At the moment, Lan Chile escorts me 30,000 miles above the Galapagos Islands. I have only the imagery of past Discovery Channel specials, combined with Toby's entertaining story of the islands' invasion of goats. In front of me, the back of the seat in front of me has a television, informing me that I'm above the Oceano Pacifico (don't know how to make accent marks on this yet). Soon, I'll be landing in Lima, then Santiago, then finally to Buenos Aires.

In the meantime, I am very much a minority as an English-speaking passenger. It's inspired me to put this eight hour flight to good use, so I've been madly scuttling through my Spanish coursebooks, trying to pick up what I can. I managed to request some "jugo de naranja" to the satisfaction of the stewardess, but that's about the extent of my verbal success so far. It's scary but also thrilling.

Clicking on mathematician mode, I grabbed a Santiago newspaper on the plane and flipped through the pages for about ten minutes, analyzing the stories as if they were cryptographic functions. Combined with a frugal dictionary, I made some very rudimentary headway on what's going on in Chile. There's a funny article about how a political scientist rated all of the Latin American nations' democraticness on a scale of 1 to 10, which the Santiago paper was proud to announce had determined Chile to be the highest. They also had a lengthy article on the east-coast blackouts in the USA, which was interesting.

Zip to the present, where I've just burned out after 89 games of hangman en espagnol. All in the category of food. At first it seemed pretty mindless, but as I progressed, I started to notice some patterns in which letters were more common than others. Eventually I managed to win 20 games in a row, although I cannot say I knew exactly what foods I was spelling. It was helpful though. I felt a bit silly when my streak ended after I could not guess "hot dog" - an English food caught me by surprise.

So, here I am. Excitement eating my boredom alive. Soon, South American soil.

P.S. Hey Sam, as it turns out, I´m soon to be in Lima, and then when I arrive in Santiago, I'll be landing on the other side of the driest desert on the planet, which stretches all the way up to where you were in Peru.