Can’t anyone get some hepatitis around here?
I took the night bus to Arica, where I sat next to some dude who smelled like beer (but not excessively) and played his music loudly. Sometimes he sang along with his music, which was amusing. Luckily I was not annoyed. I dumped my stuff at a hotel in Arica and headed out to check out the town. As I walked onto the main pedestrian walkway, I was greeted by a huge Blockbuster, next to a huge McDonald’s, two places I hadn’t seen for a long, long time. (After pondering this myself, it was confirmed by another traveler that there, indeed, no McDonald’s in Bolivia, an interesting fact, I think. There used to be, but they left…don’t know why.)
I really had a pretty lazy day. The weather was nice – warm-ish with a nice cool breeze off the ocean, but definitely not beach weather. I walked along the waterfront for a while, stopping to watch the waves crash up against some rocks for a good hour or so. The next day, I decided that, being in a more developed country, I would seek out a hospital to get my second round of Hepatitis A shot. I chose this instead of going to a beach with caves and seals – a questionable decision, indeed, but health is important out here.
I went to the hospital and asked at the front desk where I could get the vaccine from. The man directed me to the emergency room, which I thought I was strange. I waited in line there for a good 10 minutes. I finally explained to the woman that this wasn’t an emergency, but I needed my Hepatitis A vaccine and the guy told me to come here. She directed me back to the front desk, where I visited a different man. He told me to go to another place, one block up, all the way to the end.
Well, I went one block up, all the way to the end, and there was nothing resembling a place offering vaccinations. I walked around a bit and found the place, where I waited in line another good 20 minutes. Well, this place only had the Hepatitis A/B combo, and I already had as much Hepatitis B as I wanted. They told me to go to another place, which I did. The woman there told me to come back in 45 minutes. Well outside the city center by this point, there was little to do during this 45 minutes, so I sat on a curb. I went back and told the woman I needed my Hepatitis A vaccine. “For adults or children?” Well, it’s for me. “Adult. We only have for children.” OK…do you know another place? She directed me back to the clinic where I had just come from. I told her I had just come from there, and she made some calls. Apparently a pharmacy in town would be receiving Hepatitis A on Wednesday (it was something like Saturday), so that ended my quest, as well as wasted a whole day that I could have been walking through caves and seeing seals…some days are just a waste.
As I was eating dinner, I ran into Darrell, the really annoying English guy from Alter do Chao in Brazil…of all people to run into, of course I run into the annoying guy, the one who, to use an Aussie term, was “doing my head in”. He was with some Brazilian chick he had picked up and had already been to the south of Argentina and now way back up to the most northern city in Chile. Meanwhile, I had just pretty much been in Bolivia the whole time. They sat down and we chatted for a while, me in my three languages, English to Darrell, Portuguese to the chick, and Spanish to the waiter…it was a whirlwind of languages, I’ll tell you.
The girl wanted to go to a karaoke bar they had seen, which I couldn’t understand because she didn’t drink and didn’t sing. Why would you want to go sober to a karaoke bar and not sing? Anyway, we walked to the place and I read the big sign in the front of the place – Club de Caballeros. Gentlemen’s Club. What? Sure enough, it said karaoke on the front (are naked girls singing karaoke?), but it soon became apparent why she wanted to go there. She thought it was a Carioca place…Carioca is the name for people from Rio de Janiero, and she thought it would be a Brazilian place. Well, needless to say, we didn’t go in. I was only glad I knew the Spanish to save us from the naked karaoke.
Tags: Chile, Travel, Tag Index
Tania