October 9, 2008

Brazil nuts and raisins

It's been too long. I know.

But considering I've been out of Santiago for four nights of every week for the past four weeks or something absurd like that, I feel okay about the delay.

So jumping backwards, last time I left off I had just returned from Valdivia and Puerto Varas and was spending the week trying to catch up (which has pretty much been the theme of my time in Santiago...) But that studious drive didn't last long. Wednesday night Maggie and I met up with a very international crowd of kids (I think five continents were represented) and headed out to After Office Santiago, a very posh club/party scene held in the castle on top of Cerro Santa Lucia. It's technically meant for the professional crowd (hence After Office) but somehow we managed to get our names on the list. I can't imagine anything more surreal than this whole ordeal. You arrive at the foot of Cerro Santa Lucia (a hill/park in the middle of Santiago) and hop into vans with tinted windows that take you up to the castle gates and drop you off in front of a fountain lit with torches. I felt like I was on an episode of some dating show like the Bachelor. The guards at the front check to make sure your name is in the massive book of guests, then stamp the underside of your wrist with a UV-light stamp (invisible under any other light I suppose so you won't get in trouble the next day in the office). Then you follow a winding prom staircase into the castle, which has been completely transformed into a club. We somehow manage to get VIP bracelets and we are escorted into a supposedly nicer upper level (though it really looks exactly like the non-VIP section). Madonna is blasting (Oh those Chileans and their obsession with the 80s), everyone is dancing and drinking and being oh so posh. The median age is about 35 but no one seems to care much that we're there. By the end of the night Maggie and I are exhausted so we hop our respective buses home and that is that. Certainly an experience...

The next day, I was lucky enough to be visited by my lovely Elena Pinsky, a friend from home who made the trip from Buenos Aires all the way to Santiago just to visit me and get a taste of Chilean culture. She got in before I was done with classes so I met up with her at my home, where she was already deep into conversation with Carmen Gloria about the differences between dulce de leche and manjar, condensed milk candies in Argentina and Chile, respectively (I know I may be denying my Chilean loyalties, but I really do prefer ducle de leche). My family prepared a traditional once for Elena to experience and we just kind of hung out and caught up and discussed with Marta, my host mom. Then I took her down to Bellavista to check out the night life. I guess it was too early for us to really see some action (it was only midnight, after all) so we just holed up in a cute little cafe for a taste of Pisco Sour and Vaina, traditional Chilean drinks.

The next day I showed Elena the best of Santiago (which, for a tourist, can be covered in a day or two--this is not the most beautiful or most tourist-friendly or most exciting the world...Chile has better to offer). We walked through Santiago Centro, hit up the Plaza de Armas, wandered on Cerro de Santa Lucia and ate some delicious fish in the Mercado Central.

Mercado Central

So Chilean...the market, the flag, the Pisco Sour

Then, off to the bus station to meet up with Maggie for our adventures on the coast...

The three of us got into Valparaiso, Santiago's coastside counterpart and the most important port city in Chile, at around 6 PM, just in time for sunset. Valparaiso is the English muffin of South America, full of nooks and crannies. It's completely organic and surprising and in constant movement. It's a bright, colorful city of houses sprouting out of hillsides and murals splashed on crumbling walls. Standing on top of one of the many cerros (hills) and looking out at the horizon is like an I-Spy game--endless details pull you in. The clotheslines blowing in the breeze, the port machinery slowly and deliberately lifting cargo onto ships, the micros crisscrossing the hills. No matter where you are there's something to see. It's a city with character.


Me and my Pinsky standing on one of the cerros of Valpo

Wandering the colorful streets

That night we checked out one of Valpo's mainstays: El Huevo, a huge warehouse club with five levels of different music styles and a salsa lesson on the rooftop patio (how could we miss that?). The next day we hopped a micro to Viña del Mar, the neighboring beachside city that's a bit more posh than Valpo, making it a popular weekend spot for santiguinos. It looks like it was ripped from Florida. Palm-tree-lined streets, pizza shops, beachside boardwalk. It was nice for a day trip and a nap on the beach but I mostly liked it because it gave us a great view of Valpo...which meant it was time to head back. On the way over to Valpo (a 10 minute micro ride) we stopped to eat some chorrillana, a local favorite. I'm sure my friends and family will not believe this but what we ate was this: a HUGE pile of french fries smothered in chunks of steak, onion and fried egg. Oh, it's good. But I mean it's good.

Maggie had to get back to Santiago that night because she was planning on climbing a mountain the next day (oh my crazy friends) so Elena and I were left to our own devices in the hostel. We decided to go out with the other guests. All in all, we were two Irishmen, three Germans, one Frenchman, one Mauritian (That, for those of you who don't know--because I sure as hell didn't--is an island close to Madagascar) and the two gringas me and Elena. Quite a sight and quite the noise we made (English and very very weak Spanish were the only options for common language). As interesting as it was to talk with them about their various experiences traveling and such, it felt kind of strange. It didn't feel like I was really in Chile. It felt like I was in a hostel the whole time, even when we were out on the town.

Maybe this will explain that a bit more: The Irish couple, when we first met them, explained they were doing the "Around the World" trip that is apparently very common in Europe. It's a yearlong traveling extravanganza that offers you 8 plane tickets to anywhere in the world and a year of traveling insurance. They were in their 8th month and told us they "did Asia and Australia and were now doing South America." Maggie's first question: How do you DO Asia? Isn't that a ridiculous claim to make? It's fucking HUGE. (They explained that they'd traveled through most of Southeast Asia for a few months.) At first I was impressed and almost jealous. But with time I began to realize more and more how little I'd like to travel for that long and over such a great distance. The Irish couple kept dropping names of the places they'd been and, while I would definitely like to go to all of the places they mentioned, I'd like to go for more than a few passing days and I'd like to go not just so I can check them off on my list or tell people I've "done" Asia but rather so I can really get to know them. And they had traversed three continents without speaking the languages (except in Australia, obviously), without getting to know the people or the culture or even the food (they had to eat spaghetti ALL of the time because it was cheaper that way), without really experiencing anything.

So, that night out with the hostel crew, I realized that this is what the Irish couple's life must have been like for the past 8 months. Being in a country but not really being there.

Maggie also pointed out that after a while, traveling, which should be a break from a routine, becomes the routine. After so much time, everything would just become a huge blur, jumping from hostel to hostel, plane to plane, bus to bus, spaghetti to spaghetti. And it would be exhausting. I need a home base, a sense of stability, a solid ground. Traveling for a year would be a year of making frustrated phone calls and sending harried emails and living out of a backpack and missing friends, family, English, just missing. There's no home on the road.

I wouldn't like to be 25 and have seen the whole world already. It's like a bag of trailmix. You can either eat all of the best parts at once and end up with only peanuts and gross raisins. Or you can space it out and eat the cashews and the dried cherries slowly and really savor them. I'd much prefer to take my time.

Elena and I spent the whole next day wandering the hills of Valpo, tiring our poor legs with all of the uphill climbing but finding it completely worthwhile when we hit the top of the hills and looked out over the splendor of this organic chaos.

At one point we were trying to get directions to this cafe tucked into one of the cerros, so we asked a girl passing by. She shook her head, she didn't know, she said. "Soy de otro cerro," she explained. What an Urban Studies moment. Everyone, as we say in URBS intellectual speak, has their own map of the city that is defined by their own daily movements through space. This girl, who is a Valpo native, was so entrenched in her own understanding of the city based on her personal experiences that she couldn't even give us directions one hill over (Valpo, by the way, is a pretty small place). I find that I love my major more and more every day...

Elena left Monday morning and it was back to routine...kind of...

Monday and Tuesday night were Rosh Hashanah and despite everything I hadn't done for school or life, I decided to celebrate Santiago-style. I met up with a few Jewish friends from my program and we rode a bus up into Las Condes/Vitacura, two of the most upper-crust comunas in the city, to go to services at the conservative synagogue there. The synagogue is in an unmarked building surrounded by tall fences and security guards with earpieces. The second night I was there I was interrogated by one of the guards and my ID was photocopied, just in case. I clearly look like a serious threat haha. But as a Chilean girl there explained to me, there is anti-Semitism in all parts of the world and you always have to be careful. I guess I didn't realize just how careful that meant. But anyway, services were really lovely (despite the professional chorus and piano--that played even during silent prayers!) and being there just made me so grateful for my own Jewishness. I really felt like even here, thousands of miles from home and in another language, I was really part of a community. That was confirmed for me when I went to Rosh Hashanah dinner with two Chilean families. They invited me into their homes both nights and were incredibly welcoming and interested in me and my story. We ate gefilte fish and drank wine (they had both Kedem and real Chilean wine) and talked about Israel and Jews in Chile and it was fascinating and warm and real. I suppose that Judaism has kind of lost its religious side for me but I definitely never ever want to lose this side of it. The family, the community, the tradition. It's a huge part of who I am and I'm realizing that more and more.

Thursday night Helen and I caught a bus across the border to Mendoza, Argentina. Some hostel mix-ups, some money issues, some way-too-early-in-the-morning-to-understand-Argentina-accents but we finally found a place to throw our stuff and eat some dulce de leche before trekking all over the city for about 8 hours nonstop. It's a gorgeous, tree-lined city with wide tiled sidewalks and some of the most interesting and open public spaces I've ever seen (oh me and my obsession with public space). Plazas on every block, a HUGE park that takes up half of the city, open boulevards, just really quite beautiful. Helen and I stopped along the way for a real coffee, wandered around the massive park and got lost along the way to the zoo (which, once we finally got there, we decided was too expensive--$3--to actually go in). That night we met up with Maggie (who decided to come in a day later) and Andres and Ernesto for our first Argentine parrilla full of steak and Malbec, Mendoza's famous wine. [Interesting side note that will make sense a bit later: Helen and I paid for Andres's and Ernesto's meals but they got there so late that there was no meat left and the hostel refused to return their money.]


In the huge park in Mendoza.

The next day, in honor of Ernesto's 23rd birthday, we jumped off a mountain. I guess fly is the better verb, actually. Ever since scubadiving in Belize in March I've been on an extreme sports kick. I suppose that may actually go back further to when my parents introduced me to white water rafting at the age of 7 and we went on class 3 rapids without a guide having never gone rafting and I almost fell out. But back to the point: So, there we were, in Argentina on the other side of the Andes and we decided it would be great fun to do parapente, or paragliding. So four of us (Helen opted out) jumped in a van for the precarious switchback ride up the mountain (joined by a video crew from a Mendoza TV show about extreme sports--no contracts, no permission, nothing formal or legal, the Argentine way). We got to the top, still not exactly sure what we were about to do, and we see people with backpacks and parachutes flying away. Everything was tandem (thank god because otherwise I would never have made it out alive) and the way it worked was you hook up to this backpack contraption with a seat kinda hanging from it and you wait for the wind to hit just at the right moment and you literally run off the mountainside and get carried away and up in circles and all around over Mendoza and the mountains and the valley below. I was flying. The ride was about 25 minutes and before landing my instructor performed all sorts of crazy tricks and flips and circles and spins and it was incredible. We landed and I was ready to go again. There really is no feeling like floating miles and miles above the ground. Absolutely beyond compare. Up next on my list: bungee jumping.


My feet dangling over Mendoza

Maggie flying below me.

That night, we brought the birthday boy some cake and wine and managed to find a Mexican restaurant in Mendoza just for him. The whole city was still alive when we left the restaurant at around 2 AM.

Early wake-up call for a wine tour, a Mendoza favorite. So here is where the shit went down. We paid $15 each for a wine tour that the hostel said should include two bodegas, one chocolate factory and one olive oil factory. It would've been a really great deal had it not turned out that the chocolate factory (the part I was most looking forward to) was closed and that the company who ran the tour said the hostel lied about the olive oil factory. So here we were, about 10 tourists with just enough wine tastings in our bellies to fire us up, and the tour guide didn't offer us anything but an awkward apology. So, naturally, tensions began flaring up. Andres took charge (thank god because as annoyed as Maggie, Helen and I all were, we didn't even want to attempt to pick a fight in our non-native language) and asked to speak with the company office. The tour guide put him on the cellphone (to get, of course, the same response that nothing could be done) and then somehow the van driver got involved and then it was Andres and the driver shouting at each other in their own Mexican and Argentine accents, respectively, and it was so obvious that there were some underlying racial/national tensions and meanwhile the 3 of us gringas were just sitting there in the middle of them unsure of what to do. Andres started making comments about how all Argentines are like this (he brought up the meat incident at the hostel as another example, which was prob a bad idea since it really didn't relate and just stirred up more tensions) and how they are ineffecient and irresponsible and who knows what else. And the driver was shooting similar comments back at him. The clash of cultures was fascinating for us to overhear but also frustrating for all sides. Anyway, moral of the story is that nothing could be done and we left Mendoza that night without a resolution since everyone kept saying it wasn't their fault. No one claimed any responsibility--something that, as Helen pointed out, would never happen in the States, where everyone is so eager to ensure that the customer is king. Very interesting comparative experience.


At least the wine was good...

Maggie, Helen and I spent the rest of the day at a cafe talking about marriage and sexism and love and everything under the sun. Then the ride back across the border through the Andes and then, all of a sudden, it was already Monday. Time here always seems to take me by surprise.


Cafe in Mendoza

Speaking of which, it is now another Monday morning (a week later than the after-Mendoza-Monday) and I just got back from a weekend in Pucon, in the south of Chile. But before I get there I want to rewind a bit...

Tuesday morning of last week I had a major presentation for my favorite lit class (the Vargas Llosa one I can't stop talking about). The way it works is that you are in a group that has to read an additional novel that the rest of the class doesn't have to read and then you present on it. I began reading the novel about three weeks ahead of time because I knew I was going to need the time to do it (think about adding another 350 pages in Spanish to your already busy workload and absent weekends). We got to the Thursday before our presentation and I met with my group only to find that while I had been compiled all of these thoughts and notes and plans for the presentation, they hadn't even started reading the book yet. Okay, I thought, I'll give them to weekend and we'll meet again on Monday. We divided the Powerpoint up and one of the members threw the slides together and sent them to me Tuesday morning so I could bring it to class. But when I opened my mail on Tuesday morning (two hours before we had to present) I was horrified. The Powerpoint was FILLED with stupid mistakes (two of the group members are also gringos) and was lacking obvious accents and contained completely made up words. I scrambled to try to fix up as much of it as I could but I had to leave my house to make it to class on time so when I got to campus after a nervewracking hourlong commute, I grabbed my group members, dragged them into the computer lab and hastily tried to fix everything. It was a complete mess and everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. We didn't have a computer to show the presentation on, we couldn't figured out how to work the projector, the color scheme didn't show well on the screen, the presentation went too fast. Not to mention THEY WERE MAKING WORDS UP. They hadn't even taken the time to put their text into Word and spell check it at least. I was so embarassed. I take great pride in my schoolwork and I have to say I have never felt worse about myself academically than in that moment. I was so incredibly upset that after class I went up to my professor and struggled to explain to him in my broken Spanish that I was incredibly frustrated because I had put so much work into the project and my group members not only didn't contribute much but their lack of diligence and their carelessness felt like a huge lack of respect for the professor, for the class, for me. I have never felt myself choking up in front of a professor before, but there I was, frustrated with having to explain myself in a language that's not my own, frustrated with the horrible surprise of waking up to a shit presentation, frustrated with everything, and I almost started crying right there in front of him. I composed myself and he said that in his many years as a professor he's learned that that's the trouble with group work and he's learned how to tell who is better prepared than others. Regardless, I was still feeling terrible about it so I sent him an email, to which he responded that I should send him some examples of my personal work with regards to the project. I did so and he wrote back telling me not to worry. It felt really good to have taken such an active approach to dealing with the problem and if nothing else, this whole terrible experience taught me a great deal about group work.

What made that Tuesday even harder on me was that I found out the night before that a friend from high school who had been severely anorexic and bulimic had died in her sleep.
To top that off, my mom told me she was unsure about my parents' trip down here to visit me. What with the economy, my mom's business and my grandfather's faltering health, it is just bad timing for them. Which, while I completely understand, is still pretty hard for me just because I've been missing my family a lot, especially with everything going on with my grandparents, and I really needed a taste of home.
All in all, Tuesday was pretty horrible.

But anyway, Thursday came and it was Yom Kippur and I skipped classes and fasted the whole day long (which was interesting for my very Catholic host family) before boarding a bus with 20 other kids from CIEE to head down south to Pucon, the tourist capital of the lakes region. The program rented out ridiculously nice cabañas for the weekend (think big screen TVs, jacuzzi bathtubs and fireplaces) and we got in the first morning for a short tour of the area (though I find that as beautiful as it is there, it's quite difficult to appreciate it when surrounded by a huge mass of gringos--my Spanish always suffers on CIEE trips, for example) and a dinner out at a local restaurant. After a few glasses of wine (it's part of Chilean culture, I promise) Helen and Maggie forced me onstage to sing for everyone. It got me thinking about how I define myself so much by what I do and how here no one really knows any of that about myself. My friends, up until that point, hadn't ever heard me sing. My host family doesn't know that I act or write or am studious. Everyone's impressions of me here are based on such different understanding of who I am because I don't have that same résumé to hand to them to explain it. Which means that I am a singer and an actress and a writer and a student but I'm also all of these other things that I never really gave myself time or space to be back at Penn just because I was so overwhelmed with everything else. This has been such a great chance for me to explore and define and re-define me.

The next day in the morning we did some major zip-lining through the canopy of the forest (though I'm not going to lie, it was nothing compared to zip-lining through the Costa Rican rainforest), took a Saturday-afternoon nap with the Saturday-afternoon sun and went to bed early to prep for Sunday. When signing up for activities (since Pucon is so touristy the only thing to do is to pay WAY too much money to do excursions like rafting and hiking and so on--it felt like a strangely surreal resort vacation weekend), Helen and I had mentioned to the guide that we wanted to do a longer horseback ride and with better horses since both of us have had pretty significant experience in the past and most horseback riding tours are meant for beginners so they're impossibly slow and boring. The guide shushed me, motioned me closer to him and told me he could set us up with a secret deal where we could ride for several hours on rodeo horses (side note: rodeo here, while it can refer to the rodeo you think of out West, also refers to rounding up cattle and things like that). Of course we took him up on that so on Sunday morning (yesterday to be exact) we set off with another friend to do an epic four-hour ride through the mountains overlooking Lago Villarrica. We trotted and galloped and got off to climb down to a private waterfall that was one of the most spiritual, moving things I've seen yet in Chile. It was four hours of bliss despite my incredibly sore legs (not that the ten-hour bus ride home helped with that at all).

In the end, as much as I love traveling, I am also learning I love some sense of stability and familiarity. As Maggie said, I'd rather save some Brazil nuts for later...

4 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

ive never met anyone who actually likes the trail mix raisins, but they are the most constante part of the trail mix. spanish trail mix has almost double the raisin content of american trail mix. muy extraño

Anonymous said...

hello schmoopy bear.
nice talking to you even if only for a little bit!!
good luck on your test,
and we'll talk more about the depth of your self-revelations later...you're getting pretty comfy with this blog audience :) está muy buena, te prometo.-jozita

Anonymous said...

I have to admit--I like the raisins. Probably some complex nostalgia centered on my mom always giving out raisins and butterscotch for Halloween growing up (I told her how lame those were, so she switched to chocolates, but now I love all three). In other news, I am sorry to hear about your Black Tuesday: I'll be praying for your friend's family and the health of your grandparents. I miss you a lot, and as the saying goes... "home is where your heart is." Heart you. ~sonj