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.