Complications

Those things I said about Ecuador being too easy to live in? I take it back, because booking this Galapagos trip has been a nightmare! Sort of a comedy of errors, although I have faith it will all work out in the end. I´m sure some of the problems have to do with me being from New York, and taking it literally when someone says they will send me the info "today" - silly me thinks today means today, but I guess in other places it doesn´t. And then "two hours from now" - same thing. And "the lady from the boat will send you the information right away." Nope, nothing. When I finally got the voucher for the boat from the travel agency....it had the name of another boat. What really worried me was that the names are very similar, and maybe they´d booked me for the wrong boat! But it turns out the voucher was wrong, not the boat (I hope...I now do have a voucher with the name of the boat I want, and hopefully that is the boat I am booked on).

And then to purchase the airplane tickets...which I couldn´t do until they sent me the info they said they´d send yesterday and didn´t until this afternoon. Finally I got the info and they said the reservation expired at 16:00. And it was 15:58. Literally. Turns out that was wrong and it expires tomorrow at noon, but I didn´t know where the other girl was so I left her a note at her hotel. Then I went to a travel agency to purchase the ticket and the very nice lady there called the airline, who told her it was $55 more than I thought it would be. "The fare went up yesterday" said the airline. Awesome. I thought the reservation had been made yesterday, and wasn´t excited that the day it happened to go up was the day after the reservation was supposed to be made. I guess my unhappy face was enough for the lady to call the more local airline office, where they gave her the lower, promotional price. But i was able to get a slightly lower one with my ISIC card, so walked to the other side of town to the actual airline office, where you´d think they had never booked a ticket to the Galapagos before, because she was using the scrap of paper with the ISIC price the travel agency lady wrote down as the fare..too bad she didn´t write down $100! And then she had to run the credit card through three times before it worked. I´m at least proud of myself that I talked to the travel agency and airline person in Spanish, including my passport number!

Tomorrow last day of classes for a whole week...to quote a favorite blog commentor of mine, woooooo hoooo! And then to the Galapagos. Here´s hoping the trip goes more smoothly than the booking process. I actually learned a phrase similar to "God willing" today but I think I forget what it is...something like "ojala." That may be it actually. Apparently it its origins are Arabic.