While traveling around Europe, our group coined the term ‘dupe’ which is basically to be tricked. Dupes happen all the time especially in a foreign country where you do not speak the language. Thus far I have been rather lucky and I have only been duped twice. Here they are…
DUPE #1: Shower Door Attacked Me
I am well happy with my shower. It takes a moment for the water to heat up but I got pressure like the pee stream of a horse, the shower is large enough for all sorts of activities, and the shower head is well above my head so I do not need to duck down. To enter the shower you step over an 18 inch rise in the floor which acts as the basin for the shower. On this rise are two standard glass shower doors. I was aware that one of the doors was liable to come off its track, which it did a few times, but with caution it was not a problem. Well one day the maid had moved my toothpaste, so I had to open up the other door. Basically she broke my routine and this is what happens when you break routines. I open up the door to get the toothpaste because I like getting nice and sloppy in the shower while I brush my teeth. While I am openeing the door, the thing falls out of it’s track and the entire weight of the glass door fell the 18 inches and landed square on my left big toe. I yelped but held in any more noise as I waited the two or three seconds for the pain to reach my brain. The pain flowed through my nerves and hit my brain like a fat couple having amazing sex. I had to stay in the shower for about 20 minutes while I let the blood flow down the drain.
It has been almost a month now and the nail refuses to come off. It definately hurts and causes me to wake up in the night when it gets caught on a sheet or something. When it does finally come off I plan on sending it to my friend Ken in an unmarked envelope filled with shreds of paper to hide the contents.
DUPE #2: Bought a bike on mercadolibre.com
One of my plans to work on down here in South America was something along these lines in no particular order:
- Befriend bikeshop and get deals and sponsorships and free bike tune ups and shoot the shit with them and learn spanish. (COMPLETED)
- Buy a bike to fix up and replace the track bike I had built back home that was stolen. Use this bike as main form of transportation to avoid having race bike stolen.
- Train hard and go on an Andean bike trip so I can continue to disgrace Xavier at cycling.
- Enter races and dominate Argentine cycling scene
Well I went on mercadolibre.com which is the south american ebay (in fact I think it is owned by ebay). I find this bike 
that fits all my criteria that I needed. A side note here. All the bikes that people ride around here are old ladies mountain bikes with fat wheels likely to accomodate for the random streets that are still cobblestone. So the bike is 600 pesos (almost $200) but I figure it has eveything that I want and this is going to come home with me anyways to the states. I communicate with the guy on MSN messenger in spanish regarding the bike and where to meet up. I meet him in the slum part of BsAs at the train station which is very far from me. This is on December 31st at 6pm by the way and fortunately I had Parv there to support me. I inspect the bike, realize that there were some thigns wrong but figured my trusty bike shop could fix it up for me. Make the exchange, find out that the train wont let me on so we had to find a tax that would let me put this damn bike in which was not easy. So that added to the cost. Bike shop is closed 
for holidays so I have to wait a week until i can drop it off. In the mean time I purchase some paint stripper and sand paper and plan on removing all the paint so I can have it prepped for a classic Luke paint job even though i wouldn’t have crazy neighbor Mark to do most of the work like on the last bike. More cost added. Drop the bike off at the bike shop, come back to find out that they cannot fix it because the frame has been so badly damaged that the parts just do not exist that can fit the bottom bracket. So basically I am left with a fucked bike that if fixed would be a danger to whoever rides it. My plan is to resell it or part it, hopefully back to the same evil bastard that sold it to me. All together, I am out $200 bucks on this expedition, another example of my love for bikes.