Tophu's Adventures Abroad

pirate buses and self service

2007-04-26T14:02:00.000-07:00

3/26/07
Happy Birthday Grandma!

I just want to add a couple things about Santiago:
Micros Piratas and self service

1. self-service. Santiaguinos don't believe in it. I don't know why,
maybe they're trying to create more jobs, maybe they don't trust
people not to steal things, I don't know, but I don't like it. I
think my dislike for it (and the usted/tu dichotomy) is part of my
blossoming culture shock which is supposed to hit soon. Supposedly
during culture shock, when I'm trying to integrate myself into this
culture, I'll start hating things chilean out of frustration. And I
hate that they don't let us do things for ourselves. What am I
talking about? In the libraries here, you can't browse the books.
The books are all registered in the computer, you look up what you
want, write down a call number on a special piece of paper with a
bunch of other info, then give it to a librarian behind a counter, who
goes to the shelves (which are behind the counter, or sometimes even
in a locked room) and brings you back the book. In maybe half the
clothing stores (except for some ENORMOUS department stores in the
wealthier neighborhoods) the clothes are displayed on mannequins, so
you look and see what you want, and then tell the salesperson who gets
your size off the shelf, and gives it to you to try on. Also in drug
store/pharmacies, which litter every streetcorner like Starbucks, some
of them have shelves and aisles, but most of them you have to go up
and ask for what you want, even if it's just band-aids.

2. Micros Piratas- Pirate Buses! I've told you all about
Transantiago, it's controversy, and how it put many drivers and other
folks out of business. As it turns out the people selling random
items and playing music are still allowed on Transantiago buses, but
people are still pissed because buses are frequently late and over
crowded. Well, not late because they don't have a schedule, but they
are frequently few and far between. SO the night that we got back
from Valparaiso and Horcón, we were waiting a very long time in a very
big crowd for a bus, when an unmarked, old bus pulls up with a man
hollering street names out the door, and everyone piled on- PIRATE
BUSES! 4 more passed in the 45 minutes that Christina and I had to
wait for the 505. Apparently, these are the old drivers, with the old
buses, driving around and picking up the slack of Transantiago, using
the old system of paying by change. But they only run at night. How
exciting!

Ok, I should be reading hundreds upon hundreds of pages for my
classes, so I'll go. Take care and I hope you're all doing well.

Valparaiso

2007-04-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

3/19/07 11:46 PM
Hi everyone! So this weekend I went to Valparaíso, which I can best
describe as Chile's form of San Francisco, but… well... there's much
more to say. First of all, Valparaíso, or "Valpo" and Viña del Mar
(where we went last weekend) are the two big coastal towns in this
part of Chile. Viña is the beach resort town, and Valpo is the port
town.
Our study center here organizes a few optional trips every month for
the students to go on, Saturday was the first one to Valparaiso. We
had a tour guide who took us around the town, but it was really hard
to pay attention to him because there was just so much to see. Like
San Francisco Valparaiso is one of, if not the, largest port towns in
Chile, and like SF, perhaps the majority of the residential parts of
it are brilliantly colored houses filling incredibly steep hills
etched with narrow curving roads and soaring sets of concrete stairs.
Each house is different from the last, some are really impoverished,
and falling apart, and some are well-maintained, but they're all
incredible colors. Some houses looked like they could have been
straight off any street in Pasadena or anywhere else in the US, but
the majority were awesome works of art. I forgot my camera, but other
people remembered, and if you're really curious, I'm sure you can look
up Valparaiso on the internet for some great photographs. Also,
unlike SF, Valpo is covered in murals. Everywhere from spray painted
graffiti and stencils about love, hate, and politics, to enormous,
beautiful, vibrant murals, most blocks of the town (well, at least the
parts in the hills) are wrapped in awing artwork. Also since the town
is very hilly, there are some amazing vistas (I was really bemoaning
forgetting my camera). Valpo also has 15 ascensores, which are like
elevators that go up the hills, spread our around the city.
I learned a few things from the tourguide. I learned that Valpo was
mostly developed by foreigners, not by Chileans, and that it didn't
start developing until California's economy started booming (I think
he said that it was because when California's economy really started
going the Panama canal was built, so the west coast of Chile became
more accessible. But I'm not sure; that may be historically
inaccurate. I'm sure that as soon as California started hitting it
big Chile and California started trading). The foreign development
explains the many different styles of architecture in the town. Also,
he told us that Chile is the only nation in the world where all of the
firefighters are volunteer, which explains why every town I've been to
(except maybe Olmhué) has statues dedicated to it's firefighters.
Also, by my old house with Lucky and Ivan there's a firestation that
has an emblem of the Star of David adorned with a firehose. As it
turns out, that is an all-Jewish fire department.
I went on the tour for the day, and when it was over my friend Rossi
and I met up with Christina and Tiara who hadn't wanted to get up
early for the tour, but took a bus into town later in the day. We had
a good time wandering around and then found a nice maritime-themed
hostel run by a very, very friendly couple in which the husband is
French and the wife Chilean.
Our Valparaiso excursion was on St. Patrick's day, and none of us had
ever celebrated St Patrick's day as adults, so we asked around and
eventually found the Irish Pub "El Irlandes" (the Irishman). No one
in Chile really knows about St. Patty's day; I guess they don't have
much of an Irish population, but the crowd outside of El Irlandes was
pretty sizable (maybe 2/3 foreigners), and we ended up waiting for
about an hour and a half to get in, and then paid the equivalent of $7
USD for entrance and a green beer. Rossi ended up turning back
because she didn't want to pay $7, but we'd been waiting for so long
and could hear the Irish band inside playing, and everyone shouting,
so we waited. The bouncer was a tall, thin, middle-aged man with a
long pony tail who spoke Spanish with an Irish accent and had his
beard dyed green. I also met a guy who is from Eagle River in Alaska,
but has been living on/in Whidbey Island for the last 5 years (more or
less near where I used to live in Washington).
When we finally got in, there were two levels to the bar; when you
walk in there's a big bar on your left, and an area with small sofas
on the right, with a low ceiling, then you walk in further and it
opens up with a smaller bar on the left, and a much higher ceiling so
that up above in front of us was a smaller area where an Irish/Chilean
band was playing Irish music with flutes, a guitar, and one of those
really cool big Irish hand drums made with some kind of animal hide.
They sounded really good. Across from them, and above the area where
we walked in with the small sofas was a less crowded area with some
wooden tables, benches, and stools, and a good view of the band and
the open area below where the young kids (18 or so) that looked like
they knew how to dance irishly were dancing, and the crowds were
howling and stomping.
Everyone was really excited and shouting, and it looked like there
was a small group of people dressed all in green who may have been
hired or something to dance in an Irish way, cause they seemed to know
what they were doing, but it was shocking to see that the crowd hadn't
really succumbed to the intoxicating music. So we were finishing our
cervezas verdes, and this guy who we saw outside who was obviously
pretty drunk but very friendly (sounded like he was speaking English
with a German accent, but it turned out he was Chilean) tried to get
everyone to get up and dance, so Tiara, Christina and I got up and
went downstairs. Everyone was very energetic, but no one was really
dancing or moving except for stomping and clapping to the lively music
(the dancing kids had been on a break for a little while now). We
stood there for a second, and then Tiara started jumping up and down
to the music, Christina and I followed her, and within 3 minutes the
whole floor was jumping around in circles and kicking their legs out,
trying to do some sort of drunken, uneducated imitation of an Irish
jig. It was great.
After awhile we went back upstairs and all three of us ended up in a
different conversation, me with 3 chileans who were in their first
week of school at the catholic university in Valpo, Christina with a
guy from Arcata, CA who had been living in Valpo for 4 months, and
Tiara with these 2 English guys who had been traveling in South
America for 6 months. The Chileans I was talking to had heard about
the holiday in the newspaper, but other than that had never ever heard
of Saint Patrick's day, nor el Día de San Patricio. We stayed there
until 4 and then went back to the hostel. Strangely, except for maybe
some of the waiters and the bouncer, I don't think there were any
Irish people there. Right before we started dancing I heard one guy
shouting about how no one was Irish. He was like "I look Irish, I
think Irish, I'm fucking Irish!" I couldn't really hear his accent,
so I asked "Where are you from?" and he responded "New Zealand."

Sunday we got up and after some complications getting Rossi to meet up
with the girl she was going to Viña with (we had already gone to Viña
and didn't care to go again), headed off to Horcón, a small beach town
about an hour and a half north of Valparaíso. On the busride to
Horcón we passed Quintero, which Christina's guidebook described as "A
scruffy, forbidding town with filthy beaches; to be avoided at all
costs." I'm writing that from memory, because we read the description
and laughed at least a dozen times. Despite our curiosity, we didn't
get off the bus, but from the windows the town really didn't look so
bad. I was expecting to see the same look of hopeless and ennui in
the people as I see in parts of Fresno, but people looked contented,
and the town was made up of acres and acres of unique, colorful
(though faded and dusty) houses in rows lining a long hill overlooking
a great wooded valley and a small busy port. That was way more than I
was expecting to write about Quintero.

Horcón was a beautiful little town with really cool beach-side houses,
and tidepools filled with garbage and masses of various colorful
seacreatures. The road along the beach smelled like boiled dog skins
and rotting crabs, but the shore itself only smelled lightly of urine,
which is pretty typical of most of what I know of Chile. The beach
even had an awesome arch from the cliffs above into the water, like
what used to exist at Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz, but bigger, and
made of some sort of yellowy, sandy stone. We had lunch, explored the
tidepools, sat on the beach, and then left after about 5 hours. It
was fun. Christina and I had talked about staying later because
neither of us had class on Monday, and I don't have class on Tuesday,
but we felt like there wasn't much else to do, and I have to do some
homework.

Pucón y Latin Vive

2007-04-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

4/17/07 12:09 AM

Hi. Still getting caught up on weekly adventures. Pucón is a tourist trap for the wealthy outdoorsy types that Chile attracts. It’s a similar latitude to Oregon with similar climate, a great big lake to swim in, and a smoking volcano in the background. Me, Christina, Tiara, our friend Sara, and Tiara’s friend Chris who was visiting from Santa Cruz for 3 weeks, all went to Pucón with the intention of climbing the volcano which is a huge tourist attraction, and quite the endeavor with lots of gear including picks, helmets, gators, boots, boot clamps, etc, etc. We had been planning to miss our Friday classes, but lucky for us the students at La Universidad de Chile are pretty into rioting, so the campus was shut down Wednesdsay afternoon and didn’t open again until Monday (Lucky me, I don’t have classes on Monday or Tuesday, so I got a 6 day weekend).

Anyway, long story short (I’m just going to skim through Pucón), after a very gravelly 2 hour climb we got to the first part of the glacier (for which we would need the ice picks and boot clampy things), which was just less than halfway up the whole mountain, but it was too windy, so the guides made us turn back. Christina and Sara were both extremely disappointed, but we could see people who had gone on earlier treks up the volcano coming down the glacier and being blown off balance and falling most of the way, which actually looked like fun but is apparently very dangerous. That night we went to one of the many natural hot springs in the area. The drive there in the dark was dusty with oak trees hanging over the barbed wire fences that lined the road, and rabbits darting in front of the car, and it was such a comforting drive because it reminded me so much of home.

Also in Pucón Sara, Christina, and I went to a beautiful national park. We took an ancient bus on roads that reminded me of the back road between North Fork and Auberry, but not paved. We also went swimming in Lago Villarrica, where we were terrified by what we thought was an empanada fish (what looked like an empanada on the lake floor, but it had a trail and may have been moving, or not, but it was terrifying nonetheless).

Everyone left Sunday night, except Christina and I so we rented bikes and rode out to Rio Plata, which was a BEAUTIFUL bike ride past grazing sheep and blackberry brambles, and rolling green hills with jagged volcanic mountains in the background. We packed a picnic tried to go swimming in the glacial melt river (WAY colder than the Nooksack), and had a very pleasant afternoon on the outskirts of Pucón.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot that we went river rafting the second day in Pucón. It was a lot of fun. The river was a class 4.5 or something like that, except for one drop that was rated a 6 because it was 10 feet. At which point we had to get out, walk through the forest, and then jump off a 10 foot cliff into the river to meet up with the raft. It was great. Terrifying for a few seconds, but I think it gave me the courage to jump through the roof of the keyhole room, which I’ve never done before.

Latin Vive (or Vivo?) was last night. This is Latin America’s answer to Coachella. Something like 21 bands playing on a horsetrack in Santiago. It was the most music I’ve heard in Spanish since I’ve been in Chile, and it was pretty good. Christina, Tiara, Sara, and I went. One of the most popular bands there was a Chilean group called Chancho en Piedra (hog in stone). Sara and Tiara had gone to sit on the grass, but Christina and I went to get up close. We felt silly because everyone was obviously huge Chancho en Piedra fans and we didn’t know anything about them. Throughout the crowd there were a lot of people who had big plastic yellow pigs, some old, some new (brand new ones were for sale at the show for $8), and each person had decorated their pig in a special way. One was painted in pot leaves, one was dressed like Marvin the Martian, our favorite had a scary clown face and what looked like moss for hair. So in anticipation for Chancho en Piedra, the crowd would chant “¡olé, olé, olé, olé! ¡Chancho! ¡Chancho!” and the people with the pigs would wave them in the air over their heads. Christina and I were just wondering what kind of music the band was going to be, and worrying a little that they might be some crazy death metal band and we would be in the middle of a violent Chilean moshpit, when the lead singer came on stage in what I think was a lobster suit, with yellow shorts, and a yellow heart on his chest that bore the letter “ch” (which is one letter in Spanish).

The band wasn’t all that hard, but we did find ourselves in the middle of what I guess is a Chilean version of a moshpit. It was a lot happier than any I’d seen in the US. Everyone was jumping around and bruising each other with enormous smiles, enjoying the music. They’d get really worked up for a few minutes, and then the pit would fizzle out, and they’d get way worked up again, and then it would fizzle again. But no one was angry and just moshing to get hurt or to kick someone’s ass like at the harder rock concerts I’ve been to back home in Fresno (in my rebellious youth).

We also got to see Los Jaivas (the king crabs)!!!! Los Jaivas are THE band in Chile. THE band, more than any other Chilean band I’ve heard or heard of. They’re like Chile’s answer to Led Zeppelin. Or at least that’s how I think of them because they use similar fonts on their albums and posters. And they’re from the same era, and they’re kinda hippied out rock. I never liked them before I saw them live, though. First, their drummer is a woman. That’s always cool. Second, they use a bunch of Mapuche and other native instruments (the Mapuche are the people native to southern Chile. I’ve been told that they were the only group of natives of the Americas who actually held off the Spanish conquest for decades. Maybe it was even centuries. And their culture is still very much alive today, I’ve yet to recognize it, but supposedly you can still hear their language, Mapongo, spoken on the streets of Santiago). ANYWAY, so they had some crazy drums and horns, and they were having a great time. I suggest looking up Los Jaivas.

So at this show with three main stages of all the best bands in Latin America, who was the closing act? A semi-emo British pop band called Keane. Tiara went home early, but Sara really wanted to see Keane play because their one hit was one of her favorite songs freshman year of college, so Christina and I stayed with her, and waited through about 8 very predictable songs in English until her beloved tune came on, and then we left. But watching Keane was fun because we were giddy with exhaustion, and the band was soooo cheesy. When I said predictable, I literally meant it, we to sing the lyrics to the songs we didn’t know, and were met with some success because it was all so cliché. Oh jeez, I’m so sorry if one of you is a die-hard Keane fan and I just don’t know it. What was bizarre was that there was an even bigger crowd for Keane than there was for Los Jaivas, which is just absurd.

At the end of the night we finally got to ride a PIRATE BUS!!!!! And that’s about it. Unfortunately, of the bands there last night, I didn’t get to see Los Amigos Invisibles, or Los Tres, which are both supposed to be really good bands. But in between some groups we got to see a breakdancing competition, and gymnasts doing some interpretive dance/gymnastics thing. Oh, and Chileans, when they like a band they put their arms in the air and shake their hands around.

Oh man, good times. I feel like I could write more, and I feel like I’m forgetting something, but this is a darn long e-mail, and I have a quiz to read for. Oh, realy quick, the shooting in Virginia was headlining all the news here. I don’t have a TV, but the guy at the cyber café across the street told me about it. I didn’t know what to say. I just told him that there’s a lot of stress in the United States. He said “sí, mucho estrés.”

Okay everyone, take care of each other!

-Sophie

4/17/07 1:06 AM

Pucón y Chiloé

2007-04-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

4/12/07 12:04 AM

Oh wow, so I guess it’s been quite awhile since I’ve written. Two big adventures in the past weeks: Pucón and Chiloé.

I just got back from Chiloé so I’ll write about that first. It was a difficult decision to go to Chiloé for semana santa, but I’m really glad that I did. You’d think that in a catholic country like Chile we would get more than just a 3 day weekend for Easter, but that’s not the way it works. But no matter, In the last 2 weeks I have had six classes cancelled because of student protests and riots (and one today for my professor being sick, and then the week before I had a class cancelled because there was an organized drunken beach trip for the freshmen, where the university hires busses to take students to the beach, and apparently everyone was told to write their bus number on their hand so that when they passed out on the beach they could be carried to their bus. I didn’t go because I thought I had class, but then it turned out that the class was actually cancelled so we could all get trashed at the beach. Oh well), so I’ve had plenty of time off, though my homework is getting a little overwhelming. Anyway, we had Friday off, so I went down to Chiloé to meet up with my friends Ben and Sara.

Chiloé is a little difficult to explain, but it’s supposed to be a very unique place in Chile. It’s an island, so for years and years it was very isolated from the rest of the country, and the world. They grew into a very strange mix of Chilean Catholicism and indigenous superstition. They have their own mythology that includes a lot of hideous hags and trolls “ravenous sexual appetites.” There’s also a tradition (I guess you can call it) that it’s pretty common for a woman to get pregnant while her husband is away, and the adultery is never questioned. I guess in the old days they used to blame it on one of those sexually ravenous trolls named El Trauco. But today I guess people just accept it. Also on chiloé they supposedly have something like 200 different species of potatoes or something like that, so they make a lot of potato and seafood dishes. The most famous is called curanto, which Tiara, Christina, and I have pledged to make in the woods in Santa Cruz. Traditionally curanto is made in a big pit dug in the earth, they throw in all kinds of different potatoes and mariscos (mussels, clams, maybe some shrimp or something tentacly, maybe even fish) and different kinds of beef, and pork, possibly chicken, I’m not sure, and then I think they put in red-hot rocks, and cover the whole thing with GIANT leaves that grow wild on the island. They leave it for however long, and then come back with forks and plates and all dig in and eat from the pit in the ground. Nowadays they also make curanto in a pot on the stove.

So that said, I went to Chiloé this weekend. The first day I got into Castro, the big “city” and capital of Chiloé, and met up with Ben and Sara who had gotten in the night before. Friday was Good Friday, which is the day when “Jesucristo” was crucified. One of the most famous things about Chiloé is the abundant, unique churches. After dark what seemed like most of the town gathered around the giant tin church. The three of us snuck in to find a group of young teenagers acting out Jesus’ sentencing. When it came to the part where Jesus sets out with the soldiers to climb the hill on which he’s crucified, the kids moved outside, and got on the back of a flatbed truck, and the whole town (or maybe 300 of it’s most pious inhabitants) followed the truck around to the 14 stations of the cross. I didn’t know that there were so many stations, I thought that the parade would end after like, a circle around the block, but the truck stopped 14 times around the town, and the teenagers would act out the different stations of the cross, even up to station 12 (I think) where the student/soldiers actually put nails into the cross and the kid playing Jesus screamed out loud. Between the stations the truck would drive with all of the town following and singing songs about love and god and Mother Mary.

My second day in Chiloé we went to the town of Achao, saw their gorgeous little church that seemed to be chiseled by hand. From Achao we had to finagle a ride with some salmon fishermen to give us a ride in their boat to the little island of Llingue (I think that’s what it’s called), which was supposed to be a “step back in time,” but the mostly wild island, with it’s one outwardly stoic church, a few old but colorful houses, and a community center near the dock didn’t seem any more old-fashioned than Finegold. We took a steep, newly grated road up into the heart of the island, enjoyed tremendous views of ocean, of all kinds of livestock pastures, and peoples’ houses dotted along the island. On our way down the hill a women came out of her house to ask if we wanted to see some of her artesania. She showed us a spread of woven baskets and boxes and bird-shaped something-holders. I asked her where she learned to weave like that and she said that a woman came to the island and taught many of the women how to do those crafts, so now there is a collective of them who weave different things out of native plants to the island, which they sell to the occasional tourist passing by in the high tourist season (Jan-Feb), or take to artesenal fairs on the main island (chiloé’s actually an archepelago), and a lot of it is taken to Santiago by Comercio Justo. I was stoked to hear that because I just started an internship with Comercio Justo! (www.tiendacomerciojusto.cl). We left her house, walked down to the beach, entered the now-open church. It was pretty. It was raining and there were little brown piglets snorting under the church and eating the green grass on the lawn to its side. After seeing the church we were invited up into the community building where the women from the collective were having their meeting, so we got to see all of the faces of the community. It was really cool.

That night we stayed in Dalcahue, which is not too special of a town, but for dinner Sara and Ben both had curanto de olla (the kind cooked ina pot on the stove. WE were told that despite what we learned in the intensive language program, people in Chiloé only make curanto in the ground during tourist season. But somehow I don’t believe them. The true Chilote people have to make it for themselves for special occasions year round). The curanto looked really intense, so I’m glad that I didn’t order it (I had fresh salmon, which was really good). Sara couldn’t even finish hers, so Ben had to eat enough for both of them, though even he couldn’t eat all of the clams.

The next day, Easter, we went to…. A town whose name I can’t remember at all. But it was also very small, and only accessible to us by a bus that passed through three times daily. The church there was the most impressive from the outside that we had seen so far, but it was closed. An old man passed by and said that he had the key or something, and something about 2 PM, but we didn’t really understand what, so we decided to go on a walk and come back around 2 to see what would happen. So we went up another steep hill winding into beautiful hillsides with excellent views of the ocean, and all kinds of pastures. We spent about an hour or so wandering through the hillside, and then around 2 were directed down a new path toward the town by some little girls who were out picking blackberries.

We tromped down the muddy road, admiring the beautiful world around us (it was great, sunny weather), until Sara saw the cutest piglet possible. WE stopped to watch it squeal with joy as it scratched it’s little belly on it’s water trough. While we were watching, the piglet’s owner passed through the yard, and after a few words of greeting invited us into her house. Inside were her elderly parents, and a woman who I think was her sister. The room was hot from the wood stove in its center, and the roof was low. There were lots of windows looking out on the hills around, and a big TV up on a shelf in one corner They sat us down and fed us apple empanadas which they had made for Easter, tea, and hard apple cider, all of which (except for the tea) was made from the apples on their trees. (The apple cider was served from a used 2 liter orange soda bottle. I later found out that Ben thought that they were just serving us orange soda that had been sitting out on the back porch for too long and had turned a little. He had never had hard cider before and thought it tasted like old orange soda, which made me laugh because he drank it so graciously). The old mother, who was hard of hearing, served us 2 servings of empanadas each (I thought that I couldn’t eat finish one!). They all kept asking if we were siblings, or if one of us girls was Bens girlfriend. It took a little while to convey that we were just friends, and then we all joked about Ben being the strong man protecting the two of us, and the old father told us a story about a Russian woman he knew who came to Chile to find a husband. At least I think that’s what he said. And the old mother, because of her bad hearing would repeat everything that was already said. We talked for about 5 minutes about how dangerous Santiago is, then moved on to another subject (perhaps about Ben’s manliness, perhaps about the frequency of tourists in their little town) and when that was over the old women asked “isn’t Santiago dangerous?” It was all so lovely, but unfortunately we arrived at their house at about 2:20 and the only bus that left the town was going to leave at 3 PM, and we had left our big back packs down at another woman’s house by the church. So at 2:55 the three of us, filled as much as we could be with apple empanadas and a little light-headed from the cider, took off running down the hill as fast as we could in our current state. We ran into the bus part way to our bags and had to ask them to wait, then ran to get our bags, and had to run back to the bus with out giant back packs.

That was the best part of the trip. Everything else can be skimmed over. Ancud, the second biggest town in Chiloé, has a nice museum with a blue whale skeleton and lots of artesania. I bought 2 very nice ponchos there, and took pictures of me with wool for my mom. That’s about it. I didn’t get a chance to go to the national park there, but hey, maybe next time. Ok, I have class at 8:30 tomorrow, so I ought to hit the sack, but I’ll give a brief description of Pucón tomorrow.

-Sophie

4/12/07 1:12 AM

New Apartment

2007-04-26T13:39:00.000-07:00

3/6/07 9:31 PM

Well, that’s a real long time to go without writing about anything. Well, I’ve already started an e-mail that has all the details about Torres, so I’ll skip over that. What’s important about that is that Tiara, Christina and I are now very good friends with a lot of inside jokes, which is good to have. It’s great to have people to laugh with, even though when we’re together we pretty much only speak English.

School is starting this week, though all of us gringos are confused because in California you sign up for classes like 2 months before they actually start, and the first week is the most important, but here registration doesn’t start until the first day of classes, and I guess that a lot of people don’t even go to the first days, or maybe it’s not required to go in general… I’m kinda confused, and the computer is not letting me sign in to register, so things are difficult. But I went to my first class today. It was Literatura Hispanoamericana Contemporánea, or Contemporary Hispanoamerican (I don’t think that’s a word in English) Literature. This morning I definitely had one of those “What am I doing here? Am I really doing this?” moments, and was pretty nervous about going to class, and wondering if people could tell I was a gringa just by looking at me. But everything was fine. The class was very small, less than 20 people, and the first four people who came into class were exchange students; me, two guys from the east coast, and a German girl. And then Tiara showed up later. I could understand the professor pretty with very little difficulty, and I even asked some of the students a question and they were very helpful. But when the students asked questions I couldn’t understand what they were saying at all. As far as the feel of the formality and strictness and everything in the classroom, it feels like an American university so far. Maybe not quite as informal as UCSC, but it is only the first day. Tomorrow I’m going to go to a class on Contemporary Chilean Literature, and I’ll decide which one of the two I am going to take.

Other big news is that I moved out of Lucky and Ivan’s when I got back from vacation, and am now living in an apartment on the north end of Ñuñoa with two Chilean guys in their mid 20s. Their names are Marcelo and Pierre, and they’re both from the country in the foothills a couple hours south of Santiago, and came here to work and study. They both also play music, Marcelo loves blues and plays guitar and harmonica, and Pierre plays guitar in a Jazz band. We’ve actually hardly seen each other cause the day after I moved in Christina, Tiara, and I went to the beach for the weekend, and both of these guys work all day.

My room is very noisy because it’s facing Irrarazaval, a very busy street, and the place is messier than I thought when I first interviewed, but I like it. The kitchen is very small and doesn’t have an oven or microwave or shelves, and the stove is really a camp stove with a propane tank under the tiny improvised counter, and one of it’s burners doesn’t work. My room is big with lots of sunlight, and blue and yellow walls, and Pierre gave me a ficas. When I moved in it also had small posters of SpiderMan, ACDC, and “El Señor de los Anillos” (Lord of the Rings) which I’ve left up. Someone also wrote “Te Amo Juan” (I love you Juan) and “Juan y Pamela” with hearts all over one of my walls. I left it all up cause it’s kind of funny and makes me happy, but Marcelo says the apartment manager is going to have all of the walls painted and the bathroom and hallway floors redone at the end of the month. One kind of interesting thing about the apartment is that my room has two walls of newly painted blue, and two of old-lookinng bright yellow, our large living room is half white and half lime green, Marcelo’s room I think is orange and green, and Pierre’s is blue and green. When I asked Marcelo why this was, he laughed and said that he always gets bored after two walls. Tiara thought that was hilarious, and I thought it was pretty great, too. Also, Marcelo wants to make a couch out of an old mattress he has and some extra wood that he found somewhere and is storing in a corner of the kitchen with a hacksaw. For those of you who know me well, I imagine that the homemade couch and half-painted walls are enough of an explanation of why I’m moving in, despite the tiny dirty kitchen. And Pierre said that he just ordered a washer and dryer online, so we should have those in a couple weeks. The biggest drawback besides the noise (which Pierre says I’ll get used to, because he also has a street-facing window, and for which Marcelo’s mom made me some curtains) is that there is no internet, which is very painful, and Internet is very expensive here; something like $80 US to start up, and then around $40 or $50 monthly. Blech. For now, though, there are 3 internet cafes across the street, and Tiara has wireless internet at her house which is a 15-20 minute busride away.

Now that we’re back from Torres I can tell how ugly and terrible the air is here. Transantiago is working better. I actually like it a lot better than the old system. The buses are a lot cleaner and I understand the system in general. People are still mad, though, and buses sometimes pass bus stops with people for no apparent reason, but I think passengers forget that the old buses did that, too.

That was a surprisingly short passage. Before saying goodbye I’d like to let you guys know that my cellphone must have fallen out of my purse on the bus to the beach this weekend. I’m trying to get my old number again, but it’s kind of a pain, so I’ll keep you all up to date. Just don’t call me on it any time soon. However, after daylight savings time this weekend I’ll be only 3 hours ahead of you all, so it will be easier to be in contact if I ever do get internet and skype.

Much love, and I hope you’re enjoying the coming spring as I’ll be enjoying the coming fall.

-Sophie

3/6/07 10:20 PM

Micreros, TranSantiago, and Pamela Anderson

2007-04-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

2/7/07 4:24 PM

Riding buses in Santiago is quite the experience. I don’t remember very clearly how the combis were in Chiapas (did we even take real buses? I just remember combis), but I’m pretty sure that they waited until people were all the way in the vehicle before they took off. In the past all of the buses in Santiago have been privately owned, and the micreros (bus drivers- a bus is called a micro here) and a bus driver is paid for the number of tickets he sells in a day. The result is dozens of buses zooming around the streets of Santiago as quickly as possible, stopping on any street corner regardless of the absence of a bus stop, driving with their doors open, driving with so many people during rush hour that the doors can’t close, and taking off as soon as the person boarding the bus has one foot in the door and one hand on the hand rail. Most of the bus driver’s here are pretty big assholes, too. I ride the bus 2-6 times every day, and in the last two weeks I have encountered exactly three congenial micreros.

It’s kinda cool, though, cause a lot of the buses are Mercedes Benz from the 70s, and have tassels around the windshield and curtains on the windows. And it’s very common for people vendors to hop on the bus and cell candy and popsicles. Yesterday I was on the bus to Providencia and a guy got on and was selling pirated CDs. He was very professional about it and called out the name and winning qualities of each CD while displaying it the way a kindergarten teacher shows her students the illustrations in a book. The other day Danny and I were on a bus and a young tocante (musician) boarded and started playing and singing “Proud Mary” (Rollin’ on the River). He didtn’t really know the English words, but did a very good job of sort of sounding out the syllables, and singing “Row-ry kee-on murnin, ole’n, ole’n, ole ‘nana neeva” [Proud Mary keeps on burning, rollin, rollin’, rollin’ on the river] Also, I have y et to see them, but Ivan told me that the micreros employ people to sit on street corners and keep track of how efficient the competing micreros are, so supposedly sometimes as a bus speeds by a corner one can see an informant flashing complicated hand signals at the driver.

I’m pretty comfortable with the bus system now that I understand how it works, but it’s all about to change. Despite the insanity that I described, Santiago has one of the most advanced and orderly subway systems in the world, and on February 10^th they’re going to be implementing a new bus system to match; the wonderful TRANSANTIAGO. I think the system is based on one from Lima. Every comuna (district) is going to have it’s certain color of bus (my neighborhood of Ñuñoa is yellow) and interdistrict buses will be green, within the next 6 years they’ll replace all of the old buses with new ones, and the buses will actually run on a schedule. There are already some green interdistrict buses running on the streets. Oh, also, people will no longer use change to ride the bus. Everyone will have to buy a rechargable “bip” [beep] card that will be scanned by machines on the new buses. The bip also works on the metro (subway).

The whole concept of Santiago is to make the buses more accessible to the elderly, disabled people, people with kids, and anyone else who just doesn’t want to hassle with buses. It will also make the streets a lot safer, and encourage people to drive less, because the air quality in Santiago is somewhere between Fresno and Mexico City. I’m looking forward to the change and am really stoked cause I think that Chile and Santiago have a lot of potential to make some really amazing changes and set some great trends for Latin America. However, the system is very controversial because even though the new system is going to employ a lot more mechanics, etc, and even 10,000 average people who have been hired for the first 3 months to be on buses and at bus stops to answer questions and explain the new system to the Santiaguinos, it’s going to put all of those informants and popsicle vendors out of work (though Ivan told me that the musicians will still be allowed on), and the solid wages that the drivers will now be earning are going to be lower than what they were paid before for their daily sale of tickets. Also, I’ve talked to some people in the program who think that the color-coded buses are going to amplify the classist tendencies of the locals. For example, say a bus from the wealthy area of Las Condes is red, and a bus from a poorer area like … oh wow, I hate to say it, but I don’t even know the names of any poorer neighborhoods. But let’s say the poorer neighborhood is purple, then maybe someone from Las Condes wouldn’t ride a purple bus cause they’d think it was below them, or that someone from the purple district wouldn’t ride a red bus because they’re intimidated or something. So it’s supposed to be a big deal, AND it’s supposed to start next week. Weehoo.

On to a new subject. I went with my cultural monitor and the rest of our group to Pablo Neruda’s house in the neighborhood of Bellavista. If you take out some of his mistress’ retro furniture and slap on a few semi-functional solar panels the house would fit right in on a hill in Finegold. The house has 3 separate parts with winding, narrow, crooked staircases, lots of native plants, funky built-in wooden furniture, and a few old bay windows looking out on the thick layer of smog that covers the Andes and their foothills.

On the way there we encountered a stenciled graffiti of two jets flying into the twin towers, with their jetstreams in the shape of a McDonald’s M, and below it the English words “Eat this.” Having gone to public school and grown up with TV in the nineties and all that, I’m fairly desensitized, even when it comes to issues like terrorism and the whole 9/11/01 thing, but that stencil really kind of hit me. I was like “woah.” That’s not the greatest description, but it’s really the best way I can explain the feeling.

I also wanted to say a few words on the food here. In general it’s not amazing. A lot of kids on the program actually hate the food because they say that it’s so bland, but maybe their host mom’s aren’t as good of cooks as Luki. Thus far my favorite food here is sort of a cornmeal soup with white beans, that I can’t remember the name of, but it’s yellow, traditional, and very good. Jugos naturals, or fresh-squeezed juices, are also very popular, and chitimoya is a specialty of Chile and my favorite flavor. I think that’s what it’s called. It’s a small green fruit that’s white on the inside and I’ve heard has lots and lots of seeds though I haven’t tried the actually fruit yet. Banana blended with milk is very common and delicious, too (though I drink banana blended with soy milk). Oh, and Jugos Naturales introduced me to my new favorite Spanish word: frambuesa. It means raspberry. COMPLETOS are ridiculous and unbelievably popular. Technically a completo is a hotdog, but in the bun on top of the hot dog they pile avocado/guacamole, tomatoes and/or onions and/or whatever else they can find, then top it off with a thick squiggle of yellowish mayonnaise (of course) and serve it with ketchup. Every restaurant I’ve seen advertises them and the Shell station that I pass on my way to school has an enormous poster illustrating their offer of “dos por uno.” A lot of the gringos are really into them, and I tried one once but wasn’t impressed. It was actually really difficult to eat because of all of the toppings, and I the hot dogs are Oscar-Meyer quality. Don’t worry, you can’t even taste the mayonnaise because of everything else that is in there. That’s about it for food, except that there are Chinese restaurants all over. I take the bus between 15 and 20 blocks to get to school, and on the way I pass at least 6 Chinese restaurants, and those aren’t even in areas where there are a lot of restaurants. I think the nationally reknowned food here is the empanada, which is like a little calzone or turnover; a bready pocket filled with meat and/or cheese and usually having tomato, too. The meat ones are pretty good. They include slices of hard-boiled egg white, and one olive, among other random things.

Now I have to write an essay, but I thought you’d all like to know that Pamela Anderson just bought a large plot of land in some expensive area of Chile, near where the President lives.

Take care,

Love,

Sophie

2/7/07 5:44 PM

2/7/07 10:41 PM

P.S. I found out that the new buses are NOT going to have a schedule. BUT it is going to be free to transfer between buses or from bus to metro or vice-versa within 3 hours. Cool, no? And I also keep forgetting to write that there’s a Montessori preschool a few blocks away from my university. Oh, and I forgot to say that the Matisyahu concert was pretty good. I had a good time. The first band was some DJ who was pretty terrible. He played the same drum loop for like 5 minutes, then introduced a new one and played that for 5 minutes, and on and on for like an hour. The second band was good. Matisyahu was pretty good, but it was hard to hear him over all the feedback and the instruments and everything. It was his first time in South America, and he spoke to the crowd in English cause he doesn’t speak any Spanish. But he did say “Buenas Noches Santiago!” toward the beginning of the show. He was on for like two hours, until 2:30 in the morning, and when we got out a lot of the people in our group were like “Man, wasn’t that the sickest show ever!” and I had a good time, but I have definitely seen better shows. The location was very, very nice, though. We had to walk like 30 minutes from the metro station to get there (we were a group of 12), and we were in what looked like an old downtown, so I thought the place would be kind of a dive, but it was like the Warner theater in downtown Fresno. You get out of your car and you’re like “oh man, I better be sure to lock the doors” but then once you go inside you’re just awed by the beautiful detail in the architecture. And it had air conditioning. I’ve never been to an air conditioned concert before.

Okay, now I’m going to go to the Ciber across the street that closes at 11:30 to mail this letter to all of you guys. OH! But before I go, I heard that there’s an internship here available to work with the sustainable development team for the city of Santiago. If I can do it and work it into my Soc minor, or even the cultural context part of my language studies major, I’m definitely going to try.

Okay, lots o’ love!

Sophie

10:49

Skinheads, Matisyahu, and contact info

2007-04-26T13:34:00.001-07:00

2/2/07 8:54 PM

Hi everyone!

It’s still light here at 9 PM, but darkening. A few shades before twilight. It’s very nice and purple. Well…. I have a list of things to write about, so I’ll just follow it for now.

Santiago’s really a pretty interesting city. You can find all kinds of strange things on the streets. The best example is La Pequeña Gigante, or “ giant little girl,” a giant, 30 foot wooden marionette that was set up in the middle of central Santiago. I guess she’s an project of some traveling French art troupe of some kind, but everyone loved her. She just spent 4 or 5 days in Santiago, doing things that little girls do, like sitting, standing, sleeping, eating, peeing (I don’t know how that worked, but that’s what the newspaper said she did), and brushing her hair. 1000s of people went to go see her, and I guess she was quite a site. And her eyes could be moved, too, so she could look directly at specific people, which I guess was pretty exciting for little kids. Also, in the same week, the citizens of Santiago would find upturned cars and trucks, and all kinds of debris on the streets for two or three days, and then one day an enormous metal rhinoceros appeared on one street corner. Someone told me that they were the same project; that the little girl had supposedly come to Santiago to rescue the people from the rhinoceros, but I that is not confirmed. I think they were the same French group, though. Ivan also told me there was one “art project” where a woman went through her daily life in a glass house, so everyone could see everything she did, but that was really controversial because, of course, she showered naked and changed clothes and such.

Matisyahu’s playing here tomorrow in this big reggae fest with UB40 and some other people (I’m not sure whom exactly), so I got tickets with some folks, and they cost 12000 pesos, which is…. $24! So I’m going to see Matisyahu tomorrow night for TWENTY-FOUR dollars! WOOH!

Now a little story about Chilean skinheads:

Wednesday all of the gringos went out with our “Cultural Monitors” which is a really sterile term for these students from La Chile and La Catolica who are here to like, support us, and answer questions we have about being young in Santiago, and what there is to do, etc. SO Wednesday my group of like 8 people went out to Bellavista with our cultural monitor, Daniel. Bellavista is this really trendy neighborhood with lots of shops and nice-ish restaurants. It’s the only place in Santiago that I’ve found postcards. And I guess at like 1 or 2 in the morning it transforms and has the hottest discos in Santiago. But that has nothing to do with the skinheads.

After the little dinner that the program paid for, a few of us went out to Plaza Ñuñoa, one of the most popular restaurant places, for some drinks. We had some good laughs, etc, and then went for French Fries down the next block. There were about 6 of us walking in twos, when all of a sudden we saw 5 or 6 kids, in camou pants and varieties of black t-shirts, and mullets and shaved heads, etc, all probably about 17, maybe 18, chasing after some other kid about the same age, but dressed in jeans and a casual white button-up shirt. I couldn’t understand what they were yelling, but they were throwing rocks at the other kid, and two of them were toying with butterfly knives. They only ran another block or so, and then the kid in white disappeared, and the skinheads turned around and ran back past us. I was standing next to Tristan, a kid from UCSC who’s like 6’4” with shaggy blonde hair and wears billabong t-shirts, and as they passed us the skinheads got up in Tristan’s face and were like “¡eyyy, gringo, ¿que tal gringo!?” very aggressively, but just in passing as theey were running back to wherever they came from. It was one of those “wow, what the hell just happened?” moments.

When we got to the restaurant with the fries I walked in first with Danny, Jonny, and Lili, and some normal-looking Chilean kid came up and said something we couldn’t understand in Spanish, so Danny was like “what? Are they closing?” in Spanish, and the Chilean guy said “oh no, no, come on in, come on, sit down, they’re just being drunk and fucking around,” and then one of his friends came up from the table where they were sitting and was like “yeah, I’m sorry, come on in and sit down, we’re just being stupid,” and so I looked at their table and saw all of the skinheads and some more of their friends, and that the kid who said “I’m sorry” was actually the one with the butterfly knife who got in Tristan’s face. So we sat down, and had some fries, and the skinheads spent some time laughing and joking around, just like us, and then paid and left.

Thus concludes my story about Chilean skinheads.

Now I’m going to do some things with Luki, so I’ll finish with some more stuff later.

-Sophie

2/2/07 10:46 PM

I bought q-tips today. The most magnificent thing. Magnificent.

I’m having trouble figuring out what to do about housing and the future here in Chile. The program ends in two weeks, and then I have to decide where I’m going to live. I’m mostly pretty happy here with Luki and Ivan, but there is almost no privacy, because the apartment is tiny, and I feel bad closing my door during the day. Also, it still feels really awkward with Luki serving me all the time, and her feeling obligated to get up early whenever I get up early, so she can make me breakfast, even if it’s just putting cereal on the table. It’s not even that she feels obligated, it’s… I don’t know. I guess that’s what women do here. I don’t like it. I thought I might get used to it or she might stop doing it, or something, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s becoming more apparent that she really doesn’t have much else to do. All of the kids with cancer are on vacation for the summer and Ivan watches a lot of TV in their bedroom, and she doesn’t watch TV. But I really like being able to talk to them about things. Today I was reading an article for class about how Santiago never fully exploded into a city of radicals after Pinochet like the cities of Spain did after Franco, and whatever I didn’t understand I could ask Luki about, and she’d tell me her opinions and other opinions and etc, etc. I still have 2 weeks left before I have to move out or stay here, and it’s so hard to tell after just a week, but I’m going to need to start making preparations soon. Looking for a pension should be pretty easy, and that will be more or less like living in the dorms, which seems like an OK option, but nothing amazing. Or I could look around for posters put up by Chilean students looking for a roommate, and that will be very time-intensive, and difficult with my somewhat limited Spanish. Or I could get an apartment with gringos, which is my last choice, but probably would be pretty easy. Some other small things to consider are that Luki and Ivan live about 5 or so blocks from the campus that I’ll be attending, and also that they don’t have internet in their house, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but internet cafes only have certain hours, are frequently full, and I can’t use my own computer, and there are some real coffee cafes that have free wireless internet, but I hear the signal usually sucks, and Santiago is not the kind of city that I want to carry my laptop around in.

I’ve also been thinking about how long I’m going to stay here. Right now I’m signed up for 6 months, but have had every intention of extending to the year program, but I also want to travel a lot, and if I go to school for the whole year I don’t have much time to travel. This month we have two weeks to travel, and then we have a 3 day weekend for Easter, and then 2 weeks between July and June. This month I’m going to the south of Chile, to Torres del Paine, and to see penguins. In July and June it’s winter, and my mom’s coming to visit, so I figure we’ll go up north because it will be winter, and the north is warmer. There we can see llamas and flamingos and beautiful deserts that look like they’re on the moon. But I really, really want to see the rest of South America! And if I stay for a year I could travel in December after school gets out, but I’ll probably be missing home a lot by then. So I’m thinking maybe I won’t extend, and I’ll go traveling for a few months after school gets out in June. But I won’t have a lot of money, and I can’t work here under my student visa. Besides that, studying here for six months doesn’t seem like it would have the same impact on me as a year. I don’t see how I could see al there is to see and really start to understand the culture here after just 6 months, even if I’m in South America for 9 or 10 months, it won’t be the same as LIVING and STUDYING in Santiago for 11 months. Ah well. That deadline is May 1^st. I’ll have to extend by May 1^st, so I can think on it. Hopefully I’ll be over the culture shock by then and will be able to make logical decisions that aren’t clouded by fear or confusion.

Contact info!

Mailing address:

I receive mail at the EAP study center here. You can address any mail to

Sta. Sophie Carrillo-Mandel

Programa Universidad de California

PUC-CHILE, Campus Oriente

Ave. Jaime Guzman 3300

Ñuñoa

Santiago, Chile

My cell number is:

8-1816777

I’m not sure with all the codes and stuff, but I think that in order to call me from the US you have to dial

011-56-8-1816777

or possibly 011-56-9-8-1816777

All incoming calls are free for me.

I also have Skype, but a) I don’t have internet in my house, and b) I couldn’t get it to work when I tried to figure it out before

My skype name is

SophieAshayne

Now I’m goin cause I have to get up early to get my Chilean ID card, to be an official Chilena.

-Sophie (A quick P.S., my professor, Andres Bobbert, looks a lot like the guy on SNL who always does the impressions of George W. Bush. I can’t remember his name, but most of you should know what I’m talking about)

2/2/07 11:22 PM

ILP

2007-04-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

1/31/07 12:50 PM

Hi. Life is going pretty well here. I just cleaned my room today, and it feels a little cleaner, but not really. I guess probably just because it’s so small that it’s hard to make it feel clear. School started on Monday. We have 4 hours of Intesnive Spanish class Monday-Friday. There are five different classes and 3 levels; intermediate, intermediate-advanced, and advanced. I’m pretty stoked on being in the intermediate-advanced class, because the advanced class is all native speakers. Our teacher is named Andres and is the only male teacher in the program. I think he said his family is from Germany, and he has blondish-red hair, blue eyes, and a graying beard. He looks just as gringoey as any of us, so I’m trying to figure out what it is about him that makes him seem Chilean, and makes all the students seems so foreign. There are a lot of people here who dress and generally look like anyone back home, but there is something in their “forma de ser” (form of being) that makes them so apparently Chilean.

I have to finish my laundry, but later I want to write about

Big doll girl/strange art here

Extending and my plans for the year

Travel plans for summer?

Contact info

Oh, and I haven’t done my homework yet… and I leave for class in 30 minutes. Damn.

1/31/07 1:00 PM

Lago Rapel

2007-04-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

1/28/07 11:17 PM

Hola. I’m watching TV for the first time since I got here. I kinda wanted to watch something American, cause I imagine that Chilean TV’s bad. But I also wanted to watch something in Spanish. So I’m watching Latin MTV. That one cartoon that’s really vulgar with the black chick in orange with fox ears on her hat, and the black and white Betty Boop looking girl and and a pig with a unibrow and a pikachu-lookin thing. I guess I’ll turn it off now that I’m typing, though. Ok, anyway, I just spent the last couple days with the kids from the program. We went to Lago Rapel for an orientation weekend. There are three really great women working in the UC EAP study center here who are going to be helping us with everything, so there’s a lot of support. They told us all about cultural differences with things like drugs and sex here (sex is the same. But if they catch you with any amount of pot or any illegal druge here, you go to jail, and for us we go to jail and then get deported). They also talked to us about the universities. I guess that La Chile, where I’m going to attend, frequently has student strikes that get rather violent and then the cops come in with tear gas, which is much stronger than American tear gas. My host mom told me that the protests are because before the Pinochet regime education was very socialistic, and everyone could go, but since the military dictatorship it hasn’t been so, and so the students are protesting so that more students can go to school. Or something like that. But if I don’t finish my credits and flunk out I can be deported, so I may actually have to cross a picket line, which sucks, cause I’m not particularly part of the politics. I guess.. But there is a student union or student coalition here that organizes the strikes, and so the director of the EAP program suggested that if a strike starts up (as it almost definitely will, at least once) then we should go to the student coalition and see if they have a special policy towards foreign students, etc, etc. Also, I got to look at the class listings and there are some pretty amazing looking classes that should count towards my major, like Rural and Urban Sociology, and a bunch of other that I don’t remember exactly right now. We spent a lot of time going over details and deadlines, but most of the weekend was spent just hanging out.

Everyone was pretty stoked on going to Lago Rapel (Lake Rapel) and brought their swimsuits and everything, and then when we got there the first people to jump in found out that the lake bottom is concrete, and the lake itself is only about 3 feet so it was possible to run through the water all the way to the middle of the lake. It is a big lake, though. Someone said 7 miles across, but that seems a little too much for me. The whole place was pretty nice with little cabins, and one really big, nice cabin that looked like it was out of storybook. There were boats on the lake, small motor boats, kayaks, rowboats, there was a pool, also a parrot house, a bunch of chickens and roosters and little chicks, a big doppley white horse that was discovered in the middle of the night wandering around the cabins, and a German Shephard who fetched bricks and chewed on them. The whole weekend was nice, and people got to know each other pretty well. Everyone’s very friendly and open, which is cool. There are a lot of Santa Cruz kids, more than any other campus I think, and most of us are from Merrill. Throughout the weekend I kept finding myself in small groups of UCSC people, not at all on purpose or because we knew each other but because it’s just the kind of people we all attract, I guess. This girl Christina from Merrill and I shared a room with 3 girls from UCLA, and the first thing we both did after we put our stuff down in our cabin was take off our shoes and run through the grass, and we were laughing about what a Santa Cruz thing that was to do, and then later I picked up a spider off of a girl sitting in front of me and took it outside and another SC kid shouted “yeah, Santa Cruz!” from behind me.
There are a lot of really interesting people on the program, though. I’ve had and listened to some really interesting conversations about alternative fuels, economics, sustainability (especially sustainability being adopted by corporations like McDonalds, Starbucks, and Wal Mart), fair trade, etc, etc. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know people but for some reason I’m keeping my distance, and haven’t really allowed myself to feel entirely comfortable with any person or group of people. We played a game of pool at the hotel-type place on Rapel, but I guess Chilean pool is different or something; the pockets are a lot smaller, barely bigger than the balls, and the corners around the pockets are a lot sharper. It took us over an hour to get down to the last 2 balls, and then we just gave up.
Unfortunately, yesterday we actually had someone have to go home. This girl named Alice got a call that her mom had been hit by a car and was in critical condition in Berkeley, so she had to go back to Santiago (a 3-4 hour drive) and catch a flight home. It was very scary and so I hope that everyone at home is staying safe.
What else? The food here’s not so amazing. A lot of people think it’s very bland, but I don’t mind it. Except today for Sunday lunch they served a masado (I think that’s how you say/spell it), which is a barbecue, but this one was a banquet, with all kinds of vegetables and breads and meats and desserts. Very tasty. Also, when I got home tonight Luki had made a very, very good soup that’s pretty Chilean out of white beans and cornmeal. Very good, also. Oh, and here avocado and strawberry are called palta and frutilla, instead of aguacate and fresa like they are everywhere else I’ve been. I’m sure that there’s a lot more to say because I was gone for a whole weekend, but I’m very tired. I think I’ll try to post all of these tomorrow, because my Intensive Language Program starts, but not until 2, and Luki said there’s a Ciber right around the corner.
Buenas noches,
Sophie

orientation

2007-04-26T13:29:00.001-07:00

1/26/07 12:52 AM

Not TOO much to say today. First day with orientation. Met lots of people. Hard to connect, though, cause most don’t really use phones, or at least I don’t porque tengo miedo. I know where I live! Luki took me to the school today on the bus, and then walk for a few blocks, and then I got home on my own. It was very intimidating but I got it! And I live on Avenida .. oh shit, what’s it called? Avenida Pedro de Valdivia. The house is pretty far from the metro or anything, but it’s a main street so LOTs of buses go by. After I came home from the first orientation thing and took a nap and stuff I went out to explore a little. Salí a little tarde, so I didn’t get to go out for a long time, but I took the bus all on my very own to la comuna Providencia and walked around some. It’s really an incredible place with all kinds of everythings everywhere. Lots of very nice restaurants and little shops and parks. I said earlier that Santiago me parece Mexico, and it does in ciertas formas, but Providencia, a wealthy area reminded me of somewhat wealthy areas of the US. I’m not sure that I’ve been to any of those areas, but it had beautiful tree-lined streets, and nicer cars and big houses behind walls, also big condos or apartments behind walls. Very clean, very nice. Not overly fancy or anything, just nice. I guess you could also call that European. Sort of English-looking, maybe. Modern English. Also, today over melon I talked about many things with Luki and Ivan, including medications, medicinal herbs, religion, and many other cosas. Luki told me before that she is Catholic, but her daughters are Athiest. I didn’t want to tell her that my religion is, more or less, nature, and that so many things that other people see in god, I see in nature. I didn’t want to tell her this because I thought she might think I was some kind of crazy hippie American, but we were sitting there at the table over lunch, and she said that exact thing; she believes that god is nature, and vice-versa. I was blown away, but very excited, of course. Ivan is an atheist, but he very much respects the natural world. Also, today we learned that in the next month or two they are completely changing the bus system in Chile. Instead of crazy buses that run all over and just have a list of the streets they go in the windshield so that you have to try and read the list as it goes by, they’re going to have a color-coded system with a different color for each district, and one color for inter-district buses. And they’re going to have all new buses, cause some of the ones they have right now are old Mercedes Benz buses from the 60s or 70s. I’m looking forward to understanding how to get around, even though now that I know some main place names and have a map (thanks to the study center) I do feel a lot more comfortable. Okay, well I need to go to bed, but yesterday I forgot that I meant to write one little thing, and that is that Luki and Ivan are not married. They have been together for 40 years and have 2 children together, but they were never married. This is partly because of Luki’s feminist point of view (though she told me that in Chile women never take their husbands’ last names. They do in Argentina, and I think they do in Mexico, too, but not in Chile), but largely because in Chile divorce just became legal in 2004, and when Luki and Ivan met, he was legally married, though separated from his wife, and now 40 years later he’s still legally married to a woman who he hasn’t seen in some 45 years or so. Luki said Ivan still hasn’t gotten divorced because they don’t feel like they really need to bother, and besides that they haven’t seen the woman in so long. Okay, esta tarde y tengo que estudiar unas cositas, I have an oral exam tomorrow for placement in Spanish classes next week.

Buenas noches,

Sophie

1/26/07 1:10 AM

host family

2007-04-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

1/24/07 11:29 PM

Day 2 in Santiago. Met my host family. Very nice. The wife, Lukí (short for Lucrecia), picked me up at La Pontificia Catholic U. I had a million things about them and my day to say a minute ago, but then I started listening to music and forgot it all. Well, their names are Lucrecia and Iván. They’re retired and I guess their in their sixties, though Luki I would never have guessed. If I didn’t know she had a 35 year old daughter I would assume she was in her 40s or so. Her face is lined, but she doesn’t look old. They lived in Switzerland for 14 years, doing some kind of business something that I didn’t understand (I understand about 60% or so of what I hear. Well, maybe more. I think I’m getting concepts pretty well but am losing lots of detalles. Yesterday Hebrew words kept popping into my head, but today I’m doing fine, though I think I’ve lost a lot of vocabulary and grammar in the last year and a half that I’ve gone without a Spanish class). They moved back to Chile about 12 years ago, but their youngest daughter married a Swiss man and lives there now. Their older daughter (hey have 2) studied abroad in Santa Monica, CA and met a Spaniard from the Canary Islands while she was there, and so she lives in the Canary Islands now. I am their 10^th exchange student. Luki says she was sort of lonely and bored after her daughters moved out, and her youngest suggested she start taking in exchange students, so she did and they love it. It sounds like they’ve had a lot of kids from Santa Cruz and had some funny stories about vegans and surfers and kids trying to ride bikes out here. They live in a condo in Ñuñoa, which is the one middle class district here (like in Mexico, there is a HUGE gap between the upper and lower class here in Chile, but the gap is slowly being filled by a growing middle class). The condo is small, but pretty comfortable. I think my room is almost exactly the size of a single dorm at Merrill, for those of you who know what that means. And I have my own bathroom, which is by the front door, across the apartment from my room. My window looks out on THE most beautiful scene! I took like 10 pictures but none of them seemed to capture it. Right below my window (we’re on the 3^rd floor) is a garden, and then next door is a kind of funky wooden house with an old-looking red tin roof. It’s yard is OVERFLOWING with grape vines and all kinds of fruit trees, so that I can’t see any of the houses next to it, and then they all have tree-ey yards, too, so that I can just see a roof here and there for about a block, and then jetting above the trees are these new big apartment buildings, then kind that have like 30 floors, with cranes working on them. They’re sort of peachy/orange colored and then behind those are the Andes, shrouded in smog that dissipated a little bit as the day went on. They’re so much more sudden than the Sierras. You can’t see the highest peaks of the Sierras because of the many different levels of foothills, but you can see straight to some pretty big mountains here. I guess there are some foothills winding up, but they don’t mask the really big parts of the mountains. I had written on my EAP family placement questionnaire that I really like a lot of natural light, and I’m really glad that I wrote that.

Ivan is a retired policeman and may be the friendliest man I’ve ever met. I guess most of the people who live in this building are retired policemen and their families. Apparently he’s pretty well-read and likes novels by Chileans. He also has 3 TV shows that he watches: 24, Prison Break, and Lost. I thought that was kind of cute. Luki is also a very, very friendly woman. She was telling me that she relates better to young people and children than anyone else. I was realizing over dinner that something about the very core of her reminds me of my mom’s friend Bonnie. Or maybe it was just her haircut. I’m not sure. And something about the quality of her laugh and her smile remind me of my friend Lara. Maybe it’s just a South American thing. She was saying that she doesn’t want to spend her retirement watching TV and sitting around the house, so she volunteers in a house for children with cancer. She is also a big fan of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s first and current female president. She said that she voted for her because “soy buena feminista.” They also eat fairly healthy which is great. The whole organic/sustainability thing hasn’t really hit here yet, but she said she always cooks fresh vegetables, they don’t eat much red meat, and they have whole grain bread (I was shocked!) and she started talking to me a little bit about climate change, and how important recycling is (they do recycle! At least in Ñuñoa…). She’s also very accommodating. Almost more than I’m comfortable with because I was expecting to have to adapt to their way of life, but she keeps telling me how adaptable she is.

It’s way too early to tell, but right now I don’t think that I’m going to stay here after the Intensive Language Program. The deal is that the UC study center down here assigns the UC students each to a family for the first 5 or so weeks we’re here, during which time we participate in the aforementioned ILP, but after that we have to find out own housing. If the family we live with for the ILP invites us back, we can stay with them for the full year or 6 months, or we can find another family, or rent an apartment with friends (gringos or chilenos) or live in a boarding house. The universities here do not have dorms because the vast majority of the students live with their families (40% of Chile’s population lives in Santiago so most students are from the city). I really like these guys (from the first day) but a) I’m not used to being waited on, and cooked for, and served. I like being a little more independent, and it is just the beginning, but I get the distinct feeling that Luki really wants to do some hardcore mothering. B) they don’t have internet in the house (which is supposed to be almost as common an amenity in Chile as in the US). C) I guess this is just a variation of A, but it’s so strange to live in a house with parent-like people. I don’t know if I can handle it. So like I said, I may be jumping the gun with this after just one day with these people, especially when I didn’t even have any classes today, but I’m just thinking.

What else? We went to the supermarket today to buy me soy milk. It was similar to home, with a million different brands and a deli and huge, etc, but like in Mexico, they store milk in cartons on an unrefrigerated shelf, and unlike in Mexico, they sell milk in bags; like pouches. Those are also on the shelf.

70% of the music here is American. 15% is Mexican. 10% is French and any other kind of South American. 5% is Shakira. I haven’t heard any Chilean bands yet.

Actually, the Shakira thing is just a rumor. I haven’t hear any Shakira yet. They listen to a radio station that mostly plays American 70s Music. Well, I guess ABBA isn’t American, but it’s in English.

It’s also nice to be in the heat again. I really need to learn Celsius. Ivan told me that it was 30 C today which he translated to being about 90 F. I love feeling the sun again, though they’ve got a pretty big hole in their ozone down here, so I guess I gotta start wearing sunscreen, but it’s nice being able to sleep with only sheets for blankets again. Okay, well I have an oral proficiency test in Spanish tomorrow at La Catolica, so I ought to go to bed. Buenas noches.

-Sophie 1/25/07 12:28 AM

P.S. mom, they loved the bowl and the book. Luki’s really into photography so the pictures were great.

new bloggity blog

2007-03-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

Ok, Travel Blog confused me and didn't work on my computer, so I followed Jesse Lee's example and started this blog on here. I hope it will be better, and this way I can add photos to my letters home, and I can put up all of my writings in one place so that people can go back and read them, cause I guess I left a lot of people off of my letter list before. So here I go experimenting around with this new blog!