Well, spring is in the air, at least. Not at the moment. At the moment it's 55 degrees inside and colder and raining outside. But the trees on my street have started to bloom and all over the place flowers are opening up and the weather, despite setbacks like today and apparently most of the weekend (bummer), has been getting steadily warmer and sunnier. Today was a looong day for classes. Wednesdays are usually my worst day, with 4.5 hours of class, but it got bumped to 6 today because Rosa, my Spanish professor, decided that we needed to make up for lost time due to a prescheduled holiday. I am still trying to figure out how that makes sense, can anyone help me out here? Prescheduled holiday, she failed to plan for it, we are punished. The logic is faulty somewhere. Oh well. That and I had two essays due in my Chile, los chilenos y su cultura class. I worked on the first one for a long time last night and then got really fed up with Spanish and ended up killing time and talking to Katy, a friend from Michigan who's going to be one of my travel partners this summer (winter). It had been a while and she cracks me up, so that was fun. I woke up early this morning, finished the first essay and did the reading for the second one, showered and ate breakfast, and left for noon class. I did the second essay in between Spanish and Chile, los blah blah blah, which was all right because it was a short essay in any case. Still, it was dumb and I won't get caught doing that again. I talked my way out of the last half hour of Spanish to work on it, so that was good, I guess. Spanish class is boring enough for an hour and a half, after another hour my brain was beginning to shut down.
Chile, los blah blah blah is a really interesting class. Our prof is really cool and seems to know a lot and think a lot and he's funny and clear. Funnily, today there was a new girl in class and as we were waiting outside for the prof to let us in, she said, "Hey, you play ultimate, right?" Turns out she played last Thursday and is planning to continute through the semester in the league, like me. And then, after class, a girl came up to me and said, "Hey, you're a friend of Kelly Anne's, right?" Turns out she was at the party last weekend, I met her briefly. So two people in that class that I also know in totally separate ways. It's a small city, I guess. As small as a 6-million person city can be. In other news, Rosie and I made up for real, which was good. After saying good night to her (we have that class together) I came home, demolished the delicious meal Luz María had made for me (charquicán with beef and a salad) and also threw some pebre on toast and ate that, too. I thought briefly about going to Miercoles Poh, the weekly party la Católica throws for foreign kids that is apparently really fun, then realized that I'm exhausted, it's nasty out, and this week the club they're having it at is even farther away than I'm used to going for parties. So, in short, fuck that. I watched TV, read the newspaper, talked to Luz María and Francisco, came in here and have been being unproductive ever since. Tomorrow, no class til three, but I have to wake up and figure out the stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid system for getting readings from INAP, which is the department my class in la Chile is in. I would vent about it, but I have done that twice today and to start to write about it would just get my blood boiling again. Another time. Anyhow, I'm going to bed; Luz María gave me her copy of Inés: Del Alma Mía, Isabel Allende's newest novel, about the lover of Pedro de Valdivia, who was on Pizarro's crew and helped found Chile (there's a lot of stuff here named after him), so I'll read that for a bit and then be out like a light. That's the plan, anyway. 'Night.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
El Misionero
I just read a story for my Chile, los chilenos y su cultura class about a missionary who goes to convert a people called the Ona, and after some initial doubts captivates them with fantastic descriptions of paradise. They become extremely pious, attending church and performing all the rituals he asks of them and then, as a sign of their great thanks for changing their lives and showing them the way to eternal paradise, they deliver him there themselves. The last line is "Y lo mataron." "And they killed him." Interesting story. Still trying to figure out what to think or say about it, which is a crapload easier to do in English (as I'm doing right now) than in Spanish, which I'll have to do as soon as I finish writing this post. And now I'm finished.
if triangles could speak, they would say that god is emminently triangular
That is one of the most astute observations I have ever come across. Thank you, Baruch Spinoza. Here is a question I have been asking myself for the past couple of days. Am I really more curious than other people? Sometimes I think I have an off-the-charts desire to know things and sometimes I think I'm full of shit. Not that it makes a bit of difference either way, obviously. It's just been on my mind.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
i think i'll call it morning from now on
I rediscovered Gil Scott-Heron this morning when I woke up singing that song. It was a good rediscovery. I am enjoying my small collection of his stuff (15 songs from different albums and years and so on), and wishing I had more. Maybe I'll go look for some more today. I don't have class, so I got to wake up nice and late and lay in bed for a while. Now I'm going to make lunch and work on a couple of little essays I have to do for tomorrow. I have the pronunciation class from 4:30-5:30, but as I've said before, that doesn't really count, plus it gives me an excuse to go back into COPA and bring Isa and Katie the flowers they deserve. I searched desperately for a florist yesterday in the COPA neighborhood, but neither of the supermarkets I found sold them (LAME) and the only one I ended up coming across was like for weddings and stuff and had huge gorgeous bouquets for way more than I was willing to spend. So I didn't get to do that yesterday and was quite stressed about it. But today, I'm going to find flowers on the way there if it kills me.
Last night, I had my first real relationship fight. Judy and I didn't really fight and every fight Jenna and I had doesn't count because, well, just because. It was confusing and new and upsetting and made me angry and sad and I didn't really know what to do. But I got home around 10:15, Olga, out of nowhere, IMed me that she was sending me love, I thanked her, put on shorts and my running shoes and went out to run. I ran very hard for about 40 minutes and by the time I got back I was wide awake, sore as hell, sweaty and felt better. I was still confused and upset about what had happened, but much calmed down about it. Then Olga told me that two people very close to her had been crushed by a tree; one of them was killed and the other is recovering from a spinal injury in Ann Arbor. Nothing like a little perspective to put your troubles out of mind. I miss Olga.
Anyhow, in other news, I've finally selected a team to support. I am disappointed in myself, but I've settled on la Universidad de Chile (no connection to the university in which I study), aka la U. They're the second-most boring pick I could have made, after Colo-Colo, which is the most popular and most historically successful Chilean football (soccer) team. I wanted to pull for Santiago Wanderers, because I like that name a lot and they have classy jerseys and aren't terrible, but they play out of Valparaiso and I need to root for a team whose home games I can go to with ease. La U fits the profile. So anyhow, time to start learning the roster and the cheers and going to games. The "Clásica" between la U and la Católica (Cata) was on Sunday, while I was playing frisbee, and la U won. My host family supports Cata, but they're the wine-and-cheese, rich people team and I want no part of that Dean Dome nonsense. Plus neither Luz María nor my host brothers cares particularly about soccer. So there you have it. La U.
Now I'm going to go make lunch. One quick note: Sunday was also the first time I'd got to wear my Crocs outside here because wearing shoes with socks when you're about to put on cleats is just dumb if you can at all avoid it. They are such great shoes, no matter how ugly certain persons might say they are. Thanks, Mom!
Last night, I had my first real relationship fight. Judy and I didn't really fight and every fight Jenna and I had doesn't count because, well, just because. It was confusing and new and upsetting and made me angry and sad and I didn't really know what to do. But I got home around 10:15, Olga, out of nowhere, IMed me that she was sending me love, I thanked her, put on shorts and my running shoes and went out to run. I ran very hard for about 40 minutes and by the time I got back I was wide awake, sore as hell, sweaty and felt better. I was still confused and upset about what had happened, but much calmed down about it. Then Olga told me that two people very close to her had been crushed by a tree; one of them was killed and the other is recovering from a spinal injury in Ann Arbor. Nothing like a little perspective to put your troubles out of mind. I miss Olga.
Anyhow, in other news, I've finally selected a team to support. I am disappointed in myself, but I've settled on la Universidad de Chile (no connection to the university in which I study), aka la U. They're the second-most boring pick I could have made, after Colo-Colo, which is the most popular and most historically successful Chilean football (soccer) team. I wanted to pull for Santiago Wanderers, because I like that name a lot and they have classy jerseys and aren't terrible, but they play out of Valparaiso and I need to root for a team whose home games I can go to with ease. La U fits the profile. So anyhow, time to start learning the roster and the cheers and going to games. The "Clásica" between la U and la Católica (Cata) was on Sunday, while I was playing frisbee, and la U won. My host family supports Cata, but they're the wine-and-cheese, rich people team and I want no part of that Dean Dome nonsense. Plus neither Luz María nor my host brothers cares particularly about soccer. So there you have it. La U.
Now I'm going to go make lunch. One quick note: Sunday was also the first time I'd got to wear my Crocs outside here because wearing shoes with socks when you're about to put on cleats is just dumb if you can at all avoid it. They are such great shoes, no matter how ugly certain persons might say they are. Thanks, Mom!
Monday, August 28, 2006
see that link over there on the right?
The one that says "Professor Juan Cole's "Informed Comment'"? Click on that link.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
my body is crying and laughing at the same time
My day today went like this: Woke up, ate, went to play ultimate, played ultimate for three hours, ate again (a burrito! with hot sauce! spicy things are like little miracles in this country), came home, ate again and now I'm writing this and about to go take a shower. The frisbee was incredibly fun and most of the people who play are really good and hardcore and fun. But now my shins, ankles, knees, quads, hips, back and feet are conspiring to kill me in order that I might never put them through that again. But it's okay, they're just my body parts and couldn't kill me if they tried. I'll just put them through it again and again until they get used to it again. Now I will shower and then stretch and then do all the homework I didn't do this weekend. Oh, homework, how I hate you. 'Night.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
gonna party like it's 1986
Kellyanne's birthday party was last night, and it was 80s themed. The best I could do was to wear a tracksuit, because the jacket I bought a while ago to trick people into thinking I'm not a gringo (which apparently works a lot of the time) came with pants. I also brought a bottle of wine, which I ended up drinking entirely on my own because everyone else was too into the piscolas. Anyhow, the party was really fun, I spoke a lot of Spanish because many of the people she lives with, including the owners of the hostel, don't really speak English. So that was good. Today, however, has been a day of wanting to do nothing but lie in my dark room and wonder why alcohol can make you dizzy so long after you've drunk any. Anyhow, I'm okay now and need to shower really badly.
Also, yesterday, I met up with a bunch of the kids from the COPA history class, which had been on a tour of parts of Santiago we probably otherwise wouldn't go, at el Centro Cultural abajo de la Moneda. There's an exhibit there now by this famous Chilean poet (they call him the anti-poet), Barra. It was very provocative and interesting. I didn't get to spend enough time in there and will definitely be back sometime soon. Afterwards Rosie, Valeria, Alex and Elan and I went to Parque Arauco so I could finally buy a new bag. Alex ended up getting one, too, and then we all went and got ice cream from a branch of that amazing ice cream place and sat outside in a big courtyard of the mall and hung out for a while. So that was yesterday in something like reverse order. Not too interesting, I suppose. Oh well. Now, shower time.
Also, yesterday, I met up with a bunch of the kids from the COPA history class, which had been on a tour of parts of Santiago we probably otherwise wouldn't go, at el Centro Cultural abajo de la Moneda. There's an exhibit there now by this famous Chilean poet (they call him the anti-poet), Barra. It was very provocative and interesting. I didn't get to spend enough time in there and will definitely be back sometime soon. Afterwards Rosie, Valeria, Alex and Elan and I went to Parque Arauco so I could finally buy a new bag. Alex ended up getting one, too, and then we all went and got ice cream from a branch of that amazing ice cream place and sat outside in a big courtyard of the mall and hung out for a while. So that was yesterday in something like reverse order. Not too interesting, I suppose. Oh well. Now, shower time.
Friday, August 25, 2006
joy of joys
ULTIMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE!!!!!!!!!!!! I've got some people to buy flowers for now. Isa, for being a saint when I absolutely fucked up my schedule and working everything out. Luz María, for being a saint in general. And now Katie Howe, for finally introducing me, via some guy she met at some thing, to Santiago ultimate. She doesn't even play, but she wrote down the info and gave it to me on Wednesday. I went to the website, found out there'd be a game Thursday and the email of the president, emailed him asking if it'd be all right if I showed up. He said, yeah, come on down. So yesterday, I went to class in San Joaquin. It was boring but not horribly so, and at the end we watched an extremely powerful clip from an early Soviet propaganda film and a long clip from J. Stuart Blackton's 1909 "Life of Napoleon" that was also very interesting. This class could end up being really cool. Fingers crossed. Then I went to Rosie's and had once with her host mom and sister, who just got back from Brazil on Wednesday. That was nice, if a little awkward. Poor Rosie, she basically has to meet her host family all over again because they've been gone for 2 weeks. Oh well. Anyhow, at 7:25 I left for the Club Deportivo de la Católica, which is in Las Condes, near the station where I switch from my line to Line 1 every day. After a few minutes of being lost, I found it, and the sight of flying discs from afar, under bright lights, filled me with a happiness that I cannot begin to describe. I really missed frisbee. I practically sprinted down the little driveway leading past the tennis courts and indoor arena to the frisbee field, introduced myself to the first person I saw and asked for Tom Smith (the president of the club). Lucien, the guy I met, pointed me the right way, and Tom said, "Just go get changed, we'll figure out which team you're on in a minute." I went over to the little bleachers, put on my cleats and took off my pants and was assigned to the dark team.
We played for an hour and a half, I'd say 17 or 18 people total, which was perfect. The field is pretty nice, and the players are generally very good and athletic. The quality of the game wasn't that great because it was disorganized and also misted/drizzled the whole time (that was fun, I was wearing my glasses). But whatever, I was just overjoyed to have found a place to play. They run what they call a "tournament," which is really just two teams playing each other over 14 weeks. It'll cost me 35,000 pesos, but I can't think of a better way to spend 70 bucks. They had four teams last semester, and will expand to that again if they get 24 (4 teams of 6...savage in the extreme). But whatever, I just want to make cuts and throw and lay out. A quick note: I am pathetically out of shape, and the air in this city doesn't help. But the game yesterday galvanized me to get off my (not) fat butt and start running and doing daily 15s and GOD I'm just so happy to be playing ultimate again. There's a game on Sunday somewhere outside the city at an American high school up near the cordillera, where the air will be clear and the field is apparently great. Joyous day. My shins hurt like crap. I don't care.
In other news, after the game about 10 of us went out for beer and dinner to a bar in between the field and the station. I had a decent schop grande (half a liter of draft beer) and split a salmon/roast vegetable/salad plate with Chris, who's a financial analyst for MetLife and has lived down here for a couple of years. And the Colo Colo vs. Huatchipati game was in the 70th minute or so when we got there, and the bar was packed with Colo Colo fans. I have been forbidden to pull for them, but it was hard not to get caught up in the raucous cheering and explosions of emotion every time there was a hard foul and then particularly when Colo Colo scored the winning goal on a PK in the 78th minute. The place went crazy. CHI CHI CHI LE LE LE!!! I've got to pick a team soon. I think I'll probably just end up with la U by default, but I'm resisting that as long as I can while I look for a more original team to support. After that I joined up with Elan, Emma, Tim Becker and Alex and three Chilean friends of Elan's, Pancho, Sebastian and Felipe. They were all cool guys and Elan got all his drinks for free because he'd made friends with the bartender last week and got some other people's drinks paid for, too. I split a cab with Pancho, who lives in Las Condes. I'm into this whole splitting cabs deal, it saves so much money. Anyhow this morning I woke up at 11:30 and I have done nothing at all. It's time to make lunch. Bye for now.
We played for an hour and a half, I'd say 17 or 18 people total, which was perfect. The field is pretty nice, and the players are generally very good and athletic. The quality of the game wasn't that great because it was disorganized and also misted/drizzled the whole time (that was fun, I was wearing my glasses). But whatever, I was just overjoyed to have found a place to play. They run what they call a "tournament," which is really just two teams playing each other over 14 weeks. It'll cost me 35,000 pesos, but I can't think of a better way to spend 70 bucks. They had four teams last semester, and will expand to that again if they get 24 (4 teams of 6...savage in the extreme). But whatever, I just want to make cuts and throw and lay out. A quick note: I am pathetically out of shape, and the air in this city doesn't help. But the game yesterday galvanized me to get off my (not) fat butt and start running and doing daily 15s and GOD I'm just so happy to be playing ultimate again. There's a game on Sunday somewhere outside the city at an American high school up near the cordillera, where the air will be clear and the field is apparently great. Joyous day. My shins hurt like crap. I don't care.
In other news, after the game about 10 of us went out for beer and dinner to a bar in between the field and the station. I had a decent schop grande (half a liter of draft beer) and split a salmon/roast vegetable/salad plate with Chris, who's a financial analyst for MetLife and has lived down here for a couple of years. And the Colo Colo vs. Huatchipati game was in the 70th minute or so when we got there, and the bar was packed with Colo Colo fans. I have been forbidden to pull for them, but it was hard not to get caught up in the raucous cheering and explosions of emotion every time there was a hard foul and then particularly when Colo Colo scored the winning goal on a PK in the 78th minute. The place went crazy. CHI CHI CHI LE LE LE!!! I've got to pick a team soon. I think I'll probably just end up with la U by default, but I'm resisting that as long as I can while I look for a more original team to support. After that I joined up with Elan, Emma, Tim Becker and Alex and three Chilean friends of Elan's, Pancho, Sebastian and Felipe. They were all cool guys and Elan got all his drinks for free because he'd made friends with the bartender last week and got some other people's drinks paid for, too. I split a cab with Pancho, who lives in Las Condes. I'm into this whole splitting cabs deal, it saves so much money. Anyhow this morning I woke up at 11:30 and I have done nothing at all. It's time to make lunch. Bye for now.
joy of joys
ULTIMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE!!!!!!!!!!!! I've got some people to buy flowers for now. Isa, for being a saint when I absolutely fucked up my schedule and working everything out. Luz María, for being a saint in general. And now Katie Howe, for finally introducing me, via some guy she met at some thing, to Santiago ultimate. She doesn't even play, but she wrote down the info and gave it to me on Wednesday. I went to the website, found out there'd be a game Thursday and the email of the president, emailed him asking if it'd be all right if I showed up. He said, yeah, come on down. So yesterday, I went to class in San Joaquin. It was boring but not horribly so, and at the end we watched an extremely powerful clip from an early Soviet propaganda film and a long clip from J. Stuart Blackton's 1909 "Life of Napoleon" that was also very interesting. This class could end up being really cool. Fingers crossed. Then I went to Rosie's and had once with her host mom and sister, who just got back from Brazil on Wednesday. That was nice, if a little awkward. Poor Rosie, she basically has to meet her host family all over again because they've been gone for 2 weeks. Oh well. Anyhow, at 7:25 I left for the Club Deportivo de la Católica, which is in Las Condes, near the station where I switch from my line to Line 1 every day. After a few minutes of being lost, I found it, and the sight of flying discs from afar, under bright lights, filled me with a happiness that I cannot begin to describe. I really missed frisbee. I practically sprinted down the little driveway leading past the tennis courts and indoor arena to the frisbee field, introduced myself to the first person I saw and asked for Tom Smith (the president of the club). Lucien, the guy I met, pointed me the right way, and Tom said, "Just go get changed, we'll figure out which team you're on in a minute." I went over to the little bleachers, put on my cleats and took off my pants and was assigned to the dark team.
We played for an hour and a half, I'd say 17 or 18 people total, which was perfect. The field is pretty nice, and the players are generally very good and athletic. The quality of the game wasn't that great because it was disorganized and also misted/drizzled the whole time (that was fun, I was wearing my glasses). But whatever, I was just overjoyed to have found a place to play. They run what they call a "tournament," which is really just two teams playing each other over 14 weeks. It'll cost me 35,000 pesos, but I can't think of a better way to spend 70 bucks. They had four teams last semester, and will expand to that again if they get 24 (4 teams of 6...savage in the extreme). But whatever, I just want to make cuts and throw and lay out. A quick note: I am pathetically out of shape, and the air in this city doesn't help. But the game yesterday galvanized me to get off my (not) fat butt and start running and doing daily 15s and GOD I'm just so happy to be playing ultimate again. There's a game on Sunday somewhere outside the city at an American high school up near the cordillera, where the air will be clear and the field is apparently great. Joyous day. My shins hurt like crap. I don't care.
In other news, after the game about 10 of us went out for beer and dinner to a bar in between the field and the station. I had a decent schop grande (half a liter of draft beer) and split a salmon/roast vegetable/salad plate with Chris, who's a financial analyst for MetLife and has lived down here for a couple of years. And the Colo Colo vs. Huatchipati game was in the 70th minute or so when we got there, and the bar was packed with Colo Colo fans. I have been forbidden to pull for them, but it was hard not to get caught up in the raucous cheering and explosions of emotion every time there was a hard foul and then particularly when Colo Colo scored the winning goal on a PK in the 78th minute. The place went crazy. CHI CHI CHI LE LE LE!!! I've got to pick a team soon. I think I'll probably just end up with la U by default, but I'm resisting that as long as I can while I look for a more original team to support. After that I joined up with Elan, Emma, Tim Becker and Alex and three Chilean friends of Elan's, Pancho, Sebastian and Felipe. They were all cool guys and Elan got all his drinks for free because he'd made friends with the bartender last week and got some other people's drinks paid for, too. I split a cab with Pancho, who lives in Las Condes. I'm into this whole splitting cabs deal, it saves so much money. Anyhow this morning I woke up at 11:30 and I have done nothing at all. It's time to make lunch. Bye for now.
We played for an hour and a half, I'd say 17 or 18 people total, which was perfect. The field is pretty nice, and the players are generally very good and athletic. The quality of the game wasn't that great because it was disorganized and also misted/drizzled the whole time (that was fun, I was wearing my glasses). But whatever, I was just overjoyed to have found a place to play. They run what they call a "tournament," which is really just two teams playing each other over 14 weeks. It'll cost me 35,000 pesos, but I can't think of a better way to spend 70 bucks. They had four teams last semester, and will expand to that again if they get 24 (4 teams of 6...savage in the extreme). But whatever, I just want to make cuts and throw and lay out. A quick note: I am pathetically out of shape, and the air in this city doesn't help. But the game yesterday galvanized me to get off my (not) fat butt and start running and doing daily 15s and GOD I'm just so happy to be playing ultimate again. There's a game on Sunday somewhere outside the city at an American high school up near the cordillera, where the air will be clear and the field is apparently great. Joyous day. My shins hurt like crap. I don't care.
In other news, after the game about 10 of us went out for beer and dinner to a bar in between the field and the station. I had a decent schop grande (half a liter of draft beer) and split a salmon/roast vegetable/salad plate with Chris, who's a financial analyst for MetLife and has lived down here for a couple of years. And the Colo Colo vs. Huatchipati game was in the 70th minute or so when we got there, and the bar was packed with Colo Colo fans. I have been forbidden to pull for them, but it was hard not to get caught up in the raucous cheering and explosions of emotion every time there was a hard foul and then particularly when Colo Colo scored the winning goal on a PK in the 78th minute. The place went crazy. CHI CHI CHI LE LE LE!!! I've got to pick a team soon. I think I'll probably just end up with la U by default, but I'm resisting that as long as I can while I look for a more original team to support. After that I joined up with Elan, Emma, Tim Becker and Alex and three Chilean friends of Elan's, Pancho, Sebastian and Felipe. They were all cool guys and Elan got all his drinks for free because he'd made friends with the bartender last week and got some other people's drinks paid for, too. I split a cab with Pancho, who lives in Las Condes. I'm into this whole splitting cabs deal, it saves so much money. Anyhow this morning I woke up at 11:30 and I have done nothing at all. It's time to make lunch. Bye for now.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
of protests and spanish
Woke up this morning at 9 with the intention of heading down super-early to the building where my Europe/Latin American class is in order to cut other kids to the chase for the readings, which we have to photocopy on our own and of which there are only two copies that have been checked out all the other times I've tried to get a hold of them. But I felt crappy and fell back asleep and woke up at 10:30. I re-woke up at 10:30 after some crazy dreams that I don't remember other than bits and pieces--someone pulling up purple socks under black shoes, for example--made breakfast and headed down to class, which starts at 12. I got there and it turns out that I made the right choice to go back to bed; the building was deserted except for the guard and a guy sweeping the floors. Apparently there were big protests yesterday and classes had been cancelled for the day in that building. Frustrated that I'd gone all the way down there for no reason but happy not to have class, I went to Rosie's apartment to talk about an issue that came up last night. So we talked, and it was good, and then she had to go to class and I went and got a prosciutto pizza from that pizza place, which I ate by myself in 11 minutes. DAMN that place is good. Anyhow, then I went to COPA Spanish, which I thought was going to be three hours today to make up for the holiday we had last week. But, delight, that's been postponed til next week. So I hung around COPA for a while, talked to Vale and Gaby and various other people. I would have gone home, but I have class at 6:30 that's a lot closer to COPA than my house (as is everything else), so I decided it would be a waste of time. Rosie showed up after her afternoon class and then when the kids got out of the Spanish class after mine, a big group of us walked through this very chic and sleek-looking neighborhood to go get the "best ice cream in Chile" according to Joseph. It was damn good. I got a lúcuma milkshake and then Rosie and I hoofed it down the street that the ice cream parlor is on, which turns into the street that our class is on on the other side of Plaza Mayor. We were about two minutes late to class, but the only kids there when we got there were gringos. The Chileans started showing up about five minutes later and the prof himself was 15 minutes late. Sometimes this country is nice.
The class was "Chile, los chilenos y su cultura." It started off kind of badly, because the prof was saying a lot of things I either knew already or took to be self-evident, and I got bored, or he was saying things that I think are blatantly wrong (for example, Eastern philosophy says, "live every day like it's your last"--his exact words) and he seemed to be paying lipservice to a biocentric view of humanity while saying that he wasn't. But then he started talking about things like the Aymara (a Chilean indigenous group, from the north) view of time and its implications. That was very interesting. Also the class appears to be pretty easy--a short reading or activity each week and then a short essay on it and then a mid-length paper at the end. No tests, which I have a huge fear of in Spanish. Essays I can at least take my time on and consult many, many reference works.
I came home after that and ate gnocchi that Luz María had made and then I had another good talk with David. He's a really nice guy, today we talked about music, first about concerts and how expensive it is to see big acts in Chile because they come so rarely here (he kept saying Chile's "the end of the earth") and then we talked about Stomp and percussive acts and how interesting they can be. He's apparently seen Stomp twice and thinks there's an Israeli group that's similar but a lot more interesting, and an Argentinian group called "Mayura" that he really likes, too. I read a really, really interesting article today in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell about pensions and the stupidity (sorry to use that word, but coming up with a list of more descriptive, complex ones would require more thought than I care to use at the moment) of the American system of forcing companies to pay for their own worker's benefits. Here's the link. I've got class tomorrow from 3-5:50 and OH! I just remembered some enormous, earth-shaking news. My friend Katie today told me, out of nowhere, that she'd heard about an ultimate league in Santiago!!!! AAAHHHH!!!!!!! I got really flushed and my heart started beating really fast when she told me that, which surprised me. I knew I'd missed ultimate, but I guess not really just HOW much until she told me. So anyhow, I went to the website today and there are league (league!) games on Thursdays and pickup on Sundays. I'm going to go tomorrow unless the league president emails me back saying that there's not actually anything going on tomorrow, whether I can play or not. Just to be around it again...YES!
So anyhow, class tomorrow from 3-5:50 and then maybe ultimate afterwards. The readings for that class (Cinematographic Language) are really hard. Oh well. Also, for anyone who's looking for a very intellectually challenging book that is very critical of American (United States) society, The Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz, is for you. Damn. So that's all for now. 'Night.
The class was "Chile, los chilenos y su cultura." It started off kind of badly, because the prof was saying a lot of things I either knew already or took to be self-evident, and I got bored, or he was saying things that I think are blatantly wrong (for example, Eastern philosophy says, "live every day like it's your last"--his exact words) and he seemed to be paying lipservice to a biocentric view of humanity while saying that he wasn't. But then he started talking about things like the Aymara (a Chilean indigenous group, from the north) view of time and its implications. That was very interesting. Also the class appears to be pretty easy--a short reading or activity each week and then a short essay on it and then a mid-length paper at the end. No tests, which I have a huge fear of in Spanish. Essays I can at least take my time on and consult many, many reference works.
I came home after that and ate gnocchi that Luz María had made and then I had another good talk with David. He's a really nice guy, today we talked about music, first about concerts and how expensive it is to see big acts in Chile because they come so rarely here (he kept saying Chile's "the end of the earth") and then we talked about Stomp and percussive acts and how interesting they can be. He's apparently seen Stomp twice and thinks there's an Israeli group that's similar but a lot more interesting, and an Argentinian group called "Mayura" that he really likes, too. I read a really, really interesting article today in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell about pensions and the stupidity (sorry to use that word, but coming up with a list of more descriptive, complex ones would require more thought than I care to use at the moment) of the American system of forcing companies to pay for their own worker's benefits. Here's the link. I've got class tomorrow from 3-5:50 and OH! I just remembered some enormous, earth-shaking news. My friend Katie today told me, out of nowhere, that she'd heard about an ultimate league in Santiago!!!! AAAHHHH!!!!!!! I got really flushed and my heart started beating really fast when she told me that, which surprised me. I knew I'd missed ultimate, but I guess not really just HOW much until she told me. So anyhow, I went to the website today and there are league (league!) games on Thursdays and pickup on Sundays. I'm going to go tomorrow unless the league president emails me back saying that there's not actually anything going on tomorrow, whether I can play or not. Just to be around it again...YES!
So anyhow, class tomorrow from 3-5:50 and then maybe ultimate afterwards. The readings for that class (Cinematographic Language) are really hard. Oh well. Also, for anyone who's looking for a very intellectually challenging book that is very critical of American (United States) society, The Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz, is for you. Damn. So that's all for now. 'Night.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
today was a good day
I don't have class on Tuesdays, except the dumb COPA pronunciation class 4:30-5:30, which I really don't mind and don't have work for. So here's what I did today: Woke up at 10:30, laid in bed for half an hour, got up, checked my email and facebook and talked on AIM for a little bit, took a shower, came back, finished one of my essays for class tomorrow, made and ate a really good lunch, shaved (for the first time in more than a week...feels great), did the Washington Post crossword, went to class at COPA, where I traded tongue twisters with my Spanish teacher, walked with Vickie and Rosie to their building and went up to Rosie's apartment, where we talked for a while, came home, ate two homemade completos (hot dogs with avocado, tomato and usually mayonnaise, although I substituted dijon mustard) and a big salad of lettuce and avocado, had a great conversation with David about Bush and the sorry state of affairs at home and about China, came in here to write my second essay and got distracted with various things, and here I am. There was a blemish on the day, but I won't get into it here because it's complicated and didn't detract too much from the truth of the title of this post, which I'm trying to stick to. Anyhow, I'd better get to work on that essay. 'Night everyone.
whoa!
Just took my blood pressure cause I'm writing an essay and I got fed up with it, and I got my lowest reading since I've been in Chile! 125/80, after averaging around 140/90! That's, like, pretty much normal for someone my age and in my physical condition! This is making me way happier than it should...
well, i meant to write a long post...
...But I got caught up in conversations and then with working on my first essay! It's not much of an essay or much of an assignment, but still, milestone time, people! Anyhow, now I feel like bed, so more tomorrow. 'Night.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
while i'm thinking of it...
Here are some pics. Also, a thing I noticed the other day and like a lot: words that are cognates from English to Spanish and translate more or less directly back and forth, but that don't work exactly the same way. Like, "stupendous" and "estupendo." In English, you really only use stupendous when you're making a joke; it's kind of an old-fashioned, extreme word to use. But in Spanish, estupendo is commonplace. Anyhow, here are a few pics from the past couple of trips. I'll go back and add more later, but this is just to give an idea of where I've been.
"Just go to number 18, knock on the door and ask for Pancho..."
Isla Damas
Guanacos on the road to Isla Damas. They're the most common camelid in the Western Hemisphere and the most durable, and they're standing on the hills that are all over the part of the country north of Santiago that are semiarid and remind me of nothing more than clove oranges.
Me and Durham in our mining gear
Sewell
"Just go to number 18, knock on the door and ask for Pancho..."
Isla Damas
Guanacos on the road to Isla Damas. They're the most common camelid in the Western Hemisphere and the most durable, and they're standing on the hills that are all over the part of the country north of Santiago that are semiarid and remind me of nothing more than clove oranges.
Me and Durham in our mining gear
Sewell
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LINCOLN
You know that awesome feeling of people asking you directions? A feeling of pride that someone thinks you know your stuff. I love that feeling and it happened to me twice today in the metro. The first time, a group of older British guys were on the same car as me and when we got off, they were confused because there are lots of false exits in Santiago stations if you don't know Spanish. Seriously, would you know what "SOLO CAMBIO DE ANDEN" means? Anyhow, I approached them and asked if they needed help, they said yes and I showed them out. Then tonight, on my way home, a Chilean woman came up to me on the platform and asked if I knew when the last train left from the station we were in. I didn't, but it was still cool that she assumed A) that I spoke Spanish and B) that I would know the answer to her question.
Anyhow, yesterday we went to Sewell, the oldest mining town at the oldest copper mine in Chile, which also happens to be the biggest subterranean mine in the world. It's still a functioning mine, but no one lives in the city anymore. It's now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The drive there, up from Santiago into the Andes, was gorgeous, and the town itself was really interesting. It's on the side of a hill, so there aren't many roads or walkways, you have to get almost everywhere by stairs. We had a snowball fight (!) and ate lunch and then went to the mine itself, which is called El Teniente, for unknown reasons. It was very interesting and we all got to wear masks and special jackets and boots and helmets. Also, best of all, we watched a gigantic mortar and pestle-type thing crush the bejesus out of tons and tons of rocks, which came pouring down from above. It was really loud and amazing to watch the thing work. Awesome. Anyhow, we got home late, which stressed me out. To explain, I will relate the two hours after the bus dropped us back off in Santiago.
It was 8:30, I had to buy flowers for Luz María (it was her birthday yesterday), so I walked to the Lider near Rosie's apartment (the bus dropped us off near there) with Rosie. We started walking with a big group but people peeled off to catch buses or take other streets; it was kind of funny, actually. Anyhow, I picked out some flowers and then went to pay. Slowest express lane ever. Then I gave the cashier my card cause I didn't have any cash. Rosie bought the flowers, bless her, then I hauled ass to the metro, making a trip that usually takes me 35-40 minutes in 22. I burst in the front door at home to a house full of people all dressed nice. I said happy birthday to Luz María and hi to everyone else and gave her the flowers, then tore back to my room, took a 2.5 minute shower, got dressed and went back out to meet people and tell Luz María that I had to leave instantly because I had to be at the Club de Jazz by 10:30 to meet up with people and make sure we got a table. She said it was fine and introduced me to some of her family and friends, her niece offered me a pisco sour, which I drained (it was really good...one of the best I've had here). I was out the door at 9:55. I walked to Avda. Ossa, which is where the bus that goes by the club runs (it's about ten minutes from my house) and proceeded to wait 20 minutes for a bus to come that said "Irarrazaval" on it. Brief aside: the buses here have all the streets on their route written on the front, so even if you don't know the number you need, you can just look for the street you're going to and hop on that bus. Usually it's good to double-check with the driver that he's going where you need, but really it's a pretty good system. Okay, back to the story. I got on the bus and made it to the Club at 10:40. Not bad. I was the first there of the people I thought were coming, so I bought my ticket and sat down at the same table we had the last time, which was kind of funny. Kind of not cause it's not that great a table, but that place is so small that anywhere's really okay. Anyhow, Tim and Gabby, who I knew were coming, and Valeria, who I didn't, showed up around 11:05, just as the first band was getting into a groove. Charlie and a girl who used to live with his host family showed up about 40 minutes later, which wasn't too bad cause the first band kind of sucked.
Paragraph break. We got drinks and a bottle of wine and their little cocktail empanadas that are so good and just chilled for the next two acts (Saturdays have three), which were both really good. The show was wrapping up around 1:30 when we left (shorter than last time) and after saying bye to Charlie and the girl we split a cab over to meet Elan, a couple of his friends, Durham, Rosie and Tim Becker to continue the party. After some confusion about where to go, we ended up in Suecia, which is this hilarious, kitschy, gringo-friendly street in Providencia with theme restaurants and bars (my favorite is Alabama Grill). We found a cheap club (2000 for guys and free for girls, and the guys' cover included a drink, which was crazy) and went in and after drinking my second, and MUCH cheaper (cover AND a drink for less than 4 bucks? come on, drinks at the club de Jazz are 6 bucks or more on their own) gin and tonic of the night, I joined the dancing. [CENSORED FOR THE SAKE OF CERTAIN PEOPLE'S WELL-BEING]. Gabby and I split a cab home, which was great. It took her to Las Condes for about 1200 and then me from her apartment for another 1200. That's a lot cheaper than the 4000 I'm used to paying for cabs.
Today I woke up at 1, made myself some breakfast, apologized profusely to Luz María for leaving so quickly last night. She said it was okay, but I still feel bad about it. Anyhow, this afternoon I went to the Museo de Arte Precolombino (Pre-Columbian Art Museum) with Rosie for our class on Chile, los chilenos y su cultura. We have to write an essay on nonverbal history and how the pieces in the museum tell their creators' history, or something like that. I think it might actually even be more general than that. Just a short reflection. The museum was unbelieveable. The collection is astonishing, it's incredibly well marked and explained, everything is tastefully lit and the building is nice. Unreal. I will back many times, I predict. Rosie had been very upset about a realization she came to earlier in the day, but the museum was so great that she cheered up. Afterwards, we went back to Plaza de Armas, where we'd met up, and sat on a bench and talked for a while. She tried to tell me what she'd been upset about and I tried to talk to her about it, but neither of us could make the other person really understand what we were saying and it was very frustrating. We had just started moving onto other topics--namely, that we both really wanted a barros luco--when a guy came up to us and told us that we were on his sleeping bench and could we please leave. We laughed and obliged him. We got our barros lucos and then I went to her apartment to do some reading for class. It's funny how much we take for granted the freedom we have in the States. We both would have loved to watch a movie together on her bed, for me to sleep there, just to be able to be in a private place in which we weren't bound by someone else's stuffy and repressed cultural norms. We both had the feeling during our conversation that if we were able just to lie and hold each other that understanding would be much easier. But here we are in Chile, and I left at 10:30 to take the metro home, and here I am, writing this. Anyhow, I'm going to do some more reading and work on that essay and listen to the mix that Rosie finally finished for me. I have not been able to call someone a girlfriend since the beginning of 11th grade. It's nice. 'Night. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LINCOLN
Anyhow, yesterday we went to Sewell, the oldest mining town at the oldest copper mine in Chile, which also happens to be the biggest subterranean mine in the world. It's still a functioning mine, but no one lives in the city anymore. It's now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The drive there, up from Santiago into the Andes, was gorgeous, and the town itself was really interesting. It's on the side of a hill, so there aren't many roads or walkways, you have to get almost everywhere by stairs. We had a snowball fight (!) and ate lunch and then went to the mine itself, which is called El Teniente, for unknown reasons. It was very interesting and we all got to wear masks and special jackets and boots and helmets. Also, best of all, we watched a gigantic mortar and pestle-type thing crush the bejesus out of tons and tons of rocks, which came pouring down from above. It was really loud and amazing to watch the thing work. Awesome. Anyhow, we got home late, which stressed me out. To explain, I will relate the two hours after the bus dropped us back off in Santiago.
It was 8:30, I had to buy flowers for Luz María (it was her birthday yesterday), so I walked to the Lider near Rosie's apartment (the bus dropped us off near there) with Rosie. We started walking with a big group but people peeled off to catch buses or take other streets; it was kind of funny, actually. Anyhow, I picked out some flowers and then went to pay. Slowest express lane ever. Then I gave the cashier my card cause I didn't have any cash. Rosie bought the flowers, bless her, then I hauled ass to the metro, making a trip that usually takes me 35-40 minutes in 22. I burst in the front door at home to a house full of people all dressed nice. I said happy birthday to Luz María and hi to everyone else and gave her the flowers, then tore back to my room, took a 2.5 minute shower, got dressed and went back out to meet people and tell Luz María that I had to leave instantly because I had to be at the Club de Jazz by 10:30 to meet up with people and make sure we got a table. She said it was fine and introduced me to some of her family and friends, her niece offered me a pisco sour, which I drained (it was really good...one of the best I've had here). I was out the door at 9:55. I walked to Avda. Ossa, which is where the bus that goes by the club runs (it's about ten minutes from my house) and proceeded to wait 20 minutes for a bus to come that said "Irarrazaval" on it. Brief aside: the buses here have all the streets on their route written on the front, so even if you don't know the number you need, you can just look for the street you're going to and hop on that bus. Usually it's good to double-check with the driver that he's going where you need, but really it's a pretty good system. Okay, back to the story. I got on the bus and made it to the Club at 10:40. Not bad. I was the first there of the people I thought were coming, so I bought my ticket and sat down at the same table we had the last time, which was kind of funny. Kind of not cause it's not that great a table, but that place is so small that anywhere's really okay. Anyhow, Tim and Gabby, who I knew were coming, and Valeria, who I didn't, showed up around 11:05, just as the first band was getting into a groove. Charlie and a girl who used to live with his host family showed up about 40 minutes later, which wasn't too bad cause the first band kind of sucked.
Paragraph break. We got drinks and a bottle of wine and their little cocktail empanadas that are so good and just chilled for the next two acts (Saturdays have three), which were both really good. The show was wrapping up around 1:30 when we left (shorter than last time) and after saying bye to Charlie and the girl we split a cab over to meet Elan, a couple of his friends, Durham, Rosie and Tim Becker to continue the party. After some confusion about where to go, we ended up in Suecia, which is this hilarious, kitschy, gringo-friendly street in Providencia with theme restaurants and bars (my favorite is Alabama Grill). We found a cheap club (2000 for guys and free for girls, and the guys' cover included a drink, which was crazy) and went in and after drinking my second, and MUCH cheaper (cover AND a drink for less than 4 bucks? come on, drinks at the club de Jazz are 6 bucks or more on their own) gin and tonic of the night, I joined the dancing. [CENSORED FOR THE SAKE OF CERTAIN PEOPLE'S WELL-BEING]. Gabby and I split a cab home, which was great. It took her to Las Condes for about 1200 and then me from her apartment for another 1200. That's a lot cheaper than the 4000 I'm used to paying for cabs.
Today I woke up at 1, made myself some breakfast, apologized profusely to Luz María for leaving so quickly last night. She said it was okay, but I still feel bad about it. Anyhow, this afternoon I went to the Museo de Arte Precolombino (Pre-Columbian Art Museum) with Rosie for our class on Chile, los chilenos y su cultura. We have to write an essay on nonverbal history and how the pieces in the museum tell their creators' history, or something like that. I think it might actually even be more general than that. Just a short reflection. The museum was unbelieveable. The collection is astonishing, it's incredibly well marked and explained, everything is tastefully lit and the building is nice. Unreal. I will back many times, I predict. Rosie had been very upset about a realization she came to earlier in the day, but the museum was so great that she cheered up. Afterwards, we went back to Plaza de Armas, where we'd met up, and sat on a bench and talked for a while. She tried to tell me what she'd been upset about and I tried to talk to her about it, but neither of us could make the other person really understand what we were saying and it was very frustrating. We had just started moving onto other topics--namely, that we both really wanted a barros luco--when a guy came up to us and told us that we were on his sleeping bench and could we please leave. We laughed and obliged him. We got our barros lucos and then I went to her apartment to do some reading for class. It's funny how much we take for granted the freedom we have in the States. We both would have loved to watch a movie together on her bed, for me to sleep there, just to be able to be in a private place in which we weren't bound by someone else's stuffy and repressed cultural norms. We both had the feeling during our conversation that if we were able just to lie and hold each other that understanding would be much easier. But here we are in Chile, and I left at 10:30 to take the metro home, and here I am, writing this. Anyhow, I'm going to do some more reading and work on that essay and listen to the mix that Rosie finally finished for me. I have not been able to call someone a girlfriend since the beginning of 11th grade. It's nice. 'Night. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LINCOLN
Friday, August 18, 2006
sometimes safari annoys me
No offense, Safari. I didn't mean to offend. You are the best internet browser there is, bar none. But sometimes you do things that are stupid, like assume that when i type "so" in the subject line it means i want the subject to be "sorry for not posting yesterday," which i did not. It was actually just supposed to be "so," but so much for that. Ha! Funny joke. Anyhow, the past couple of days have been good, if a little stressful. I made a very stupid (embarrassingly stupid) mistake when scheduling classes, signing up for two that overlapped for an hour and are in different parts of the city. Ridiculous. But, good news is, after much emailing and stressing, I lined up a new class and my schedule is set. Here's what I'm taking, for real, finally:
Español avanzado (clase de COPA)
Chile, los chilenos y su cultura (la Chile)
Relaciones entre Europa y America Latina a través de la historia (la Chile)
Lenguaje Cinematografico (la Católica).
I went to the Cinematographic Language one yesterday. It was long (three hours) and very, VERY basic (this is a close up. This is a medium close up. This is dollying. This is zooming in. This is blah blah blah). But the prof seems nice and his assistant does, too. We chatted for a little bit at the photocopier during the 20-minute break the prof gave us in the middle of class. And we watched parts of the Princess Bride (dubbed), Barry Lyndon (a Kubrick from the 70s--made me really want to see the whole thing) subtitled and Citizen Kane, also subtitled. Also a really goofy 80s 3-D graphic explanation of all the different actions of a camera and dolly, complete with unchanged English names (see above) but spoken, of course, with heavy accent. Because I already knew most of what was being taught, I stopped paying attention and started free-writing, which I haven't done in so long. It was very nice, to slow my thoughts down and have to concentrate on them. I'll go back and read what I wrote in a couple of days. So that was alright, and afterwards I got all my reading for the semester. The way readings work here is that, because books are so expensive, you have to photocopy whatever you need to read, period. And printing is expensive, too, so the prof puts together the readings and gives out a list, and then the students have to go to a photocopier and get the coursepack, I guess you could call it, together. And the poor photocopier at la Católica was so overwhelmed, it took him 45 minutes to do all the copying and take care of all the other kids who wanted this or that. I struck up a conversation while I was waiting with some kid about his advanced statistics book, which was in English, about how hard it must be to learn something that complicated in a language you don't understand. He said he got about 30% of the text, but he was working on it. I understand a lot more than 30% of the Spanish I read and hear, but I can't imagine trying to learn advanced math or anything. Just understanding metaphors is hard enough. In any case, he seemed like a nice guy. Then I went to Rosie's with my computer, intending to transfer music, but ended up just eating dinner with her and her host mom's cousin, who's staying with her most nights while her host mom and sister are on vacation in Brazil.
After that a bunch of people met up at HBH, the beer bar, for Charlie's 22nd birthday (weeeeeird, he's more than 3 years older than I am). It was fun, I guess, but kind of a waste of money. Then I went back to Rosie's to get my stuff and ended up having a long talk with her about each other and our relationship and so on. I spent the night, which was all right because the cousin got up really early and left, and no one opens doors here without asking. We woke up early, Rosie having not slept very well and me having slept like a rock, and made breakfast and hooked up the computers to transfer music, but by the time we got around to that she had to leave for volunteer training near COPA, and I had to gather syllabi and deal with this re-registration crap at COPA, so nos fuimos. I went back there after, then left to go have coffee with Izaak and Kellyanne (YAY, SILVER SPRING-TAKOMA PARK!) in La Reina. It was great to talk to them and see how they're doing. Seems like we're all good, although none of us is speaking as much Spanish as we'd like to be. Kellyanne is still living in that hostel, but there are people there now and she's enjoying it. Still intends to get an apartment at some point but is no longer in such a hurry. Anyhow after that I went back to Rosie's to get my computer, which she had kept in order to take more music off of it. I had intended to go to a concert tonight of some classical music at el Teatro de la Universidad de Chile, but I waited for Rosie and her friend from school, with whom she'd been getting coffee near the station where I switch from my line to the main line (which she lives on), at said station (Tobalaba) and then talked to them for a while. By the time we got to Baquedano, which is Rosie's stop and also right underneath el TUC, it was almost 8 and I gave up. I'm mad at myself for doing that because I really did want to go and I stopped myself in order to wait for her. So I'm a little sad about that at the moment. I'll get over it, though, there will be tons of cheap concerts that I can go to and I know so little about classical music to begin with it probably won't matter one to the next.
Tomorrow, all the COPA kids are going to Sewell, which is apparently very high up (we've been told to bring warm socks and parkas and hats because there's SNOW). I'm not exactly sure why, but it's a trip they organize and we don't have to pay any extra, so it ought to be cool. We get back around 7 or 8 and then I'll come home and wish Luz María a happy birthday! That's right, August 19. Hear that, Jenna? She's having a party at the house, which I'll probably stay for the beginning of and then dip. I want to go to Club de Jazz again tomorrow, and I know at least Gabby does, too, so hopefully that'll happen. I should see what the lineup is. These past few days have been very introspective and somber for me, lots of homesickness and thinking about my relationships with people at home and here. I think about myself and those things all the time (who doesn't), but it's rare that they slow me down or give me mood swings. I've been REEEEALLY happy at times over the last few days and at other times really, well, any number of negative emotions. Resentful, sad, anxious, cold. I don't know. But I think I'm better now, despite the weirdness and rarity of those emotions in me. Like the little clouds say in the Animation Show: "Life is gooooood!.............YAYYYYY!.............my anus is bleeding!............YAYYYYYY!"
Also, the canal by my house is higher when it doesn't rain than when it rains. If I have already mentioned that on this blog, apologies. But I really can't get over that, it trips me out. Anyhow that's enough for tonight. Time for bed cause I got an urrrrly wakeup tomorrow and I might shower (sike who am I kidding?). 'Night.
Español avanzado (clase de COPA)
Chile, los chilenos y su cultura (la Chile)
Relaciones entre Europa y America Latina a través de la historia (la Chile)
Lenguaje Cinematografico (la Católica).
I went to the Cinematographic Language one yesterday. It was long (three hours) and very, VERY basic (this is a close up. This is a medium close up. This is dollying. This is zooming in. This is blah blah blah). But the prof seems nice and his assistant does, too. We chatted for a little bit at the photocopier during the 20-minute break the prof gave us in the middle of class. And we watched parts of the Princess Bride (dubbed), Barry Lyndon (a Kubrick from the 70s--made me really want to see the whole thing) subtitled and Citizen Kane, also subtitled. Also a really goofy 80s 3-D graphic explanation of all the different actions of a camera and dolly, complete with unchanged English names (see above) but spoken, of course, with heavy accent. Because I already knew most of what was being taught, I stopped paying attention and started free-writing, which I haven't done in so long. It was very nice, to slow my thoughts down and have to concentrate on them. I'll go back and read what I wrote in a couple of days. So that was alright, and afterwards I got all my reading for the semester. The way readings work here is that, because books are so expensive, you have to photocopy whatever you need to read, period. And printing is expensive, too, so the prof puts together the readings and gives out a list, and then the students have to go to a photocopier and get the coursepack, I guess you could call it, together. And the poor photocopier at la Católica was so overwhelmed, it took him 45 minutes to do all the copying and take care of all the other kids who wanted this or that. I struck up a conversation while I was waiting with some kid about his advanced statistics book, which was in English, about how hard it must be to learn something that complicated in a language you don't understand. He said he got about 30% of the text, but he was working on it. I understand a lot more than 30% of the Spanish I read and hear, but I can't imagine trying to learn advanced math or anything. Just understanding metaphors is hard enough. In any case, he seemed like a nice guy. Then I went to Rosie's with my computer, intending to transfer music, but ended up just eating dinner with her and her host mom's cousin, who's staying with her most nights while her host mom and sister are on vacation in Brazil.
After that a bunch of people met up at HBH, the beer bar, for Charlie's 22nd birthday (weeeeeird, he's more than 3 years older than I am). It was fun, I guess, but kind of a waste of money. Then I went back to Rosie's to get my stuff and ended up having a long talk with her about each other and our relationship and so on. I spent the night, which was all right because the cousin got up really early and left, and no one opens doors here without asking. We woke up early, Rosie having not slept very well and me having slept like a rock, and made breakfast and hooked up the computers to transfer music, but by the time we got around to that she had to leave for volunteer training near COPA, and I had to gather syllabi and deal with this re-registration crap at COPA, so nos fuimos. I went back there after, then left to go have coffee with Izaak and Kellyanne (YAY, SILVER SPRING-TAKOMA PARK!) in La Reina. It was great to talk to them and see how they're doing. Seems like we're all good, although none of us is speaking as much Spanish as we'd like to be. Kellyanne is still living in that hostel, but there are people there now and she's enjoying it. Still intends to get an apartment at some point but is no longer in such a hurry. Anyhow after that I went back to Rosie's to get my computer, which she had kept in order to take more music off of it. I had intended to go to a concert tonight of some classical music at el Teatro de la Universidad de Chile, but I waited for Rosie and her friend from school, with whom she'd been getting coffee near the station where I switch from my line to the main line (which she lives on), at said station (Tobalaba) and then talked to them for a while. By the time we got to Baquedano, which is Rosie's stop and also right underneath el TUC, it was almost 8 and I gave up. I'm mad at myself for doing that because I really did want to go and I stopped myself in order to wait for her. So I'm a little sad about that at the moment. I'll get over it, though, there will be tons of cheap concerts that I can go to and I know so little about classical music to begin with it probably won't matter one to the next.
Tomorrow, all the COPA kids are going to Sewell, which is apparently very high up (we've been told to bring warm socks and parkas and hats because there's SNOW). I'm not exactly sure why, but it's a trip they organize and we don't have to pay any extra, so it ought to be cool. We get back around 7 or 8 and then I'll come home and wish Luz María a happy birthday! That's right, August 19. Hear that, Jenna? She's having a party at the house, which I'll probably stay for the beginning of and then dip. I want to go to Club de Jazz again tomorrow, and I know at least Gabby does, too, so hopefully that'll happen. I should see what the lineup is. These past few days have been very introspective and somber for me, lots of homesickness and thinking about my relationships with people at home and here. I think about myself and those things all the time (who doesn't), but it's rare that they slow me down or give me mood swings. I've been REEEEALLY happy at times over the last few days and at other times really, well, any number of negative emotions. Resentful, sad, anxious, cold. I don't know. But I think I'm better now, despite the weirdness and rarity of those emotions in me. Like the little clouds say in the Animation Show: "Life is gooooood!.............YAYYYYY!.............my anus is bleeding!............YAYYYYYY!"
Also, the canal by my house is higher when it doesn't rain than when it rains. If I have already mentioned that on this blog, apologies. But I really can't get over that, it trips me out. Anyhow that's enough for tonight. Time for bed cause I got an urrrrly wakeup tomorrow and I might shower (sike who am I kidding?). 'Night.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
no real post today
Today, I went to class, ate lunch, went to class, ate an empanada, bought more minutes for my phone, came home, ate a snack, emailed Isa, talked to Francisco, ate dinner and had a long and great conversation with Luz Maria and then had a ridiculous chat room with Elan, Rosie, Durham, Sara, Justin and Vickie and talked to Nora. Today has been very interesting and I'm not sure what to think about it. That's all, I'm not going to reflect any more than that here because, well, too many people read this. Careful what you wish for, right?
'Night
'Night
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
nothing to do but laugh about it...
I meant to start this post about three hours ago, but one thing led to another...I ate once...I met a new neighbor...I got really sad about not going back to school and all my friends and family and then I shut down emotionally for a while and it was strange and hard to explain...and then I talked to Izaak about how we were both, coincidentally, in La Serena this weekend and did not see each other. Which leads me to the point of this post, which is to write about the weekend since Saturday.
Sunday we took super easy. A group went to a beach about an hour away called Tongoy to watch the sun set, and Rosie and I followed a little while later. We missed seeing the sunset on the beach (in fact we missed the beach altogether because it was dark when we got there and the other group was already walking back towards the town when our bus stopped), but we saw it along the coast from the bus and it was very beautiful. I talked to the fam for a while, which was nice but kind of stressful because it was just Rosie and I on the bus and I felt bad for abandoning her to talk to MDLJ and then felt bad for rushing them, especially Dad. Oh well, I can just look forward that much more to having a great conversation next weekend. She said it was okay, that she liked overhearing people talk to their families, but to be honest it made me feel nervous and self-conscious to be doing it, let alone rude. Anyhow, Sunday night was uneventful because we all had to wake up early Monday morning...
...To go to Isla Damas. After a cramped and bouncy 2-hour van ride through beautiful harsh hill/coast country, we got to Punto de los Chorros and hopped (I should say stumbled) into these tiny little wooden boats for a ride through choppy seas around Isla Chorros, on which we saw many sea lions and pelicans and penguins and cormorants and swallows and things like that, and then to Isla Damas, where we walked around and took lots of pictures because it was beautiful. REALLY windy. The boat ride itself was completely miserable and I was very unhappy--soaked in salt spray, freezing, seasick. I could not WAIT to get off. The ride from Isla Damas back to shore wasn't so bad because the sea was calmer and because I wasn't in the back I stayed a lot drier. Then we had a really good lunch of shrimp and cheese empanadas, fried fish and rice. Delicious. Then back in the van for another two hours. I tried to sleep, but more and more I am coming to the realization that I can't sleep on things that are moving if I don't have tons of space to get comfortable. I can sleep in a tight space if I know I'm not going to get bounced out of position, and I can sleep on something that's moving if I stretch and turn and put my head at the right angle, but there's no middle ground. Oh well.
Monday night we decided, geniuses that we are, that we should go to the grocery store and cook dinner for ourselves and the people who own the hostel we stayed at, Casa Maria. Shopping for dinner for 15 people with 8 different ideas about what should be eaten really, really sucks. We all ended up super stressed out and yelling at each other about who would pay for what and blah blah blah it was not enjoyable. After finally agreeing to just buy some stuff separately and some together. Then we came back and Alex and Ester got to work right away and then I went and helped. Ester was a saint, basically cooking everything except Rosie's and my string beans and our pasta, which I made because Rosie was sick. But we ate (every little splinter group had variations on a theme: Rosie and I ate bowties with parmesan, chopped beef and string beans) and it tasted good. Then everyone but Rosie and I got extremely drunk and decided to go out. Vickie and Durham in particular were hilarious.
This morning, the people on the 10:15 bus packed up and left and then the people on the 11:45 bus (that would be Rosie, Amalia, T-Dubs and myself) got stuck haggling with a suddenly psychotic Maria about how much we owed for the rooms. A moment to bitch about the hostel: When we got there, everyone (Mauricio, Pancho, Maria and Andreas) seemed incredibly nice and accomodating and generous. Maria needed some money for shopping so a few of us paid her 2500 apiece for Saturday night, when we had our tour bus mishap she suggested that those who couldn't fit on the bus just take a regular one and make our own tour, which turned out great. But the whole time, there were signs of the incredibly disorder of the place. They told us we'd have a room on Sunday night that they then gave away to some French kids. Maria bitched loudly about a group of Germans about how they'd underpaid. And this morning, she made paying a horrible, horrible experience. The previous rate of 2500 was suddenly too low and we owed 3000 apiece for the rooms, which we got together, of course, after the first group had left (minus me, cause I had absolutely no cash whatsoever...I had to borrow) and then decided that it was 4500 a person for the rooms. This was insane because the rate per room was supposedly 9000, but we had slept three to a bed, hence the earlier discount of 2500 per person. She continued to insist and then started yelling at us about how she wasn't working for this, that she couldn't live with this. Andreas took out a pad of paper and started scribbling some figures on it, but it was really Amalia (this is when having a friend who's totally fluent REALLY helps) who worked it all out. Andreas was nice about it, but Maria was just awful, putting on a huge show about how we were just selfish exchange students and she'd never host another exchange student again and then going back to sweeping before letting loose another stream of invective. Such a sweet lady until today...but seriously, I just wanted to scream, "Look, you crazy idiot, if you're running a business it helps to be clear up front about how much your clients owe you and come up with some kind of system for keeping track of money. Otherwise, when it comes time for them to pay and they pay you at the rate you told them before and then decide that it's too low, shit gets confusing. So maybe try having people pay up front. Oh, wait, then you don't get to have your little hissy fit about how much you hate exchange students. I guess that takes the fun out, huh?"
Anyhow, after that joyous interaction, we peaced out and walked back to the grocery store, where we bought stuff for lunches (turkey, ham, fresh bread, cheese, mustard, yogurt, chips, chocolate wafers, Coke--oh BABY) because, as we learned on the way up, food is not really provided on the bus. Then we headed back to Santiago. They played What Women Want and Troy on the bus, and some incoherent Spanish movie. I tried hard not to watch and distracted myself with the scenery and Bastard Out of Carolina, which I like so far (I got through about two thirds today). Now I'm back in Santiago, I really have to pee and then I really have to study for my Spanish test tomorrow (food, the body and diseases...hoo boy, I just love vocab). Julia, I listened to your mix today and I miss you a lot. I'll definitely visit Bs As sometime before the semester's over. Okay, that's enough for now. 'Night everyone.
Sunday we took super easy. A group went to a beach about an hour away called Tongoy to watch the sun set, and Rosie and I followed a little while later. We missed seeing the sunset on the beach (in fact we missed the beach altogether because it was dark when we got there and the other group was already walking back towards the town when our bus stopped), but we saw it along the coast from the bus and it was very beautiful. I talked to the fam for a while, which was nice but kind of stressful because it was just Rosie and I on the bus and I felt bad for abandoning her to talk to MDLJ and then felt bad for rushing them, especially Dad. Oh well, I can just look forward that much more to having a great conversation next weekend. She said it was okay, that she liked overhearing people talk to their families, but to be honest it made me feel nervous and self-conscious to be doing it, let alone rude. Anyhow, Sunday night was uneventful because we all had to wake up early Monday morning...
...To go to Isla Damas. After a cramped and bouncy 2-hour van ride through beautiful harsh hill/coast country, we got to Punto de los Chorros and hopped (I should say stumbled) into these tiny little wooden boats for a ride through choppy seas around Isla Chorros, on which we saw many sea lions and pelicans and penguins and cormorants and swallows and things like that, and then to Isla Damas, where we walked around and took lots of pictures because it was beautiful. REALLY windy. The boat ride itself was completely miserable and I was very unhappy--soaked in salt spray, freezing, seasick. I could not WAIT to get off. The ride from Isla Damas back to shore wasn't so bad because the sea was calmer and because I wasn't in the back I stayed a lot drier. Then we had a really good lunch of shrimp and cheese empanadas, fried fish and rice. Delicious. Then back in the van for another two hours. I tried to sleep, but more and more I am coming to the realization that I can't sleep on things that are moving if I don't have tons of space to get comfortable. I can sleep in a tight space if I know I'm not going to get bounced out of position, and I can sleep on something that's moving if I stretch and turn and put my head at the right angle, but there's no middle ground. Oh well.
Monday night we decided, geniuses that we are, that we should go to the grocery store and cook dinner for ourselves and the people who own the hostel we stayed at, Casa Maria. Shopping for dinner for 15 people with 8 different ideas about what should be eaten really, really sucks. We all ended up super stressed out and yelling at each other about who would pay for what and blah blah blah it was not enjoyable. After finally agreeing to just buy some stuff separately and some together. Then we came back and Alex and Ester got to work right away and then I went and helped. Ester was a saint, basically cooking everything except Rosie's and my string beans and our pasta, which I made because Rosie was sick. But we ate (every little splinter group had variations on a theme: Rosie and I ate bowties with parmesan, chopped beef and string beans) and it tasted good. Then everyone but Rosie and I got extremely drunk and decided to go out. Vickie and Durham in particular were hilarious.
This morning, the people on the 10:15 bus packed up and left and then the people on the 11:45 bus (that would be Rosie, Amalia, T-Dubs and myself) got stuck haggling with a suddenly psychotic Maria about how much we owed for the rooms. A moment to bitch about the hostel: When we got there, everyone (Mauricio, Pancho, Maria and Andreas) seemed incredibly nice and accomodating and generous. Maria needed some money for shopping so a few of us paid her 2500 apiece for Saturday night, when we had our tour bus mishap she suggested that those who couldn't fit on the bus just take a regular one and make our own tour, which turned out great. But the whole time, there were signs of the incredibly disorder of the place. They told us we'd have a room on Sunday night that they then gave away to some French kids. Maria bitched loudly about a group of Germans about how they'd underpaid. And this morning, she made paying a horrible, horrible experience. The previous rate of 2500 was suddenly too low and we owed 3000 apiece for the rooms, which we got together, of course, after the first group had left (minus me, cause I had absolutely no cash whatsoever...I had to borrow) and then decided that it was 4500 a person for the rooms. This was insane because the rate per room was supposedly 9000, but we had slept three to a bed, hence the earlier discount of 2500 per person. She continued to insist and then started yelling at us about how she wasn't working for this, that she couldn't live with this. Andreas took out a pad of paper and started scribbling some figures on it, but it was really Amalia (this is when having a friend who's totally fluent REALLY helps) who worked it all out. Andreas was nice about it, but Maria was just awful, putting on a huge show about how we were just selfish exchange students and she'd never host another exchange student again and then going back to sweeping before letting loose another stream of invective. Such a sweet lady until today...but seriously, I just wanted to scream, "Look, you crazy idiot, if you're running a business it helps to be clear up front about how much your clients owe you and come up with some kind of system for keeping track of money. Otherwise, when it comes time for them to pay and they pay you at the rate you told them before and then decide that it's too low, shit gets confusing. So maybe try having people pay up front. Oh, wait, then you don't get to have your little hissy fit about how much you hate exchange students. I guess that takes the fun out, huh?"
Anyhow, after that joyous interaction, we peaced out and walked back to the grocery store, where we bought stuff for lunches (turkey, ham, fresh bread, cheese, mustard, yogurt, chips, chocolate wafers, Coke--oh BABY) because, as we learned on the way up, food is not really provided on the bus. Then we headed back to Santiago. They played What Women Want and Troy on the bus, and some incoherent Spanish movie. I tried hard not to watch and distracted myself with the scenery and Bastard Out of Carolina, which I like so far (I got through about two thirds today). Now I'm back in Santiago, I really have to pee and then I really have to study for my Spanish test tomorrow (food, the body and diseases...hoo boy, I just love vocab). Julia, I listened to your mix today and I miss you a lot. I'll definitely visit Bs As sometime before the semester's over. Okay, that's enough for now. 'Night everyone.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
la serena
I´m writing this from an internet café in La Serena, to which a group of 12 COPA kids arrived yesterday night, late, after a 6 hour bus ride. We were split up into various hostels (few have room for 12 people from any kind of group, especially because it´s a long weekend) by a nice guy named Mauricio, all within walking distance of the bus stop. Funnily, when he was divvying us up, he asked, "¿Hay algúna pareja?" because, it turned out, one of the hostels had a room with a big bed (he called it the "matrimonial bed"--no joke). Rosie and I timidly raised our hands and he pointed down a side street and said, again, no joke, scout´s honor, these exact words: "Go to number 18, ring the doorbell, ask for Pancho and tell him Mauricio sent you." Perhaps the sketchiest instructions I have ever received from a stranger. But we went and it turned out, after a walk down a dark and utterly deserted street, to be a very sweet place, Pancho was a great guy and made us tea and the room is comfortable enough. There are also some French and German kids staying there and a trio of girls who are Australian, Dutch and the other´s nationality I don´t remember but it was equally exotic. Very nice people all around.
Today we got up early and after some mishaps and confusion about a bus tour that Joseph, who got here yesterday morning before any of us, arranged, we split into two groups. One went on the bus tour and the other, including me, Rosie, both Tims, Vickie and Amalia, made our own way by bus first to the Capel pisco factory, where we took a free tour and tasting. The mango pisco, which isn´t available in stores even here yet, was delicious and I bought a bottle for my host family to enjoy. From there we went to Vicuña, a cute little town very near (walking distance) from the pisco factory, and the birthplace of Gabriela Mistral, who is a national hero here. We ate lunch in a good little café and then chilled in the beautiful plaza before wandering around to look in on some artisan stalls, where I bought a new nice leather wallet and others got similar nice little things. Then we went to the Mistral house and museum and I realized that, well, winning the Nobel prize for literature means you were probably pretty good at writing. And she was. Her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in particular was very moving. Anyhow, we wandered back to the plaza and then found our way to the bus station and came back to La Serena. The plan now is to make a trip to the mall because various people forgot bathing suits (we´re on the coast and the weather today was SPECtacular) and I need some socks, and then to the grocery store for some eats, which we will take to the beach and eat picnic-style. Good plan. I had lots of time for thinking and reflecting and being introspective today and I thought about many interesting things (helped along by The Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz, which is fascinating), but I´m paying by the minute here, so they´ll have to wait. Pics will be up as soon as I´m back in Santiago. Take care, my peoples.
Today we got up early and after some mishaps and confusion about a bus tour that Joseph, who got here yesterday morning before any of us, arranged, we split into two groups. One went on the bus tour and the other, including me, Rosie, both Tims, Vickie and Amalia, made our own way by bus first to the Capel pisco factory, where we took a free tour and tasting. The mango pisco, which isn´t available in stores even here yet, was delicious and I bought a bottle for my host family to enjoy. From there we went to Vicuña, a cute little town very near (walking distance) from the pisco factory, and the birthplace of Gabriela Mistral, who is a national hero here. We ate lunch in a good little café and then chilled in the beautiful plaza before wandering around to look in on some artisan stalls, where I bought a new nice leather wallet and others got similar nice little things. Then we went to the Mistral house and museum and I realized that, well, winning the Nobel prize for literature means you were probably pretty good at writing. And she was. Her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in particular was very moving. Anyhow, we wandered back to the plaza and then found our way to the bus station and came back to La Serena. The plan now is to make a trip to the mall because various people forgot bathing suits (we´re on the coast and the weather today was SPECtacular) and I need some socks, and then to the grocery store for some eats, which we will take to the beach and eat picnic-style. Good plan. I had lots of time for thinking and reflecting and being introspective today and I thought about many interesting things (helped along by The Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz, which is fascinating), but I´m paying by the minute here, so they´ll have to wait. Pics will be up as soon as I´m back in Santiago. Take care, my peoples.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
mixin' it up
The title of this post derives from the fact that I am currently working on a new mix. I've abandoned completely the idea that I'll ever get my music taste down to 80 minutes, so I'm moving on. It's a bit of a relief, to be honest. I'm almost done with this one, there's just one transition that I'm not totally happy with and it's a minute too long. Shit. Anyhow, today was good. I went to class this afternoon (I'm not going to have any class before noon...OH BABY) and then Elan and I went and got some coffee and crepes (well, I did, he was too mad to eat) and he vented to me for a while. It was really interesting because some of the things he said, some of the anger, was really unexpected on my end. He had to move houses this week and he's in the process of applying to lots of medical schools (like 10, and all the best ones, too--UCSF, UCLA, Stanford, NYU, Harvard, etc....smart, hardworking guy, he is) and so he's pretty drained and there was some drama between him and someone else that seems really fucked up, especially considering the circumstances. Anyhow, I'd get more into that but it's very personal and it's not my place to share more. I really like him a lot, he's a very complicated and thoughtful person and I can see us becoming good friends. It's funny, he told me today that on the first day, on the bus, he thought that he'd be friends with everyone on the program except me and that he prayed we wouldn't be roommates in the hotel because I said something brusque to him about gas here being in liters instead of gallons or something...long story. I really don't like my compulsion to correct people, the importance I place on other people knowing what's right and what's not. Arguing I like and don't mind that I'm opinionated, but why can't I just hold my tongue more on things like that? I resolved again after he told me that to stop correcting people...so much.
I came home after that and ate with Luz Maria and David and Francisco. Speaking of Francisco, we went to see Me, You and Everyone We Know at the Santiago International Film Festival (SANFIC) last night, which I liked a lot. Very strange and disjointed and sad, but interesting. Francisco is a psychoanalyst by training, so he had some things to say about it afterwards that I wouldn't have thought of. Anyhow dinner tonight was good and then I watched the Simpsons with David and drank tea (speaking of tea, I cannot describe how amazing it was today to have a good cup of coffee...revelatory...) and now I'm writing this. Soon's I finish, I'm going to pee and then on to Bellavista to curarnos y cantar karaoke with some COPA kids. Okay, I'm finished. 'Night.
I came home after that and ate with Luz Maria and David and Francisco. Speaking of Francisco, we went to see Me, You and Everyone We Know at the Santiago International Film Festival (SANFIC) last night, which I liked a lot. Very strange and disjointed and sad, but interesting. Francisco is a psychoanalyst by training, so he had some things to say about it afterwards that I wouldn't have thought of. Anyhow dinner tonight was good and then I watched the Simpsons with David and drank tea (speaking of tea, I cannot describe how amazing it was today to have a good cup of coffee...revelatory...) and now I'm writing this. Soon's I finish, I'm going to pee and then on to Bellavista to curarnos y cantar karaoke with some COPA kids. Okay, I'm finished. 'Night.
wherethemotherfuckincafesat, cachai?
Here I sit, in the COPA office, posting for no reason. I have nothing to say except I still need to find a damn courier bag. I got a non-gringo jacket yesterday, which is nice, but no bag. The selection at the department store (que se llama Almacenes Paris) of man-bags, as Rosie calls them, was pésimo (freaking horrible, as in, Chilean Spanish is pésimo). I´ll write more later but right now I am dying of thirst. Class registration deadline is tomorrow, I´m flipping out and don´t know what to do. Other than that, life is good. It rained for two days and now is beautiful and clean.
Monday, August 07, 2006
first day of class for real
Today was mixed. I got up this morning, looked at the syllabus for the first class I had intended to go to (the COPA academic adviser, heretoforward called Saint Isabel on this blog) and realized that it would be demanding in English (two mid-length papers that require considerable depth of thought and complexity of expression, things of which I am not capable in Spanish at this point...maybe next semester). It's too bad, too, I had really wanted to take the class. It was the one about the five Latin American Nobel Prize winners (Neruda, Mistral, Paz, Asturias and Garcia Marquez), which I think I'll still try to cover the syllabus for. Just too much writing and too much reading. As a sole class it'd be great, but on top of all the other reading I'm going to have to struggle through, it's just too much. Hopefully my one class tomorrow, Modern Chilean Literature, will look easier and as interesting.
Anyhow I went instead to Relations Between Europe and Latin America Throughout History, which was quite interesting and small. The profe (pro-fay) seemed really nice and she smiled a lot and interrupted her lecture to question the gringos in the class (there are only four including me, which is good, too). Also there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of reading. Super bien. Then I and the other gringos (two go to GW and the other to Berkeley) went and got lunch in Santiago Centro, where the government studies building is. I finished my (very cheap) ham and cheese and Coke and metroed on over to COPA, where I had another joyous installment of Spanish grammar and vocab class. I think it'll be good for me, but GOD is it boring. Oh well, that's all right. I came home after that for a little while, made myself a sandwich on some toast and some tea and watched TV with Francisco, before heading over to Chile and the International Political System at UDP. That class was so boring I thought I'd cry. Sara, if you're still reading this ever, it was a confusingly explained summary of realist theory and followed by an awkward transition into how that applies to Chile's economic interests as the preferred point of entry for commerce from the Pacific into South America and its competition for that title with Peru and Colombia. The teacher seemed really nice and he was very young and smiley and cracked jokes, but he couldn't make up for the incredibly pedestrian material and the confusing and not particularly coherent way he tried to convey it. Also at the end there was a movement among the Chilean students to move the class to 8:30 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays because they all have the same schedule and apparently want to work at night or something like that. There was much finger pointing at us gringos because we aren't on the same schedule as them so it was thought that the class shouldn't be changed because it would impede us. That was the real problem with this class. I was all ready to decide not to take it and then all the kids in it were incredibly friendly. Guh. I'm still not going to take it. Too boring.
Then Rosie and I went and got pizzas at that awesome pizza cafe joint I wrote about a little while ago. I guess Rosie and I are dating now. There are about 50 million reasons why we shouldn't be, which I won't get into because most of them ought to obvious and to tell the truth I'd just rather not write them all out. But we talked about that, and the fact of the matter is, we both really like each other, so why the fuck not. Take THAT, logic and reason. If Rosie reads this, she will be embarrassed. But that's all right. Seems stupid not to write about it.
Speaking of which, it is interesting and kind of sad how sexually repressed Chilean young people are. It means that you can't really ever have privacy. Because families are still so traditional, there is absolutely NO closing of doors allowed and really no PDA indoors and so anyone with any sexual attraction at all is forced outside. So you get parks with a couple making out on every bench. This seems to me a very, very unhealthy way of acting and thinking about sex and all things sex-related. There's a lot to be said for self-restraint, but social repression is a whole different animal. Say, a big, angry german shepherd with fangs and big loud barks, like the ones two doors down from me that SCREAM at me every time I walk past. Perhaps that wasn't the best analogy, but I wanted to throw in a reference to them, as they are an integral part of my day. I wish they'd just get over people walking by their yard, which, by the way, is surrounded, like all yards in this neighborhood, by a seven or eight-foot fence with spikes on the top. Commas! Yay, commas! Anyhow it'd be nice if maybe the Catholic Church could look at itself and say, "Hmmm, some of our celibate priests take out their sexual energy on young boys, and on a much MUCH bigger scale, all of our young people are so desperate to express themselves sexually and so restrained in our strict dogma that they make out anywhere there's four square feet of space out of sight of parents and priests. Hey, maybe sexuality is an integral part of being a human and it's really not a good idea to tell everyone that it's sinful because, well, it's not!" Okay, this has gone on long enough and I've started bitching about Catholicism, which is really not something I have any right to be doing. Tomorrow I only have the aforementioned lit class in the afternoon, but in the morning I have to back to UDP to preregister for the classes I might take there and then I have to buy a jacket and a new shoulder bag because the free one from la Chile is already falling apart. You get what you pay for, right? 'Night.
Anyhow I went instead to Relations Between Europe and Latin America Throughout History, which was quite interesting and small. The profe (pro-fay) seemed really nice and she smiled a lot and interrupted her lecture to question the gringos in the class (there are only four including me, which is good, too). Also there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of reading. Super bien. Then I and the other gringos (two go to GW and the other to Berkeley) went and got lunch in Santiago Centro, where the government studies building is. I finished my (very cheap) ham and cheese and Coke and metroed on over to COPA, where I had another joyous installment of Spanish grammar and vocab class. I think it'll be good for me, but GOD is it boring. Oh well, that's all right. I came home after that for a little while, made myself a sandwich on some toast and some tea and watched TV with Francisco, before heading over to Chile and the International Political System at UDP. That class was so boring I thought I'd cry. Sara, if you're still reading this ever, it was a confusingly explained summary of realist theory and followed by an awkward transition into how that applies to Chile's economic interests as the preferred point of entry for commerce from the Pacific into South America and its competition for that title with Peru and Colombia. The teacher seemed really nice and he was very young and smiley and cracked jokes, but he couldn't make up for the incredibly pedestrian material and the confusing and not particularly coherent way he tried to convey it. Also at the end there was a movement among the Chilean students to move the class to 8:30 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays because they all have the same schedule and apparently want to work at night or something like that. There was much finger pointing at us gringos because we aren't on the same schedule as them so it was thought that the class shouldn't be changed because it would impede us. That was the real problem with this class. I was all ready to decide not to take it and then all the kids in it were incredibly friendly. Guh. I'm still not going to take it. Too boring.
Then Rosie and I went and got pizzas at that awesome pizza cafe joint I wrote about a little while ago. I guess Rosie and I are dating now. There are about 50 million reasons why we shouldn't be, which I won't get into because most of them ought to obvious and to tell the truth I'd just rather not write them all out. But we talked about that, and the fact of the matter is, we both really like each other, so why the fuck not. Take THAT, logic and reason. If Rosie reads this, she will be embarrassed. But that's all right. Seems stupid not to write about it.
Speaking of which, it is interesting and kind of sad how sexually repressed Chilean young people are. It means that you can't really ever have privacy. Because families are still so traditional, there is absolutely NO closing of doors allowed and really no PDA indoors and so anyone with any sexual attraction at all is forced outside. So you get parks with a couple making out on every bench. This seems to me a very, very unhealthy way of acting and thinking about sex and all things sex-related. There's a lot to be said for self-restraint, but social repression is a whole different animal. Say, a big, angry german shepherd with fangs and big loud barks, like the ones two doors down from me that SCREAM at me every time I walk past. Perhaps that wasn't the best analogy, but I wanted to throw in a reference to them, as they are an integral part of my day. I wish they'd just get over people walking by their yard, which, by the way, is surrounded, like all yards in this neighborhood, by a seven or eight-foot fence with spikes on the top. Commas! Yay, commas! Anyhow it'd be nice if maybe the Catholic Church could look at itself and say, "Hmmm, some of our celibate priests take out their sexual energy on young boys, and on a much MUCH bigger scale, all of our young people are so desperate to express themselves sexually and so restrained in our strict dogma that they make out anywhere there's four square feet of space out of sight of parents and priests. Hey, maybe sexuality is an integral part of being a human and it's really not a good idea to tell everyone that it's sinful because, well, it's not!" Okay, this has gone on long enough and I've started bitching about Catholicism, which is really not something I have any right to be doing. Tomorrow I only have the aforementioned lit class in the afternoon, but in the morning I have to back to UDP to preregister for the classes I might take there and then I have to buy a jacket and a new shoulder bag because the free one from la Chile is already falling apart. You get what you pay for, right? 'Night.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
as promised
This post is merely to deliver the aforementioned picture of the funny joke Elan played on me after I gave him one of my 21 ID photos.
these are a few of my favorite things
So I found my two favorite places in Santiago yesterday. One is the top of Cerro San Cristobal, which is really very high (840-some meters) and has a huge statue of the Virgin on top looking out over the city. It's a spectacular view and you get above the smog. We traveled up via the funicular railway, which is very old (about a hundred years, I think) and jerky but fun for those reasons. Once at the top, the cleanliness of the air was euphoric. You can really look DOWN on the smog from up there, and really see the cordillera (and the lower range on the western side of the city, too). Even on a clear day here the mountains are hazy, but from up there...wow. Everyone took lots of pictures except me and Vicky because we'd forgotten our cameras. Then it started to get dark and the last train down is at 8 (you can walk, but it takes a long time), so we descended back into the smog and bustle of the city. It was very pretty on the way down because the sun was setting spectacularly and lights were starting to blink on all over.
Then we walked around a little bit and people peeled off and went home and eventually Rosie and I were back at the cafe near her apartment with the delicious pizza. Unfortunately we couldn't order any because they only serve it after 8 and it wasn't that late yet, so she got tea and i got a coke and we sat outside and talked for a while. Then I went home and started making some calls about getting people together to go to my other new favorite place in Santiago (either you've been waiting on tenterhook to see what it is or you've forgotten that that's how this post started out...I fall into the latter category and I'm writing it, for crying out loud), the Club de Jazz (pronounced: Cloob de Yazz). The show was fantastic. First, the headliner, a Swiss drummer named Christian Bucher soloed for 20 minutes in some very odd ways, including playing for a while with hollow sticks, which was awesome. Then a bassist and a pianist came out and they jammed for about a half hour, doing some weird experimental stuff. The group ended up being just me and Tim and Durham and Rosie. Tim and I got there first and saw the whole show and the girls got there about half an hour in. The next group was a Chicago-style quintet of Santiaguinos, including a music student from la Catolica on the sax who was sick. Wrapping up was a swing band, but at that point I was a little drunk and very much enjoying talking to the other kids, so I forget what they were called or anything too specific about them. The show ended around 2:30 and, very happy and somewhat inebriated, we went to HBH, the beer garden, which is practically across the street from the Club de Jazz, and ordered some schop negra (schop means draft beer here) and little pizzas, which set us back a little bit more (sometimes you just have to commit to an expensive night, that's what I've decided) and yelled because that place is LOUD. It was really fun and there were people at all the tables singing and cutting up and whatnot. Good times. I spent 40 bucks on the night (gulp) but had a spectacular time and now that I know what's up I won't have to spend so much next time. Tim and I decided that we'd be back at least once a week for the rest of the semester; we'll see how many trips that turns into but right now I'm pretty serious about going for it. I loved it there. Okay, now I'm hungry and am going to eat lunch. Classes start tomorrow (from the Dept. of Non Sequitors). Bye!
Then we walked around a little bit and people peeled off and went home and eventually Rosie and I were back at the cafe near her apartment with the delicious pizza. Unfortunately we couldn't order any because they only serve it after 8 and it wasn't that late yet, so she got tea and i got a coke and we sat outside and talked for a while. Then I went home and started making some calls about getting people together to go to my other new favorite place in Santiago (either you've been waiting on tenterhook to see what it is or you've forgotten that that's how this post started out...I fall into the latter category and I'm writing it, for crying out loud), the Club de Jazz (pronounced: Cloob de Yazz). The show was fantastic. First, the headliner, a Swiss drummer named Christian Bucher soloed for 20 minutes in some very odd ways, including playing for a while with hollow sticks, which was awesome. Then a bassist and a pianist came out and they jammed for about a half hour, doing some weird experimental stuff. The group ended up being just me and Tim and Durham and Rosie. Tim and I got there first and saw the whole show and the girls got there about half an hour in. The next group was a Chicago-style quintet of Santiaguinos, including a music student from la Catolica on the sax who was sick. Wrapping up was a swing band, but at that point I was a little drunk and very much enjoying talking to the other kids, so I forget what they were called or anything too specific about them. The show ended around 2:30 and, very happy and somewhat inebriated, we went to HBH, the beer garden, which is practically across the street from the Club de Jazz, and ordered some schop negra (schop means draft beer here) and little pizzas, which set us back a little bit more (sometimes you just have to commit to an expensive night, that's what I've decided) and yelled because that place is LOUD. It was really fun and there were people at all the tables singing and cutting up and whatnot. Good times. I spent 40 bucks on the night (gulp) but had a spectacular time and now that I know what's up I won't have to spend so much next time. Tim and I decided that we'd be back at least once a week for the rest of the semester; we'll see how many trips that turns into but right now I'm pretty serious about going for it. I loved it there. Okay, now I'm hungry and am going to eat lunch. Classes start tomorrow (from the Dept. of Non Sequitors). Bye!
Saturday, August 05, 2006
el internet dejo de funcionar
I wrote a whole post yesterday only to find out that the internet had stopped working while I was writing it. So that was fun. Anyhow, I'm going to the Club de Jazz now to see a sweet show and I'll write more when I get back or tomorrow. Today I climbed to the top of the tallest hill in Santiago and got a 360 degree view of the city, the cordillera and the smog. Oh, the smog. Okay, more to come. Bye for now.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
meet me in the city
That title has no meaning beyond it being the song I was listening to when I wrote it. Now is "The Light" by Common, followed by "Smoke and Mirrors" by RJD2, which is followed by "If There's Love" by Citizen Cope, "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" by, well, if you don't know you shouldn't be reading this blog, "Poppin My Collar" by Three 6 Mafia, and about 40 other songs. As you can see, I'm still working on that intro mix, and it's about as far from completion as it was whenever I started it. Anyhow, today was good, if a little frustrating. I went to PUC in the morning to check out a class I think I want to take called "Seminar on Latin America in the 20th Century." The San Joaquin campus is about a 45 or 50 minute commute from me, including walking, so imagine my stress as it first took longer than I thought it would to get there, then couldn't find the damn room it was in, then found the room and read the sign: "Seminar on Latin America in the 20th Century will begin August 17." FUCK. So I went to COPA, chilled for a little, preregistered for la Chile, and talked to Valeria and all the kids who are taking the COPA history class (about 10 or 12 of them...seems like a waste of time to me). Then I went and ate by myself cause everyone either left or didn't want to leave yet, came home, RAN (more on that in a minute), showered and went back to COPA to meet Rosie so we could go BACK to San Joaquin to do our PUC preregistration and.
The running felt, in a word, spectacular. The air here does suck, and I live high up, too, so it's way better here than the middle of the city, which slopes gently upward to the North and East (towards the cordillera). La Reina is waaayyyy East, so it's not so bad. But still, I could feel it. Also I hadn't run for weeks and I am really out of shape and I only ran for 20 minutes (hard, but still). But all that being said, I felt SO GOOD afterwards and stretching felt great and then I did pushups and crunches and the plank and it was wonderful.
PUC was frustrating again, because by the time I got back two of the classes that I had wanted to preregister for in the morning were full. FUCK again. But I got onto one that Isa said I would like, so I'll visit and check it out. Whoop de do. This was going to be a much better (read: longer) post, but my host brother Francisco came in and wanted me to translate yesterday's post for him. He seems very interested in me and is a great host brother for that reason; he always wants to talk to me, help me out with things, etc. So I did, and it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be! That was encouraging. I haven't been speaking enough Spanish because I'm still trying to figure things out with classes and the city and so it's just been a lot easier to chill with COPA kids. About that, though, Rosie gave me a really good justification today. She said that it's important for us to get close with kids in the group because later, when we're branching out, it will be important to have people here to come back to when we're stressed to whom we can communicate as clearly as we need. Spanish friends are important, but the fact of the matter is, our Spanish is far from adequate to express deep or complicated thoughts and feelings. We'll need each other less and less as the semester moves on, but for now it's great to be able to build a foundation of support. I like Rosie a lot, we've been hanging out a bunch the past few days or a week or something like that and she's super open and happy. It's good to hang out with happy people in a place that's so strange and overwhelming like this. I guess we've had a couple of those great college getting-to-know-you conversations that get sad and introspective. But it's okay, because she's so different from me and so interesting! In any event, this post ended up being medium-length anyway, so lucky you all. I'm going to do my Spanish homework (I cannot BELIEVE I just wrote that) and then go to sleep. Maybe with a little Elmore Leonard thrown in (I'm reading Mr. Paradise, which I picked up at the COPA office yesterday). 'Night.
The running felt, in a word, spectacular. The air here does suck, and I live high up, too, so it's way better here than the middle of the city, which slopes gently upward to the North and East (towards the cordillera). La Reina is waaayyyy East, so it's not so bad. But still, I could feel it. Also I hadn't run for weeks and I am really out of shape and I only ran for 20 minutes (hard, but still). But all that being said, I felt SO GOOD afterwards and stretching felt great and then I did pushups and crunches and the plank and it was wonderful.
PUC was frustrating again, because by the time I got back two of the classes that I had wanted to preregister for in the morning were full. FUCK again. But I got onto one that Isa said I would like, so I'll visit and check it out. Whoop de do. This was going to be a much better (read: longer) post, but my host brother Francisco came in and wanted me to translate yesterday's post for him. He seems very interested in me and is a great host brother for that reason; he always wants to talk to me, help me out with things, etc. So I did, and it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be! That was encouraging. I haven't been speaking enough Spanish because I'm still trying to figure things out with classes and the city and so it's just been a lot easier to chill with COPA kids. About that, though, Rosie gave me a really good justification today. She said that it's important for us to get close with kids in the group because later, when we're branching out, it will be important to have people here to come back to when we're stressed to whom we can communicate as clearly as we need. Spanish friends are important, but the fact of the matter is, our Spanish is far from adequate to express deep or complicated thoughts and feelings. We'll need each other less and less as the semester moves on, but for now it's great to be able to build a foundation of support. I like Rosie a lot, we've been hanging out a bunch the past few days or a week or something like that and she's super open and happy. It's good to hang out with happy people in a place that's so strange and overwhelming like this. I guess we've had a couple of those great college getting-to-know-you conversations that get sad and introspective. But it's okay, because she's so different from me and so interesting! In any event, this post ended up being medium-length anyway, so lucky you all. I'm going to do my Spanish homework (I cannot BELIEVE I just wrote that) and then go to sleep. Maybe with a little Elmore Leonard thrown in (I'm reading Mr. Paradise, which I picked up at the COPA office yesterday). 'Night.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
sorry for not posting yesterday
Somehow, deep in yourselves, I believe you have in you the strength necessary to cope with me not writing yesterday and not making up for it today by writing about yesterday and today in one post. Cause I'm tired and this is going to be short anyway. Suffice it to say that yesterday was just fine and dandy. And if you really can't handle it, I know a couple of good therapists, and one of my host brothers is a psychiatrist, so he might be able to give some pointers.
In any event, today was just fine, too. We had our first COPA Spanish class, which was, well, let's just say I went in with a lot of energy and after about 15 minutes wanted nothing more than to curl up and take a nap. Oh well. Beforehand Elan and Rosie and Alex and I got lunch at a place across the street from COPA with good salsa that would be mild in the US but here is practically atomic. It tasted gooooooooood. After the COPA class, I hung around the office for a little bit and then walked with Katty and Gabriela to Isa's house for help with my course selection. She was super nice and helpful and her apartment is very cute and she has good tea. I had her all to myself for most of the time (Gabby and Katty stayed for a few minutes but then had to leave), which was nice because everyone else went in groups and divided her attention.
An den I hauled ass on over to the Teatro Municipal, where a bunch of the COPA kids, courtesy of Elan's planning and persistence, met up to sit in the last row in the obstructed-view section of the TM for a concert given by a Chilean jazz singer named Claudia Acuña. She was very good, especially a song she sang in English called, "Goin' Home," which gave me many waves of goosebumps. There were also two guest musicians, one on sax and the other on clarinet, who were both great. Her band was good, although the drummer was just a twinge overzealous (i.e. he drowned out the sax solo because he was doing his own little flares). I could probably go on being critical, but the fact is it was VERY enjoyable and the TM is quite beautiful and distinguished-looking. I'll get a pic of it up one of these days. Then I came home, heated up the dinner that David prepared for me because Luz María is sick (stayed home from work today) and watched "¿Quién marece ser millonario?" (Who wants to be a millionaire) and Sportscenter in Spanish. And then I sat down and wrote this. GOD what a boring post. Apologies, and tomorrow's will be better, I'm certain. 'Night.
In any event, today was just fine, too. We had our first COPA Spanish class, which was, well, let's just say I went in with a lot of energy and after about 15 minutes wanted nothing more than to curl up and take a nap. Oh well. Beforehand Elan and Rosie and Alex and I got lunch at a place across the street from COPA with good salsa that would be mild in the US but here is practically atomic. It tasted gooooooooood. After the COPA class, I hung around the office for a little bit and then walked with Katty and Gabriela to Isa's house for help with my course selection. She was super nice and helpful and her apartment is very cute and she has good tea. I had her all to myself for most of the time (Gabby and Katty stayed for a few minutes but then had to leave), which was nice because everyone else went in groups and divided her attention.
An den I hauled ass on over to the Teatro Municipal, where a bunch of the COPA kids, courtesy of Elan's planning and persistence, met up to sit in the last row in the obstructed-view section of the TM for a concert given by a Chilean jazz singer named Claudia Acuña. She was very good, especially a song she sang in English called, "Goin' Home," which gave me many waves of goosebumps. There were also two guest musicians, one on sax and the other on clarinet, who were both great. Her band was good, although the drummer was just a twinge overzealous (i.e. he drowned out the sax solo because he was doing his own little flares). I could probably go on being critical, but the fact is it was VERY enjoyable and the TM is quite beautiful and distinguished-looking. I'll get a pic of it up one of these days. Then I came home, heated up the dinner that David prepared for me because Luz María is sick (stayed home from work today) and watched "¿Quién marece ser millonario?" (Who wants to be a millionaire) and Sportscenter in Spanish. And then I sat down and wrote this. GOD what a boring post. Apologies, and tomorrow's will be better, I'm certain. 'Night.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
