I haven’t posted for a while because of a combination of being busy doing stuff and my computer not working, so this post will be an amalgamation of a lot of little things from the past few weeks. Deal with the abundance of information and lack of flow.
Valparaíso and Viña del Mar are beautiful in their own ways. As my Poetry professor put it, they each have their own rhythm, as do their inhabitants. I do a lot of wandering. As my sole purpose is to discover and observe, I am never disappointed. The first Sunday in town I came across an open air antiques and books market. I spent the next hour perusing stacks of antique post cards from all over the world and pining over books I can’t afford (I did buy a couple by Chilean authors though, because, you know…books).
Valparíso is a port city, cradled by the foothills of the coastal mountain range. Much of the city is vertical; winding passageways decorated with copious amounts of colorful street art, stray dogs and cats and perfumed with all the smells a city has to offer. At the top of one of the cerros (hills) is the ex-prison park, the site of a notorious prison leftover from the dictatorship. The juxtaposition of dark history and the beautiful park left me thinking about hidden legacies of the Pinochet era.
On a neighboring cerro, (“happy hill”) I found true happiness in a lovely cafe when I was served real coffee (as opposed to the Nescafe everyone drinks here), a salad with goat cheese, a beautiful chicken soup with homemade bread, and strawberry juice. Later that day I observed the permanent resident sea-lions lounging, fighting and yelling on a platform near the shore, and played pool in a dingy pool hall with new friends (and new rules).
Mandatory School Update: I am enrolled in 5 classes: 20th century Chilean Poetry, International Public Law, Theory of Translation & Interpretation, Geomorphology, and Mapuche Games. Soon I will start my extracurricular workshop classes: Digital Photography and Salsa. Readings take about 4 times longer than usual, but everything is interesting and good.
Last week in class I experienced my first real earthquake (the one I felt in Mexico was very far away). As Mama Earth had contractions (tremors) my professor’s face turned bright red and everyone looked at each other, then giggled. Later that day there was another one that woke me up by shaking my bed around. This is life on the edge of the continental plate!
I live with Erika (Chilean mom), Paulina (25, Chilean sister), Javier (18, Chilean brother) and Hernán (Erika’s boyfriend, when he’s home on the weekends). Our main interactions center around food; we eat almost every meal together. Erika spends hours every day cooking large amounts of food that she freezes for later. Twice a month she goes to the market and comes home with dozens of bags of produce and every day we buy bread at the Botilleria across the street. Erika makes her living by renting rooms to students and travelers. My best friends here so far are the renters: Alejandra and Gabriela from Monterrey, Mexico (exchange students studying journalism at my university), Richie from Münich, Germany (an engineer here to learn Spanish) and Jaime from La Rijoa, Spain (a high school math teacher here for the year). They have a communal kitchen where we eat, drink, and play cards on the weekdays. Often we go on excursions together. Everywhere we go, we meet other travelers, who are always the easiest to get to know. I promised myself to not surround myself with gringos, but no promises were made about other foreigners! The common experience of being foreign brings us together.
Yesterday we went with some other Mexican friends to La Campana National Park and climbed the mountain La Campana. The ascent was four hours of pure uphill hiking and our reward was an amazing panoramic view of the neighboring mountains and the ocean in the distance (mostly covered by clouds). At the top I ran into my Colombian classmate and met her group of friends and some other students. We all climbed down together, speaking at least five different dialects of Spanish, and invaded the metro with our dirty, sweaty selves.
Last week we went to an Asado (BBQ) with Chilean journalism students and watched the México-Honduras and Chile-Peru fútbol games. México and Chile lost, but I learned Chilean fight songs, lots of new and vulgar slang, and got to eat a choripan (chorizo + pan (bread)). Something about being surrounded by a bunch of people who care about sports makes me care about sports, a little bit.
I was recently awarded a small grant by Beloit’s Office of International Education to pursue a research project about the Mapuche people, the indigenous people in Chile and part of Argentina. My goal is to learn about Mapuche culture and connect what I learn to the ongoing Mapuche-Chilean conflict over land rights and natural resources.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Mapuche Ceremonial Center at the top of a hill on the outskirts of Viña. After climbing a few of km up the hill during the hottest part of the day (I didn’t know buses went up the other side) I arrived at the center and found a family eating lunch. They were extremely welcoming quickly invited me to eat their delicious food. The oldest woman was a respected elder visiting from the south (where most Mapuche live). She wore a traditional dress, jewelry, and headscarf. Printed all over her robes were the words “I <3 Jesus”. One of the young men, Luxin, showed me around (there is a Temascal (a sweat lodge), a green house where they grow traditional herbs and vegetables, a field for ceremonies, and a building for workshops and markets). On Saturday, Luxin and I had our first Mapudungun-English language exchange over a beer. Before he taught me anything, he made sure that I really cared about learning about the Mapuche people. He said I seemed to want to learn for the right reasons. I may use some of the grant money to travel south to Valdivia (Luxin’s hometown) sometime in the next few months. Seeing the ocean every day and the sunset from the balcony outside my room, reading on the beach, speaking Spanish all day every day, commuting on the rickety little buses, spitting at the feet of nasty men, sleeping off my language-learning fatigue, enjoying the best part of the sun (the shade), making friends, drinking tea (my new coffee), getting lost, slipping in puke one day, waiting for hours to get my Chilean ID, playing my fiddle by myself and evoking nostalgia with my tunes, drinking beer, eating so much avocado and bread, following little lizards, listening to my host-sister’s crazy stories. These are some things that compose life here. It's impossible to transcribe the rhythm, but I'll keep trying. In yoga the other day, during suptenasana (sp?), I imagined myself as a soup bowl, deep and open. I am determined to identify with my bowl-self more often, in this world so poised to fill me.
