Chao Chile

So school wrapped up with a wopping sweep. Because of all my traveling and the issues in Bolivia and changes in the schedules and stuff I ended up having to take a reading test and a midterm and turn in a final project for my geography class all on the same day which together compiled like 80% of my grade so I was a little nervous but somehow I was able to do well enough on all of that and on all my tests in my Poli Sci class that I was able to exempt myself from having to take the final in either class. So basically classes ended for me even before Thanksgiving which was a pleasant surprise. Since I had originally thought that I would have to be in Santiago for tests and things, I didn’t have any big trips or anything planned. I just hung out with friends and went bungee jumping and picnicking in the Andes and stuff. The weekend before Thanksgiving I spent with my gringo friends for the most part since everyone was starting to finish up and head out on their travels and they threw me a 20th birthday party themed as “Super Sweet Sixteen” because they like to make fun of how young I am, even though I am only a few months younger than most of them. It was a blast though. On the actual day of Thanksgiving I actually sort of forgot about it until I talked to some people in Santiago that were trying to throw some sort of Thanksgiving dinner dealio together. I’ve decided Thanksgiving is sort of a funny holiday. I just feel like an idiot anybody in Chile ever asks me about it because I have to relate the same stupid, extraordinarily fictional story about Pilgrims and Indians that we are all told as elementary schoolers in the US when we have to make those turkeys out of a hand print. I mean, I guess the whole big dinner with the turkey and stuffing and all the family tradition stuff has some value but the origin is kinda BS.

Anyway though… the following morning my mom arrived to Santiago. She came for 10 days in which time we had arranged to go to Patagonia and I had a list of things to go see in Santiago. The first few days we mostly just slugged around Santiago and went to see my campus and the presidential palace and some other things and poked around in different artisan markets. We also went to Valparaíso for my real birthday since it is the best place on Earth. If ever I am in the position of being in one of those game shows like on Friends between Monica/Rachel and Joey/Chandler where they are competing to win back the apartment by answering personal questions about one another, then you the reader should now be able to answer the questions as to “where the best place on earth is”. It is valpo. I can’t explain why exactly. But somewhere between all the murals and colors and hills and secret passage ways between streets and ascensors and vegetarian food and hippies and the port with all the ships and the people I met there, it is the best place on Earth. Plus it has the biggest firework show in Latin America for New Years although unfortunately I will not be there to see that.
Valpo:


Anyhow, after a few days in the city, we set out for Patagonia. We flew into Punta Arenas first which is the southernmost city of its size and the departure point for a lot of excursions to Antarctica. From there we hopped straight on a bus to Puerto Natales where we spent the afternoon walking around and relaxing to recover from out 2:50am flight out of Santiago. The next day was the day we actually entered the Torres Del Paine National Park. From Puerto Natales it was another 2-3 hour bus ride north to enter through the southern entrance of the park. While in the park we had decided to pass on trekking due to my mom’s frail knees so we stayed at the lodge at Paine Grande and just went out for day hikes. Determined to see as much as I could see being limited to day hikes, I may have pushed my mom and little hard, chasing her to the Grey Glaciar and back the first day (22km total – approx. 15 miles), so after hiking with her a while the second morning she sent me on my own way to haul up to the top of the Valle Frances where there was an awesome view of some striking mountain tops that the call the “catedral” or the “cathedral” (27.5 km – approx. 18 miles).

The two main trails to trek through the park are the “circuit” and the “w”. The “ciurcuit” takes about 10ish days and goes all the way around the park and the torres (towers) themselves. The “w” is actually part of the “circuit” but only takes 5-6 days. I would have liked to do the full “circuit” or even the full “w” but I was pretty satisfied with what I did in the time I had. I ended up doing one “u” of the “w” twice. Plus it was kind of nice to stay in the lodge with showers and beds and hot food. We got really luck with the gorgeous weather we had. The first afternoon walking out to the glacier it seemed a little dreary as we were being beaten in the face by snow and slush but after that it was pretty perfect. The second day I barely even needed to be wearing long sleeves. Plus it was awesome because we were so far south that it was light out until about 11pm since it’s the summer so I could sleep in until noon and start hiking around 1 and still complete a 10 hour hike with light to spare. It was all in all really awesome. The third day we didn’t do too much because we had to catch the catamaran ferry around noon to get back to the bus to go back to Puerto Natales to catch the bus in time to get back to Punta Arenas that night.

We stayed in Punta Arenas for two nights at a funny hostel run by an pretty Italian Chilean man named Alejandro who woke us up each morning with Frank Sinatra and Pavarti bellowing from his stereo in the living room and fresh squeezed Pomelo juice. We only really had one day there though since we came in late the night we arrived and had to head out early the day we were leaving in order to catch our flight back to Santiago. The day that we had was well spent though as we went to the Isla de Magdalena where we saw 35,000 pairs of Magallenic Penguins. It was my mom’s special request trip.

It was so cool because there were just so many penguins and they were fairly unafraid of humans so we could get pretty close and take lots and lots of pictures as they waddled around and ducked into their little burrows and played in the water. My pictures look so fake with how many penguins that are but I swear on my life that the are real. It was pretty amazing. We also had a little time to wander around Punta Arenas which was a lot larger than I had expected but not particularly different than many other Chilean cities. And then the next morning we headed back to Santiago. Back in Santiago we didn’t have a lot more time before she had to leave so we went to the winery that I went to with my group at the very beginning, Concha y Toro, and went to see the German country club, Club Manquhue, that the family of my pololo belonged to, and took the ascensor (elevator thing) up Cerro San Cristobal to see a view of the city.

On the same day that my mom was to head back home, I actually set out for Uruguay to meet up with Meg, Maggie, and Molly in Montevideo to spend some time on the beach in the sun and aprovechar (take advantage of) the summer before I had to sadly head back home myself. We met up in Montevideo where we poked around for a whil in the morning, stopping by a large Gaucho statue (in front of which the UCSB girls had to take a picture) and stopping through a plaza where legendary tango spirits wallowed although none of us felt a particular desire to start dancing. In Montevideo we rented a car, a manual car, which I got to drive because I was the only one that knew how, and headed east along the coast towards Brazil, past Punta del Este which is a popular beach resort destination but far more developed than what we were seeking out. The roads were actually pretty good but it was kind of funny because every now and then we would pass tractors and horse drawn carriages just putting along down the highway.

We decided to drive all the way pretty much to the Brazil border and then work our way back to Montevideo. The first night we set up camp semi-illegally (although nobody really cared) on the bluff right over the beach in Punta del Diablo and slept under the stars. On our first day laying out at the beach we pretty much all got fried and I accidentally slipped into the campfire that night, covering my foot in second degree burns, so that put a little but of a damper on the rest of the trip but it was still awesome. We stayed a second night in Punta del Diablo although we rented a tiny, cute little cabin after being swarmed by bugs when we woke up that morning on the beach which was kind of nice to shower and nurse our burns with the aloe plants that we found abundantly on the side of the road. The next day we set off for Cabo Polonio. To get there we had to drive about an hour west and then hop on what they refer to as the “bus” but which I really a giant 4x4 army-ish truck that drives you over the sand dunes into the town.
The bus:

The town there is so cool. In the entire place there were apparently about 200 people although I can’t say we saw more than 20 of them. The town is spread out among some small dunes with tiny, quaint, colorful houses sprouting out like daisies sporadically with no reason as to their location and no mark of borders to property.

The beach was awesome too. It felt like we just had it all to ourselves to swim or walk along the sand or sunbath in the nude as we pleased. There we had to stay in a hostel, one of the two hostels that there are there, because camping was strictly prohibited.
The hostel:

The dunes:

The guy that ran the hostel was this super hippie, funny, kind of washed out German guy named Uve that was pretty cool and helpful. He was the one that told us that pretty much anywhere in Uruguay its cool to camp and strangers will wake you up with a welcome and a glass of mate, except in Cabo Polonio where they will come take your tent down at 5 in the morning. He pretty much just confirmed what we suspected but it was nice to hear to reassure us that we didn’t need to pay for some shitty campground. There were a bunch (by a bunch I mean like 5) of French and Swiss people at the hostel too that were cool although not super social. There were also 2 Chileans which was cool for us and pretty rare since not many Chileans are able to travel. That night we just stayed out and watched the stars for hours. They were probably the coolest starts I have ever seen since the town didn’t even have electricity and we were hours away from the nearest city. It was awesome. The next day it was a little colder and we had all soaked in a pretty sufficient amount of sun for such a short time period, plus we ran out of sunscreen, so we spent the day checking out the lighthouse and wandering around town before heading on to La Paloma to camp that evening. We were driving around on random dirt paths that split off the highway when we stumbled on this crazy crater land that looked like we had landed on mars. Im not sure how it formed but just before the dunes started there was this weird valley with islands of land sticking up our of nowhere. We decided to camp there and set up tents just in time for the rain to start. It rained pretty much all night until morning when we got a slight break to pack stuff into the car. From there we headed back to Montevideo so that I could get my plane back to Santiago and they could find a bus. They had left Santiago about 3 weeks earlier to travel through Patagonia and Argentina a bit before I met up with them. They had been planning to go back through Mendoza but ended up scratching that plan I think, in favor of just getting back home to Santiago.


Santiago really is home to me now. Which makes it all the weirder to leave. I only had a few days left in Santiago when I finally got back so I did my best to see everyone I wanted to see and do everything I wanted to do. I hung out with Ivan and Gonzolo and went to lunch with my roommates and bought gifts for people and such. I finally went to Pablo Neruda’s house in Bellavista in Santiago because he is a famous Chilean poet who actually has three houses in Chile and I had yet to go to any of them. I saw Meg and Molly and Maggie briefly when they finally got back although all of my other gringo friends has already left for home. I packed up all my stuff which made my room feel unbearably naked but was of course necessary and hung out with Ivan, Gonzolo, and Fanny in my apartment right up until the taxi came and I had to say goodbye. I hate to say goodbye. And although I now have done the deed, I hate that it still doesn’t feel real. Santiago is home. To think I could feasibly never go back is out of the question. I have to. Chile, te amo. Nunca te olvidaré.



Things to remember about Chile:
-Musicians on the buses
-Choripan
-Mote con Huesillos
-Completos, Italians, Chorillana

-Pisco
-Terremotos

-Castellano
-Chile-time, aka always a few bendable minutes
-The Andes

-Alberto Magno

-Manuel Montt
-508 Echaurren

-Chileans: Gonzolo, Ivan, los amigos de Ivan (Franco, Pancho, Nicolás, Felipe, Marco, etc.), Egon (host hermano), Miguel de Chiloe (ruka owner, savior from rain), Marta de Castro (hostel owner)




- Extranjeros: Geoff, Pat, Meg, Molly, Maggie, Matt

- Compañeras de departamento: Fanny, Miriam

-La Cueca

-Trips: Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Patagonia, Chiloe, La Serena
-Valparaíso

Catch Up (Part II)

After Chiloe I had two weeks and a weekend to enjoy in Santiago before I sent out again. Those two weeks were the chalk full of essay and tests for the most part which is of course always a good time. I did get to go work at my internship though which I am enjoying. I am working with Mano a Mano, a HIV research initiative that is through the nursing school at my university here. So far I’ve mostly done catch up work to learn about the project and the two socio-economically disadvantaged communities in the southern part of Santiago where we work. I also got around to inputting data a little bit as well and actually got to accompany the project directors to a Mapuche Convention at a real Mapuche Roco (hut) in the city. Its kind of funny because you just sort of drive down the city street pas all of these shabby buildings and shacks and all the sudden there is a (relatively) big plot of land with a traditional indigenous hut in the middle. The day was a lot longer than expected seeing as the meeting started probably 2 hours later than it was supposed to, just because nobody really cares too much about time, but it was really interesting hearing everything they had to say about their experiences with HIV and sex education and how they think things could get better. There was one very interesting 12 year old boy who, like the rest, came from far away to be at the convention, and had come alone and yet despite his age he spoke very charismatically about his value of the mapuche culture and point of view on education. He also go up the courage to practice his English with me over lunch which was very basic but I thought it was cool. He asked me afterwards to take a picture with him on his phone to show to his English teacher but I kind of doubt it was as much for that as it was to show off his blonde gringa friend. Whatever though, I’ve had many a stranger chileno ask to take a picture with me randomly. At least I talked to this kid a while. The convention all in all made for an interesting weekend though. We also celebrated my friend Geoff’s birthday by going to his host brother’s band’s (Los Chiches aka The Bedbugs) concert on Friday night and having a mini party with his host family on Saturday.

That Wednesday began my series of big trips, three in a row: Bolivia, Iguazú Falls, and Buenos Aires. Bolivia, I think, was one of the coolest and craziest but most difficult trips I have ever been on. We left out home in Santiago at about 3am Wednesday morning in order to catch a plane to La Paz at 6. From La Paz we hopped onto an 18 hour bus to Rurrenabaque in northern Bolivia, in the Amazon Basin. Everyone was complaining about the bus ride since everything after the first hour was dirt or gravel but I didn’t think it was too bad besides the layers of dirt coming in through the window and settling on us. The trip was gorgeous though. La Paz is the highest capital in the world at about 13,000 feet so the trip to Rurrenabaque is all downhill going from snow peaked volcanoes and mountain plains down into think, humid jungle. They used to drive a different road know as the “Most Dangerous Road in the World” for its high altitudes and instability but somewhere in the last few years they built a better, supposedly safer road to go by so we were only on the “Most Dangerous Road in the World” for a little while before we split off onto the “safer” road. I can’t really imagine how bad the old one must have been however because even on the safer one there were definite moments we all envisioned our lives ending as the bus tumbled off the edge. Nevertheless, we ended up making it in good time and good safety. Once in Rurrenabaque we found a local tour agency to set up a tour for us.I knew having a tour was necessary but I didn’t know why until we set out on the little motor-powered banana boat we had to ride three hours up the river to enter the park. The plan was to have one day/one night in the jungle and three days/two nights in the pampas (flooded savannah grassland type thing). The first night we spend in Madidi National Park where we had a really cool tour guide named Lucho. He was one of those guys that learned everything he knew about the jungle when he started walking through the jungle at age 10 with his father who learned it all from his father who learned it from his father, and he knew an incredible amount. He led us wandering through the jungle for hours with a machete in hand and stopped periodically to show us things – ants as big as my thumb that were apparently very poisonous, bats hiding in a hallow tree, giant termite nests, vines that you can drink water from when the rains are scarce, mud holes where the wild boars play, the wild boats themselves, leaves that turn into a red mush to pain your skin with, little yellow monkeys, and so much more. Lucho also took us on a separate jungle night hike late in the evening when we found huge tarantulas. He was a pretty funny guy though and likes to mess around with us, especially with the boys. At one point he told Pat to lie down on the ground such that his head was inside this hollow tree, and look up to see the spiders and bats. Meanwhile he grabbed a long piece of grass and slyly tickled Pat on the ear while he wasn’t looking, totally freaking him out and making him jump up out of the tree immediately. Lucho just laughed and laughed. Another time, he kept making jokes with Geoff about slicing him with the machete, understandably making Geoff a little uneasy. So when Geoff looked up to see the moneys, Lucho put his finger across Geoff’s throat as if it were the machete and totally freaked him out. Again, Lucho just laughed. What a guy…

Lucho:


Anyway, after our day and night in the thick of the jungle we headed on to the pampas. After really having to search to find the cool things in the jungle, the pampas seemed like some kind of Disneyland ride with all animals on display for us. It was crazy just cruising up the river while off to either side it was like alligator, alligator, capybara, alligator, bird of paradise (the bird, not the flower), crazy red parrots, alligator, family of capybara, alligator, bird with neon yellow feet, alligator… I remember distinctly being kind of jealous the first time someone saw an alligator because I missed it and really wanted to see one but by the end we were almost sick of seeing them. Of course we weren’t actually sick of seeing them but what I mean to say is it was just too normal.

Alligator


Monkeys


Extraordinarily Large Bird


The whole pampa trip was crazy cool like that though. By day we would go wading through alligator and piranha infested waters to hunt for cobras and anacondas (we found one that was like 10 feet long!), or fish for piranhas (Meg and I both caught one), and cool off by going for a swim with big pink Amazonian river dolphins, except in the heat of the day when we had the chance to relax and kick back in the hammocks to wait it out. In the evenings too they had two sort of bar/hut things up the river where they took us to play some grass volleyball and grab a cold beer.

Anaconda we caught


It was amazing and we were all pretty high on life as we headed back to Rurrenabaque three days later. The plan was to fly from Rurrenabaque back to La Paz that evening in order to be back in La Paz for our flight to Santiago at 10am the next morning. When we got to the airport in Rurrenabaque however, it started to torrentially rain for all of 3 minutes and they had to cancel the flight because the runway was made of grass. And that was where the string of bad luck started. Since we couldn’t fly out, and there were no buses, and the buses would have taken too long anyway, we had to organize for a jeep from the tour company to drive us back. The jeep was supposed to take 12 hours, as opposed to 18 on the bus or 1 flying, but cost the same as the flight which sucked but we didn’t really have any other choice. It as awful too because we were all covered in mosquito bites and sun burned and hadn’t slept too much in the past few days because we had to get up early to do the different activities so all we wanted to do was shower and sleep but the jeep was super uncomfortable. It was so bumpy that nobody could sleep, especially those sitting in the back seat, and there was virtually no way to get comfortable. So on this jeep trip, first the jeep broke down 3 different times and the drivers had to get out and play with the engine a while. Then we got a flat tire. Then at about 5am we asked how far away from La Paz we were and the driver said we were still 5 hours away which wasn’t going to work if we were going to catch our flight at 10 so he told us he would hurry and started driving like a maniac. About an hour down the road though we ran into a huge line of traffic, only to find that there had been a mudslide and the highway was closed for the next few house. So saying goodbye to catching our flight, with nothing else to do, we had to wait it out. We finally got back to La Paz a couple hours later, a full 18 hours after we had left. When we got there we decided to go to the airport anyway to see what our options were. However, because we had bought the cheap tickets, LAN would not give us our money back and would not put us on another flight. And, if we were going to try and fly back, the next flight wouldn’t leave for another two days anyway and would have cost us around $1,500 each. So that was not an option. Starting to get a little stressed out about the whole thing, we headed to an internet terminal to assess out options and write to all our professors and internship bosses to let them know that we were stuck in Bolivia and didn’t know exactly when we were going to be back. We figured out though that we could take a bus to Arica, in northern Chile, and then fly back to Santiago from there because the national flights were a lot cheaper than the international ones. However, we were told that the bus for the next day was sold out and that the bus terminal had closed for the day. Just to make sure, Meg, Molly, and I headed to the bus terminal to double check while the others headed off to find a hostel for the night. About 30 seconds after walking into the terminal however (which was closed anyway), we realized that we had left all out luggage in the taxi. We ran back out to see if the taxi was still there but he was gone. We waited until dark to see if he would come back but he never did. Exasperated to the max, we had a very hysterical group hug moment that I think was pretty much the low point. Fortunatley none of us lost our cameras, wallets, or passports but I did lost all my clothes, my backpack, my ipod, and my notes for the geography midterm I was supposed to take that week among other things (bday/Christmas presents anyone??). With nothing else to do, we headed back to the hostel to meet up with everyone else. We showered and borrowed what clean clothes they could lend us and got some dinner and then headed straight to bed since exhaustion was really the only thing we could control at that point.

After we lost everything...

From there we decided to go to the bus terminal in the morning anyway to see if we could get on a bus. We were actually able to get on a bus but the plan was to then get on the last flight out of Arica at 4 but we didn’t get there until 3:45 so we ended up being stuck in Arica for a night too. Just being back in Chile at that point was so homey though that it didn’t matter too much. The pharmacies on every corner were comforting and we could eat the fruit and veggies again which we were all craving since we had to be super careful about what we ate in Bolivia.

Stopped Llama in Arica:

We walked around Arica a bit that afternoon and then finally got on a plane back to Santiago the next morning. I don’t think I have ever been so happy to walk into Santiago before in my life. That was probably the best feeling of showering and changing my clothes that I have ever felt.

We got back to Santiago just in time however, to leave for Iguazú a day later. With no other choice but to pack light, I set out on the next adventure, again with Pat and Geoff, but this time with the addition of Matt and Nadine instead of Meg/Maggie/Molly. Originally the plan had been to go to Buenos Aires that weekend so that is where we flew into but Pat and Geoff and I decided that we all really wanted to go to Iguazú Falls instead so we parted ways from Matt and Nadine pretty much as soon as we got there and didn’t see them again until the flight back. We had a few hours to kill in the city and get some food before we hopped a bus to Iguazú (I think I need to add up how many hours I have spent on buses after all of this… weeks I think) which left that evening and got us there like 15 hours later, the next morning. The day we got there and the day after we spent entirely in the park on the Argentina side. Iguazú Falls is actually located on a triple border between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay although we couldn’t go to the Brazil side without paying for a visa and I’m a little unclear as to where the border with Paraguay is. Regardless, the Argentina side is awesome and I’m pretty sure we must have been in all three countries at least once when we were in on the river. The falls are amazing though. I think they are the falls with the most volume of water pouring over and this year the water level was particularly high. There are two main loops in the park to walk through as well as a couple side trails where you just mill around and see falls of all different sizes. In some spots by the bigger falls you can just stand on the pathway and get soaked from the mist which is actually really fun and a nice oasis from the strong sun. The groomed, wooden planked pathways were a million miles away from the bushwhacking we had to do in the jungle in Bolivia but the walls of water were mesmerizing all the same. We really only had two sort of half days to see the falls although it turned out to be plenty since we had to take such a long bus and we only had a normal sized weekend for the trip as opposed to the stretched out 4-5 day weekends we had managed to work out for our other trips. It was completely worth it though. It think it made me realize how much I like the ecotourism stuff as opposed to just wandering through cities when they all start to seem pretty alike. It was a particularly funny trip as well because for the whole weekend Pat, Geoff, and I decided to introduce ourselves as Cran, Axel, and Falon respectively. It was particularly funny because even though it was Halloween, Geoff and I ended up having to stay in to work on homework so Pat, or should I say Cran, went out alone to a club and ended up running into some people that we had met earlier that day to whom he had already introduced himself as Cran so he had to keep it up for the night all by himself. It was also funny because earlier in the day when Pat had introduced themselves to a guy as Cran and Axel, the guy made some funny comment about how those were “not the most usual names” without actually questioning their validity.

The falls:


Me:


Cran, Axel and Falon:



Our trip to Iguazú was still only the 2nd of the 3 in a row though. The very next weekend I once again headed out to Buenos Aires although this time with Meg, Molly, and Maggie and then half way through I met up with Marianne who was returning from a birding trip in Argentina. The whole weekend was pretty relaxed as we just sort of wandered around the city and had some delicious Argentine beef

and poked in the little artsy shops and parks and randomly got our hair cuts and went to see Evita Peron's grave in the cemetary in Recoleta (after which none of us could stop singing "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" and some other things. Someone told me that Argentinians are Italians who speak Spanish but think they are English and that is exactly how the city feels. It is a cool blend of Parisian architecture with Tengo and Mate and Beef and art and Spanish spoken with an Italian accent and lots of food and things, set in the southern cone of Latin America with all the same economic and political issues that characterize most countries of the region (Chile is exempted from this actually). It is very European over all and very distinct from Chile but we had a great time. Meg, Maggie, Molly and I found some flyers for some bar or something shaped like huge lips so we each grabbed a pair and took pictures with them throughout the city which was funny.


And Marianne and I met up with some friends of her brother who live in a really nice house in Buenos Aires and offered to provide transportation to/from the airport for us with one of their 3 private chauffeurs and take us on a tour of their yacht club and feed us dinner and stuff. It was fun. They were super nice people and made us a lovely meal. And then afterward their oldest son, Valentín, who is 22, took me out with his friends and we went and picked up my friends and checkout the Buenos Aires Sunday night night-life which is actually far more lively than one might expect. Nobody eats dinner in BA until like 10 or 11pm so everything is just open later. Its definitely one of those cities that never sleeps (although I think the original was New York, no?). Marianne and I also went to see an art exhibit at the cultural center done by some Belgiam artists who had never been to Patagonia but had read about it and made a whole series of art things based on how they interpreted what they read. It was pretty funny. For example, to depict the Macaroni Penguins, they made a penguin statue and put macaronia noodles on its head. And the did a whole bunch of stuff with yukalaylee which I guess are originally from the Patagonia region. This was also in the exhibit:

Trip was overall really fun and really relaxing. I stayed in a nice hotel with Marianne which was an awesome treat after so many hostels and things three weeks in a row. Plus, as she is rather infamous for packing way too much stuff, she was able to help replenish my supplies of gear after losing everything in Bolivia so that I would be prepared for future trips to Patagonia and stuff. It was in general really nice to see her. And it was a really fun trip.

I'm not going to lie though, it was one of the craziest/funnest months of my life but I was definitely looking forward to just chilling in Santiago for a couple weekends to come.

Catch Up (Part I) - Viña, Villa Grimaldi, El Teniente, Chiloe

Well well well… where to begin… as mentioned previously, I do suck at keeping up with things like this, but I am making an effort. The last few weeks since I have written have just been wild though, and its been a struggle just to keep up with all of the few real responsibilities I have here, much less have time to hang around and catch up on things like blogging. It has been so amazing though, so lets see… where to begin…

Well, I guess the first notable thing was our trip to Viña del Mar. Its just a beach town just north of Valparaíso but it was pretty fun and relaxing. I went with Pat, Geoff, Matt, Nadine, and this girl Maya who had recently arrived to Santiago at the time with the Stanford program. Its funny because all of us extranjeros (foreigners) tend to know each other, despite how big the city is. We run into one of the groups of Stanford kids a lot but its so weird almost to spend time with them because they are at such a different stage of this experience. I remember being just like them when we didn’t know anybody and didn’t know the city and were always hustling around half lost. It sucks for them that their program is so short really. They arrived in September only to leave again 3 months later in December. I’ve been here almost 5 months now and am nowhere near ready to leave. Anyway though, Maya is a cool girl, despite her comparative noob status. And the weekend was just nice to soak in the sun. (BELOW: Geoff and I in Viña)

The following weekend was stacked with EAP field trips; Friday to Villa Grimaldi and Sunday to El Teniente. The Villa Grimaldi trip was very powerful because Villa Grimaldi is an old estate that was used to detain and torture political prisoners during the Pinochet dictatorship and our guide was a former prisoner. It was nowhere as big as the German concentration camps like Sachsenhausen which I visited in Berlin, and today it has been converted to a peace park, but it is still extraordinarily creepy in that the history is so much more recent. Pinochet led a military coup to come to power on September 11^th, 1973 (for this September 11^th has a very different significance in Chile) and stayed in power up until 1990. But even then its not like the country finally realized how awful he was and ran him into exile or something. Pinochet willingly stepped down when he lost a plebiscite election with 40% of the country supporting him. And there are still many Pinochet supporters in Chile today and it is still a huge issue even in the presidential elections coming in December since several candidates have previously been supporters. It is such an interesting yet confounding topic for me because it is hard to understand how after causing the “disappearances” of so many thousands of people and torturing them and committing so many blatant human rights crimes, he can still have supports. Okay, yea, he saved the Chilean economy and blah, blah, blah, but still… really? Anyway though, after visiting the torture site, we went to see the general cemetery where Salvador Allende, the popular socialist president killed in the coup is buried, as well as the grave of Victor Jara, a famous Chilean musician and political activist who was famously killed in the Estadio Nacional a few days after the coup after having his hands broken so he could never play music again. I think just about everyone had tears in their eyes standing next to Allende’s grave as our guide started to cry, a grown graying Chilean man, telling us of all his youthful dreams for better widespread educational opportunities and a better country before he was taken from his family and tortured for months on end. It was intense but incredibly vale la pena (worth it). The trip to El Teniente was much less intense because it is just a copped mine a couple hours outside of Santiago. Mining pretty much makes the Chilean economy so its pretty important but I’m not going to lie, all I really took from the day was that big rocks get broken into smaller rocks into smaller rocks into smaller rocks and eventually they pull metal out. We got to wear all the neon orange miner gear and steal-toed boots though, so that’s a plus. And I guess it was interesting the way it was all developed by north Americans and then nationalized, and the way mining brought about the existence of mining towns. All in all it was an okay day. (BELOW: Miner gear)

Not too long after that, I made my way down to Chiloe for a girls trip with Maggie, Meg, Molly, Annette, and Casey, all EAP girls. They area great group to travel with but its completely different from my style of travel. I generally kind of just float along and figure out things as I go, whereas they tend to have everything planned out from whatever transportation methods are to be utilized to what hostels we will stay in and what activities we will do each day. There are definite ups and downs to both styles. Chile is an interesting place though. It is an island just off the coast of southern Chile in a region of the country known for being consistently cloudy and rainy. For this it has a very sort of mystical feeling with fog rolling off the coast in all directions. There are tons of legends about how mystical the island is as well, about some hairy guy that walks around on three hands with one leg behind his head as he delivers messages for witches, and a ghost boat that takes away children who misbehave. It is very beautiful though. Bright yellow flowers cover the countryside, standing out against the fog, and there are lakes everywhere. To get there we flew to Puerto Montt and took a bus that drove us right onto the ferry and then down to the southern part of the island to a city called Castro. Castro is a very small town but it has a little bustle to it and it has this really cool old church made entirely of wood although styled like the old stone ones with domes and arches. There are also these things called Palafitos which Castro is know for that are basically just brightly colored houses on stilts. Apparently they just built them as a way to avoid paying property taxes, which is kind of funny, but they are cute. In Castro we also took advantage of the phenomenal sea food (the region is the number 1 producer world-wide of salmon) and 500+ species of potatoes (no joke… we ordered French fries, ha). They have a dish called Curanto which is basically a big bowl of all sorts of shellfish, fish, different types of meat, and potato dumpling things that is all cured together in a hole in the ground. It is interesting… We didn’t spend all our time in Castro though. On our second day we headed further south to Cucao where the southernmost entrance to the National Park is. To get there by the way, we traveled down I5, yes Interstate 5, the same I5 that I travel down at least twice a year to get to LA and back from home because it is all part of the Pan-American Highway which ends in Chiloe. To be fair, there is a slight break between Panama and Colombia where I went last spring break in the Darien Forest because the jungle just gets to thick and filled with FARC guerillas and narco wars and things. Regardless, seeing “Ruta 5” on the side of the highway almost made me feel at home. And the national park was pretty cool. We didn’t have too much time to walk around before it stated mad hailing and we decided to bail. We made it out to the beach before that though. When we got back from our hike we were soaked though from the hail and sort on in a pickle since nothing in the town was open as tourist season hadn’t really started yet and the bus back to Castro wasn’t coming for a few hours. It was then however, we met Miguel, our savior, who invited us into his Rocca (big hut) and let us dry out clothes on the wood stove and hooked us up with hot chocolate. He almost refused to let us pay him for all the hot chocolate afterwards too, and called the bus driver to have it stop right outside so we wouldn’t have to wait in the rain. I love meeting such nice people when I am traveling, it leaves such a good impression on the place and really acts as a reminder to what kind of amazing people there are in this world. Thank you Miguel… We finally made it back to Castro that night. That night as well we, or rather Chile, qualified for the world cup and the whole country went crazy. I can’t really even convey the energy that everyone felt because I don’t think there is anything in the US which unites so many people in excitement. On TV they were showing all the masses of people gathering in central plazas up and down the country going nuts. Santiago was by far the biggest scene and we all sort of wished we were there for a moment. But even Castro was going nuts and cars were circling the plaza, honking, with huge flags out their windows, and yelling. We walked up to the central plaza to experience it for ourselves until we got tired of all the attention that we drew as 7 young, American women. It was definitely exciting though. I’m happy for them. It is inspiring to see so many people of all walks of life and socioeconomic statuses so happy and so proud of their country, despite whatever day to day difficulties they face. The following day we just made our way ba

ck to Puerto Montt and then back to Santiago with one last seafood stop in Ancud, in the north, just in time to get back for classes the next day. (BELOW: The Girls, BELOW THAT: The Palafitos)

A Picture Journal

My new roomies... Fanny is on the left (France) and Miriam is on the right (Chile).

Skiing the Andes...

Laura (Wisconsin), Pat (Boston), Geoff (Texas), Me

Trekking the Andes - Cerro El Durazno

A dead cow we found...



Victoria (UClA), Jocie (UCSB), Me, Niki (UCLA), Thomas (UCSB)
The climb...
Maggie and I
The crew

Some Crazy Chilean (plus Geoff on the left there and me in the middle)

The Chilean flag

Around Town

So this sign was posted over the entrance to a building... doesn't that kind of ruin it?

A fat woman and man with no leg... or a fat woman and a man with a boot that camouflages really well... depending on how you want to see it
If we didn't stand out already...
C-H-I-L-E