The Internet Wanderings of an Idle Traveler Still In La Paz

Picture this, Dave and I were running around town for a third day trying to put together the package of information to get our visas for Brazil. We had to show proof of the yellow fever vaccine again, but this time we needed the original. So we are up early on Monday morning to go to the Bolivian health center to get an original document (not a shot) with the same piece of paper that was denied the previous Friday. It didn't pass the Common Sense Test to me, and I had half a mind to tell her that. The most annoying part was that she was not going to keep the original, she only needed to see it. She knew that we had received the shot and could have overlooked the minor discrepancy, but had to be a jerk about the whole thing.

So we went back, ready to do battle the next day. Needless to say she found some other nit-picky things to send us scrabling to get done, so we fix that and went back, oh did I mention we were trying to catch a bus in the morning so that we could get out of La Paz? I ran 14 blocks in the high capital in the world to pay the processing fee, and had all my ducks in a row. I was looking at the clock realizing that the bus was leaving from the other side of town in five minutes. In my optimism I told myself the bus won't leave until 15 minutes late, we are totally fine. As I turn back to the same evil secretary she looks up and smiles in her unique way (uh, this can't be good) and says "I'm sorry but you don't have any pages left in your passport." From the euphoric look on her face I think she may have had an orgasm from the joy in providing such bad news.

¨What about the three pages at the end, there is nothing on them.¨ I reply in my ignorance of passports.

You could see the tingle of pleasure run down her spine as she turned my passport back to me and showed me the three pages, ¨It says right here that I can't put any visas on these pages, (euphoric shutter) you are going to have to go to your embassy first.¨

Bastards! Dave could get his passport processed, but he was going to need more pages as well. Between the two of us we needed to be in La Paz everyday for the next week (for maybe ten minutes). That meant that we were not going to make our bus that day or for the next week, and we were not able to go chasing after alligators, anacondas, and piranhas fishing in the Amazon Basin. Bastards!

The week off gave us an opportunity to do some good ol' fashion college style internet time killing. In the past two years the internet has improved greatly. It has gone far beyond Al Gore's expectations when he discovered it all those years ago. At least he finally got his credit for the discovery this year in the form of the Nobel Peace Prize. A couple of those discoveries I will share since I seem to have nothing better to do with myself than waste the reader's time.

First I started to YouTube (can YouTube be verbed?) the debates for our next presidential candidate. In the process I watched some of the participant's propaganda that they also leave up on the website. Based on one advertisement I have selected my dark horse, and because my candidate as lost every time I have voted for president I have no problem shamelessly plugging former Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson.




There is also a huge sub-culture based around everybody's favorite ass kicking Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris. At http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/ one can get a glimpse of why Chuck Norris is a better man than you. My personal favorite: ¨Every night the boogeyman checks his closet for Chuck Norris.¨

Not to send y'all away from my blog, but there is a button that automatically comes up on most blogs that are affiliated with this website. If you scroll to the top you will discover as I did the ¨Next Blog¨ button. This button will allow you to go to another blog by a random person somewhere in the world. After an hour of mindlessly pushing the button I realized that most blogs are absolute crap. Which begs the rhetorical question, do other people think my blog is as crap as I think their's is? It probably is. Blogs are crap.

The largest waste of time on the internet was done without Lane's knowedge, he would be very disappointed in me if he knew I was search for a... hold on... Ok, he's gone, in search of a (whispered) Jay-Oh-Bee. That's right, I have been reviewing his bank account balance, and by the time he is done with this South America thing he will be more broke than if Chuck Norris would have roundhouse kicked him in the face. That's right a job (gasp!), so if anyone out their is interested (or knows someone that might be) in giving this future-less engineer a job (preferably one that pays more than monopoly money and boild green bananas) let him know, but you didn't hear that from me.

With that I must leave in search of more garbage on the internet. If you have not burned enough time at work yet I recommend starting with the ¨Next Blog¨ button, I wonder how many times I would have to push it to randomly come across the blog of someone that I know? There is only one way to find out...