El gitano

You have to like avocado to live in this town. This morning, I asked my mom for toast for breakfast, and when she asked what I wanted on top of it, I mumbled awkwardly until she was satisfied with my answer. She demonstrated for me the best way to remove an avocado from its skin, and plopped half of an avocado onto one half of my small toasted roll, making my entire breakfast consist of one small toasted roll, one whole avocado, with two small pieces of deli turkey on top.

So far it's been difficult for me to have a personality. Usually I rely pretty heavily on sarcasm as my one form of humor, but it's hard to be sarcastic in a language that you barely understand. Also, I am used to long periods of quiet, but I realize that those around me may prefer conversation. My brother Cristobal took me into Valparaiso today (I'm getting better at understanding him every minute) and there were times when we didn't say anything for a long time. I kinda hope they understand that that's just me, it's not because I don't know how to talk in Spanish.

Finally, today I learned a slightly expensive lesson. In other words, I got swindled. Okay, so here's how it happened. I was walking innocently along the boardwalk when someone said hi or something and asked me the time. She stopped when she asked the question so, being polite, I stopped too. I wasn't wearing my watch, but I took a second to pull out my phone to check. It was like 5, but that's not really important. She said that she was a gypsy, and since I was nice, she would tell me my fortune for free. This sounded fun enough (more like I'm too pansy to just walk away) so I extended my hand. She said something something and then encouraged me to sit down on the edge of the boardwalk for a more in-depth look. I think I was starting to get sketched out about now, but she put a 1000 peso note (approx. $2) in my hand and said something something about how it's all a gift. Then she took her pesos back and asked me to replace hers with one of my own. Obviously a reader is saying now that I should not have done it, but I did. Once she saw my wallet, she kinda started fingering through it, pretending like she was blessing each one of it's folds or something. Luckily I did not have very much in it. She ended up pulling out the 5000 pesos that I had in it (in addition to the 1000 I had in my hand), and she held these, all crumpled up in her hand. I got slightly more assertive now, saying "Please give that back to me," or something along those lines. Obviously she did not. We went on in this charade for a while, and I was getting quite uncomfortable when finally she poured water on my pesos and started kneading them in her hand with a stick. She was blabbering the entire time and I was naively pretending to understand. When she finally reopened her hand with my money, all that was left was a grayish mush where my pesos had been. She said something like "This is a tragedy in your life, of which there will be many, but your life is going to change." Then she asked for one of my beers and let me go. So that was an experience.