Travel
Podcasts and Other False Predictions
The last two days have been pretty brutal transport-only days, with something like 9+ hours Thursday and significantly more today. Why did I go to Argentina for 15 hours, you ask?
I originally came to Chile on a student visa, which was a long and circuitous process I’d love never to have to repeat (think FBI background checks, HIV test, reams of paperwork, and a nice cash deposit in the Chilean consulate’s bank account). That has unfortunately run out, and in an effort remain as legal as possible, I’m on a bus right now to Mendoza to pick up a new tourist visa.
Mendoza is the border town just on the other side of the Chilean/Argentine border, and quite a beautiful wine-filled area, though I’m only staying the night before heading back. The Chilean government is notoriously apathetic about their visas, and basically anyone willing to pay the entrance fee can get a stamp for a 90-day tourist visa. The “Mendoza run,” then, has become a ritual for foreigners and quite a nice and easy way to stay in the country.
Etcetera, and Such
The last few months have been a bit crazy, which would be an excellent excuse to account for my lack of blogging, but the truth lies somewhere between inertia, laziness and malaise, though I’m only about 2/3 confident about the definitions of 2/3 of those words, so who really knows?
School is long over, though I haven’t the slightest idea how I fared, considering the generally disorganized nature of the University of Chile. I legitimately really enjoyed each of my classes in their own way, and learned a lot, but I find myself complaining about the dysfunctional nature of its administration and habits of its faculty more than lauding the classes, which is too bad, but it’s interesting that that’s really what stuck with me. I’ll do my best in the future to acknowledge the good with the bad the next time an anecdotal discussion of the comparative merits of Latin American public higher education comes up which, knowing the crowd I tend to run with, will probably be pretty soon.
Making Finger on a Big Little Island
Sorry for the oddly timed updates, Internet access has proven to be scarce in this part of the world as I’ve been continuing traveling in the south; my friend Jenà left for a few weeks of sun, family and a bounty of Mexican food.
Our second day on the archipelago of Chiloé was one of the more amazing and memorable of my travels. We left Ancud after sleeping in later than we should have, vowing to visit the town of Degañ and Quemchi in the day, with plans to continue traveling south on the island over the next few days. People we’d been talking to throughout the island had been telling us about the ease of hitchhiking throughout Chiloé, owing to the relative proximity of everything on the island, as well as the friendly nature of the islanders. It was easy and utterly safe, they said, to “hacer dedo” (literally make/do finger) throughout Chiloé.
Going South for the Summer
With the semester officially over and almost everybody I know gone from Santiago, my friend Jena and I decided to go down to visit the south for a brief time: she´s going home after a week and I´ll be down here for another week after that.
We flew into Puerto Montt on Sunday, arriving around 9 am and immediately blowing that popsicle stand to get to Puerto Varas, a nearby town. Puerto Varas was a charming, touristy town with a surprising amount of German influence: the architecture, the food, the people, everything. Jena, who comes from Austrian stock and is nearly fluent in German, was in heaven when we sat down to a breakfast complete with omelettes, empanadas, and some apfel struedle (delicious). › Continue reading
Lima: LAN, Chifa, and Walter the Language Guy (Peru Part 1)
Our journey began at 4:30 in the morning in the Santiago airport: a group of 11 bleary-eyed Gringos carefully checking and rechecking our bags, and getting ready for the trip. Most had been able to grab a few hours of sleep before coming; I, unfortunately, had not.
I’d been kept up writing a last-minute piece for the Santiago Times, a quick tale of my personal take on Chilean wine, accompanied by the note to my editor “I think this is what you were talking about…but please let me know if I’m just way off the mark and I’ll figure out something else,” thinking to myself that this had better be on the mark, or there was no way I’d be able to fix it in time while on my trip.
A Lover and a Sword Fighter
Being 6′5, one becomes pretty used to comments about height, and the inevitable question of “Do you play basketball?”
“No, do you play miniature golf?” has become my favorite response, but seriously, I don’t play basketball, or football. I tried both, and I’m pretty terrible. I do, or did, play hockey, I might say, which seems to satisfy their curiosity for a moment, though I always feel bad saying that. Sure, I played something that had the word “hockey” in the name, that is the bastardization known as “floor hockey,” but if someone called on me to demonstrate something as simple as skating in a straight line, I’d fall every six seconds. Floor hockey, on the other hand, is played on a floor. You know, something that humans can walk on without strapping blades to their feet.
But I digress.
The sport that I got the most into in college was fencing, including taking a class for a couple of years and competing on the team in a few tournaments. And while I would be the first to admit that my footwork never proceeded beyond “terrible,” I was quick enough in my upper body to consistently stay one of the better students in the class. It helped that the majority of students switched to the club when they reached a high enough level and quit the class, following the eternal hatred between the class and the club, but shut up. I was good. I have a lot of pictures of me winning, but they’re all, um… on a different computer. But I swear they exist.
Oh wait, here’s one! › Continue reading
The Plan, Stan (Part 2)
Santiago is a different city in the spring, which it finally finally is. Sure, the temperature still varies wildly and the sky is known to occasionally open up with a 10-minute rain and hail downpour, but for the most part it simply varies from brisk to beautiful. The sun is out, the flowers are starting to bloom, the young horny couples are inappropriately touching each other in inappropriately public areas, it’s Spring!
On my part, I’ve been trying to make opportunities to walk as much as possible, something that seems to scare the hell out of most Chileans. “You’re going to walk home? From here?” my friend said incredulously. “But we’re right next to a Metro stop!” I attempted to go to a movie yesterday, but ended up stranded on the far end of Providencia, needing to get home (long story), the Metro just closing, and decided to walk home. I arrived about two hours later tired, but in a good way.
Today I went to Los Leones to check out the leather jacket shop I’d seen my first week in town (god a nice new leather jacket for about $42), and was on my way back when I decided to stop in to the Mundo a Mil (basically their version of a $1 store). I picked up a SUPER 3D PUZZLE of the USS Constellation CV-64, an aircraft carrier, and I was blown away by its amazing descriptions on the packaging. In its unedited glory:
Use hand and head — Training kid’s flexible for their proportion on the hands and eyes.Develop them imagination ability. Make a teaching fairyland.
Design munificent — It can be assemblaged detached over and over,and looks like vertiable.It needn’t any assist tools.
Perfect in workmanship — Materials are daintiness. Safety and slightly.Full of colour printing.
And there › Continue reading
Still Kickin’
Hello dedicated reader base (those of you who are still around)! I am alive.
I emerged from a whirlwind trip through Peru, only to emerge into two weeks of tests and essays, and I promised myself that I would not take the time to update until I had finished my work and hit another temporary lull in the school schedule.
So here I am, a bit battered and bloody from a week with three essays due (2 8-pagers and one 4-pager, in Spanish), and after procrastinating a bit more, I’m forcing myself to do some writing before I can go to bed.
In the interest of time, I think I’m going to streamline several topics that could certainly warrant full posts, and I’m going to hold off on pictures until I have way more time for that. The Wordpress upload system is fine, but does not lend itself to big albums or slow connections. Also, I’m going to talk about Peru separately.
• I had the opportunity to cover the presidential debate here in Chile for the Santiago Times, which was pretty amazing. I’ve pretty much taken over the politics beat for the paper, so my editor got me and Kendal (photographer) press passes to go. I got to sit in the section for “Accredited Press” near › Continue reading
Weekend Trips: Papudo/La Ligua
This post is a bit overdue, but I’m sitting here in a café a few blocks from my apartment, enjoying fast, free wifi, and I figure that finally updating about my trips is as good as any reason to put off reading an actual book, so here we go.
A week or two into our Intensive Language Program we were given the assignment to take a weekend trip, in groups, out of Santiago to another community and then to give a presentation to the rest of the EAP group about the place we had visited. I was with a group that decided on the general assignment of Papudo/La Ligua/Zapallar, three small towns in the same general vicinity, all very different. We decided to stay in Papudo and head out from there.
This is not where we stayed, but I found it pretty funny. The name means "Open All Year."
A couple of hours in a bus later, we arrived in Papudo and proceeded to a hostel at the side of what could generously be known as the “center of town,” a plaza filled with grass and trees, a busted phone booth and a snack stand. The hostel was a nice place, run by a friendly couple with several rooms in the back, with anywhere between one and four beds per room.
We had had a brief misunderstanding with the prices, as we had thought it would cost $5 per night (dos mil quinientos), but it in fact would cost $25 per night (doce mil quinientos). Still, the place was quite nice, and came with breakfast, and we managed to haggle them down to $20 per night if we all stayed both nights. Still a bit much, but the best we’d be able to find. We quickly split up into our rooms, with people generously letting me take one of the singles due to my hacking cough at the time, and we settled in.
Papudo is a beach town, almost entirely based around tourism and fishing, both of which are far more lucrative exploits in the summer. Going in dead winter, we found the town next-to-deserted, with empty restaurants, beaches and streets with a few local kids and the occasional Santiaguino couple that decided to get out of town for the weekend.
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