Drown me with bubbles, fill me with food, show me el mar

Saturday, October 28

On Saturday, my friend Jorge had his examen del grado (similar to a defense of thesis), and I tagged along with the San Antonio-bound celebratory party. Apparently, at the actual examen portion of the weekend, Jorge had been so nervous that he’d instructed the small circle of invited parties (his mom, his grandmother, Cristián, and Minna) to wait outside, suit and tie/dresses and all. In the end, he came out with a 5,9—highly respectable (it’s a 7-point scale)—and everyone was allowed to breathe.

Once in San Antonio, and with a hefty amount of Cristián’s Mom’s cazuela safely planted under each of our belts, we stopped in on his cousin’s 10^th birthday party, which had apparently attracted all of San Antonio. Or maybe it’s just that his family makes up the entire portion of the Chilean port city; I’m not sure. Aside from the enormous grouping of young girls, young boys, aunts, uncles, grandparents, random townspeople, small old ladies, hired help, and various random (and not really invited) non-Chilean guests, there was a lovely assortment of canapés, cakes, cookies, and ponche a la romano (a wonderful, Mountain Dew-colored, concoction of wine and something sweet and yummy), in addition to the karaoke, the uncomfortably erotic choreographed dances put on by the ten-year-old girls, the streamers, and the threats made by one of many uncles to have the three of us get up and sing. Luckily for us, there was still time to sneak off to Cristián’s grandmother’s house a block away for onces, so we snuck out (sadly just before the birthday cake was cut), and instead feasted on homemade pan amasado, bucket-loads of tea, palta (the best word ever for avocado), different cake, ham, and chocolate lovingly brought by Cristián’s cousin, Joaquín (with whom, for some reason or other, the entire family thinks I’m going to have a heap of Jewishly-stingy, Latin children with. I found this odd, but found it safer to just mutter into my tea between outbursts of laughter).

After onces, we headed over to Jorge’s house for the celebratory asado (because, clearly, no one had had enough to eat). Luckily, the asado ritual takes a good four hours to get going (apparently fire is difficult), so we had plenty of time to present him with our gifts—a lovely boxed set of Johnny Walker (known here as Juancito Caminando, a name I love) from Minna and I, and a picture Cristián and Jorge in Mendoza taken by your’s truly, and to enjoy the homemade pisco sours provided by his mom and grandmother. Other friends came over, and we all grouped outside on the patio to watch the parrilla struggle itself down to a hot orange glow before giving itself over to the enormous slabs of meat waiting nearby. Everyone marveled gaspingly as I threw back my collection of colorful pills I’d stashed in my coat pocket between swigs of Fanta and forkfuls of the best meat you could possibly hope to eat at midnight on a Saturday night in San Antonio.

Once it was sufficiently late enough—meaning a little past 2am—we piled into our pair of cars and headed to one of San Antonio’s two clubs. We stayed several hours, even after they turned on the steroidal bubble machines that left my perfectly straightened hair pretty much the opposite of straight, my jacket soaked and smelling like a mixture of toxic soap and cigarette smoke, and my shoes more than a little squishy. I don’t think I’d ever really thought about what it would be like to die by way of bubble-induced drowning, but this was impressively close. Not only did the machines let out a cloud-like spray that covered the unoccupied parts of the floor with a good foot of foam, they also seemed to be releasing a very specific kind of bubble—the asphyxiating kind that attacks the throat, the nasal passages, the cuticles, and the eyes. It left Minna and I coughing, which left Cristián (who had recently discovered a certain person’s diario de viaje online, of which references to a certain Dr. Gonzalez and his diagnosis of “bronquitis” had been particularly entertaining) laughing. Around 5am, with toxic suds dripping down my face, we piled back into our cars and headed for home where there was half of a not-yet-soapy pillow screaming out to me.

Sunday, October 29

The next day, at the lovely hour of noon, we got up and drowsily had breakfast before heading out to the nearby beach called Las rocas (the rocks). Past the blatantly rich beach houses and the curvy streets lined with white-shuttered windows that could have been ripped right out of Hampton Bays, Long Island, the ground suddenly drops off, giving way to cascading boulders dotted with graffitied declarations of love, wild yellow and white flowers, and windswept black sand, all tumbling over one another down towards the even more windswept beach far below that eventually met up with a crashing body of noisy grayish-blue. We picked our way (some of us a bit slower than others…the ankle still needs a bit of cuidaring) down the steep incline, moving from boulder to boulder, trying not to fall into the surprisingly frightening crevices in between. Once down on the beach, we found ourselves a somewhat-sheltered area to lie beneath the now much warmer late-October sun, and to be slowly covered in a stubborn layer of sticky black sand that I’m still picking out of my hair. Before leaving, I was introduced to the actually quite cute pulgas del mar (ocean fleas), which look like highly swollen rollie pollies that disappear under the sand as soon as you set them on the ground. Then we headed to a grassy plaza nearby for some more sun bathing, minus the sand-pelting. We met a funny-looking dog, slept in the sun, and then awoke to a chorus of small children who were climbing trees and singing something to the effect of estábamos curados, todo el año pasado! (roughly, we were all drunk all of last year), before heading for home and some more of Cristián’s mom’s cooking and another nap—all quite Chilean—before heading back to Viña/Valpo and another week of classes.

Oh man, it's been awhile

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but somehow I found myself back from Mendoza, surrounded by piles of homework and group projects and dissertations, overcome by exhaustion pretty much every hour of every day, forever without time or energy to try to codify my life into written words, and cada vez más intimidated by just how much there was to write down, to make sense of, to ensure that I would have something to look at four years from now in order to pry back those memories. So I just didn’t write. Instead, I read about Chilean fashion trends during the Unidad Popular government, I meticulously summarized every single chapter of Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros, I wrote a lovely little paper about punctuation and Pablo Neruda, I celebrated the examen del grado (think defense of thesis) or a Chilean friend in San Antonio, I went to a few epic-length, animal-inundated asados, several songs (or several versions of the same song) were lovingly made by my friends in honor of my new name, Mily, I made up a song about daiquiris (a word which sounds even cooler with Spanish pronunciation), I made a gringo-ified telenovela for grammar class, I survived my very first (and then second and third) earthquakes, I successfully cooked an entire meal of Jew Food for my friends, helped make an entire meal of Finnish Food with my friends, I suffered an itchiness relapse, I gave two dissertations in three days—one that lasted an hour, and another that lasted about 40 minutes, and I managed not to sleep ever. And somewhere along the way, I realized that when I wasn’t consuming myself with worrying about homework or when I’d be able to get to the gym, I was occupying myself with everyday worries, with trying to manejar relationships, friendships, plans—things that at times pertained to being an exchange student trying to deal with the complications that inevitably arise in that context, and at other times things that had nothing to do with studying abroad. At times I can even forget that I’m here on an exchange program; there are those days when I don’t speak a word of English, when I don’t see another American, when I don’t walk into the COPA office, when I go to class and am surrounded by Chileans being just as uninterested in how the precordillera de los Andes was formed in the sexta región as I am, when I take onces in my friends’ apartment before typing-up a joint paper and later watching the week’s episode of Lost, when I sit quietly on the micro as it speeds past the slate-gray sea on a cloudy day, or the bitingly bright blue sea on a sunny day, on my way to Valpo, when I get stopped in the street by someone asking for directions, when I pass by the supermarket to buy apples before class, when I realize that writing blog entries forces me to pull myself away from that part of my mind that isn’t here as an outsider, to face looking at my experiences through the lens of what I really am, which is someone who isn’t permanent, who despite all the luck she’s had, is still just another estudiante de intercambio.

And amid all of that, and perhaps partly because of it, I’ve made the decision to extend my time in Chile. It’s something I’d been thinking about for quite awhile; it took me some time to finally break the idea to my parents, and then to finally decide to make it official, and even more time to actually announce it openly. So instead of coming home in mid-December as originally planned, I’ll be here until mid-March living with Chilean/Finnish friends, doing an independent study about contemporary regional literature in Chile, traveling, and writing. I’ll be spending Christmas with my friends and their families in San Antonio, and then New Year’s will either be spent there or in Valpo; in January I plan to travel around doing research for my independent study (right now I’m thinking Chiloé, Puerto Montt, Valdivia, Arica, and Valpo) before going to Perú and Bolivia in February. Plus, it’ll be summer as opposed the darkness that is Minnesota in the wintertime. Needless to say, I’m fairly excited; it’s the kind of thing I’ve wanted to do forever—one of those abstract dreams that never really seems possible, but that you always swear to yourself that, if the opportunity ever arose, you’d grab onto it so tightly that the skin around your knuckles would split and tear. I’ve been using lots of lotion lately.

Traipsing Through Chile

Traipsing Through Chile

Let me tell you about el Río Elquí and its tributaries

I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, swearing I could feel those mysterious, tiny insects stinging and chewing and poking and devouring my slowly dying body, until 6am. I woke up at 8:30, then managed to sleep a little more, before getting up, cancelling my physical therapy appointment I wasn’t going to be able to make it to, and heading to class for my Chilean geography test (though not before squeezing the last of my trial-sized vial of mystery cream onto each every picotazo that now attractively cover my body.

I don’t know a thing about Chilean geography. Sure, I’ve been able to make a few cognitive leaps thanks to my Carleton geology background, but anything beyond the basaltic Cordillera de los Andes in contrast with the granitic depression intermedia, or the formation of copper from the melted rocks that rise up to the surface as oceanic plate subducts under the continental plate, pretty much has me beat. And so it was that I spent three solid days pouring over notes, reading, census figures, tourist brochures, and Wikipedia trying to learn and memorize everything there is to know about regions I-IV of this utterly bizarre country (Tarapacá, Antofagasta, Atacama, and Coquimbo, from north to south…yeah, I also know each of their populations and population changes per the 2002 Census, in case you’re interested). I memorized climactic zones, mining history, tourist-based economic diversification, Chilean vegetative terminology, types of rivers (exorreic, endorreic, pluvionival, fluvionival), and the names of all kinds of valleys and basins, ports and cities. After my solid three-plus hours of sleep, I walk into the classroom, join in on the communal jostling for seats, and look down at the test just as every single person around me starts asking those sitting around them for the answers. I went about answering the questions—loathing how much I’d suffered through studying for a test that was four questions long, didn’t ask for the population numbers I’d so successfully memorized, and was apparently a group effort. That did come in handy, however, when I couldn’t remember how to spell the country’s biggest copper mine (Chuquicamata…it’s tough). I asked Cristian later if our professor realized that every single person in the class was cheating. The high and mighty honor system seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside in this country.

Besides that, however, I stick by my earlier words; I look around and I see home in peoples’ eyes. It may not be the home I’m used to, and it’s certainly not one I expected to find, but it’s there all the same, and it overwhelms me in the best of ways. And I think that you can see it in my eyes, too.

There's home in your eyes

I feel like I’ve been putting off updating my blog because the thought of trying to process and write down the montón of things I’ve seen and done since last writing makes me frighteningly sleepy. I suppose that’s a good thing, though. Since getting back from my trip to the south, Chilean Independence Day, in all its empanadas-mixed-with-chicha glory has finally officially ended, I’ve had my first Chilean sleep-over followed by geography field trip, I’ve been to my very first Chilean dermatologist after contracting my very first bought of mysterious insect bites all over my body, I’ve survived my first week going out four nights in a row (up from the usual three), I’ve (unsuccessfully) introduced a Chilean to peanut butter—with both jelly and bananas, though clearly not together—I’ve finally lost my first article of clothing, my host mom’s birthday has come and gone—complete with three cakes, I’ve discussed Chilean machismo and whether or not the U.S. is “for living in” or not over large hunks of salty asado, and I’ve decided that, if the kind of opportunity you’ve always dreamed of suddenly presented itself, such as to spend three months traveling and writing, there’s no way I could so no.

I’ve always been overly contemplative, but I think this environment has raised that propensity to lose myself for weeks on end in thought by a few dozen factors. The main thing my meandering, day-dreaming mind has kept coming back to recently has been the fact that I feel completely overwhelmed by what has fallen into my lap. I honestly don’t know when it happened, or who did all the work or why, but I often catch myself hurrying down the street between class and therapy, on my way to a friend’s apartment in Valpo, strolling along the rocks by the casino, picking my way through the windy, mural-covered paseos that line the hills, or taking that early-morning micro back to 4 Norte and Libertad, look around and realize that somehow I found myself a little life all the way at the end of the world. It’s sickeningly trite to say that the thought of what I’ve blindly stumbled upon here actually takes my breath away, but there just aren’t appropriate synonyms. I don’t quite understand how friendships can just suddenly form without you really having done anything to deserve them; or how you can mistake a month-long history with people for ones that have lasted all your life. I suppose that kind of thing is overwhelming for everyone, but with the language/cultural barrier on top of it—and a dose of personal insecurity—I’m left stupefied, especially given how I was feeling about my chances of making friends just a few weeks ago. And then, of course, I read over what I’ve just written, and I want to gag myself because I sound like a gushing, love-sick lunatic. Or maybe Chile just brings that out of me.

Another development of the past week or so is that my feelings about my family have improved. I’d come to the decision around Pucón time that I wanted to change families, and I even had a list of three possible ones that I was going to go visit, but things have been better—I may even be starting to enjoy some of their ridiculously obnoxious eccentricities. It didn’t hurt that they took me to a tasty asado today, or that over lunch yesterday they discussed how they’re going to remember me above their other students after I’m gone, or that the kitchen’s been oozing vegetables, non-fried chicken, and pevre the past few days. They may not be the sushi-eating, theater-going intellectuals Alex gets to live with, but they have their moments. Plus, they're enthusiastically helping me deal with all my insect bite-related fumigating needs.