san jose

This will be short, as I have to get to the bus station in order to meet April and Katy in Manuel Antonio. Yesterday was long. I didn´t sleep a wink Sunday night, then all told was traveling for something like 12 hours (door in Stgo to door of hostel in San José. I really like San José, I´ve taken two long walks now and met some cool people in the hostel and basically enjoy the vibe here. It's kind of shabby and run down and cloudy (rainy season, I guess), but the people seem happy and open and everyone I've asked for help (trying to find a place to change my Chilean currency or how to get home when I got lost yesterday) has been really nice. The currency thing is a bit annoying, though. Nowhere in the whole country will give me a fair rate on pesos. None of the banks will take it, and the only currency exchange wanted to give me the equivalent of $34 on the $100 I have in pesos. I guess demand here to buy pesos is reeeally low. Oh well, I´ll just put it in an envelope and at the bottom of my bag and save it for when I get home. Anyhow I´m going to check out now and then maybe have another cup of (good, free) coffee in the hostel. On the hostel: it is called Hostel Pangea and I would recommend it to anyone coming down here. The staff is friendly and today I met my first-ever "Latin American person whose English is better than my Spanish" since I got here. He works at the front desk. The restaurant attached is good and pretty cheap (dinner last night was 5 bucks, breakfast this morning 3) and the dorms are 10 a night. Here´s their website. Bye for now!

contrariness

I'm going to start keeping a list of things I avoid or hate when they come out because everyone falls all over themselves to laud them, then come back to on my own, by accident, years later, and actually enjoy. Case in point: "Last Night" by the Strokes, which is currently playing on the radio, is not a bad song. It didn't deserve the lovefest it got from everyone five years ago, but it also didn't deserve my militant opposition to it. Go figure.

gross injustice...

...is what I will do to the past few days, given my state of tiredness and the fact that I won't have time to write anything more before I leave at the crack of dawn on Monday. I had a wonderful time with Grandpa and Marinell. We saw some great things, had a good time in Valparaiso in Viña, and ate good food. It was also great just to spend some concentrated time with them; I so rarely get to do that. They left on Friday afternoon, dropping me off at la Católica metro stop on the way out of town from our final lunch after Concha y Toro (whose website ought to be taken out and shot, or at least corrected). I finished my end of the FAFSA Consortium Agreement crap (finally) and left them for Katty to finish and fax on to Jennifer Myers on Monday. Ugh. This would not be a problem if anyone, anyone at all, had told me I needed to fill out such a form BEFORE I left the damn country. You'd think being in a program like the RC would take care of a bureaucratic oversight like that, but not this time. Oh well. Then I spent the past couple of days pretty much with Vale, walking around and watching movies and following the Pequeña Gigante (YouTube of her in London). It was really cool but less cool because there were more than 50,000 other people there, too, and so it was kind of hard to see sometimes. Tomorrow I'm going to get up, pack, go see her again (and hopefully take some pics) as she looks for her hidden rhinoceros, which wreaked havoc on a couple of buses the day before she showed up to look for it (Grandpa and Marinell, what we saw was caused by the rhinoceros escaping). She dances, showers, sticks her tongue out, swings kids on her arms, dances to music, blinks, moves her eyes, eats ice cream, pees, changes her clothes and sleeps--and her chest moves as if she was breathing. Amazing. Thank you, Royal Deluxe. Anyhow bedtime now. 'Night!

grandpa and marinell

Well, today was really nice despite a slew of minor annoyances. Grandpa and Marinell ran into trouble at customs, getting into the right line but in the wrong order, and didn't come out until more than an hour after their flight landed. The rental car thing went relatively smoothly; they got upgraded to an SUV. Then getting to the hotel was a bit dicey, even though we took the right way into Stgo (sorry MDLJ, it should have taken us two minutes to get onto Alameda) because of all the one way streets. Then we had to fill up the tank because it was almost out, which took forever because we couldn't find a gas station. Then we finally parked the car and got them checked in and went to lunch at Los Corrales, the Argentinian steak place. Then they went to take a nap and I went to the office to talk with Katty and see if I could take my own nap at Vale's. She actually suggested it before I could, I talked to Katty about the FAFSA mess (yes, Dad, progress is being made on that front, it's just confusing. I'll have it resolved before I leave) and then I went to Vale's apartment. After some trouble with the key, I got in and fell almost instantly asleep. She woke me up at 7:15 by ringing the doorbell and we sat and talked for a while and she made us both sandwiches. At around 8 I called the hotel as planned and they patched me through to Grandpa and Marinell's room, and we agreed to meet up in the lobby at 8:30. We went to Liguria, which ended up being a great choice. They both really liked the environment and their food and even though Grandpa wasn't too fond of the pisco sour he ordered we had a good time. And now I'm home and tired again, but want to watch a little of the state of the union if I can catch it on CNN. 'Night!

great weekend

Saturday I finally got lunch with Dan Schwartz. We met up and went to Patagonia and then Emporio la Rosa for ice cream and caught up. It's amazing how much he's changed, or maybe just how different he is from my memory of him. He talks a lot more coherently, he makes eye contact and gestures. All in all we were only together for about an hour and a half, but it was great to talk to him about Chile, his program here, how things are going in College Park, etc. After that I went up to Escuela Militar to meet Vale and take the micro all the way to her aunt and uncle's house (where I slept on New Year's). Spent the afternoon alternately relaxing and kicking her and her aunt and uncle's butts at Pensante, which is Spanish Scrabble. It was intensely gratifying. Vale had been talking trash and after the first game, she got so mad that she vacuumed the entire downstairs of the house. I couldn't stop laughing and had to avoid her for the next fifteen minutes because she said "Fuck you" every time she saw me. In the second game, I scored 222 (in a three-way game) thanks to a bingo (CANCELA). Third game, her uncle started to get frustrated, too, but that was actually kind of cool because he started making fun of me and such and it felt like a "Hey, welcome to the fold" kind of thing to do. We ate dinner, and then a few friends of her aunt and uncle's (their names are Cecelia and Rodrigo) showed and we commenced playing poker and drinking, which carried on for me until 2:30, at which point I'd lost four bucks and decided to call it a night. I played seriously for a while but literally could not have had worse luck (not to say that I'm any great shakes at poker, but really, I got shitty hand after shitty hand and the few hands I got that were good and bet on either someone else had a fantastic hand--four 10s or a flush or something--or no one else wanted to bet). Everyone else played until 3:30, apparently, but I fell asleep very soon after climbing into bed. Spent all day today at their house, relaxing, reading the New Yorker winter fiction issue, which MD brought from home (THANK YOU). Vale and I left around 8 and took the bus to MallSport, which is way up at the top of Las Condes (but not even close to as high up as Ceci and Rodrigo--they are WAY up there) in search of a frisbee. We were unsuccessful, and decided to walk to Alto Las Condes mall. We saw a beautiful sunset, had a great conversation (I spoke almost exclusively Spanish this weekend!), and walked and walked and walked. We ended up walking for about 2.5 hours, down to Tobalaba, stopping for a coffee in Parque Arauco. Dad, I'm very sorry I didn't call but I got caught up in walking and talking with Vale and just lost track of things like time and plans. I will call tomorrow. Anyhow I'd better get to bed, tomorrow is another paperwork day (let it be the last, please...) and then Tuesday, Grandpa and Marinell come and I have to get up early to go meet them at the airport. So good night for now!

HAHAHAHAHAHA if only lynn swann didn't suck so much...

Stephen Colbert on the NFL Playoffs

Just click on it. Stephen Colbert, you are the greatest thing since sliced bread (thanks to GorillaMask for the link). BRADY RULES! GO BLUE!

john scofield.

Oh my, what a show. I think it goes on my top-10 "Best 10 dollars I have ever spent" list. The opening act, a Finnish group called the Tube Factory, were good but kind of boring. But then Scofield and John Patitucci on bass and Kendrick Brown on drums came out and blew all 8,000 of us away. Whew.

In other news, I talked to Nicole today and am going to have lunch at her office next Wednesday. Also, went over to Dur's old family's house (I guess I should call them the Diazes now, it's shorter than "Dur's old family") to return a bunch of their CDs that I'd borrowed and also give them the Bill Evans Trio and John McLaughlin albums I bought at the beginning of the month. Just the mom and younger sister, Rocío, were there, and the mom had to leave about ten minutes after I got there to go to her son's practice baptism or something (he's marrying into the Greek Orthodox church...they're doing the full Big Fat Greek Wedding deal, it sounds like). So Rocío and I ate humitas and watched Chile's sub-20 national team absolutely destroy Columbia until I left around 7:10 to meet Vale and head over to the show. Good day.

yesterday blogger was being stupid

Also, yesterday we had an earthquake and I felt sick all day. I tried to go to the concert (day two in the Festival Internacional Providencia Jazz: Escalandrum and Contracuarteto) last night but left early. My chest hurt and I had a headache and it was getting cold. Of course, the instant I was out the gates I started kicking myself because I really should have just sucked it up. I'm sure the concert was awesome and I'm really pissed at myself still for leaving. But at the time it seemed like a good idea; I really did feel like crap. I'm a lot better today, and I'm getting pumped for the Tube Factory/John Scofield show tonight. Also, yesterday I called Nicole--she was in a meeting but I gave the guy who answered the phone my number and hopefully I'll hear back from her today about having lunch sometime in the near future. AND, more importantly, I finally worked up the balls to call my new host family. The daughter, Pili hija (mother and daughter are both named Pilar) picked up and said that she'd talk to her mom about me coming over this weekend! Pili will be at the beach but it'll be nice to see the apartment and meet my new host mom! So here's hoping both those things come to fruition.

In other news, I'm pretty pissed off at Stephen Colbert right now. His appearance on O'Reilly Factor SUCKED. This is the man who absolutely demolished Bushco and the entire mainstream media right in their faces, and yet got too wrapped up in his character to really do anything but a few subtle jabs. O'Reilly on Colbert Report was a lot better (including a much better stab at O'Reilly's phone sex scandal), but still! This could have been Stewart-on-Crossfire-eating-Carlson-and-Begala-alive good. And it wasn't. I guess I'm not pissed, really just disappointed. Oh well, it's okay, Stephen. I still love you. Anyhow lunch is served and I don't want to keep Luz María waiting, so bye-bye for now.

al di meola band

Today was largely uneventful until about 9:15. I woke up earlyish, went to COPA, filled out my portion of the Consortium Agreement, emailed my adviser about what to do about his portion (or if it even IS his portion, and if not, whose is it, blah blah blah), waited around for him to respond, did some Peru and Costa Rica research (hostel reservation for first night in San José, CHECK), and chilled with Vale until about 6:15, when we closed up the office and went over to her apartment, where she cooked up some Spanish rice and beef and a salad and we ate and then left for the lynchpin of the evening: See title of post and time mentioned in first sentence.

We got to the western entrance to the sculpture garden and the line to get in was around the block. Vale and I went up to the ticket counter, where they told her they'd just sold out, and that I was on the wrong side (I had lawn seats, which are split into two groups there by the expensive seats in the middle). So she walked me around to the other side, where we said see you tomorrow and I waltzed on into the jammed lawn. There weren't very many chairs left, but one of the luxuries of being alone is that finding one chair in a sea of people is about eight million times easier than finding two next to each other. So I got pretty close and the magic started just about on time. They opened with a few more recent electronic songs and then he introduced the band and himself and he and his percussionist, whose name I'm forgetting at the moment, did four duets while the rest of the band joined the audience in noisy appreciation. They were unreal together, and so obviously having a blast that the energy infected the whole crowd. It was great. They played a bunch of other stuff afterwards (2 hours in total, including three curtain calls), but the show peaked for me with those acoustic duets. Wow. After the concert ended I walked back to Providencia and found myself with a craving for sushi, which was easily remedied by a trip to Miyoshi. American sushi restaurants should learn from the Santiaguino "everything 50% off after 6 p.m." discount. Anyhow I didn't sleep much last night due to the Coke I drank with dinner (which David brought from Burger King! What!?!?! But lord it was good...), so I'm going to try and fix that right now. Tomorrow I'll likely be back down in the COPA office to finish off this blasted FAFSA crap. Ugh, I hate it. Oh well, life could certainly be worse. 'Night!

back from algarrobo

Spent the past five days at Algarrobo, staying with Katty's mom, Blanche, who lives here half the year and in northwestern PA half the year. It was wonderful, I did nothing productive except call Grandpa and Marinell to talk a little about plans for when they come down (in less than a week!) and email Katy and April my final itinerary. I talked to Rosie on her birthday, which was nice. It sounds like she's having fun back at school, and that's good to hear; she was worried about the transition and coming back together with all her friends. I lay on the beach, went kayaking, took a long walk with Vale along the beach all the way to Mirasol, the next town to the north, watched stupid TV, finished The Woman at the Washington Zoo, by Marjorie Williams, which I generally really liked. She was a very insightful and observant writer, and I enjoyed reading her pieces, especially the ones about feminism and her cancer, because those are two subjects I am interested in but don't know enough about. But the footnotes by her husband, who edited the book, drove me insane. I'm sorry, I know she just died and that this is his labor of love for her, but I wanted to tear out every cutesy little comment about his own involvement in her stories, or what had happened since then (which were so scattered and informal as to seem random--sometimes there, sometimes not, as if he hadn't been paying attention to a lot of the news and only put a comment in when he had to look up what had happened himself and then assumed no one else had been paying attention, either), or snide remark about some politician or other. I also made it up to the start of WWII in A Treatise on Poetry, Dad's Christmas gift to me, which is Czeslaw Milosz's long poem about Poland and particularly Polish poetry in the first half of the 20th century. It's beautiful and makes me wish I spoke Polish and also that I knew a lot more about Polish history.

In other news, Boston Legal is on at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. HOLLAAAAA!!!!!

Anyhow I'm going to start looking at Costa Rica and Peru activities and lodging now, so time to stop this post. Hope everyone who's reading this is well. Bye for now!

more pics

And here are some more. Sorry they're not in order, Blogger does that. God knows why.

ofoto sucks

Trying to use Ofoto Express to upload pictures made me want to kill someone, so I'm just going to use blogger's horribly inefficient uploading thing to put these up, as per Mom's request. I'll get that other piece of crap figured out sometime but for the moment I'm taking deep breaths and trying not to yell. It's almost 2 a.m. after all. So here are some pics from the vacation, sorry for not posting them earlier. Enjoy!

no ross or dan

Dan called me around 10 to say they hadn't ordered yet at the restaurant and could we hang out tomorrow or something. I'm leaving for the beach tomorrow about noon, after taking care of some more paperwork at COPA, and they leave for Valpo on Sunday, so that's kind of disappointing. But they get back from Valpo a week from Sunday, and will be in Stgo for a couple of days, so we'll just have to hang out then. So tonight I'm going to watch V for Vendetta (which I've always wanted to see despite iffy reviews).

In better news, I can go to Peru and Costa Rica after all! THANK YOU DAD AND MOM!!!!!!!!!! Sorry, I'm not usually one to overdo the punctuation like that (except ?!?!?!?!?, which I really like). However, here I think it was merited. Also, tomorrow I leave for Algarrobo! That ought to be really nice, I'm actually going to finish packing as soon as I finish this post. Which will be soon, right after I gleefully point out that Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly will be appearing on each other's shows in the near future. Bill O'Reilly is a disgusting moron and Stephen Colbert is a bona fide genius. This ought to be fun like when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and basically destroyed Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. I look forward to the inevitable YouTubing of the shows, because I obviously won't be able to watch down here. That's all for now, sorry to be so boring this post. 'Night!

tim left

Last night was Tim Wilkins' last night, so we (me, Vale, Gaby, Tim and his friend from Emory named Sarah) went to Thelonious and saw an okay act and then went to CRAZY BAR, which has reopened months after it closed. I guess it must just have gone under for a while, because they sure hadn't spent the time doing renovations or coming up with a new business model. Same old kind of crappy place, reeeeally slow service and a guy playing covers on the guitar. It was just as close to empty as always, but still, it has the best name of any bar I've ever seen (wouldn't be funny in the States, though) and we came here so much at the beginning that it had a nice feeling of closure for Tim. We had a lot of fun and there was even a couple who came in at one point who had just gotten engaged! That was fun and kind of weird: A) They chose to celebrate their engagement at a nearly-empty; and B) The guy was really excited and drunk and kept coming over and talking to us, going up to sing with the guitarist, and so on, and the woman was just sitting there, smiling occasionally. I got home at around 5 and fell asleep as fast as I ever have.

Today I went to the office for a while and chatted with Vale and got the ball rolling on this Noyes descendants-of-WWI soldiers scholarship and wrote some emails and researched things to do in Stgo over the next month. January is really cool, all this open-air theater and music and cinema, all for really cheap (I'm hopefully going to get to see Al Di Meola and John Scofield for about 5 bucks each! That's an errand for tomorrow, to the ticket office). Also read my daily dose of blogs and came across a post on Hullabaloo (link at the right, check out the post called "Moral Hazard"), which has a section about this new stupid book about how every American is a swing voter and you can tell someone's tendencies by certain lifestyle choices. The book has a website which features a questionnaire that allegedly tells you where you fall on the political spectrum. To give you an idea of its accuracy, it put me in the red camp. Smart fellas, those authors. Here's the poll, if you're interested. Anyhow I've barely eaten anything all day and I'm not hungry, but it's bad not to eat and so I'm going to fix myself some dinner and force it down.

mozart's librettos

I just read the first half of a New Yorker piece from this past week about new books on Mozart's librettist and the ongoing debate about how much of a role Mozart played in the writing of Marriage of Figaro, Cosí fan Tutte and Don Giovanni. And I thought, this could not matter less. It's like arguing whether Mom or Dad had the greater hand in deciding what color to paint the kitchen. Who cares? And yet, for all that inconsequentiality (if that's not a word, it should be), it's so interesting to so many people. Why?

new jazz club

Tonight I met up with Gaby and Vale in Patio Bellavista and we went to this new-ish jazz club (first time any of us had been there) called Perseguidor, across the street from Off the Record. Cover and prices were about the same as the Club de Jazz but the place was nicer and the band ROCKED. It was a quartet: drums, piano, stand-up bass and trumpet, and the trumpeter was very good. He'd studied at Berklee and the Manhattan School of Music or whatever it's called and really know how to play. The drummer we'd seen before, at the other Bellavista jazz club, Thelonious, which we didn't like as much. Good to know about the new place, it's a hell of a lot easier to get to than Club de Jazz, which is still worth going to when it has really cool shows like Valentín and Pedro Amat Trujillo. Anyhow now I'm tired as hell and going to bed. Also, Bill Evans Trio kicks ass.

good-bye, peru

I'm about thiiiiiis close to giving up on the Peru section of my trip with Katy and April because I just don't think I can afford the flight. Oh well, Costa Rica will still be tight and maybe when I get home I can go up to Bahía Inglesa or one of those other northern beaches. Fingers still crossed that this travel agent lady can hook me up with a sweet deal, but I kind of doubt it. And now, to run.

flight 93

So I sat down to eat lunch today and turned on the TV, watched a little of the Chilean coverage of the inauguration of the new Congress and then channel surfed my way to "United 93," which had just started. I had never seen it when it was in theaters in the States; I think I was scared of it. Turns out that I was scared with reason. I had never, ever in my entire memory cried during a movie before but I cried just now right here in my living room. It is without a doubt the most powerful movie I've ever seen. I'm not sure what else to say about it at the moment, I'm still a little dazed. So that's all for now.

bill simmons can go to hell

One of my favorite weekly readings in Bill Simmons' column The Sports Guy. But this week he got lazy and republished a column from 2001 about how we shouldn't all worship Cal Ripken so much because, after all, he wasn't THAT great of a player and his streak was counterproductive for the Orioles and there was really not much but dumb luck and stubbornness involved and all this other crap. Well, Bill Simmons, I get goosebumps every time I think about exactly two (2) sports events. One is Duke's 22-point comeback over Maryland in the 2001 Final Four. The other is Cal Ripken's lap around Oriole Park in the middle of his 2131st game. So screw you, Bill Simmons, I'll bounce my grandkids on my knee and tell them about getting to see Cal Ripken play because of that memory alone. And just because you're soulless doesn't mean you should try to spoil it for the rest of us.

Lyric of the year to date:

I been thinkin' bout Alicia Keys, couldn't help from cryin'
When she was born in Hell's Kitchen I was livin' down the line
I wonder where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I been lookin' for her even clear through Tennessee
-Bob Dylan, "Thunder on the Mountain"

finally posting again

Well it's been too long, there's so much to tell and I'm going to end up giving a wayyy too short summary because to try and reconstruct the last two weeks in their entirety would be a mighty and probably impossible attempt indeed. The day after my last post, I went to pick Lincoln up at the airport in the early morning and then spent the day with him and also with all the leaving people. Saying goodbye to Rosie was very hard. Lincoln and I had a great and very relaxing two days and then MDJ came and we spent a couple of days in Stgo, a couple in Valpo (as the first real guests at the very nice new B&B Yellow House Hostel: their site is here) and Zapallar (where we had Christmas day) and then finally a few days in Pucón in the south. We had great weather overall and even in Pucón, which was lucky because they get a lot of rain down there. It was really wonderful to have the family down here, they got to meet Vale and Gaby and my host family and we had a great time. Traveling with family is very different from traveling with friends, I realized, because we can fight all the time and in the end it doesn't really matter; we still have a good trip. I got to talk to Mom and Dad about things I never really had before and that was also cool, it felt like a big growing-up step. I was very sad to see them go on the 31, because I realized then for real that I won't see them again for longer than I hadn't seen them before. That sentence was pretty tortured, I'm sorry.

But I didn't have too much time to be sad because I had to hustle over to Alcántara, where Vale and her aunt picked me up to get ready for a New Year's party at some friends of her aunt's. It was a costume party and I went as a sultan thanks to Vale, who rigged me up some fancy pants and bought me a very nice sultan hat complete with brooch and feather. It was a fun party, if a little weird. Everyone there would be in the ex-frat/sorority mold were they from the States, they were all really rich and knew it and for one of the songs we danced to the chant started, "Whoever doesn't jump is Bachelet!" That is, if you're not dancing, you're a dirty socialist. HAHAHA...oh, wait. Well anyhow they were nice to me and we all got really drunk and everyone hugged everyone at midnight and then we watched the fireworks downtown, which we could see because we were high up enough on the hills (you basically don't live high up unless you're loaded). They were great. I spent the night and all the next day in Vale's aunt's house, recovering with the adults from the night before and playing Playstation with their kids. I didn't leave the house or even really a prone position (with breaks to change location) until about 9, when we went to Bravissimo and her uncle treated us all to heaping amounts of ice cream. I got home around 11:30, exhausted, and found Francisco using my computer for a work report; his has finally pooped out, it seems. So I went to bed and woke up this morning and took my blood pressure for the first time also in too long, which reminds me that I need to put the readings from this morning onto my spreadsheet. So I'm going to do that, and cut this off. Sorry again for not posting at all the past couple of weeks and I promise to get more regular again starting now. Oh, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!