Harto

Some changes creep up on you.

I realized today that part of my conception of normalcy has shifted. Allow me two anecdotes to illustrate this point.

Jessie and I are planning a short backpacking trip for this weekend. The destination is the Valdivian Coastal Reserve, a nature preserve about 70 km from Valdivia owned by the World Wildlife Federation. The reserve has a website, but, as with so many Chilean websites, there isn't much useful information on it. Furthermore, the town that their headquarters is located in doesn't even appear on most maps (including google maps). Luckily, Don Oscar told us that the WWF has an office in Valdivia, we looked up the address online, and Don Oscar gave us directions on how to get there: 1. find an alley. 2. Follow it until you see a really big tree. 3. Turn left. So today we went to go find it. We found the alley, saw the tree, turned left, and arrived at a completely normal, and empty, house. After ringing the bell, knocking, and waiting, Jessie noticed a handwritten paper sign in one of the windows. The tape holding it up had failed, and the paper was doubled up, but it was written in sharpie, so you could sort of read it backwards and upside down through the back of the sign. Significantly, I was able to discern two things: WWF and another address number. This led us to another normal looking house although this time there was a WWF sticker in the corner of the garage door. Sure enough, this was the place. They didn't have any maps, or anything really, but they did give us the phone number of a park ranger who was able to answer our questions.

Anyways, the salient point of this rambling story is that at no point did any of this feel out of the ordinary. Life simply works this way. If you want to find something, you have to ask for directions... a lot. You have to follow the trail, sniff out clues, and always be prepared for things not to turn out as expected.

Later in the day, we went shopping for sleeping pads. On the way to the downtown area, we have to pass by the entrance to the university. Today, as we walked past, we first noticed a lot of carabineros (police) around the intersection in front of the university. Then we saw riot cops. Drawing even with the entrance, we saw about 80 encapuchados (protesters wearing hoods and masks to prevent photo identification) chucking rocks at a couple of guanacos (tanks that shoot streams of water), with a line of carabineros in riot armor behind the tanks to stop the protesters from taking control of the only bridge to the city. Just as we passed, the guanacos started launching tear gas bombs. All this taking place a scant 80 yards away, and our only reaction was "great; now we're going to sneeze all the way to the store".

I've never even seen a cop in riot gear in the States much less tanks in the street or tear gas canisters, but here I accept such scenes as daily life. It wasn't until some time afterwards that I realized how strange it is that I should be so unaffected by this and yet still struggle daily with the novelty of the language. Jadedness works in funny ways.

As promised, here are some photos. Most of them have nothing to do with the post subject and are included merely for the joy of having a camera again:

A protest march I snapped through a dirty bus window today.

Disc! (photo by Michael)

Jessie!

Don Oscar and Cecilia puzzle out something on the computer.

A lonely beach at Lago Caburgua. With a disc! And Jessie! (photo by Michael)

Deporte nacional

gooooooooooooooool!

You might hear that in Latin America, as in much of the rest of the world, futbol (soccer) is king. In Chile, this may indeed be viewed as an accurate appraisal of the situation. Just about everyone has a favorite team, with Universidad de Chile, Universidad Catolica, and Colo Colo topping the lists. (A side note: coming from the USA, where sports coverage is divided fairly evenly between collegiate and professional leagues, I initially thought Universidad de Chile, was a school team. It is, in fact, a professional team, which was started at the Universidad de Chile. There are many teams named for schools, but such teams currently have no official affiliation with their namesakes.) Pretty much all sports journalism starts and ends with futbol, and sports makes up a hefty percentage of all journalism here. When you go to website of biobio, one of the largest news conglomerates in Chile, and go to the economics section, the sidebar shows the latest futbol scores instead of the latest stock prices. Chile's biggest celebrity (as measured by television coverage that I've watched) is also its best futbol player: Alexis Sanchez. Futbol is a big deal; however...

In my entirely experiential and anecdotal investigation of Chilean sports, I have identified an even more popular spectator activity: smooching. No other single endeavor garners as much interest among practitioners and spectators alike. Kissing in public ought to be considered the national sport of Chile. The ratio of couples to single people among the Chilean youth is absurdly high. And since the home is such a family-dominated space, there is no better venue for affection than outside en el aire libre. Consequently, in parks, sidewalks, cafes, and buses, you see couples everywhere making out like two seals fighting over a candy bar. They have little to no regard for who may be watching, and the passersby, for their part, accept it as part of the scenery. From the perspective of a norteamericano, it's shocking at first. It's kind of uncomfortable at times. It's funny as hell. It's Chile.

Noticias

Update.

I just got back from a student convocation deciding what to do about the administration's date for resuming classes. I heard about the meeting ten minutes after it started and biked over. By the time I got there, there were about 500 students crammed into the largest lecture hall in the school, which is supposed to hold about 200. I managed to jam myself into a corner of the entranceway to hear what was going on. They were voting on whether or not to come back to classes to finish up the exams from last semester. As far as I could tell, ending the paro (strike) for the current semester wasn't even on the table. When I arrived, they had just gotten themselves organized and had begun to do a roll call vote, yea nea or abstain, of the representatives from each carrera (major). They ended up voting to finish up the past semester by a vote of 17 to 15 with 5 abstentions.

The next item on the table was to construct a set of guarantees concerning when the makeup exams would take place. We never got to this item, however, because several students began to complain that the options presented in this meeting were not the same as the options they were told to vote on in their meetings by carrera. In the smaller meetings they had the additional option of voting for a toma (take over), a toma de los pabellones (taking over strategic buildings) or for the outright resumption of classes. This devolved into a three hour session of trying to maintain some semblance of order and figure out exactly what each carrera had agreed upon within these sub-options. (Nobody except for me seemed to notice that all of the additional sub-options are within the proposition that lost the vote. The only exception was the sub-option of outright resumption of classes, and all of the people who want this will certainly want to finish the last semester too.)

They finally compiled a list of what each carrera wanted, and quickly formed a committee to review, summarize and present the findings, and then they called for a 30 minute recess. I'm not sure if I am going to go back. It's all very interesting, but my claustrophobia was acting up in the meeting room.

I also listened to a very moving personal anecdote about the military coup today, but I'll have to wait till later to write it down.

EDIT: formatting and grammar

Día a día

Uncertainty has been the norm so far.

This Monday promises to be an interesting one with respect to the situation in the university. The administration of UACh has unilaterally set the 26th of September as the start date for the resumption of classes, starting with the exams that were never taken last semester. This decision comes in spite of the continued lack of accord between the government and the main student organization, the CONFECH. I'm not sure how this will play out (nobody is really). I've seen a lot of student meetings taking place in the past few days, and they staged another march yesterday, but it's a matter of waiting and seeing what comes on Monday.

Yesterday I spoke with a friend at Dartmouth who told me he had heard nothing of the student movement in Chile, from which I gather the situation is not garnering very much media attention abroad. Needless to say, it's big news here every day. So as not to confuse you needlessly, I'll try to give a basic rundown of the situation as I see it. I realize this could take a while, so I'm going to break it up into small chunks. (For those interested in a more in-depth explanation, I invite you to consult the Internet for more information.)

Chunk 1

The principal antecedent of the current movement was another student mobilization in 2006. This movement was called "the march of the penguins", so named because the students' uniforms made them look like penguins. The main objective of these protests was to achieve greater equality in education. Some specific demands were free/reduced student fares in public transportation, reduced/waived fees for taking the university entrance exam, and repealing the eleventh hour omnibus education bill that constituted the Pinochet government's parting gift to Chile. In answer to the protests, the center-left government promised a lot and delivered little. Many students today feel betrayed by their politicians for the lackluster response to the march of the penguins.

End of Chunk 1

For those interested in my personal day to day, I'm celebrating my first full week in Valdivia without rain. Also on the theme of uncertainty, I've had five (out of a possible 8) of my class sessions rescheduled or canceled this week. Being called for lunch. Blog can wait.

Fiestas patrias

I had intended to write something yesterday, but the past couple of days have been marvelously busy. Parque Saval, just down the street from my house, played host to the fonda, home of various traditional festivities for the fiestas patrias, and I payed a visit every day. It most reminds me of a county fair in the US. There was a stage for shows, booths for food and alcohol, more booths selling assorted artisan crafts, fields for games, fields for horse racing, and a small midway.

The main stage shows were very loud, very well attended, and comprised of about 90% cueca. I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable it is to watch people dance cueca. The best shows pulled random people from the audience for impromptu cueca competitions in various styles. Each region, each person really, dances their own peculiar version of cueca built from a few basic pasos or movements. The worst show was a magic show. It was terrible. Really, wholly and unrepentantly awful. I didn't know whether to laugh or cringe.

The traditional foods for the fiestas patrias are extremely well liked. Number one on the list is the empanada, a doughy sort of pasty filled with any of a variety of ingredients (almost always onions for some reason though) and then baked or fried. Second is straight up meat: beef, pork, sausages and mutton seasoned with salt and ají (hot pepper) and grilled over a wood fire. Also, Camilo told me that "the women usually make lots of salads that end up in the trash." The latter part of this statement did not hold true in my experience, as Ceci's spicy onion salad was quite a hit.

The alcohol of choice for fiestas patrias seems to be chicha, a mellow sort of hard cider. Another favorite is the terremoto (earthquake), a sweet wine topped off with pineapple icecream. Very alcoholic, very sweet.

On the second day at the fonda, we saw a crowd gathering on the soccer pitch, so, on the principle that anything is better than another godawful magic show, we went to see what was going on. It turned out that we had arrived just in time to lay down bets on a hotly contested round of musical chairs (my kid won, but Jessie never payed up). This was followed by tug of war and several variations of sack races. Another important sporting event was horse racing or carrera a la chilena. This is the drag racing of the equestrian world: two horses side by side on a 500m straightaway. It was very exciting to watch when the horses were actually running, but in between each 20 second race was about ten minutes of trying to get the horses to stand still facing in the right direction. Two or three false starts per race also appear to be traditional.

The fiestas patrias are also regarded as a fine time to dress your children in traditional (read silly looking) costumes. The boys are dressed as huasos with broad-brimmed hats, square ponchos, boots and, if you have a really good costume, gigantic spurs. The girls are dressed as chinas, with floral pattern dresses and ribbons in their hair. It's cute.

The other big activity at the fonda was, unexpectedly, flying kites. From a distance of two blocks, every street leading to the park (all two of them) was filled with kite merchants, selling their flimsy, plastic wares for one luca (1000 pesos) to kids of all ages. All day long, the soccer pitches were filled with huasitos and chinas tossing kites into the air with abandon. By the end of the weekend the trees were filled the less fortunate of them (kites, not kids). Don Oscar, my host uncle (tio-uncle- is a general term for a friend of ones parents, an elderly neighbor or what have you), told me about flying kites in his childhood. It was a lot more interesting back then. They would grind up glass bottles and use the powdered glass to treat their kitestrings. Then they would use the treated line to try to slice the kitestrings of other kids. The last kid with an intact kite won. He also told me that this sort of kite fighting is illegal now because kids would get their throats cut by accident with the strings.

The midway featured a collection of small rides that looked like they were built in the 1960s and last serviced or maintained in the 1960s. Jessie and I decided to try our luck with the tagada, a large, horizontal wheel that you sit inside of. We thought it was like a giant centrifuge, with the fun and excitement being derived from the centripetal forces pressing you against the wall. Boy were we wrong. It turns out that the tagada also incorporates a pneumatic apparatus for slowly tilting the wheel while it spins. Its clever operators had discovered that by violently jogging the controls you can make the machine buck and lurch wildly as it gyrates, much to the excitement of its occupants. We had blithely tush-tushed the sign reading "maquina de alto riesgo" and payed no heed to the fervent manner in which the other passengers were gripping the side railings (there were, of course, no restraints of any kind). Thus we were caught totally unawares when, with a resounding kachunk, the machine started giving its best efforts to liberate us from our mortal coils. I lost my cell phone and camera in the first couple of seconds and almost went tumbling across the middle of the wheel. At some point I think Jessie did start to fall because I remember hauling her back onto the bench by the waist. We finally got a good grip on the railing and averted disaster; Jessie cut her hand from gripping so hard. It was a wild ride. I couldn't stop laughing through the whole thing and quite a long while afterwards.

I would have liked to post a bunch of pictures, but my second camera is now out of commission as well. Instead I would direct anyone interested in good pictures from the event to Jessie's blog (which has the additional advantage of actually being updated regularly): http://www.jessieinvaldivia.blogspot.com/.

Lluvia es vida.

Today: rain making up for lost time.

Two days of sun come to an end. In Valdivia I've developed a very personal relationship with the rain. It's one more character in the story. It shows up most days, sometimes just to say hi, sometimes for a longer conversation, often to make sure you're following the dress code (waterproof), and sometimes it just hangs around as fog.

I went skiing last weekend with a group of friends. We took a bus to the city of Pucon, which is sandwiched between Lago Villarrica and the Volcan Villarrica; it's really quite a lovely spot. The bus tickets were surprisingly cheap (about $7 USD for a three hour trip). First thought: I should travel more. Second thought: wait I don't have $7.

We made reservations at a reasonably nice hostel, which turned out to be just about perfect. The best part was a Dutch expat who met us in the busport, showed us the way to the hostel, made

us tea and coffee, offered really good advice on where to go/what to do, and drew us very detailed maps to get to these places.

We found some awesome waterfalls, beautiful lakes, free drinks, and we skiied through some of the worst weather I've been outside in. There were also hot springs.

Also, nearly missed the bus back to Valdivia. Great fun.

Here are some pictures for those interested.

Part of our team getting ready to leave from the Valdivia busport. From left to right: Clark (from Washington), me, and Michael (from Germany).

Lago Caburgua: good picinic spot

Salto El Claro: an hour and a half's walk down a little dirt road and a fifteen minute scramble down a nearly vertical rainforest trail found us at these surprisingly large falls (130+ ft.). Very remote. Very cool.

Some of the landscape near Pucon.

Hostel el Refugio: also home of a cute dog.

Renovación

I've decided to resurrect my blog in the hopes of tricking myself into writing more.

Anyways, today I called my brother Nathan to wish him a happy birthday (and to commiserate on the ailing state of his grease truck). During the course of our conversation, he asked me how much my recent skiing trip to Pucon had set me back financially speaking. I didn't know, so I checked my bank account. Apparently $17.10 is all I have to my name, which means that, earlier today, I inadvertently spent over half of my net worth on wax for my hiking boots. On the plus side, I won't get my feet wet walking to work/class every day, and you can't put a price on dry feet.

We're getting geared up for the fiestas patrias, a long weekend of eating too much and drunken cueca dancing. I'm planning on balancing my time between enjoying the festivities with my adopted family and riding with SAMU (the local EMS) to take advantage of the wealth of interesting trauma these weekends invariably produce.

There was supposed to be another demonstration today; the students were going to block the bridge along with various other protesting feats. However, nobody showed up except for the carabineros, who had nothing to do but swap jokes while their German Shepherds lazed in the sun.

Taking advantage of the lack of civil unrest, I crossed the bridge to quest for a copy of Cien anos de soledad, Garcia Marquez's masterpiece and one of the most famous novels in the canon of Latin American literature. My professor assured us when she assigned the book that it could be found in any bookstore in South America. Valdivia appears to be the exception. At every stop on my citywide tour of booksellers, I received the same apologetic shrug: "no me queda."

Well damn.

If there's one thing to be learned in Chile, however, it's that every problem has a solution. This one came in the form of a newly approved library card. At 20 pesos a page, I can photocopy the whole darned book for 8000 pesos (about $17 USD), which is coincidentally exactly how much money I have left over from my life's savings.

Bacán.