholm, ferry to Poland?)

WEEKS 10-11ish (June 23- July 9) Travel south over land from north-eastern Europe to Rome (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria)

WEEKS 12-13 (July 10 - July 21): Italy (Assissi, Ravenna, Sienna, Rome, can we afford Amalfi in July?)

WEEKS 14-15 (July 21 – Aug. 1): Israel (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Sinai Peninsula, Dead Sea)

WEEK 16 (Aug. 1 – 10): Turkey (Istanbul and southern Mediterranean coast (Fethiye, Kas, Olympos via gulet!!)

WEEKS 17-18 (Aug. 11 – 22): South East Asia (flight into good ‘ol Bangkok, from there maybe Koh Phangan? North to China?)

WEEK 19 (Aug. 22 – Aug. 31): Japan (Hi Peen! Tokyo, Kiserazu, Hiroshima, Osaka, World’s Fair and company mountain cabin in Nagano, onsens!

WEEK 20 (Aug. 31 – Sept. 2): Hawaii

HOME!!

Here are a few pictures of what we hope to find:

Buenos Aires
Perito Moreno Glacier
Ushuaia (southern most city in the world)
Falls de Iguazu
Rio
Buzios
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
Reykjavik (our second glacier)
Copenhagen
Prague
Good times in Krakow
Budapest
Salzburg
Assisi
Amalfi Coast
Dead Sea tourist circa 1984
Kas, Turkey
Koh Phangan
Pan
Kailua

Quit job...Check!

Friday marked the last day of life in my cube. I dreaded the day. I can't stand being the center of attention. If I ever get married, I will surely die. When my co-worker picked me up in the morning, I begged him for some of his Ativan.

As predicted, people stopped by my cubicle all morning to drown me in cries of, "you're so lucky, I wish I could do the same thing, stay in touch, and where are you going?" Truth was, yes, I am lucky - and yes I do feel a tremendous amount of guilt at being able to travel the world for four months. Also, with no ticket in hand, I had no idea where we would really end up going. I threw out various countries at these people while they stared at me, with the same blank look. I imagined after the first two countries I named, they stopped paying attention and focused more on what an asshole I was to be able to take such a trip.

At 12:30, my regular lunch crew began sending IMs demanding to know where I wanted to go for my final meal. In a city with so many choices, the daily decision of where to eat was one that always plagued us. Our best week ever was when we decided to eat ethnic every day. We covered Korean, Ethiopian, and Mexican, and by Thursday we were all out of ideas. We were simply apathetic. That and 3/4 of the crew had various tummy issues and couldn't always handle exotic ethnic fare.

I chose Ethiopian for the final meal to the protest of one of the lunch crew members. Said member loathed the special Ethiopian spongy bread as she claimed it reminded her of a spongy penis. We promised her a trip to 7-11 afterwards, and off we went.

The remainder of my final afternoon at the office consisted of me lifting papers from my file cabinet and depositing them into the trash. I then hosted a garage sale, giving away various desk trinkets - a small frog, a pair of Thai chopsticks, a few pictures of Gael Garcia Bernal (who two people told me thought was Keanu Reeves the entire time he was up at my cube), and loads of left-wing rhetoric. Hillary 2008!, Bush/Cheney axis of stupidity, that Jesusland map of America. The good stuff had been tagged weeks earlier and was promptly picked up at the beginning of the sale.

For my dreaded final department meeting, the thunder of my last day was shared with not one, but two other people. It was our executive producer's birthday and another girl's last day. When the time came to talk about where we would be headed, the other girl spoke first. She began calmly and within seconds was sobbing. She talked about moving back east to be near her family and how much she would miss everyone. When it was my turn to talk, I peaked out from the person I was hiding behind and announced I was leaving to go traveling. "You shallow bitch!" someone screamed out from across the room. Hilarity ensued and I was saved from giving a longer speech about the trip I was taking without actually knowing where I was going. I was also spared having to rationalize my decision to walk away from a stable job that offered me health insurance and a 401k plan that enabled me to save hundreds of dollars.

I woke up the morning after my last day at work and completely freaked. What the fuck was I thinking quitting my job? The other Noodle had quit working about a month earlier and told me the same thing happened to her. She said it takes about a week to get used to and then you settle into your decision and realize it was the right one. I freaked less today, but when I met up with two former co-workers I admitted to them that when I looked at them, what I saw staring back was two people with health insurance.

This is all very scary and exciting. The other Noodle had this to say to ease my woes, "You can always buy health insurance, but you can't buy back your 20s. Let's go see the fucking travel agent and get going."