The bicycle thing

I went on a bike trip with the university from Monday to Friday. There's a class called Tiempo Libre and basically the only assessment for this class is you get into a group and plan a group trip that the whole class takes. I was going to take this class but when I went, the people were so juvenile and I was so tired (it cut into my siesta time) that I didn't do it. Emily tagged along with me and enjoyed the class so she took it this semester and signed us up for the bike trip.

On the first day, we were riding along the road to Santiago and it was quite rocky and my bike crashed on a rock on the road and I fell on another rock. It bled quite heavily and my sock and sneakers turned pink from all the blood- you could even see the fat on my knee (unless it was the bone). So they took me to the hospital where the doctor and nurse taught me how to swear in Spanish instead of yelling 'OW!' every time they touched my wounds. They couldn't stitch it though, because all the skin had scraped off and was dangling by slivers. So bloody painful, but kind of attractive in a creepy way. The doctor had to cut them off. He said I had to get it redressed every day till the end of the trip, so on Tuesday, the teacher took me to the hospital. He's such a nice teacher- he brought a wheelchair to the jeep and said 'Sit.' And he would point at random guys in our group and say 'You- carry her bag for her' or 'You over there, lift her out of the car, she can't move'. Which wasn't true; I could move, just very slowly.

Spanish guys are so... chauvinistic though. And absolutely useless. When I was hobbling down the hill from our campsite on the 3rd day when we were leaving, with my big backpack and day bag, only two out of the 30 guys offered to help, and one guy said something along the lines of 'What ho! Heavy bag, good work, keep it up!' Ha!

I had to travel in the jeep instead of riding along for the rest of the trip, but it was all right. I travelled with Lily, one of the people who worked for the outdoor adventure company they hired. She was absolutely hysterical and I got to practise Spanish. On the Monday, when we were driving along, we passed a cherry orchard and we stopped and picked handfuls of absolutely fantastic cherries.

I decided to document the phases of my wounds. The above photos are Day 3, when I'd just taken off the bandages and Day 5, when they'd scabbed decently.