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 11th, 1973 (for this September 11th 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)
