Patagonia

Timesaving measures are in effect so we're going the picture-worth-a-thousand-words route. In summary: Patagonia is breathtakingly beautiful and terrifically windy. I spent a week backpacking the "W" trail in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine with two friends, we met up with Molly and Elise almost by accident on our second day and spent the rest of the time with them. We also met nearly the entire population of Germany on the trail, as well as probably half of Israel. Lots of laughter, lots of hiking, a little bit of snow, a little bit of rain, a little bit of sun. And now for the pictures.

Las Torres

Molly and Elise!

Sunrise hike to las Torres. Not much sun.

There's the sunrise!

Los Cuernos

El Glaciar del Francés

Molly and Elise were going the utilitarian camping route. No stove, lots of salami and cheese and trail mix

A cloudier day

El Glaciar Grey

Chiloé

At the end of November I spent 5 days in Chiloé in the south of Chile with three friends. We spent a day and a half in Ancud, a small town (but the second largest on the island) on the north end of the island, a day hiking and camping on the island’s remote west side, and two days in Castro, the island’s largest town/small city.

Ancud

One of the greatest pleasures of the trip was being surrounded by so much green for the first time in many months. As much as I have enjoyed living in a city, and Valparaíso is a beautiful city with beautiful views of the mountains and the ocean, I hadn’t really realized how much I missed seeing green things—green fields, green trees—until we arrived in the south. Chiloé is largely rural and as we rode the bus around the island I reveled in the farming landscape, dotted with sheep (sheeepieees!!!) and cows and small, old and beautifully constructed wooden houses. Every time we took a bus (and in total we took 16 buses on the trip, including getting to and from Valpo and Santiago), it was a struggle between wanting to look around at the landscape and the views of the smaller islands in the archipelago and wanting to give in to the drowsiness that being on a warm, moving bus always produces. I usually lost the battle in the end but still spent a good amount of the time soaking in the beautiful views.

Our largest adventure of the trip was the day we spent attempting to reach the national park. I say attempting because we never actually made it there but we camped in a park an hour or so before the entrance to the national park. My friend Dan had a guide book that said there was a bus from Ancud to Chepu, the closest town to the park, at 2 pm on Saturdays but after initially going to the wrong bus station, we found our way to the correct bus station and learned that there are in fact, no buses to Chepu on Saturday. Interesting kink in our plan. So we asked around and found out that the only way to get close to Chepu was to take a bus to Cruz 25 and then try to find a ride the last 15 km to Chepu. As we held a little conference to decide if that was what we wanted to do, the bus to Cruz 25 started pulling out of the station so that made our decision much quicker and we banged on the door, jumped on, and were off. I should mention that we had planned to go to the supermarket after checking what time the bus left but as it turned out we didn’t really have time for that. So when we boarded the bus we were equipped with 3 palta (avocados), 3 apples, 3 oranges, 3 pears, a bag of raisins, and 4 pieces of bread.

Cruz 25 is literally a truck stop along the highway, with one restaurant and a big sign kindly pointing the way to Chepu, 15 km down the gravel road. A woman in the restaurant told us that a bus to Chepu passes around 2, which was only half an hour away at this point, so we hung out in the parking lot and Grace taught us the “Thriller” dance, much to the amusement of some kids playing outside the restaurant. At about 2:40 we decided that we could no longer count on the bus just being on Chilean time (you may not all know this but Chilean time is between 25 and 45 minutes slow, for everything) and decided to start walking and hope that the bus or some kind soul in a truck would pass eventually.

Trekking to Chepu

It was a beautiful day and the walk was quite lovely, but we quickly realized that Chepu is what one might call a remote town. Others might call it the middle of nowhere. Very few cars passed and most that did were going the opposite direction. After walking nearly 4 km, we were on the verge of walking up to a house and asking if anyone would be willing to drive us down the road, when I saw a car coming over the hill towards us. So we “hicimos dedo” (literally make/do finger, aka hitchhike) and much to our relief, they stopped. Side note: I’m not one to consider hitchhiking a legitimate option in most circumstances but if there is anywhere in the world that you can hitchhike without worries, it would be Chiloé. Chileans are nice people in general but Chilotes are astonishingly friendly and warm and the island is the definition of sleepy tranquility.

So after an exciting ride in the back of the elderly Chilean couple’s truck and then another few kilometers walk, we made it to Chepu. And despite Dan’s assertions that it has to be a real town because in the guidebook there were several hostals listed, it is really more of a smattering of houses and pastures spread out along the Río Chepu. Our dreams of a supermarket (or even a minimarket!) quickly burst. Several people asked us if we were coming from “afuera” (outside) and they weren’t referring to outside of Chile, or even outside of Chiloé. Anything beyond Chepu constitutes outside.

We were told to ask for Alfonso Vergara, a fisherman who could take us across the river in his boat, and when we found him, he told us that there was no way we could make it to the national park and back by tomorrow. Since staying another day wasn’t an option with our limited supplies, we decided his suggestion of hiking to Parque Ahuenco, which he and his wife assured us was “precioso,” meaning very beautiful, was our best option. And best of all, his wife sold us 10 biscuit-like discs of bread.

In the end, all the hassles of getting there were completely worth it. In fact, all the hassles just made it better. Alfonso took us across the river and then led us through some fields out onto the entrance to one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen. As we started walking down the sand dunes onto the beach, a horse ran out in front of us and galloped down the beach. At that point we decided that we were definitely not in the real world. We walked along the beach, past a rusted out shipwreck, past the horse again this time with a herd of cows, and up over the cliffs bordering the ocean. Each time we got to a lookout, it was more beautiful than the last. From the time we left Alfonso to the time he picked us up mid-day the next day, we didn’t see a single other person. We camped in a grassy area by the water and enjoyed a wonderful dinner of bread, palta, and raisins. The next morning was my friend Grace’s birthday so we had a celebratory breakfast of bread and oranges before hiking out. That night when we were back in the booming city of Castro, we had a true celebratory dinner, with a brindis (toast) to our adventures.

la playa 

Sunset at our campsite

The rest of our time we spent exploring small towns and islands near Castro and visiting the wooden churches for which the island is famous. We also ate curanto, the typical dish of Chiloé, which is a ground-cooked barbecue of mussels, clams, chicken, pork and chorizo. This has become an extremely long post so rather than describe our last few days, I’ll just put up some of the pictures. Enjoy! 

church in Dalcahue

the interior of the church in Castro

Los palafitos--houses on stilts over the water in Castro

Big ol' bowl of curanto

Oh heyyyy, remember me?

Aaaaaand….now it’s December. Did anyone else blink and miss November?

My blink was a rather hectic one, hence no blog posts for a month. Here’s what’s been keeping me busy.

At the beginning of November everyone on the Middlebury program went to Santiago for the weekend. We toured what is now called Parque de la Paz and was formerly Villa Grimaldi, a detention and torture center during Pinochet’s dictatorship. We were given a tour around the center by a man named Pedro Matta who was held and tortured there for nearly a year. It was, as you can imagine, a very moving and at times difficult story to listen to, not just his personal story but the story of all the prisoners who were held there. It is truly astonishing what barbarities humans are capable of committing against each other and it was sobering to think that such horrific experiences are not a thing relegated to the past but something that continues and something in which the US plays all too central a role in the world. 

Pedro Matta, in front of a wall with the names of the prisoners held at Villa Grimaldi

The Rose Garden, where women prisoners were raped and sexually tortured. When the park was created, one rose was planted for each victim and the signs have the names of the women on them

The most notable part of the experience for me was that Pedro Matta was able to tell us his experience and experiences of his close friends with very little visible emotion but when we then toured the National Cemetery and stood in front of Salvador Allende’s grave, he became choked up and couldn’t speak. To him, the part that still makes him emotional is the ideals for which Allende and his government stood and the hope that Allende held that he could transform Chilean society into a more just and equal one.

Interestingly, the National Cemetery is laid out in a manner that reinforces the traditional hierarchies of society. Cemeteries here are like little miniature versions of cities—the wealthiest families build elaborate tombs that resemble small houses or churches, the more middle-class tombs are stacked like apartments and the lower classes have smaller and shorter plots. The poorest section of the cemetery is one in which families rent a plot of land and when they can no longer afford to pay the rent, the remains are removed to make room for someone else. Ironically, Allende’s tomb is located in the very heart of the aristocratic section of the cemetery.

The other notable part of the tour around the cemetery was seeing the damage from the earthquake last February. Parts of the cemetery were closed off for repairs and one old mausoleum was crumbling and had lost its front cover so that you could actually see the remains. Kind of alarming.

On a much happier note, my sister came to visit after that weekend and I spent a week playing around Valparaíso with her and her friend. We ate lots of seafood, went to the beach and sand dunes, walked around Valparaíso and just generally had a grand old time.

Patented Molly-pose at the dunes

My friends and I somewhat unwittingly planned our only three trips of the semester to coincide perfectly with the end of classes and finals. So the end of November was extremely busy. First, we went to Buenos Aires. It was really fun to see another South American country and to spend time in a totally different city. Buenos Aires felt very European and cosmopolitan—quite different from little old Valparaíso. Basically I spent a lot of the weekend people-watching and soaking in the atmosphere and giggling at the Argentinean accent. We stayed in a hostel where we were definitely not cool enough or arsty enough to fit in with the rest of the guests so instead we spent all our time exploring the city. We walked a lot, went to the cemetery in Recoleta and searched for ages to find Eva Perón’s grave, went to an enormous street market, watched a capoeira performance in a park, went to the zoo (where you can buy little bags of food and feed the animals—but it was a choice between using our remaining pesos to feed the animals or feed ourselves and we chose to buy lunch for ourselves instead), the Museo de Bellas Artes and went to La Boca, the very touristy sector of the city where people dance tango in the street. And we ate like kings. We had two dinners at parillas (par-i-zhas in the Argentinean accent), which are Argentinean barbecue restaurants. Without a doubt the most delicious steaks I’ve had in my life. We met up with a friend of mine from Middlebury who’s spent the semester in Buenos Aires and it was great not only to spend time with him but also to have a knowledgeable tour guide to take us around the city. All around a great trip. 

Cemetery

La Puente de la Mujer

The next weekend we went to Chiloé, an island in the south of Chile and yesterday I got back from a week of backpacking in Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. For the sake of getting this post up, I’m going to write about those trips another day.

My classes have ended, I took the Spanish language-proficiency exam and now I just have two essays left to write for the Middlebury program. It would be a lot easier to get those done if it weren’t sunny and beautiful outside. I guess I’m just going to have to close my curtains and dig deep to find the discipline that I used to possess. It’s there somewhere. I'm off to search for it now.  

October highlights

Wow, I can’t believe how quickly October has slipped away from me. Here’s a re-cap of the happenings down south.

--The miners were rescued. Just in case that little bit of news happened to escape your notice. I don’t know whether the Chileans were more happy and proud about the actual rescue or about the fact that Chile was for a brief moment the focus of the international media. It was pretty great to be here and watch the rescue. All normal television programming was suspended on the national channels and for the two days of the rescue effort it was the only news shown. Truthfully, I felt that the media coverage of the event was excessive and sensationalist, invading the privacy of the miners and their families and I have talked with several Chileans who felt that Piñera, the president, has exploited the event for political motives, especially with his tour of Europe. I even heard someone say that they thought it had all been a hoax construed by Piñera to boost his popularity. Ah, conspiracy theorists.

However, it is undeniable that the entire saga of the miners produced an incredible sense of solidarity in the Chilean people. It is also undeniable that the moment when the first miner emerged from the capsule and hugged his wife and son was beautiful and very touching. Amazingly, I did NOT cry, but his son more than covered for me in that department. (As my Chilean mother would say, Chiquitiiiiiiito, que liiiiindo.) The next day my host mom, along with probably millions of other Chileans, played the Lotto and put down the number 33. It was not a winning number.

The rescue capsule is making a celebrity tour around Chile

--I finally was able to do some hiking here. A group of us took advantage of the holiday for Día de la Raza, Columbus Day, and hiked La Campana, which is a nearby national park. It was a hideously ugly day when we left Valparaíso and despite my optimistic assertions that “it will get better, this dense fog/cloudbank will definitely burn off,” I had little hope. But amazingly it did! Or rather, we hiked high enough to be above the clouds and found the sun. There were clouds all around the base of the mountain and other peaks poking up like islands in the cloud-sea. We didn’t have enough time to hike all the way to the summit but we got to a point a few kilometers below the summit where Charles Darwin once hiked. There is a plaque commemorating “Carlos Darwin’s” time in that spot. We ate lunch there (fresh bread, turkey, and lots of avocado—muy chileno) and old Carlos D and I shared a moment.

Darwin's plaque: "We spent the day at the summit and never has time seemed to pass more quickly; Chile extends at our feet like an immense panorama limited by the Andes and the Pacific Ocean" Carlos Darwin Aug. 17, 1834

--I turned 21. Not such a big deal in a country where the drinking age is 18 but I had a wonderful day celebrating with my family and friends here. Here are some pictures that my dad took of the barbecue we had at our house with my family and the gringos.

Just some gringos enjoying anticuchos

Mordiscon

mi papá chileno

--I now have less than two months left here which is astonishing. At the beginning when I had no schoolwork 5 months seemed like all the time in the world but now it doesn’t seem to be nearly enough. The next two months will be very busy with lots of work squeezed in between spending time with my family and traveling. A large part of my work for my internship has been organizing a Regional Conference on Environmental Education, which is finally happening next week on November 4. There will be speakers presenting on a range of topics about biodiversity and education and various organizations and schools presenting projects and initiatives that promote environmental education. We’re in the crunch-time now to finish all the planning but I think it will be a success.

Even after being here for three months I still have moments where I think “I’m LIVING in CHILE.” It happens at random times, sometimes when I’m riding the micro, sometimes when I spend an entire day not noticing the fact that I’m speaking in Spanish the whole time, sometimes when I wake up in the morning and walk out onto the back balcony of my house and look over the houses of Playa Ancha, over the Pacific Ocean and across to the beaches, sand dunes, and curvy road of the coast, with the blue-gray mountains of the Cordillera de la Costa beyond. The day after my birthday I spent the afternoon at the beach in Viña with my siblings and some friends and as we walked back through the city to buy ice cream I inexplicably had another one of the moments. There was nothing particularly notable about what we were doing, just walking along and talking and thinking about what flavor ice cream we would get but I thought “you know, that is really pretty cool, I’m living in Chile and I’m loving it.”

As far as the Spanish goes, I’ve recently started feeling much more comfortable with my speaking and I can actually notice an improvement now. This, unfortunately, is kind of screwing with my brain, which is now a jumble of Spanish and English. Some words will only come to me in Spanish, others only form themselves as a hazy English concept that I can’t find the actual word for. Once when I got really excited about something while talking in Spanish I said “ME TOO!” without realizing I was speaking English until my friend started laughing at me. My dreams, when I remember them, are still stubbornly in English. But when I count in my head, the numbers now come out in Spanish first. I’ve realized that true fluency is a huge task and probably something I’ll spend most of my life working on. Even the other student who lives with my family, who is Romanian but has lived in Chile since he was 10, makes mistakes and often makes up words in Spanish, causing great hilarity in my family. Sometimes it has been hard for me to recognize an improvement in my Spanish but when I actually think back to my first days here in Chile and the number of times I was completely adrift in the rushing, tumbling torrent of Spanish spoken by the Chileans around me, I can see that there has been a big improvement. I can now absent-mindedly eavesdrop on conversations around me, just like the true daughter of my mom that I am. It’s a great feeling of accomplishment.

Today is an absolutely gorgeous, sunny spring day so we’re headed off to the beach. Ah, the joys of being in the southern hemisphere right now. I hope you northerners aren’t too chilly and that you have a very Happy Halloween!!

My life is a 7

Well, only two months after the start of classes, school has finally started here. And by that I mean I had to write my first essay. Actually, the very first real school-related work I had to do was for my papermaking class, of all things. It was also my first experience with the Chilean grading system, which is based on a 1-7 scale. I mean, that makes sense right? Who doesn’t consider a 7 to be the highest one can hope to achieve? 10? Who needs a 10? I’m going to start using the system in my daily life—“on a scale of 1 to 7, how excited are you for the weekend?” “On a scale of 1 to 7, how hungry are you?” “On a scale of 1 to 7, how scary was the movie?” Chileans are clever and innovative and it’s clearly the wave of the future.

In other news, last weekend I experienced the crunchy side of Chile. Crunchy meaning hippy-granola type, unrelated to food in any way. It was the Mil Tambores (1000 Drums) festival here in Valparaíso, which is a big cultural, environmental, music and all-around hippy fest. 

The crowd on Cerro Alegre

Apparently in past years it has taken place in the flat downtown “plan” part of the city but this year it was moved to the cerros, in an apparent attempt to lessen the inconvenience to storeowners and innocent passersby. I went with some friends to the festival during the day on Friday and it was lots of fun. There were lots and lots of people, mostly young people but also families and older people. There was a big parade of all the drum and dance groups and more dreadlocks than I’ve seen in a long time. 

Cute kid, gnarly dreads

Painting your body for Mother Earth was encouraged

In many ways it reminded me of Seattle, although such festivals in Seattle usually do not involve policemen carrying rifles or people burning things in the street at night. Happily I avoided this part of the festival and spent the night watching a movie with my host siblings instead. 

The festival wasn't just a bunch of crazy kids drinking and smoking and vandalizing things though. As I said, it's a musical, cultural and environmental event and this year it also had a decidedly political side. For over 80 days, 34 Mapuche prisoners have been on a hunger strike protesting their imprisonment under the anti-terrorist law and demanding a fair trial in a civil court (under the anti-terrorist law they are tried in a military court). 

the Mapuche flag

The Mapuche are the largest indigenous group in Chile and the relationship between the Chilean government and the Mapuche has been contentious for basically all of Chilean history. At best they have been ignored, at worst, they have been murdered, abused and denied their ancestral lands. The Mapuche today are engaged in a struggle to recover land taken from them by the Chilean government. The actions are often violent, including setting fire to crops and farm equipment. The anti-terrorist law, a Pinochet-era relic, is used exclusively against the Mapuche and carries harsh sentences, including life in prison. 

The hunger strike has brought the issue to national attention (although somewhat overshadowed by the news of the miners) and there have been demonstrations throughout Chile. Several congressmen have even joined the strike. However, it keeps dragging on, the prisoners keep losing weight and the possibility of one or more of the prisoners dying before the strike is resolved is beginning to seem like a very real, and very tragic, possibility. For this reason, Mil Tambores included a focus on Mapuche music, culture, and political rights. As a group of Mapuche danced in the street, the surrounding crowd shouted "Libertad, libertad para la comunidad Mapuche" ("freedom, freedom for the Mapuche community"). I am hoping for a swift (if over 80 days can be called swift) resolution to the current issue and then a long and careful consideration of Mapuche political and cultural rights. It is undoubtedly a complicated issue but simply ending the hunger strike is only the first necessary step to improving the situation. 

One weekend, two continents

Last week, the marvels of modern air travel allowed me to attend two celebrations of life on two continents. On Tuesday night I left Chile and a mere 12 hours and two flights later I landed in Chicago to spend the next four days with my family and attend Popeye’s memorial service. 

I had a minor attack of culture shock while waiting for my train at the Ogilvie Transportation Center (everything was so big, so clean and expensive-looking, and just generally very American) but soon began to relax and look forward to a few days of English-speaking and, more importantly, time with family. Being suddenly surrounded by English for the first time in a month and a half was certainly odd but the strangest thing for me was actually something much more inconsequential: going to the bathroom. In Chile, you don’t flush toilet paper, you throw it in the trash. Every time I went to the bathroom I had to stop my impulse to throw the toilet paper in the trash and remind myself that in the U.S., toilet paper actually goes in the toilet.

My time in Chicago was wonderful, a very special time spent with family remembering and honoring Popeye. One of my favorite parts was the chance to look through all the mementos of Popeye’s past. Pictures of him as a young boy and pictures of my grandparents looking irrepressibly young and beautiful as they fell in love, got married, and had kids. Letters from my great-grandfather to his son, tickets to Yale-Harvard football games from the 1930s, passports with dozens of entry and exit stamps and visas in all different languages. It was a chance to see my grandparents as I never knew them and to see what an incredible, long, and full life they lived.

The G4s, Popeye's great-grandchildren, singing Edelweiss

I flew back to Chile to celebrate an even longer life than Popeye’s…Chile’s 200^th birthday. While I arrived the morning after the actual Independence Day, Chileans know how to throw a party and the celebrations continued for the next two days. On my flight from Atlanta to Santiago, the captain said “I understand it’s the 200^th year of Chile as a nation…so Happy Birthday!” and all the Chileans on the plane began cheering and clapping. A rowdy group of teenagers in front of me started the rousing cheer of “CHI CHI CHI LE LE LE….VIVA CHILE!” and nearly everyone on the plane joined in. That same energy and pride was evident everywhere over the next two days.

Good morning, Andes

I did my best to pack as much Chilean-ness into my two days of the bicentennial. I ate a lot, spent a lot of time with my family and friends, and even attempted to dance the cueca, the national dance, with no knowledge of the steps. I went to an asado (barbecue) with my family at an aunt’s house where we ate choripan (delicious sausage in a mini-baguette-like bread) and grilled chicken and steak. And because Chileans are crazy for mayonnaise there was plenty of that as well but this was actually homemade mayonnaise that I watched my uncle make so it was a vast improvement over your standard mayo. That night I went to the ramada near my house. A ramada is basically like a state fair in the U.S. but much more debaucherous and with fewer animals (actually no animals except for the street dogs that wander everywhere). Over the past two weeks, makeshift wooden stalls covered with fabric and eucalyptus branches had sprung up on the soccer fields at the University of Playa Ancha. Everyday when I would take the micro downtown to class I would see the progress until finally the entire area was ready and waiting for the crowds to arrive.

And boy, did the crowds arrive. On Sunday, which, mind you, was the fourth day of the bicentennial celebrations, the ramada was absolutely packed. We wandered around and took in all that it had to offer. There were fondas, informal restaurants and bars whose main offerings were empanadas, anticuchos (Chilean shish kabobs—heavy on the meat, light on the veggies…aka no vegetables in sight), and chicha, a sweet drink made from fermented grapes that somehow isn’t wine. There were lots of booths for carnival games, most of which are nearly impossible to win. There were also two ferris wheels and several other twirly-type carnival rides brought in by the company “Felizlandía.” A very happy land, indeed.

Piña Hawaiana, ice cream in half a pineapple--genius

Taka taka! (foosball)

The next morning (alright, actually around noon) when I woke up, I watched an air show and boat parade from my deck with my family. It was a beautiful day and honestly I much preferred just soaking in the sun and the stunning view of the sea and the beach and the mountains to actually watching the show. And later, in case I hadn’t gotten enough of the ramada the night before, I went to the one in Viña del Mar with my parents and my sister. That night I fell asleep, happy and full of empanadas, listening to the sounds of probably 30 different cumbia songs from all the different bars at the ramada that merged into one pulsing beat, as the Chileans squeezed every last ounce out of the bicentennial celebration before returning to work, school, and the beginning of the next 200 years of Independence the next day.