i shaved

Finally, I just did it. I asked Luz María where I should go to get my hair cut, and she told me about a place around the corner. I went, sat down right away, paid 4900 pesos and walked right on home. Beautiful day, today. I got my stuff together right away, camera included (photos of the process below) and went to the upstairs bathroom, where the light is way better, and commenced. It feels really weird but I'm really glad to be free of the beard. I like the way I look with it, but a break was necessary, it was starting to drive me crazy. Okay, enough words, here are the pics:


The longest it got


This is how my beard looked most of the last year


Thought I'd have some fun with it. Tried striped but they were harder than expected, so I went with the half-beard look instead.


And then the half-fu manchu. Or whatever you call this thing.


Clean!

banana republicans!

I thought this was funny. Sad, but funny.



In other news, it poured rain ALL DAY yesterday. And I do mean all day. It was the first gross day in a while, 56 and just coming down. But today is back to sunny skies and 70s, so I guess one day isn't so bad. Also, we went out for Indian food last night because Vickie (who is Indian) has been jonesing for some for a long time and made reservations, with some difficulty, for ten of us last night at the best Indian restaurant in Santiago, which is in a Best Western, of all places, but was really pretty good. Really expensive though. Especially for here. But it was worth it just to have different flavors in my mouth for once.

yes!

I just felt my first earthquake! FINALLY! The house sort of rocked a little bit, slowly, for about thirty seconds. I was confused at first, it felt like the washer/dryer at home was in full swing and I was on the second floor, but my room is on the first floor and no washing machine on earth could make everything move like that. Can't believe that took me almost three months, there have been others since I've been here but I've somehow missed them. In other news, this article about Tariq Ramadan in the New Yorker is very interesting and also pretty distressing: George Packer in Talk of the Town. Meanwhile the French government has decided that what happened to the Armenians in 1915-1916 in Turkey was genocide and saying otherwise should be against the law (BBC Online article about it). Because, you know, the government starting to tell people what they can and can't say always works out for the best. Anyhow, I'm off to cinema class.

midterm wasn't so bad

A little harder than I expected, I guess, but not horrible. I did spring a moderately bad bloody nose in the middle, which was irritating. I still finished in plenty of time (as did everyone else, Mom and Dad) and then wrote up my proposal for the research paper I have to write for Chile chilenos class. I've decided to write about the free trade agreements Chile has signed in the past few years (with Mexico, the US and China) and the ones it's thinking about signing, and whether all this new commercial openness is good for the country or not, on economic and cultural levels. I'm not exactly happy about it, but I'm a lot more comfortable writing about that than Nicanor Parra or Pablo Neruda and I'll definitely learn a lot in the process. I've decided that as soon as I get my hair cut (hopefully in the next couple of days, as soon as I find a place) I'm going to shave. Then I'll be all nice and clean. I like the beard but it's time for it to go. Also I've let it get really long and I definitely don't like it like this. I'll take pictures along the way--I'm thinking I'll trim it back to how it was for most of the last year, then maybe shave some stripes into it or something, then shave it all the way off. We'll see. In any event, Chile chilenos class was about the same as usual today, boring and repetitive with some interesting observations thrown in. Rosie pointed out after class that our professor, Corea, is pretty sexist, not in a misogynistic way but in the sense that he is very comfortable with thinking of men and women in their traditional roles, that is, the "women are mothers, men are sons" dynamic that predominates in Chile. According to him, this is a macho society but not a masculine one; women dominate the home and family, which are much more important here than in the States. He proposed today that this results from the conquistadors' practice of raping and then abandoning Mapuche women hundreds of years ago: Left with no adult male in the family, the children grew up without a masculine role model and learned to see mothers as dominant in all things. But the women were sexist against themselves, so their children grew up admiring men and masculinity but relying on their mothers. I'm not really sure what to make of all that, but I have found that to be true about family dynamics: Francisco and David are totally dependent on Luz María but speak of their father, when they do at all, with some degree of reverence, even Francisco. I'm not sure their father abandoned them, but Luz María certainly isn't on good terms with him and the brothers only see him every so often.

Anyhow, I'm up way past when I meant to go to bed. Let me conclude by saying that on facebook, Michael Steele is WAYYYY ahead in the Senate race. And the only people on facebook (I guess it's more open now, but still, the vast majority) are young people. He's that far ahead with people MY AGE?!??!?! FUCK!!!! I'm going to register to vote absentee right now. Anyone who still supports Bush et al. at this point is utterly beyond me. I used to be able to see how people could find him worth follwing with the right combination of willful blindness and already-wrong political beliefs, or maybe just a belief that he was somehow a "good Christian," but now I just can't. What is the matter with America? We have gone so far astray... And on that rather disheartening note, I'm going to register and go to bed. 'Night.

p.s. Do you ever write something and then look back over what you've written and completely forget writing a phrase or sentence, or even why you might have written it? That just happened to me. It was weird.

i continue to grow

Today I slept, ate lunch, studied briefly for my midterm tomorrow, went to pronunciation class, had a talk with Rosie that was wearing but ended up being good, had a coffee and read Ficciones, went to Hooter's (incredibly, my first time ever in a Hooter's) with Rosie, Durham, Tim, Vale, Gaby, Justin, Amalia and a Chilean boy whose name I've forgotten but was really nice and asked lots of questions about the game, to watch game one of the ALCS. Detroit, 5-1. REPRESENT MOTOR CITY! Not that I've ever really pulled for the Tigers before, but of the four teams left, I'm all for 'em. Sometime soon I feel like I'll write about all these mysterious things I'm thinking about myself and trying to change and all that, but not right now. Now it's time to go to the bathroom, work on this mix I'm making and go to bed. Shout-out tonight to Jack Johnson for his awesome cover of Badfish/Boss DJ. 'Night.

el huerto

Finally made it to the vegetarian place in Providencia, after a little more than a week of trying to find a time. Met Rosie around 2:15, we walked around for a little bit looking for it, then found it and luckily it was open. Today was a holiday and all the other restaurants on its street were closed, but it was doing a pretty decent business. We sat down right away and our waitress was really nice and saw us right away without being hovery, which was a nice change for South America. The food was delicious, we got toast with cream cheese rolled in sesame on lettuce and carrots for an appetizer and then I got a quesadilla, burrito and rice for my main course. Rosie got a smorgasbord of different things, which were also all very good. It was a little on the pricier side, but that's all right every once in a while and I also spent so little money this weekend that I felt okay about it. Rosie and I caught each other up on our weekends (she'd gone to La Serena with the Ñuñoa kids and Sara) and then walked back to her apartment, where we did some homework (I studied for my Spanish midterm, which is on Wednesday...GULP, and she read for her gender identity in Latin America class). Then I came home, at a delicious dinner thanks once again to Luz María: salad of red lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes with the usual oil-and-vinegar-and-lemon on top and then mashed potatoes and really juicy chicken. I guess this post is about food, but the food today was so good. Then I watched football (YES!) and tried to explain it to Francisco, who seems to have forgiven me for snapping at him the other night. I think I did a decent job, although I neglected to mention how much different scores are worth. Oh well. Today he was all chummy and hit me on the face and neck and tried to pull me towards him by the shoulder again. He doesn't grab my ear anymore because I yelled at him once about that, now he just makes fun of me about not liking it. God, he's kind of an asshole. I'm surprised it's taken me so long to realize this, especially after his great-aunt told me straight out. I'm going to stop writing now. 'Night.

the 100th post

Well, it's been 149 days since I started this thing and I've finally hit 100 posts. I guess that means I haven't kept up with my original intention to post every day, but that's all right. I kind of feel like this would be a good time to comment on the mental and emotional benefits of writing down what I've been doing and thinking, but I don't really have any deep thoughts to share on the subject. I have really enjoyed and appreciated being able to use this tool to basically keep a journal, something I've tried to do multiple times during my life but always failed at. Something about the typing, and the knowledge that there's an audience...but that last part can't be it because I've started journaling for myself, too, in my school notebooks. Freewriting, mostly, just spitting out what's on my mind without thinking about what I'm saying. Being able to look back later and say, "Oh yeah! I remember doing/thinking that!" is really quite nice and I'm sorry now that I haven't been doing this for longer. I started out with the intention of using the blog for commentary, observations, meditations and things like that, but it has turned more into a chronicle, with a few of those things thrown in when they come to me. I'm mildly disappointed in my lack of deep thoughts and astute observations, but maybe my expectations were too high. We can't all be Octavio Paz. And a chronicle is still helpful and fun to write.

Anyhow, as for today, I was going to go to the Precolombino with Laura and them but they left about half an hour ago, so I'm left to my own devices instead. That's fine, I think I'll work on Ficciones and maybe go try and find a decent cafe in walking distance of my house, which I still haven't done. The ones downtown are so much closer to class and everything else. Maybe take a nap. I would love to go running, because it's beautiful again today, but I'm not sure that'd be good for my shoulder. It's feeling a lot better, but I still don't have my full range of movement and I definitely still can't exert more than a tiny bit of force with it. Instead I think I'll go to a park and sit outside. Not as satisfying, maybe, but worthwhile all the same. First, I'm going to eat lunch. Luz María has gone off to visit family (she has a LOT of family) with Francisco, I'm not sure where David is, and my lunch (meat, rice, salad...Oh, Chile) is in the kitchen waiting for me to put it together. There's also the remains of the pasta I cooked last night. Cooking in a strange kitchen, by the way, is a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. Anyhow, using the microwave is as easy here as at home, and that's what I'm going to do now.

To everyone who reads this (and I'm sure there are at least three of you), thanks for reading, hope you've enjoyed yourselves so far and gotten something out of my babbling, even if it's just to know what I'm doing.

relajado

Tonight, instead of going out, I cooked myself some pasta and sausage, planted myself in front of the TV and watched Get Shorty, Lost in Translation and the end of Swim Fan. Francisco came in around the middle of Lost in Translation, somewhat drunk, and tried to talk to me about the movie but I was trying to watch and he just kept talking and making wisecracks about how I was being cold and dramatic and finally I said, "Look, I'm trying to watch the movie," and he went away. He's a very inconsiderate person, really just doesn't pay attention to what other people want unless they bang him over the head with it like I did tonight. He's funny and interesting and likes me, so usually it's not so bad, but sometimes I just want to yell at him. But other than that mild unpleasantness, I had a terrific night. Unless something really horrible happens tomorrow, I think this weekend can already go down in the books as a great success. As to the movies: Get Shorty is one of my all-time favorites and it was my fourth or fifth time watching it, Lost in Translation was interesting and actually if it hadn't been right smack in the middle of the movie, while people were talking and things were happening, I would have liked to talk to Francisco about what he started saying about the movie being a meta-stereotype. Like I said, he's interesting. Swim Fan sucked. Now, it's time for bed. 'Night.

tour guide

The past couple of days have been wonderful. Friday I woke up late, talked to Cori for an hour or so on IM, went down to COPA to meet Valeria. I'd told her I would go apartment shopping with her, so we talked for a bit in the office while she got the place ready for the weekend, and then left and started walking around the neighborhood, getting flyers and phone numbers and so on. I really like her a lot, we had fun and she ended up deciding on an apartment! It was really funny, the woman who showed it to us thought we were together (Valeria looks younger than 28 and I look older than 19, so it was understandable) and started talking about "when you have kids..." and things like that. High humor. She went to fill out paperwork and I walked downtown. Laura called around 6:30, just before Valeria and I parted ways, and we arranged to meet at 8 at metro Santa Lucia, downtown. I went to the Biblioteca Nacional, which is very pretty but was mostly closed when I got there. This week maybe I'll go back during the day and explore a little more. Then I wandered around downtown for a while, looked vaguely for a pair of jeans (my only other pair has a big hole in the crotch) and an mp3 player/radio, ran into Valeria again right outside Almacenes Paris (a big department store chain here) purely by coincidence, and turned my aimless window shopping into "I need some jeans, so I'm going to buy a pair." We went into Paris and I found a pair for like 18 bucks. Good purchase, I'm wearing them right now and like them. Vale and I parted ways again and I went to meet Laura and them. Sushi sushi sushi (so good) and then we met up with a couple of their other friends and Izaak(!), who was really good friends with Laura back in the day but hadn't seen her in years, outside the restaurant. He hung out with us for a bit but had to go catch a bus to Pucon, so we taxied on over to the jazz club.

It was pricier than I thought it would be (5000 cover, a little less than 10 bucks), so four of Laura's crowd went to HBH instead, but Laura and Katherine and Nora and I went in and ordered some drinks. Tim, Vale and Vickie came too, and then Valentín Trujillo himself came out and played a 1.5-hour set, with his 13-year-old grandson Pedro Amat Trujillo singing for about an hour of it. They were both incredible. It was a great show. And then Durham, who was there with her parents, came over to tell us that her parents had picked up our tab! Yay! We rejoined the other half of the Viña kids and went to a bar on Plaza Ñuñoa for a while. Then home.

Today I woke up, chilled for a couple of hours, ate lunch with the family, then met up with Laura and them again in Patio Bellavista, where they had ordered lunch. They ate, I got a Sprite and then I saw Durham and her parents (Candy and Weir--such great names). I went over to talk to them, and realized that I needed sunblock. The kids finished eating, paid and we walked down Pio Nono to Cerro San Cristobal (I bought and put on some SPF-30 on the way). It was a glorious day, 80, dry, cloudless, with a light breeze...mmmmm. There was a bit of a line at the funicular that goes up San Cristobal, but it moved along and we were at the top in no time. The view was spectacular, because on top of the great weather, the smog was very thin today. Really nice. We went down and then to Emporio la Rosa, the great ice cream place that's near COPA. It was jammed. Laura and I both got lúcuma milkshakes and everyone enjoyed themselves. And, of course, we ran into Durham and her parents again. The Viña kids all wanted to take naps, so they went back to their hostel and I came back here and now I'm going to go eat dinner. Still unsure what I'm doing tonight...could go to Barrio Brasil with Laura and them or to HBH with Vale and Tim. Decisions, decisions. Such a difficult life I lead. I'm feeling very nice right now. I've had a great talk with one of my best friends who I don't talk to enough, gone apartment shopping, eaten sushi, gone to a great jazz show, gone to the top of San Cristobal and walked around on a gorgeous day and hung out with a friend who I hadn't seen in ages. All pretty much stress-free. Wonderful. Okay, time to find out what the fridge has in store for me. Peace OUTSIDE!

blood pressure

I woke up this morning and realized that I haven't been taking my BP as much as I should. So I took it, and it came out to 120/78, with a pulse of 55! Lowest reading ever, and absolutely normal. So anyhow, that's making me happy right now.

today was busy

I thought I had a test at noon; in fact my professor told me exactly a week ago that there would be a test today. So I stayed up late last night cramming as much more of the reading as I could into my head (if anyone's interested, it was two chapters from John Lynch's Latin America: Between Colony and Nation) and then waking up early to make sure I was on time and wide awake for the test. Turns out she decided the test will be the 16th, so today was just a painfully boring lecture about population growth in Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Mexico in the latter half of the 19th century. I like that class a lot in general, I'm learning a lot from it, but sometimes, well, let's just say that today's lecture was bad for my state of alert readiness. So we got out of class, got our tests from Monday back (fast! I did well, too...) and I hauled ass on over to COPA, where I did the corrections for the essay that was due last week and then the homework for class today, went to class, got out of class, finished the stupid assignment for Chile chilenos class, printed it, then waited in blissful laziness for Rosie to show up. I forgot to mention lunch: I ran to the panadería a couple of blocks from COPA, got a pair of empanadas and a Coke, and downed them in record time. More on that later. Rosie got there, finished HER version of the stupid assignment and we walked to class. It was a nice day today, if a little cooler than it has been, but super clear and the air was great. The cordillera was practically clear two days after being almost completely obscured by smog. Not a bad turnaround, Santiago. In any case, class was boring as usual, we turned in our thingies and left. I came home, talked to Luz María, ate dinner, was unbelieveably tired, watched the last half of "George A. Romero's Land of the Dead" or whatever that movie was called and part of "Black Hawk Down," came back in here and started working again on that stupid essay due tomorrow in cinema class. Death to papers, this weekend can't come fast enough. Funny how I said that last week, too. Oh well, next week will be just as bad (midterm in Spanish, among other things) and then I'll be home free for a little while.

Back to lunch for a minute: Today I spent 1770 pesos on lunch and no other money, which means I turned a profit on the day because the COPA families are required to give us 2000 pesos if they don't make us a lunch. This might not be the first day I've come up in the black on a day here, but it doesn't have much company. I felt oddly good about that. Especially because this weekend Laura and them (apparently not Mara) are coming and it probably won't end up being a particularly frugal weekend, showing them about town and so on. At least we'll have gorgeous weather and a good jazz show. NEWSFLASH: I just got distracted and it turns out Valentín Trujillo is playing on Friday at the Club de Jazz. I got reservations for four automatically, just sent an email out to COPA people asking if anyone was interested. Trujillo is a great Chilean pianist; David is a big fan and gave me a recording of a concert he gave of Gershwin, David did the lights for another show of his and got an autographed copy of this album out of it. I really like the album, so I'm pretty psyched for the show. I hope it's not already booked, but I think I'm probably overreacting and he's not as famous as I think. I just imagine that he's famous because I know about him, and if I know about him, then a lot of other people must, too. It's not like I've got my ear to the Chilean jazz underground in search of hidden talent, plus he's a grandfather, so he's not exactly an up-and-comer. Anyhow I hope there's a table and I hope it's a great show. Now I've got to do some more essay writing. Wish me luck. 'Night.

machuca and dream

Last night I watched a really interesting movie called "Machuca," about a couple of boys at Chile's most elite prep school during the coup in 1973. One is very rich and the other very poor, part of the principal/priest's initiative to bring quality education to everyone. It's a really interesting look at the stratification of Chilean society at that time and it's also a moving portrait of a young kid growing up without wanting to or really knowing why.

Also, I had a very vivid dream, of which I remember the last part, and I want to write it down somewhere, so here goes: I was on the metro in DC with a friend who was blond, and we got off at Tobalaba, which is where I transfer to my line here in Santiago but in the dream was an awful lot like Takoma. The friend was trying to get home but didn't know what bus to take from the station, so we asked Riley, from the Boondocks, who was standing outside of the station looking for his bus. But my friend didn't know what his neighborhood was called, he kept saying names that sounded vaguely like neighborhoods in Santiago and I kept saying names of real neighborhoods (¿Sótero del Rio?) and Riley said, "Man, if you don't even know where you live, how am I supposed to to help you out?" So I was like, well, whatever, you can just come back to my house. So we walked past all the buses, which were American school buses but with big cardboard Chilean protest signs dangling off of them, along Takoma Avenue and ended up walking up onto my front porch. There was a package for me wrapped in tinfoil with a note, and suddenly I knew it was my birthday, but I hadn't told everyone. I picked up the package and we went inside, and Izzie ran out to meet us and the friend sat down on the stairs and she started jumping on him. I said, "It's my birthday" and the friend didn't say anything, so I unwrapped my package, which contained a loaf of pumpkin bread. That's all I remember. Sorry to be boring, now it's time to get dressed, grab a bite and hustle on down to my second Relaciones entre Europa blah blah blah test of the week. Wish me luck!

nothing to report

Okay so the title is a lie. I took my first real test down here today (Relaciones entre Europa y América Latina) and I think it went really well! Although who knows, maybe the professor grades really hard. Well, it's over with and I'm relieved. I have another test in that class on Wednesday (today was a makeup because I missed the first one due to my shoulder), which ought to be a little harder. Oh well. Other than that, my day was pretty damn boring. I ate lunch with Katie, went to Spanish class, hung out with Rosie for a while (she was in a weird mood, let me tell you) and then came here. I'm going to go make dinner today and then try to get a little homework done before tomorrow, when I have to do homework all day (although part of that is watching a movie and then writing a baby essay about it). 'Night.

finally went to bellas artes

Today, I wandered around for a long time with Rosie looking for an open place to eat lunch, found one, ate there, wandered around looking for el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in the wrong place, found the Museo de Arte Moderna instead, went inside, looked at everything, liked a bit of it but not most, found the MNBA, went in, thought it was okay, got a milkshake (oh yes...), watched a bit of a reggae show in Plaza Italia, came home, ate once, talked to Luz María, David and Francisco, came in here and suddenly was overwhelmed by exhaustion. I don't have as much homework as I had thought yesterday, which is nice, but still, the prospect of doing it makes me even sleepier. So I'm going to do that and then call it an early night. Except the new season of the Sopranos is on at 10. Oh MAN I'm glad I remembered that. Okay, time to get cracking on my moronic Spanish essay. Wish me luck. 'Night.

today was an improvement

Today was good. I woke up in the morning, showered, ate some yogurt and toast with jam (everyone makes fun of me for calling it marmalade in English, but I do it because I say "mermelada" so much in Spanish that it just rolls off my tongue as "marmalade" now), went to meet Rosie for lunch at a vegetarian joint in Providencia, but ended up running out of time in transit because she had to meet Tim at 2:45 for the gay pride parade in Plaza Italia (three blocks from her apartment). So I just ended up chilling with her for a little bit. Tim came by on schedule and we walked up to Plaza Italia to find a kind of meager and quiet crowd assembling at 3 (the scheduled start time). But the crowd grew steadily and some music got going from trucks parked along General Bustamante street. It wasn't a big gathering by any stretch of the imagination, especially for a city of 5.5 million: maybe 400 people all told. But plenty of drag queens and outrageous political statements and flags and even a walking condom. I took some pics, we walked around, met a girl from California who had been looking for the parade in the wrong place and found it by accident (love when that happens), we sat down, people watched for a while and decided it was time to get something to eat. On to Amadeus, where we just missed the lunch kitchen, much to my disappointment. But we got some hot drinks and a big, delicious slice of raspberry-chocolate cake. Tim has been feeling sick and realized he couldn't finish his tea with milk, so after my cortado I polished that off for him. We sat there for a while, just talking about things. It was really nice, Tim's really cool and I like that I've been spending more time with him in the past couple of weeks than in the beginning. He and Rosie talked about how crazy it is that they've only got 2.5 months left, which really is pretty nuts. That's 10 weekends. No time at all. I can't really relate because I've got 9.5 months left, but even that seems like not so much. I'm in single digits month-wise. Weird. I was about to write that on the one hand it feels like I just got here and on the other it feels like I've been here forever, but the truth is that it feels like I've been here just about 2.5 months. I'm comfortable here, still-meh Spanish be damned.

Anyhow after Amadeus, we went back to Rosie's, chilled for a while, Tim left to get food and figure out what to do tonight. I had really wanted to go to the Club de Jazz tonight, but Gaby and Vale bailed on me and no one else was interested and so I was disappointed. I thought about going alone, but couldn't stand the thought of that. Just too lame, too much money for the social payback. Who knows, maybe I would've met some awesome person if I'd gone, but I was disheartened and sapped of desire to do anything after getting shot down. I ended up just watching City of God with Rosie and then coming home. Which wasn't so bad, in the end, I'd been wanting to see that again and am glad I did. It's a very good movie, if you're prepared for the brutality.

So now I'm home and not really tired and writing this. Also, I want to relate an idea that I had for writing the other day, which might be incredibly stupid but I don't care because it tickles me. Wouldn't it be interesting to write two parallel or somehow connected stories and then overlap them by alternating words. So if one started "Once upon a time..." and the other "Call me Ishmael..." the finished product would go "Once call upon me a Ishmael time..." It just seems like it'd be interesting to see the sentences and phrases and such that resulted from that. Tim pointed out that you might even need to have three stories to make sure the reader understood what was going on. I am a genius and one of these days I'm going to do that. The above idea is copyright Luke Bostian, 2006, so nobody even think about stealing it or I'll sue you blind.

On a slightly down note, neither Mara nor Laura called today, so that was kind of a bust. But that's all right, I was half-expecting them not to call. Still, it's a disappointment. This day was kind of lame, actually. I didn't do very much, I ate practically nothing (I haven't been eating particularly well the past couple of days, which will change tomorrow because if I leave the house at all, which I might not owing to my homework load, it'll be to hit up that vegetarian place in Providencia) and I had a couple of medium-sized disappointments. But I'm in a good mood nevertheless. Songs of the day: Taj Mahal's cover of "Johnny Too Bad" and "Seed 2.0" by the Roots. 'Night (or should I say, 'Morning?).

weekend!

Finally, at long last, here I am. This week was really only 2.5 days long, but it feels like months. After my horrible Tuesday came a not-so-bad but still stressful and work-INTENSE Wednesday, during which I wrote two papers and started my third. I worked on that last one (the 6-pager for cinema class) until around 4 a.m. and then gave up for the night, set my alarm for early, woke up and worked on it--with breaks for a shower and food, of course--until 2, when I finally couldn't take it anymore and went to class with something that I could have turned in but wouldn't have been very proud of/wouldn't have gotten a very good grade. I got all the way to class in San Joaquin, only to find the room empty with a note on the door saying that a professor in the department had died and therefore all classes were cancelled for the day. Relief, relief, relief, and as sorry as I am that the department lost someone, my initial reaction was just to giggle. Which I did. Then I went to Rosie's, we got dinner, watched some trashy TV and I came home and slept like the dead.

Until just about noon today (I guess today is technically Saturday, but I'm still in Friday mode), when Rosie called to say, "Hey, are you coming to my doctor's appointment." She had scheduled one for her stomach problems at 1 today and I really wanted to go. After a few moments of confusion I said yes and hauled ass on down to Salvador, met Rosie and went to the clinic with her. We were there for a while, met with a doctor, etc. and then made our way to a park at the end of Line 5 of the metro, which was really quite nice. We sat in the grass and I read (Another Country, by James Baldwin...undecided on how I like it so far...and she wrote in her journal and the sunset was gorgeous. Tonight we went to a new jazz club, Thelonious, which is in Bellavista but a little off the regular path we take there. It was nice, had a good atmosphere, a lot younger crowd than the Club de Jazz. The band was all right, had a couple of really good numbers, it was a little pricey but no more so than the Club de Jazz. I like Club de Jazz more, still, but it was cool to see an alternative. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll meet up with Mara and/or Laura and get to show them around town a little! Now I'm tired and need to go to bed. 'Night.

stressful day

So after two weeks of infirmity and then travel combined with infirmity, I realized today how much homework has piled up under my nose. I had whatever my equivalent is of a panic attack, because I rarely even get stressed out about work, let alone VERY stressed, but I was today. I calmed down, though, and got a chunk done. There's still a lot to go; tonight and especially tomorrow won't be full of sleep, but I think the 11 hours I got last night recharged me enough to make it through without going crazy. I talked to a bunch of people from home today (Julia, Anita, Laura W, Katie, Annamurph, Hannah M) and also had some facebook exchanges with others: Peaches, who is going through hard times, and also Laura Melle (freshman-year-of-high-school girlfriend, for those of you who have forgotten or didn't know she existed), who is in Viña and coming to Santiago this weekend with a big group of kids from her program, including Mara Gay, who's a friend of mine at Michigan. I'm really excited now, I haven't seen or talked to Laura in at least a couple of years and Mara since school got out. In all, though, I've had a stressful 24 hours and my ongoing personal revelation combined with stress about Rosie and classes and also all my conversations with people from home has all combined to make me very homesick, for Silver Spring AND Ann Arbor. I even thought briefly last night that what I really want to do is finish out the semester, then go back to Silver Spring and just get a job, figure out what I'm doing. Obviously that's not going to happen, I'm committed to being here and I'm committed to graduating and in general I'm very happy with all of this, but I'm starting to feel flashes of doubt. All my confusion and realizations and everything are a little too private to share on here quite yet, but they'll come out as soon as I figure out what they all mean. Anyhow, I'd better get back to work. I think I'll make another cup of tea first. 'Night.

by request

Differences I noticed between Bs As and Santiago:

-Santiago's metro absolutely kicks the pants off of the Bs As system...dramatically more extensive, faster and cleaner. Actually, I felt like Santiago (except the air) is just cleaner in general.

-Buenos Aires is bigger: It took a lot longer to get to interesting places in the heart of the city than it does here. Once you're in the middle of Santiago, nothing is really more than 15 minutes away on public transportation or your feet.

-Buenos Aires has nicer water. Santiago has the ugly, smelly, concrete-banked Río Mapocho. Buenos Aires has the enormous, beautiful River Plate and various offshoots, which may be polluted but are still pretty nice.

-Buenos Aires is cheaper in some ways: Public transportation is half as expensive (not to say that the buses or metro here are particularly costly--much cheaper than the states) and taxis are a lot cheaper, less than half of what they cost here, I'd say.

-Buenos Aires felt more like an American city in some ways...parts of it reminded me a lot of Harlem in terms of the height and age of the buildings, the way neon signs run perpendicular down the fronts of the apartments, the underground parking lots. It made me want to go back to Harlem to see if this is a good comparison or not.

-Santiaguinos are darker, shorter and heavier. The relative influence of Europeans and Amerindians on Argentines versus Chileans was striking.

-Santiago feels more modern. The Chilean national IDs, for example, are very advanced, with multi-colored background print, textured surface, complicated barcode, etc....a lot like an American driver's license but more so. The Argentine national IDs are pieces of pink paper with photo and thumbprint pasted on and laminated together.

-Argentinians really DO eat a ton of steak, and it's good steak, but Chileans make up for it by having better empanadas.

I'm sure there are other things that I noticed but that's what I can think of now, off the top of my head. I'm going to publish this and then try to put some pictures up. Bye!

remember how i said i'd write from bs as?

Yeah, so turns out that was harder than I thought, what with the high demand for the hostel's lone free computer and also the absolute lack of free time. So, in lieu of that, here's a synopsis of the trip:

Left just about six hours after I wrote my last post, as expected. Everything about getting on the bus went off without a hitch, except I was sitting next to some old, fu-manchued, tight-lipped Chilean who was convinced that he had the aisle seat, even though there was an almost stupidly clear diagram above all the seats showing which was which...you know the one: person obviously standing in the aisle because there sure as shit isn't anyone floating outside the bus, seat 15, seat 16, window. I was in 15. Moron. Anyhow I ended up spending most of the time sitting next to Rosie anyway, reading some Bruce Chatwin, watching bad movies and trying to sleep. I bought some sleeping pills, given my history of difficulty with falling asleep without being able to get totally comfortable (i.e. anything but a perfect bed), but they didn't help much. I only slept about 4.5 hours total out of the 24-hour ride over the Andes (quite spectacular, I'll add a pic at the end) and then through the incredibly flat Argentine countryside. We got to Bs As around 11 on Thursday morning and went straight to our hostel, El Cachafaz (the lamplighter, I think) Youth Hostel, to check in. It was a nice place, GREAT people, all very young, okay beds, well-kept. One drawback was the death stairs leading up to the third floor, where our room was. They reminded me of the stairs in the bell tower in Siena, but falling apart and wooden. But no one fell, thank goodness. About two minutes (literally, maybe even less) after we got there, who should walk up the stairs but Julia! I seriously haven't been so happy to see anyone in...well, in I don't know how long. We went out for a bite to eat while Rosie and Amalia showered (the other kids were in a different hostel for space reasons). She had a meeting and I went back to the hostel, from which we walked to the Casa Rosada and Plaza de Mayo, where the famous Mothers of May march every Thursday afternoon. They have been around since the disappearances, starting as a small group of mothers whose children had been abducted by the government marching in protest of that and ending up, today, as a huge organization running schools, a bookstore and even a university. And, of course, still marching. Then we walked around the old docks for a while, which are no longer used but now have upscale apartments and restaurants and whatnot. Rosie had never seen the Atlantic Ocean, so after a little MORE lunch (and a Guinness for me! Yay, Guinness!), we tried to go down through a park to the big body of water that ran off the edge of our maps. But the park that leads to it was closed and, we found out later, it's not the ocean at all but the River Plate. So Rosie still hasn't seen the Atlantic Ocean. Oh well, her time will come. That night we ate pasta and then went to a bar near Julia's house. It was fun, and a couple of Rosie's friends from school joined us, and they were both really cool.

Friday was amazing. We woke up, ate a very (even by South American standards) spare breakfast and walked to the Buenos Aires cemetery. After walking around the whole thing trying to find the entrance, we ended up in a beautiful old church complete with a museum of artifacts from the Franciscan (?) brothers who used to live there. At last, we went into the cemetery, which was staggering. Row upon row upon row of beautiful, wildly variable, majestic, ugly, black, grey, blue, white mausoleums. Again, a sample picture or two will follow this post but they won't do the place to justice, the sheer packed-ness of it and the grandeur. Really one of the strangest places I've ever been. After that we ate a steak lunch served by a very strange waiter at a restaurant across the street from the cemetery and went to the very impressive Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Very cool place, some really interesting stuff, especially by a modern Spanish/Argentine painter who goes by a Portuguese name that escapes me at the moment. Leix...something. Anyhow that night we went out to a club where everyone on the first was, get this, doing line dances! So weird, all these kids know dance after dance after dance. Anyhow upstairs there was just regular dancing, so I spent most of the night dancing, mostly after rescuing my friends from sketchy Argentinians.

The next morning we went to the Plaza Italia in search of some gardens that Julia really likes. It wasn't that nice a day and we ended up only staying in the first one we found for a few minutes before hitting up a small feria. I bought Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Marques and Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, used. I'm excited to start them. Then we ate lunch, where they had an item on the menu called a "Maryland special"!!!!! I took a picture of the menu but couldn't bring myself to order it because it sounded gross. Julia and I walked back to her apartment, which was a few blocks from the restaurant, and everyone else walked to bigger feria to do some cheap Buenos Aires shopping. We walked there ourselves and sat and talked for a while. It was a great conversation. I am still thinking about it. Then we went and did a little looking around. I bought a new, genuine Argentine leather belt to replace my beat-up vinyl one and a t-shirt that cracked me up so much I couldn't resist. It was a strange feeling for me...the belt I knew I needed but the shirt was just an impulse clothing purchase, which I can't remember ever making before. Mom and Dad, maybe you know better, but I really can't think of anything. Maybe during the Jnco phase...Saturday night we had a very delicious steak dinner with a very competent waiter; altogether a much better experience than our steak lunch. Also the restaurant provided us with a huge baked Alaska and free champagne because it was Julia's friend Ian's birthday (he had tagged along for the dinner). Me and Tim went with Julia, Ian and one of Rosie's friends (both named Alex, this was the shorter one) to a "board games bar" that sounded super cool but was jammed. We walked around the corner to a little dark bar, where I was mostly just tired, and Tim and I went home after not too long.

On Sunday, we woke up and went to yet another feria, this one mostly full of antiques. But Rosie's stomach was giving her crippling pain, so after a few minutes she and I went to sit down and then she said she wanted to go back to the hostel. So I ran to find someone else (we had planned to meet up about 45 minutes later) to let them know we were leaving, found Tim and Esther and ran back to Rosie. We took a cab back, got an empty bed for her to lie down in, but she was feeling so bad that she couldn't even stay lying down. She told me that she would be in the emergency room if we were in Santiago, but we were in Argentina and leaving in two and a half hours. I said she should maybe go anyway. She went and threw up (which she had wanted to do since the previous night but couldn't) and I talked to a really nice Chilean guy who told me that if we went to a hospital and told them we were foreigners, they would see us fast and for cheap. This seemed brilliant to me, but Rosie took a little convincing. The lady at the desk gave us the address of a close-by hospital and we took a cab there, too. They saw her right away, the doctor was very competent and clear and nice (the clarity was especially nice, considering the strangeness of Argentine castellano), wrote out some prescriptions and some directions for Rosie to help her take care of herself. We were in and out in less than half an hour. There was a pharmacy around the corner, where she got the prescriptions filled. All told, including cabs, it cost less than 35 dollars. The wonders of socialized health care. Back at the hostel, she took her meds, which immediately made her feel better, and we walked to by some bland food and water and then it was back to the bus station.

The ride back was on a much less modern bus, but we had movies and it was 5 hours shorter due to fewer stops and faster drivers, so no real complaints. Also I slept a little more than on the way over, again I really think no thanks to the sleeping pills. Oh well, they cost less than 4 bucks. Got home, ate lunch, checked email, talked to Francisco, left to go do homework with Rosie and bring her roll bag back to her (saved my life, that bag...no way I could have handled a backpack). Ended up having a weird conversation with her, getting a little Spanish done, watching most of a very strange Martin Scorcese movie about Nick Cage as a paramedic in New York over my reading, coming home, finding a bunch of people here to celebrate Francisco's birthday, which he said nothing to me about, eating dinner, drinking some wine and trying to listen to their very fast conversation, then coming in here and writing this.

Moral of the story: Study abroad is worth it for the personal revelations alone. Not that I said anything about that above, really, but it's true. More true now than I even thought before. Amazing. Okay, time to go to bed, I haven't slept a whole lot the past week. 'Night!

update: Okay, blogger is combining with my erratic connection to make uploading photos impossible. I'll try again tomorrow.
update 2: here are the pictures!


Acongagua (the one with the cloud on top)


View of the cemetery from the second floor of the cloister museum; it goes on at least as far beyond that row of trees


A couple of statues in the cemetery


Me and Julia at the big feria; I'm looking at whoever's taking another picture of us


Chilean customs

t-minus 6 hours

Well, I'm leaving my front door a little before 10 tomorrow morning for Buenos Aires. It's 4:15 in the morning and I haven't started packing. Too much else going on in this little head of mine and then too much use of TV to distract myself. Thank you, CSI/Law & Order/Charmed/ESPN/Scrubs. I felt a little sick today, I think as a carry-over from the absolutely insane amount of food I ate yesterday at Luz María's barbecue. But not so much anymore. Sorry I haven't been writing as much as I should on here, I want to write more but it's been a busy few days. I'll definitely be posting from Argentina. Anyhow, time to decide between packing now and packing in the morning. And by that I mean in 4 hours when I wake up. Better start now. 'Night!

sunday, midday

Okay, I can officially use two hands to type again, so here goes my first decent post in a while. First, shoulder update: So after all the stress and phone calls and x-rays and worrying about whether I was going to have surgery or not, it turns out that my collarbone isn't actually dislocated at all. It looked that way on the x-rays in the eyes of the three doctors who looked at it last Thursday, but they brought them to the hospital's top radiologist over the weekend and the conclusion was that I just have oddly constructed collarbones and the difference in angles of the left and right x-rays. This doesn't change the fact that my shoulder hurts a lot and I still can't use it for that much (I still immobilize it when I have to walk a lot because otherwise I swing my arms as soon as I stop paying attention and that hurts). I am very sick of hospitals and doctors, this year has been too full of them.

In other news, we're in the middle of the "Fiestas Patrias." Tomorrow is the actual independence day, but the party here lasts for a week plus, starting last Thursday and going through next Friday. So yesterday I went to a "fonda" in Providencia (one of the comunas next to mine), which is basically like a county fair in the states, with lots of traditional crafts and games and performances and fried food. It was really fun and I'll definitely go to the big main one in Parque O'Higgins tomorrow. Rosie met me at the one yesterday and we walked around and watched things and got a really, really unhealthy dinner (really fatty pork, white bread, baked potatoes and french fries and Pepsi). Then we talked about our whole state of affairs, which was hard and made me sad. We went back to her apartment and picked up some wine and chicha (the official drink of this whole week-long party--it's a fizzy grape drink but isn't champagne) and called Durham and Tim Becker and had a little party in Rosie's room watching Barb Wire with Pamela Anderson. Then we went downstairs to Vickie's apartment, drank some more wine, argued about where we should go and decided, wisely, on Bellavista. We ended up in a tiny little bar off Constitución where there was a guitarist and two singers performing and we got some shrimp empanadas and beers. It was a good time, not crazy or anything because that's still out of the question for me with the shoulder, but still it's always nice to just laugh a lot, and we did. Tim and I split a cab home, but I still ended up paying 3000 because the stupid cabby took a roundabout route and by the time he had taken the turn away from the quick route (it's a fork so I couldn't tell until after he'd done it which way he was turning) it was too late and we were on one-way streets, so I couldn't say anything. Oh well. He's gotta eat, too.

In still other news, for those of you who don't know, Michigan thrashed the shit out of Notre Dame yesterday IN South Bend, 47-21. I was at the fonda during the game but as soon as we got back to Rosie's apartment I checked the score and all my sadness melted away, replaced, at least for a little while, by straight jubilation. Now, I will sing the fight song at the top of my lungs.

HAIL! TO THE VICTORS, VALIANT
HAIL! TO THE CONQ'RING HEROES
HAIL, HAIL TO MICHIGAN, THE LEADERS AND BEST!

HAIL! TO THE VICTORS, VALIANT
HAIL! TO THE CONQ'RING HEROES
HAIL, HAIL TO MICHIGAN, THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WEST (GO BLUE!)!

Now I have goosebumps. Man, I miss school. Also, in the past week, my relative immobility has meant I'm following international news a lot more closely, which has been good. And I watched the whole second season of the Sopranos (unreal), Batman Begins (terrible, Lincoln, you were right) and Rosie and I went on Thursday to see "El Rey de Los Huevones," which is a comedy by Chile's most popular filmmaker, Boris Quercía. It was fantastic and we both understood about 90% of the dialogue and 100% of the plot, which was really cool and encouraging. Highlight from the film: Quercía's character, who's a cab driver, is taking a couple of gringos to a flight at the airport and for reasons I won't go into here they end up being really late, so when he asks them to pay the man gringo says, "No way, I'm losing my flight!" I guess they didn't bother to consult anyone who actually speaks English when writing the script. Also, they're stopped by the side of the road and the man gringo says, "How the fuck did we get ourselves into this fucking mess?" The actor did a pretty good job with an American accent, though. Anyhow I guess I'll cut it off there. Feels good to actually write a full post, better than I was expecting at the beginning. One last thing, for Dad or anyone else who's interested: If you're looking for a new CD to buy, might I recommend "Valentín Trujillo al piano" by, you guessed it, Valentín Trujillo. It's a recording of Trujillo, who is Chile's greatest pianist, giving a concert to a small group of family and friends and a lucky few others of Gershwin and Cole Porter and other old American classics. He's a wonderful player and all his commentary is left on the album, so you can hear him talking about the music. I guess that wouldn't be as cool to you because you don't speak Spanish, but still, he has a great voice. My host brother did the lights for a show of Trujillo's and met him afterwards and got him to autograph the CD. Apparently he's a great guy, to boot. Okay, that's it. Take it easy, everybody.

the past week or so

Well things have been pretty interesting. Sorry I haven't posted in a while, typing is hard with just one hand. As soon as I get the right one back I'll write a long post. Most important news: It appears I won't have to have surgery after all, although we're still not sure. I sent the x-rays to Dr. Kline yesterday and will go to the central Catolica hospital tomorrow to get examined again. I have decided that this is the year of getting fucked with by doctors who can't decide or don't know what's wrong with me. First the whooping cough, then with my "elevated" blood pressure, now this. I'm sick of hospitals and x-rays of my chest and being told I'll have to come back for some more tests. I just want to be fucking WELL for a couple of months. Is that so much to ask? More later...

overwhelmed

So I dislocated my collarbone pretty badly last night playing frisbee. At least I was making a sick D at the time. But anyhow after going home on the metro like an idiot, David and Luz María drove me to the hospital, where over the course of four and a half hours I got examined and x-rayed and so on. I'm going to have surgery next week sometime. So it's been a little intense, in a lot of ways, which I may or may not get into later. Sheesh.

sorry i haven't written in a few days...

Well, the past few days have been kind of rough. Rosie and I broke up, for a bunch of reasons, and it's probably for the best that we did but still it sucks at the moment. I don't feel as bad today as I have for the past couple of days, but still, I don't like it and neither does she. The whole process has also made me think really hard about myself, about parts of me that no one else knows about but that resonate very deeply in my personality and the ways I relate to people. Other than that, though, the past few days have been good. I finally got the stupid fucking reading for my Europe/Latin America class, thanks to Nate. And now, it turns out, he's got the second set of readings we have to do. Joy of joys! I've been plugging away at that; it's not hard at all but it's long--somewhere in the 120-page range. A cinch in English, not so much in Spanish. Last night our Chile, los chilenos y su cultura professor invited us out to a famous historical bar called La Piojera, which is, if not the birthplace, then at least the most well-known place to get a "terremoto," ("earthquake"), which consists of cheap red wine and vanilla ice cream. At least, I think it was vanilla, with the wine working its way in there, who knows? I really liked it, despite all my friends who had tried it before hating it, and had two. And almost everyone from the class went (I think Rosie, Brigid from frisbee, a gringa whose name nobody knew when the prof was taking attendance and she'd left class early, and one Chilean kid were the only ones who had been in class but didn't go), so we had some really interesting discussions about the relative importance of racism versus classism in Chile and the US, literature, the degree to which Chilean culture has begun to drift away from traditional Spanish culture and borrow more and more from American culture as it industrializes and commericializes...pretty much all in Spanish. I was sitting next to a girl named Ann, who's from Luxembourg(!) and speakes Luxembourgese, German, French, Spanish and English. Not fair. But she was really interesting and the gringos to my right were really interesting and the prof is really interesting and the Chilean guy, Gonzalo, sitting right to Ann's left was really interesting, too. He gave me some book recommendations, which I will certainly check out ASAP, because I've been looking for a good Spanish book to read and Inés, which Luz María gave me, I found lacking. Anyhow I really hope this post publishes because I've gotta go buy a bus ticket to Buenos Aires and I have no time for "Could not connect to Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail." Well, hope everyone who reads this is having a good day. And finally, a shoutout to LINCOLN, who's on his way up to college for the first time! Good luck, Blinkin! Represent with respect! Bye for now.

ramshackle

you've been so long
your blind eyes are gone
your old bones are on their own
so take off your coat
put a song in your throat
let the deadbeats pound all around

we will go
know where we know
we don't have to talk at all
hand-me-downs
flypaper towns
stuck together, one and all

the bargains you drive
buckets and bags
and all your belongings
your train's in the sand
ramshackle land
let the rats watch the races

we will go
know where we know
til we find a one and all
hand-me-downs
flypaper towns
stuck together, one and all

praises get spent
your trick face is bent
pigsties and prizes
cause there's no kind of wealth
you're suiting yourself
you leave yourself behind

we will go
know where know
til we find a one and all
hand-me-downs
flypaper towns
stuck together, one and all

-beck

I have listened to this song at least 10 times in the past 24 hours.

valpo

Did you know that the primary difference between Valparaíso and Valparaiso is the use of the accent in the former? Also that one is a beautiful port city an hour and change from Santiago and the other is a college in Philadelphia. But the main difference is the accent. We went to the city today, about ten other COPA kids, Katty and Valeria, and me, and took a shit ton of pictures because it is a very photogenic place, especially on a gorgeous day like today. I haven't uploaded those yet, but there are a lot and some of them are very nice. Only drawback was the early wakeup, which I barely made because my alarm clock failed me. Thank god for having to pee. But despite my continuing inability to fall asleep on or in anything that moves, the fresh air and great views energized me and I was awake for the day. We took a little foray in a tour boat out to the middle of the harbor and back, which was nice if oddly directionless and unexplained, and then walked around various parts of the city. We ate in a weird restaurant with big picture-window views of the ocean (one neat thing about Valpo is that you can see the ocean from EVERYWHERE, because there's a law against buildings being built on the hills that block the view of the buildings behind, that is, higher up. There are 45 hills, all named, and they serve like little mini-cities. Each has its own feria and stores and firemen and when you ask someone here where they're from, they name their hill. Also, it's a working port, so there a few big ships in the harbor and big loading and unloading cranes and containers from all over the world. It used to be a lot more important, but then came the Panama Canal and, well, why go around Cape Horn when you can save thousands of miles worth of fuel and time and risk? Still, there's definitely activity and we got to see the huge dry-dock in the middle of the water, where they float ships in and then raise the platform in order to clean and do repairs and whatnot. There were also three or four navy ships on a special long dock, and sea lions on a little platform, which barked at another sea lion that was trying to join them and smelled horrible.

Anyhow, then we came home and I ate dinner and talked to Gabby for a while, which was nice. It had been a little bit since we talked and he's leaving for Paris on Tuesday, so it was good to talk to him. The fam tried to call but somehow failed (I'm still not sure what happened exactly...), but will try again tomorrow, so that's all right. Lincoln leaves Sept 6 for RISD...exciting! But we've gotta get a conversation in before then cause after that it'll be hard. Less so if Mom and Dad and Jack get Skype (cough cough) at home and Lincoln does at school, but still, harder than when they're all together. I wrote a Spanish essay and now have to do some reading for class tomorrow, which probably won't take very long, and watch some TV because on top of all the activity of the day I have been preoccupied with something vague and strange for the past 4 hours or so and need to veg out and stop thinking about anything. Take care, my peoples. 'Night.

gratuitous picture of sherlock and izzie

Missing home (Ann Arbor AND Silver Spring) a little today, so here are some pics of Sherlock and Izzie, courtesy of Lincoln.

oye

Okay, today it's time to vent about the Chilean university library system. Which, if it was a person, I would want to kill at the moment. So, here goes, and tell me if this makes sense: In la Chile, where the class I need these particularly evasive readings for takes place, the professor tells the library which pages of which book are necessary for the class. Then, the students go, one by one, and check the copies out to go photocopy themselves. This means that any other student, coming by to pick up the readings, is just fucked if they're checked out. Which they always, always are. I've been to the library at la U 6 times now, and it hasn't been there yet. So today, I looked the book up online at la Católica, and found out that I could go to the Architecture and Urban Studies campus (which, incidentally, is quite nice) and get it from their library. So I went. But you need a special card to get into that library as a foreign student, and you have to go to the Casa Central, which is across the street from COPA but far from where I was, to get that. So I got the solicitation form for the credential and left, empty-handed and furious at the sheer idiocy and clumsiness of the system. My plan was to call Rosie, who was feeling sick, and see if she was well enough to go the Nicanor Parra exhibit at la Moneda with me, but when I called she sounded very upset and so I went to her apartment. Turns out she had just been sleeping when I called, but she was very sick, so I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon, evening and night keeping her company in her misery. I finally left her house around 11, having not eaten for 10 hours, and caught a bus home, which was a lot easier than I thought it'd be. Going to start doing that more often. Ooh! Good news! Because I'm going to be here for a whole year, Isa thinks she can get me a transportation discount card that would cut what I pay for metro and bus by 2/3!!! In not-so-good news, I spend too much money and am running low on funds. I would really have liked to go out tonight, but tonight is the beginning of my increased frugality, so home it is. Stressful. Stressful day, but I am surprisingly calm. Hungry, though. So time to eat dinner, at 1:20 in the morning. 'Night.

it IS september...holy crap

This post was going to be a play-by-play of my day yesterday, but I realized that I hardly did anything yesterday worth noting, so in lieu of that, here is a poem I like (thanks, Dad).

"Pi"

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can't be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn't stop at the page's edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief - a mouse tail, a pigtail - is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star's ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.

-Wyslawa Szymborska

it's almost september...holy crap

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.

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.

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!

today, i ran hard

Very hard. For a long time.

see that link over there on the right?

The one that says "Professor Juan Cole's "Informed Comment'"? Click on that link.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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