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 10th 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.
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