In the beginning of December I spent a 10 day trip with my friend Cora to Northern Chile and Western Bolivia. Our time was split between San Pedro de Atacama, Chile and a 4 day Jeep tour into the high plains and Salt Flats of Bolivia. I had been wanting to visit the salt flats since my time in Argentina two and a half years ago, so I felt really lucky to have finally made it there.

In San Pedro we stayed 5 nights in a camping ground, meeting interesting characters every day. The place offers many beautiful natural sites to visit, but the town itself is overridden with tourists and prices that you could mistake for those in the US. I felt like every local I met was an entrepreneur, trying to lure me into having them guide me along some tropical excursion I simply couldn’t miss out on. The campsite we were staying in seemed to be a breeding ground for these kinds of people. Right after they would explain to you how they’ve been sleeping in their tent and living ‘off the fruitful Atacama-land’ for the past 5 years, they would suddenly ask you about your plans during your stay…where have you been…where do you still want to visit…hey, we could go out together tomorrow! I’ll take you on the ‘alternative’ tour where no one else goes…I’ll even give you a discount, you just have to bring a six pack of beer for me and my buddy..the bullshit goes on, etc.

San Pedro did offer some beautiful sites and very enjoyable memories. There was a tranquility and desert silence that blanketed the town, making you fell instantly in vacation mode. Here’s some of the photos from this part of the trip

Bolivian parade, first night in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

We paid our guide in a 6 pack of Escudo

On the way to sandboarding

¡Salta!

Dunes of Valle de la Luna

Valle de la Luna

Valle de la Luna

Enjoyin' some 'cream en la calle

Comemorative picture with the owner of our hostel, a true huaso!

Lions at sunset in Laguna Cejar

"I went to the Chilean desert, and all I came back with was this lame perspective photot"

Sunset at Laguna Cejar

Floating in the Laguna Cejar (there is a heavy salt content which allows the 'Dead Sea' floating effect

The realization that you’ve crossed over from Chile into Bolivia is immediate.  It begins right at the boarder, when you notice that the immigration center is a small wooden shack in the middle of the desert, and all the rest follows: everything is 50 percent of the price, the people are darker, the running water and public bathrooms are much scarier and suddenly you find yourself sleeping at over 13,000 feet.  The 4 day Jeep trip I took into Bolivia cost a total of $141.00 USD, including food, water, nightly accommodations, nation park entry fees and a generally unforgettable experience.

For the first two days of the trip, we traveled through the Bolivian high plains, stopping at lagoons, rock formations, llama drumming circles, flamingo drag parties…basically non-stop exotic fun at extremely high altitudes.  We hit some sulfur geysers the first day that were at 16, 000 ft…needless to say, I was not feeling great.  To explain how I was affected by the altitude, I basically had a terrible headache for two days, but really nothing too bad.  We would chew coca leaves to relieve the pressure in our heads, a local treat for Bolivian tourists.  Though not the real drug, the leaves actually worked quite well…at killing my headache.

The second night, the eve of our arrival to Salar de Uyuni, we stayed in a hotel made of salt.  Really, it was entirely made of salt….the walls, the bed frames, the tables and chairs.  You could literally salt your dinner with the floor.  The next morning we woke up for sunrise and headed out towards the white horizon; we had reached the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat.  The view on the flat was spectacular, feeling at the center of a supernatural landscape.  Being at the Salar really felt like that destination you’d been longing for after days of sever discomfort and fatigue.  No surprises here, this place was well worth an aching head.

¡Vaya Vaya! ¡Salta, Espejo!

We cut a deal with the vicuñas for this balanced pose

¿Qué hacen ellos?

My new friend...

More friends...Me, continuing to be a social butterfly

Arbol de Piedra: Dalí-esq no?

Hotel de Sal

Letters from Salar de Uyuni

Sunrise at the Hotel de Sal

Surfin' on the Salar

Penelope and Scarlet, the Mujeres de lujo, cathcing rays on Isla de Pescadores

This gal's happy to be here!

An ocean of salt

Las Minas de Sal

Penelope hits the fashonable shops in Uyuni

A 6 am stop at the thermal baths on the way home

3:30 am wake up call

I followed them all the way to the airport to say my goodbyes, first time in my memory that I’ve gone to see off another person else traveling. Francis had a band of about 5 girls, all sobbing and clutching frantically to all 6 feet 2 inches of him, delaying his way to security from bag check-in. It was quite a spectacle, evoking a flood of my own memories about those few repetitive weeks in August 2007 before heading off to college. There was a tearful goodbye party to attend at least 3 or 4 times a week, a quickly tiring ritual as it soon became clear that we would be seeing one another again in three and a half months. In Francis’ case, he will be going much farther that any of us Americans did for college. In a culture where it is out of the norm to move out of your parents home, let alone your city during college, Francis is changing continents to attend university.

(NOTE: in my personal experience, maturity levels of Chileans is usually 4 to 5 years behind the norm; ex: you will be hard pressed to find a difference between a 27 year old and a 20 year old. Culture reasons for this?? They are varied and complex from what I’ve gathered, but all add up to a style retardation in maturity. I say this as neutrally as possible)

As I observed this highly dramatized ‘despedida’ of 18 year olds, I took time to think about my own feeling of nostalgia, the pains of goodbye, both to these people and to a special experience. I think it was my friend Julie Mithun in high school who used this slightly trite, yet unavoidably to the point quote below her yearbook picture senior year:

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”

I wish I had some more interesting, rich and complex words to sum up my 5 months living with the Paris family, but that expression does it justice just fine. I was so aware the whole semester how lucky I’d gotten with my host-family paring, reflecting weekly on the unique connection I was forming and strengthening with my host mother. By the time it came time to say goodbye, there was little left to sum up. It had all been said, thought and felt without having to say it, think it or feel it all over again. In addition, I think it was a tremendous help that I had spent the last 10 days leading up to the goodbye away from the house, disconnecting a bit from the life I’d been living for the past few months. While I still felt sad saying goodbye, I was able to approach it with greater poise and a more realistic perspective.

Looking ahead, I’ve been waiting for the moment to say that there is less than one week before a very special person arrives. This Sunday, I will be making my third trip to the airport in a week, but this time to welcome someone. Luke and I are in between two extreme periods right now–I look back to a summer during which we spent everyday together: we lived, we cooked, we slept, knowing that the company of the other person was just a finger poke away. Now, we are at the end of a five month period during which we had to settle for late night phone conversations, sustained through a wavering internet connection; me talking loudly into some invisible speaker somewhere on my laptop and he, pacing around in the increasing icy Ohio weather, aimlessly wandering outside his apartment or some study hall.

Each of us has experienced our own separate growths this semester, transformations taking place on opposite sides of the hemisphere. However, not for a moment did we forget the necessity and the sanctity in us evolving together, strengthening as a unit, as a team. While I’m so glad to be reaching the end of our ‘long-distance’ relationship period, I also look back on the last 5 months with a great sense of pride and achievement. It is one of life’s great lessons I think, grappling with two emotional realities that are so separate, but still unified; having your heart in two places at once, but learning how to keep it strong for both sides. When Luke gets here on Sunday, I anticipate a break from this semester-long tug of war, and I can let my heart rest, wholly and peacefully, on this side on the globe for a bit.

Reminiscing with Luke about what to anticipate when we meet each other at the airport, I know it will be one of the great romantic moments of my life, likely as dramatic as our goodbye together was. I don’t care if we make a spectacle, cause that would mean we’d be doing justice to the moment. I have various hypothetical scenes in my head, varying postulations on how the reunion will pan out. The sure thing is this: they all sound good to me, just knowing I will have him by my side again.

_______________________

So you might be thinking, I’ve skipped over a ton of stuff that’s happened over the past month. And I have, so let’s get back to it. I’ve been trying to figure out how to organize my last few blog posts, what with these massive trips I’ve taken, and will be taking. So here’s what I’m going to do: In the rest of this post, I’m going to give a brief summary of my last few weeks in Santiago + pictures. I’m then going to make a separate post about my travels to Bolivia and San Pedro de Atacama, Chile + pictures.

There will be a final post when Luke and I get back from our trip, but lets focus on catching up for now…

_______________________________________

Last months highlights: I went to a really fantastic cooking school with my program and we took a 3-hour empanada making class. We were in a beautiful kitchen, equipped with the finest of cooking tools and being instructed by a tall, glasses wearing, Dutch chef who’s lived in Chile for a decade or so. We made three different types of empanadas: Pino (the typical Chilean empanada, made in the oven and stuffed with ground beef, carmelized onions, a hard boiled egg and an olive); Mariscos y Queso (fried empanada stuffed with seafood, and sprinkled with a mild white cheese); and a vegetable empanada, identical to a Vietnamese spring roll (stuffed with sauteed veggies and wrapped in rice paper, then cooked in a steamer–by far the healthiest option). I have all the recipes, so I hope I get my act together some day to test them out in my own kitchen.

In other news, and one of the grand highlights of my semester here, I hosted a make-shift, culturally improvised, Thanksgiving dinner (the day after Thanksgiving) for 21 people. Almost everyone there had never celebrated the holiday before, and I’m afraid I gave them a rather unconventional evening, but it was so much fun nonetheless.

With lots of shopping and cleaning help from Liz, I cooked all day to assemble the following menu: 4 lemon-sage roasted chickens (turkey season doesn’t start here until Christmas); cream-whipped mashed potatoes; sage and corn bread stuffing; green beans sautéed with garlic and ginger; and a sweet potato pie for dessert. I had my friends each bring a dish from their home country: spanish tortillas, Bolivian Pastel de Choclo, some sort of ‘Basque’ salad….it was all really delicious.

Because most of us won’t be in Santiago for Christmas, we organized a ‘amigo secreto’ (secret santa), to be revealed at the dinner. The method through which we unveiled the presents was this Catalan tradition that involved a log of wood called the Tio (emphasis on the O), a long wood stick to beat the Tio, and a little song in Catalán that you have to sing while hitting the log. After the song, a blanket gets whipped off the log, and there are your presents, with a little note containing a clue identifying your ‘amigo secreto.’

The dinner went until about 4 am, after the night had evolved into a big singing and dancing party. It was surely a Thanksgiving I will never forget, between it’s rich diversity of people, food, location in addition to its great break with a classic American tradition.

oh yea! I got glasses! (just kidding, they are just glass frames

Lil' pockets of joy baking in the oven

If you got table manners don't believe what they told ya, I eat with my fingers like an African Soldjya'

Santa's little helpers. I think the 4 chickens were equivalent to 1 turkey; SO many leftovers

This lil' Tio came all the way from Santiago's Catalan Cultural Center to be with us that night

And to think that plain looking stick unleashed all those wonderful presents!

Diego's new poker set

¡Vaya Espejo!

One of the hand-made gifts from Amigo Secreto: Kisko's personal bust

Give Thanks to the Buffet !

The spread before the storm

I kept that bad Spanish 'pop' going all night long!

¡Quiero ser libre, libre, libre, como el viento! ¡Y no me importa lo que pienso el mundo entero!

The weeks have been passing both quickly and slowly throughout November.  I’ve been busy finishing up final assignments, planning upcoming trips, getting yellow fever vaccinations (see requirements for Bolivian Tourist Visa).  Alternatively, I’ve had just enough relaxation time to start reflecting on my semester, jumping between moments of constructive criticism and preemptive nostalgia for my experience.  In many ways, I enjoyed having a chunk of work to complete at the end of this semester, given the total lack of academic pressure I was under for the last 4 months.  I like having to push really hard at the end of something.  Without that final sting of stress, pressure and sleep deprivation, the whole experience feels “light.”

I’m going to have to make this short because I’m leaving my house in about an hour for the airport.  Today, I’m going to northern Chile, the driest desert in the world, to stay in Pedro de Atacama for a few days with my friend Cora.  Atacama a centrally located touristy town in the middle of the desert, located alongside many exotic and beautiful excursion destinations.  After about 4 days or so, we will be crossing into Bolivia to visit Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flats in the world.  I’ve been wanting to visit these flats since I was in Argentina two years ago. I heard too many incredible stories from many travelers I met in northern Argentina, close to the Bolivian boarder.  Those tours usually last 4 days and 3 nights, and we’ll sleep in a hotel made of salt at one point.  The altitude climbs up to almost 4,000 meters, so that usually adds a level of intensity to the whole excursion.

I will maybe try and write some updates in my blog while I’m there, but if not, there will be a long post to come, filled with pictures, upon my return.

There’s so much to tell, my Thanksgiving dinner was stupendous, I went to a cooking school with the Butler group to lean how to make empanadas, I went to a Manu Chau concert, toured around the city’s cemetery and ex-torture camp from the dictatorship, had a farewell dinner with both my abroad group and my host family…..I’m sorry i’m skipping over all of this, I’ll give details when I get back.

I’m back at around 1 am on Monday, December 14th.  My host family leaves around 1 pm that same day, Francis to start at University in Madrid and Liz to spend the holidays with her family in Holland.  We’ll be having a goodbye breakfast in the morning, but last night felt like one of our first goodbyes.

More to come….

If my anecdote has served it’s purpose, I have properly framed the circumstances which defined my previous weekend, during which I was treated to a similar campo experience, with less Colombian extravagance and more of the rustic homeliness that defines the Chilean pastoral.

Kisko (who’s names is really Cristóbal) is a friend of that big group of Catalanes that I’m friends with, and is originally from Chillán, a smaller city 6 hours south of Santiago. Chillán is the central vein of this country’s chorizo sausage industry, so you can imagine the significance of this city in a country that takes it’s asados (BBQs) as seriously as it takes soccer games. Kisko’s family is from the city, but like any well established Latin American family, they have a house in the campo in the town of Pemuco, an hour and a half south of Chillán. Kisko invited us all down to the house for the weekend to spend a few days among the horses, baby chickens and forests of eucalyptus trees. There was 11 of us who made the trek down south, communally looking forward to escaping the concrete jungle that sometimes becomes a dominating presence in Santiago.

We drove along dirt roads lined with eucalyptus trees to get to the house; a spitting image of Bolinas, California was seemingly unfolding in front of my eyes. The house was situated the exact landscape I expected it to be, with a collection of old wooden colonial style houses, a large patio with the ever important parrilla for grilling.  There were horse stables, large turkeys and hens being followed diligently by their baby chicks.  Inside the house, the living room appeared to be the only space intentionally decorated, as every other room was filled to capacity with a hodge-podge of beds.  It was the ideal setting in which to escape from the world with a big group of friends and enjoy the wildly fresh country air, spectacular night skies and sing songs, meat and drink in hand, until the early morning hours.

Saturday was the only full day we got to enjoy there and it began at around 1 pm when everyone had finally crawled out from their beds.  The horses on the property were more or less trained and each one of us got a chance to hop on a horse and trot around the huge green open space we had at our disposal.  Apologies for the cheesiness, horseback riding is still very much a novelty for me, but the view of the vibrant rolling hills, framed by the snow-covered Andean mountain range is truly spectacular atop a horse.  I’m sure that will soon be added to the list of ‘Stuff that White People Like’: #247- Exotic Panoramic Views on Horseback.

That night a group of Kisko’s friends from Chillán came to the house, bringing with them a plethora of instruments and their seemingly endless thirst for covering classic American/British rock songs.  They were all tremendous musicians and truly did justice to many typical tunes of the Beatles, Radiohead, Pink Floyd…etc.  Still the majority of it was music from Latin America or Spain and it was fun to kick back a listen to everyone singing these classic songs I’d never heard in my life.  Throughout the weekend I felt really lucky and one step closer to experiencing the real Chile as Chileans themselves experience it.

vamos al campo!

el bosque

The lone caballo

The Thinker.

Chilean Diet

Look! All the Pretty Horses

The school work as certainly increased as final exams get closer, with papers due weekly now. Regardless, I’m anticipating a terrible adjustment period when i get back to Kenyon, in terms of getting used to studying again. The current heavier work load will certainly ease the transition a bit.

A week and a half ago I went with my abroad group to the southern city of Valdivia in the ninth region of Chile, also known as the river district. The city is home to one of the countries most important universities La Universidad Austral and is known for it’s beautiful rivers, it’s rainy climate (which maintains it’s spectacularly green countryside) and the heavy German influence that has dominated Valdivian culture since the 19th Century. The city is inundated with a series of rivers, which divide the land into multiple islands that were all home to Spanish or German military forts. One day of visiting these ‘castles’ and any tourist will be quick to realize that these castillos are in fact ruins, equipped with perfectly restored cannons to prove their point. The landscape on these islands was more rewarding than anything, even with the perpetual rain and clouded skies. There are moments when you feel as though you’re in the European countryside, in a Dutch pasture with fresh, brisk air, surveying a herd of woolly sheep fenced in by old, rotting logs. This is clearly my romantic image of farmland in Europe, as I’ve certainly never been to the countryside of the ‘nederlands’.

Other highlights included a trip to the Kunstmann brewery, arguably home to the best beer in Chile. It’s only fitting that this country’s finest cerveza comes from a region inundated by German immigrants. The museum in the cervesería was kind of a let down, adored with hokey statues of members of the Kunstmann family. But I did learn a fun-fact that I’ve since contributed to various conversations. If you are familiar with the classic German beer stein, you may be interested to know that this design became popular during the middle ages, and more specifically during the Black Plauge. The mugs were used to prevent air borne bacterias from contaminating the beer between it’s transport from the tap and the table.

Visual Aid

This was Butler’s first time taking a trip with abroad students down to Valdivia and I felt like a lot of things could have been improved. I know that navigating the rivers of this region is the typical way of getting to know the area, but I found that all the time spent on the water prevented me from getting to know the city at all. I really have no perception of the town, we didn’t get to eat any German food (which is one of the most atypical activities you can do in Valdivia), there were some neat museums that I had wanted to visit, but didn’t have time… Maybe I’ll go back in December when Luke and I travel south. The weather will be better and we will be on our own schedule, so that maybe be just the right thing to do?!

High prices for a tour with a real pirate

The 'small' glass of beer we were permitted to drink with Butler's supervision

Lunch on boat, in the company of an 'over 60s' tour group

Just for Jayne: the key didn't open the lock...

Dutch dreamz

The dockside market in Valdivia

Asado del campo on one of the islands

View from the dock

Honestly, there was not much to be done in this town but kick back, eat far too many empanadas, grill much too much meat, and begin sipping on beer from the late afternoon’s dim light into the early hours of the morning. A lifetime of Just Jayne’s meticulously scheduled family vacations have trained me to be all too conscious of trips lacking structure and productivity. While my conscious was certainly aware of the shortcomings of our four-day excursion (at least in JJ’s terms), we can blame my inaction and willingness to indulge on the daunting language barrier I had to face everyday.

Each day began between noon and 2 pm, as people began to stumble out of their cabañas still in their pajamas, squinting at the blinding rays of light, which emanated from the nearly pristine coastal sky. An early riser, I got to witness the better part of this morning precession daily, noting each disheveled hair do after the other…and let me say, the do’s only got wilder the later the person woke up! The 20 minute walk into the town became an early afternoon ritual, each time making our way down to the La Casa de Las Empanadas, Pichilemu’s esteemed empanadería, boasting more than 20 different flavors, all modestly priced at 1.000 pesos, around $2.00 US.

The beach was expansive and pretty, but generally too windy to sit comfortably for a long while. Saturday, we took the 15 minute taxi ride out of Pichilemu to explore Punta de Lobos, the lookout point from which you can watch some major surfers riding California sized-waves. From the cliffs on which we stood, the ocean looked startling similar to something you’d see at home; the sizable waves crashing against jagged rocks that poked through the surface of the freezing waters. I believe all the people surfing there had permits, it looked like some serious stuff.

As I mentioned earlier, our nights began at around 6 pm with various circles of card games, guitar playing, and the enjoyment of the evening’s first beer. Little by little, the asado (bbq) would begin, and the parrilla (grill) would be loaded up with the evening’s 5 kg’s of red meat. Between bites of liberally salted steak, we would dance to music coming from a set of speakers perched on the windowsill of a cabaña. I took various opportunities when no one was looking to plug in my ipod, and moving wildly to the sounds of The Knife, Girl Talk, or Amy Winehouse, Cate and I would close our eyes and feel as if we were back at Kenyon. I love being in Chile, but being tactfully nostalgic can be just as fun…

At around one in the morning the group would make it’s way down to the town’s fonda, the typical gathering tent for festivas patrias celebrations. The roof was made of some sort vegetation, weaved together to make a sturdy and protective ceiling. Festive red, white a blue decorations hung from the leaves. There were various bars selling the typical cicha, a type of grape cider, who’s sweet, alcoholic composition gave me a headache just looking at it. The same terrible band was on stage each night, performing a combination of Chilean folkloric music y reggaeton covers. Mostly the fonda was entertaining for me to watch people dance la cueca, Chile’s national dance. Both the man and the woman hold onto scarves and dance around one another as would a rooster perusing a chicken. Pretty fun as you would imagine.

I had a rough return from the trip. I was smacked with a case of sinusitis and had a pretty miserable week as far as physical health goes. Not until my mom yelled at me via skype to get myself some antibiotics did I go to a clinic. To put it plainly, it was the sole greatest trip to a doctor I’ve ever had…I’ve never seen a process so efficient. I have lots of meds now and am on my way to a speedy recovery. I have a presentation tomorrow in my radio journalism class, so I only hope my voice comes back by the morning!

Beach Malase

Favortie Bands: Dispatch (sooo chill); Jack Johnson (he's REALLY from Hawaii AND he surfs!); Coldplay (so great in concert)

blowin' in the wind

Religious awakenings in Punta de Lobos

...other spiritual awakenings in Pichilemu!

Peeping Cora

Vista de Punta de Lobos

Cata snaggin' Ale-->me snaggin them both

Ho Ho Ho, divine indeed!

Though we had to celebrate through a call made possible by skype’s wonderful telephonic services, Luke and I get to say: “one year and going strong”

….I’m pausing for those of you reading who’ve been married for 20+ years, and are currently rolling your eyes and shaking your head.  No judgment.

Luke is coming down to visit in December and we’ll get a few weeks to travel around together, so we’ll actualize the special occasion in a few months.  Nonetheless, September 17th, 2009 makes me proud.

I’ll tell more about that trip once it’s actually happened, but I’ve done some traveling in the past few weeks that’s worth rehashing.

Two weeks ago I went with my friends from Catalonia into the Cajon de Maipo, the river valley in between Santiago and the Andes. The heart of the trip was improvisation, and we just took bus after bus until we made our way as far into the mountains as we could before starting to do some serious climbing. We ended up in a little town that attracted tourists for its thermal baths, Los Boños Morales, they were called. Though spring is starting to arrive in Santiago, this region is still a bit behind. The ground was covered in snow for the most part, or large puddles of mud left over from recent melting. The baths were apparently cold, and were the color of coffee mixed with a little too much cream. Needless to say, no one was terribly disappointed not to have jumped right in.

We spent the day kind of milling around this nothing of a town, eating empanadas on the curbside, renting a sled for a few rides down the hillside, and getting ourselves situated in our rented cabaña. The house had no electricity so when the sun went down, you could imagine the cold inside. We had lots of candles, made playing cards out of paper, drank chalas, talked, laughed, ate sandwiches of bread, cheese and tomato sauce. It was a great night. We were all in bed by 11:30!

The next day we made a hike out of our search for a bus out-of-town. We walked down dirty roads for about three hours, covering about 5 km. We saw a small cascade in the distance and hiked off the road a bit and got to stand really close to it. Bit by bit we made our way back to Santiago, stopping for empanadas, learning the ropes as we went along. It was so much fun traveling with a group of people who head out for an adventure without making plans. There’s always interesting surprises you didn’t expect and the spontaneity always makes for a good and exciting trip. You just have to not be concerned about time, and then you’re golden. The waiting, the searching, the wandering, it all becomes part of the adventure.

Last weekend I went with my abroad group to Valparaíso and Isla Negra, the house of Pablo Neruda. While I’ve been in Valpo before, seeing the landscape surrounding Isla Negra, which is about 30 minutes south of the city, was startlingly similar to a little place I hold close to my heart. The resemblance of this area to Muir Beach blew my mind. The trees, the ocean, the rocks…it’s a curious thing to feel so at home at the opposite end of the earth.

Isla Negra was a beautiful home, one of those places that inspires you to the point that you want to have a house just like it one day. Pablo Neruda worked at the consulates in many different countries all around the world and was Chile’s ambassador to France; this is to say, the man traveled a decent amount. The innumerable artifacts he collected is breathtaking, and each tell their own story about a different place he’d been, and it’s exotic culture. Pablo Neruda was a citizen of the world, and his house profoundly reflected this.

Into the Andes...

Got a lift from a guy named Pedro. Very spacious pick-up!

The town of Los Baños Morales

el grupo

cards by candlelight

Setting off in the morning

The Cascade

Cumpleaños de Francis: 18th!

View from Isla Negra

Muir Woods or Chile?

Pablo and Me

Streets of ValparaísoChain Vines

Group boat ride

While I’m yet unable to reflect on the months to follow, I predict this semester to be one of emotional challenges, cyclically emerging, submerging, and emerging again and again. The wisdom gained from such challenges is paramount, in contrast to what I’ll learn inside Santiago’s classrooms. To tie back to my remark about confrontation, the fluctuation of feelings I discussed above, have been issues demanding confrontation. With hesitation at first, and now with confidence and motivation. This is not to say that the rest of my time here in Chile will be free of feeling lonely, overwhelmed, etc. On the contrary, I’m certain there will be more. However, I’m slowly figuring out, bit by bit, how those times when you are down, when you are scared, are very much a part of being in a foreign country, and probably part of life, not matter how lucky you are to have loved one’s by your side. How you learn to pull yourself away from such feelings is the real lesson, and thus far, has been one of the most valuable teaching I’ve received. And the best part, it’s self taught!…with a little help from my friends.

Alright, I hope all of the above made sense. I have a feeling I got to sounding a bit morbid, like I’m learning how to live with depression, or that life’s really a big pit of loneliness that you have to deal with sooner or later. On the contrary, I’ve had a tremendous past two weeks, the sweet fruits of the laborious process I attempted to reconstruct above.

To share with you a bit, I’ve begun taking better care of myself- strict exercise, better eating, no wine during the week etc. Much to my surprise, I’ve taken up Salsa; yes, I’m currently in a dance class, and it’s just fabulous. I enrolled with two new friends from my radio class, also exchange students, but from Spain, so I only speak Spanish with them. We have class Thursday and Friday at this youth community center in Providencia, my neighborhood. Grace nor elegance have never come easily to me, but hopefully I’ll adapt to the Latin groove at some point.

Last weekend I went off to Valparaíso to visit Cate, who actually lives in Viña del Mar, the neighboring beach town. Shout out to Cate’s blog if you wanna check out where she lives, what she’s up to: http://www.vinademoda.blogspot.com.

It was a short trip, only Saturday morning, until Sunday afternoon, but it was filled with juice. We met up with Amanda, studying in Valparaíso also, who is one of Cate’s friends from New York, who I’ve met multiple times before. She showed us to these fabulous sand dunes that overlooked the pacific ocean, where people were sand boarding as if they were snowboarders scaling the side of a snow covered mountain. The topography is startlingly similar to the California coastline, and it gave me a sense of home like I hadn’t felt since May when I was back in the bay. That night, Cate and I cooked her host family a big dinner. We made an arugula salad with sliced pears and walnuts, and it was clear that the concept of both fruit and lettuce in the same bowl was more than alien to these people. We certainly enjoyed ourselves nonetheless, and ended the night at a very bohemian joint, Café Journal, that is conveniently located down the hill from Cate’s house.

The next morning, we pried ourselves out of bed earlier than we would have liked, so that we’d have time to explore Valparaíso just a bit before I had to leave. If you’ve hear of Valparaíso, you’ve probably also heard it’s the Latin American twin sister of San Francisco. This statement is true to an extent, but Valpo has a rustic, gritty and artistic underbelly than San Francisco’s (thriving) economy repels. Imagine the steepest street you can think of in SF, and then imagine the pavement of that street is one of crack cobblestone, with holes so big that weeds and grass have begun to poke through. The walls that line the streets have eccentrically colored murals and the ancient Victorian style houses appear to be competing for both width and height. This is Valpo- a picturesque, vibrant piece of art, that people get to live in.

How cool…

It was instantly clear to me that if I were to live in Chile, Valparaíso would be my preference over Santiago. However, I’m loving the experience of a big city, I have the best family in the world, and Cate’s house is only a pleasant hour and forty-five minute bus ride away.

The Dune Ascent

Art shot...

Shadowed dare devils atop the mountain peak

Notice my haircut!

Acensor into the cerros (hills) of Valparaíso

Vista of the puerto

And it was good coffee too-

As reality kicks, so does the personal understanding that all that’s happening around me is very real. For the first time in my life, I’m actually in a Latin American city to live, to enroll and attend classes at a university, to make substantial friendships with people from all over the world. While all that seemed to me at first mildly paralyzing, it’s slowly becoming quite captivating. Today I even picked up my Chilean foreigner’s identification card, ensuring my residency here for the duration of my studies. If I were to give a label to my transitory period right now, I’d say that it’s the post-honeymoon cold feet. This new life your living in not just for a few sun soaked weeks, but an established life change. In my case, study-abroad is not a life change, but it feels a little like one at the beginning.

To give you all a better idea of what this new world is looking like for me, my school schedule is as follows:

Lunes- Radio-Journalism Workshop from 10-12:45 pm; lunch at home; Aesthetics of Modernism and Post-Modernism from 4:30-5:50.

Martes- Contemporary History of Chile from 10:00-11:30 am (this is a course with IFSA-Butler, my abroad program, rather than with La Católica)

Miercoles- Perfecting the Spanish Essay from 2:00-4:00 pm; race to the metro to get to a campus on the other side of the city; Aesthetics of Modernism and Post-Modernism from 4:30-5:50.

Jueves- Contemporary History of Chile from 10:00-11:30 am

Viernes- starts my three day weekend

My schedule is very light certain days, and the level of homework is rather mild compared with Kenyon, so I’m on the lookout for some sort of volunteering gig or internship I could get involved in. What would really be great would be to make some money, after spending my entire summer without pay, so I may try and inquire about that option. However, I don’t know what the restrictions are about working in a foreign country without a ‘workers visa.’ We shall see…

I’ve been doing a good bit of reading, finished up A Confederacy of Dunces, which I’d started all the way back in old Miami. For those who have not read this gem, I suggest you put it on your list. If you remember being a fan of Voltaire’s Candide, or Cervantes’ Don Quixote, this is precisely your humor, just with mid-20th century New Orleans thrown in, rather than mid-evil Europe. I’ve been complimenting these readings with some books in Spanish. This is still a tumultuous process for me, and I finally have the time to try and improve these shortcomings. I’m reading some cuentos (short stories) right now, which are good practicing, as they are not too overwhelming nor difficult to digest.

On the people front, I’m certainly meeting new people all the time. My radio course has proven to be the most socially stimulating. Maybe because it’s through the School of Communications, jajajaj!! sorry… But really, yesterday I was talking for a long while with a group of people from the class, Chileans, Spanish exchange students…the novelty of simply talking to non-American’s apparently hasn’t wore down for me. The two Spanish gals invited me to sign up for a salsa course with them. I can’t dance ‘formally’ to save my life, so I figure, when in Rome! I’m still having lots of fun adventures with Ben, and he’s been introducing me to new people he’s met as well. The two of us combined, we’re making a good team.

Also, I bought a bike, but am still waiting to see how I feel about it. I got a road bike, the same type I have at home, but 50 times less expensive. It’s been raining, and the breaks haven’t been working well. The seat is rock hard, and the tires don’t exactly jive well with the poorly maintained streets. Francis told me that I should buy a cruiser bike. “Just because road bikes are good in Gringolandia, doesn’t mean they’re gonna be good here!” My vanity shut him up, and I bought the bike anyways…why did I think I knew better than a Chilean? At least I’ll look cool…

Did a little cooking for the family: pasta, chorizo, broccoli, mushrooms, and onions

Vino!

The red ranger, lost cousin of the silver bullet.

Piggy Bank decorations, Chilean past time, cachai?

Chilean Nationalism