Bad Daniel, no cookie

I have slacked tremendously on blogging, I know. The worst part is that I'm in Peru and I've having to retro-blog on Santiago, when all I want to tell you about it where I'm at and what I've been doing. All in good time my friends...

So Santiago was one of the kindest cities I've been in yet. People there are just awesome. The weather was the real bummer. It rained all but 2 days that we were there and the nicest of those days I was stuck inside working all day long.

Oh well, I guess you can't win them all. I did go out to some bars with members of the cast and crew which was a lot of fun. And my hotel room was tres elegant. Which brings me to the brunt of this blog post:

An ongoing list of my new friends (and subsequently my new enemies)

1) My new friend, Roomservice. He's great when you're feeling down. Or bored. Or hungry. I suppose it's a lot like getting delivery, but it's in a hotel and you don't have to clean anything up.

2) My new friend, The Gym. So I'll confess, I haven't really worked out in years. I'll rock a yoga class every now and then, but weights? Treadmills? Ellipsis machines? Give me a break, I didn't even know what an ellipsis machine was. Well, the rub of the Sheraton is that you have to pay $5 to use the gym and the swimming pool is a part of the gym, so I figured I better get my money's worth. And actually I really enjoyed it and have wild notions of making exercise a more prominent part of my life. The downside is...

3) My new enemy, Sore Arms. Wow, don't bite off more than you can chew when you start going to the gym for the first time in years. I felt like my shoulders cans of silly string, shooting forth pink a green streams of pliable chemicals, which are good for nothing except annoying your friends with.

Well, I didn't take any pictures that I was crazy about, but I posted 60 from Santiago on my Flickr page, in an effort to start getting that guy back up to date.
Check them out here.

Oh and the title of this entry is completely untrue- I've been eating tons of cookies.

Chilly

Admittedly, I am a huge cornball. Corny to the max. It's mostly my dad's fault. But I can't help it- it's actually cold in Chile!

I had a great first day in Santiago. Walked around Plaza De Armas, took some pictures, bought a hat and took the subway (they were playing "Friday I'm in Love" by the Cure in one of the stations!). Then met up with Maura, one of the producer's sisters who is a travel writer for the New York Times, and we went on a tour of Pablo Neruda's house. Excellent stuff. Definitely learned a lot about him and it inspired me to buy his autobiography, which in English is just called "Memoirs" (boring) but in Spanish it's called "I Confess, I Have Lived" (cool!).

Then we took a "Funicular" which is like a trolley of sorts up to Cerro San Cristobal and saw the huge virgin Mary statue, then took these crazy 60's sci-fi cable cars back down. It was a lot of fun.

I'm going to post pictures, but I mainly wanted to give myself an excuse in this post. We traveled a day early this week, leaving Rio crazy early Saturday morning and arriving in Chile (after many delays and a layover in the worst airport in the world, San Paulo Brazil) in the late afternoon. Now during the flight somehow my new instrument, the mini-harp, became un-tuned and so the new song that I had composed in Rio will have to wait until I can get a wrench and retune.

Bum out. So instead I have a picture of me sitting by my windowsill in Rio looking longingly towards the sea with my mini-harp, and that will have to do for now.