Back on Task

So, been home for about four days now, after a tiring five months and an even more exhausting seven weeks of travelling in South America. Back at the 40th parallel in the northern hemisphere. I have not really had the guts to leave my house really and aside from picking up my parents, my dog, and visiting my one and only friend still around, I have not driven more than a mile from my house and still haven't even made it to downtown Vienna. I don't really miss it.

Americans kind of scare me. They talk loud. They walk and drive fast and are very antsy. They are all really tall (i.e. taller than me). They are pushy and don't let themselves be pushed around. I don't really want to deal with them, just yet.

I am not sure if I will keep this blog up during the school year, it has kind of fulfilled its purpose in life and may be tossed into the virtual garbage disposal of the internet. But I will debate this with myself and let you know of the results. I will, however, eventually get my skates on and get organized to put up some kind of website with the (hundreds, almost thousands of) pictures which I took on vacation.

I was going to leave for Bowdoin tomorrow so I could have a leisurely drive north, but it seems that certain naysayers that I live with have poopooed the idea and I am incarcerated here until Sunday morning. Oh well, we'll see.

I am starting a revolution in Chile

A joke revolution. In stead of the “yo’ mama” jokes or “dead baby” jokes, I have decided to introduce “my micro” jokes.

For example:

My micro was so old the adult fare was 10 pesos and the student fare was free.

Now, admittedly, many of these will not be funny if your Chilean history is a little rusty (how could it not be a little rusty, it is unsensibly extensive: they have gone through some 8 constitutions and had anywhere from 3-5 civil wars—it depends who you ask, as any minor civil uprising might be dubbed a civil war.)

My micro was so old that is still had a ‘vota NO’ sticker. (year 1989: when the NO was to boot our friend Pinochet)

My micro was so old it had an 8-track instead of a tape deck.

My micro was so old it only had one door.
(oh, wait, that isn’t funny, it really did only have one door)

Hmmm, I seem to have run out of ideas, that is sad. What is cool though, is that there appears, in the gaucho culture, a tradition of ‘yo mama’ type jokes. As in: are you blind? No, yo mama’s blind.

Indefinitely signing off

Now don’t cry kids, but this may just be my last blog entry, seeing as I am pretty much leaving Valdivia tomorrow. School officially ends for me today and vacation officially begins tomorrow. I just had a pretty intense one-night stand with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Esteban Echeverría, and Andrés Bello, among other illustrious authors. I managed to whip out some 8 pages on the redefining of barbarism by Romantic Hispanoamerican writers. Yeah, I don’t know either. Don’t ask, I am sleep deprived and agotada (drained, I guess, but agotada is much better).

So yeah, off to the bottom of the world tomorrow, where the sun sets only for a few hours (how cool!) to walk my butt (and my newly acquired guatón)--Ask your local Spnaish major for a translation) off in PN Torres del Paine with my two gringa friends. Hopefully the 6 AM bus tickets to Puerto Montt are not hot items, since I still have to buy them, and pack, and buy food, and snacks, and sell my soul to the devil and arrange for the assassination of Bush AND Cheney, and potentially Mugabe (for good measure). Wait—WHAT? Did I just say all that, I mean, I have no connections to the underworld.

Lagos may be a Bush puppet but…

At least he doesn’t grovel like the rest of the world. Bush wanted to revise the list of people invited to the APEC gala (as in, oh, I don’t like him, he can’t come) and Lagos refused, uninviting him.

When it rains it pours

No, surprisingly this is not in reference to weather patterns here at 40°S, actually it very rarely pours with rain here.

This is probably one of my last entries as I head into the busiest, craziest two weeks of my life. I have two exams next week (I still have yet to read 3 full length novels by next Friday, one of which is not in the library or any of the book stores—any being one of the three), and at least two papers due the next week after that, although I can’t get started on one them since we haven’t got any of the texts or the topic (please, why would we ever get anything in advance) and since our library for all its books, seems to be a void of information. Chile is the world’s second largest salmon producer—apparently they don’t like to write about it. Additionally I am trying to simultaneously plan my trip to Torres del Paine with La Katie and Mary and help my parents (little Spanish spoken) plan the Chile part of our X-mas trip. Let me tell you, I know all about rental cars and ferry systems.

Life here is much the same, though the weather is slowly but surely shaping up. The new pensionista is proving to be a mixed blessing. He plays his music really pretty loud and often quite late, but the music that he plays—good Lord, I have never met such a musically well-read (well-listened?) Chilean. He plays everything from Dido, to bad 80’s music, to Arabic music, to the Amélie soundtrack. It is VERY refreshing after Christian rock and the radio nonstop all day for 4 months.

Oh, right. So, I the boys and I decided that we find out what all this evangelical hype was like and we attended mass last Sunday with my tíos. Two hours and forty-five minutes. It was exhausting to say the least and indescribably intense. There was a lot of love in that room, much of it directed at us, surprisingly. At the end, they do a greeting, much like Catholics do when they shake hands and say “peace be with you.” Well, here in Chile that translates to hugging and kissing ever little old lady (or man, or young man and woman, come to think of it) and saying “que Dios le bendiga” (may God bless you). We, the foreign visitors were the stars of the mass, but I don’t think we took any limelight away from God.

I will probably manage to crank out one last message before I hop a plane to the bottom of the world, so stay tuned.

Newsflash: Heat wave hits Valdivia

No joke. This week we easily broke 70 degrees Fahrenheit, probably somewhere near 76 or 78. It was quite impressive. It really was hot yesterday, I was forced to take a cold shower when I woke from my nap it was so warm and the air so thick. In typical Valdivia fashion, though, today it clouded over, tossed down a few drops of rain and cooled off.

This week has been “mas o menos.” My ire over the election last week has abated, but that is only because the reality of Bush staying on as president has not hit me yet and I am not force fed his ugly monkey face on the news every night here. This only makes me dread the day I have to go home and face the fact that we really are stuck with the wretched imbecile for another four years. Chileans don’t understand how he won when every gringo they know (usually somewhere between 3 and 4 total) voted for Kerry. I would kind of like to know the same.

We got a new pensionista this week. His name is Rene. I discovered at this time that Kermit the Frog, your favourite green amphibian hand puppet, here is called Rana Rene. I am heartbroken. Talk about butchering translations. He seems buena honda, but he is really in to loud, bad 80’s music. I mean, some is OK, I caught some “Amélie” soundtrack in there today somewhere, but still he listens to some songs I could do without. I guess it is a change from Christian rock, but it is a mite too loud.

I have a huge history presentation to do today, so we will see how it goes. I mean I guess I feel pretty good considering that it is worth a third of our grade and Sunday night saw us (a couple gringos and some Chileans) arguing for a good two hours about whether or not we should change our topic and whether or not child labour is a form of slavery. Turns out that the prof was really impressed and gave us a 7 (on a scale of 1 to 7 where doing nothing gets you a 1 and you need a 4 to pass the class).

This weekend there is a big rowing competition between Oxford, Cambridge, Brasil (the whole country?), and the Valdivia clubs, so I will be looking to catch a few races (and steal a poster or two for the erg court) and get some pictures of those British rowing machines.

Se ofrece nueva carrera: Defraude Electoral II

So everyday, in every class, they pass around an attendance sheet which you write your name, your carrera (career, the school you are enrolled in), and your signature. Apparently George W. Bush graced my history class with his presence today, a newly accepted student in the new school of Electoral Fraud.

Gotta love that Chilean humour.

I saw the Andes yesterday

I am back to the land of lots of rain and slurred speech. I promise I will write more and tell about the excitement of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and the Desierto Florido in northern Chile, but you may have to just satisfy yourselves with pictures. I am posting some new ones, but I will add some more, once I correctly identify the flora from the desert.

I also got my hair cut, which is exciting, considering it is so short that I can barely put it in a pony tail (more like a little tuft). It is pretty much the same haircut that my sister (that's you, Caroline) had the last time I saw her and it is a little weird because every time I walk by a mirror or glass window I keep thinking that I am my sister. Talk about not knowing who you are.

Also, I wrote an article for the Bowdoin Orient last week (click on posting title for link), but it was a good deal funnier before I put it in for editing, but I guess we can't be too nasty about the Chileans or the Argentines in this country (I mean your country, in this country you can be plenty nasty about the Argentines, and kind of nasty about the Chileans, or at least ones you don't like). If you want an uneditied version that is entirely un-PC, contact me for a copy.

Signing off from Valdivia

Not that I have really been all that “on” in the last few weeks, I’m sorry.

But anyways, I am heading out to Buenos Aires followed by a short jaunt to the north (of Chile) to see the desierto florido which only happens ever 4 to 5 years and I should be lucky enough to see, and maybe, if I can manage it and depending on how I feel, I might make to Viña del Mar and Valparaiso to see our friend (well, she’s mine at least) Avery Galleher. I plan to be mailing some postcards while away (since I have already stripped the rather meager selection at the post office here) so keep your eyes peeled if you have yet to receive one and think you might be due for one soon. I am going to hold a post-off to see whose mail system is faster. If you would humour me and let me know when you get postcards, that would be cool, the winner will be awarded a prize of a personal recommendation on my part. I have my money on Chile losing this one hands down (considering it took them a week to return my absentee ballot even though I doubt it left Valdivia), but just like the presidential election, there will be no nay-saying until the results are in, so just get out there and be part of the democratic experiment. Ok, sorry, I didn’t mean to let that patriotic rant slip out, I promised I wouldn’t, I don’t want to make those non US-citizen folk amongst you feel bad.

Chile. So, yeah. Guess what, it is still much the same, although this country is making me decidedly floja (lazy, but beyond that) and the best procrastinator (not that I was all that bad at it before) with what little work I have (or what little work I thought I had to do, turns out we are supposed to be reading a couple novels of Maya literature—gag—that the gringos of course didn’t know about, we never seem to get the memos, or the education system). I have also reverted to a constant state of having or fearing that I have fleas. I think I am on my third or fourth generation right now, who are busy ransacking my ankles. I am pretty sure I got them from the particularly vile bedding we slept on this weekend at some boarding school while working on “Un Techo para Chile” (the Chilean equivalent of Habitat for Humanity, except they build houses for people who literally have nothing—read, just the burnt remains of their last house). I helped fold blankets and move mattresses afterwards and my hands were literally black, that is how gross they were. It is getting pretty bad, any little itch and I start getting paranoid about where I might have got them and trying to figure out which item of clothing needs fumigating.

Chile is also making me hate meat. I have never really been a big fan of it and haven’t (knowingly) eaten it in a solid ten years. But this country (and my tía especially) is making me not only ideologically, but also preferentially (is tastebudly a word?) opposed to it. She has (I suspect on the urgings of the meat starved brothers and primo) taken to throwing a piece of meat (chicken or nondescript piece of beef) in with a mix of peas, carrots, beans, and onions and boiling the living daylights out of it and serving up everything but the meat to me with some sort of starch (usually rice or potatoes in every shape and form). The whole dish of course tastes of meat (meat is used to flavour dishes, right?), which is simply starting to make me nauseous. In fact, I suspect that yesterday’s lunch is directly responsible for my current feeling of nausea, I mean, I haven’t been using the beef fat digesting bile salts in ten years and they must be kind of rusty. It is just kind of sad, since Argentina is so well known for its excellent meat and might be capable of swinging unrestrained vegetarians, but I guess good taste for beef was never carried over the Andes (neither was mate either, apparently, which is why I have been commissioned to stock up while in BA).

Oh, mate, I haven’t told you about mate. Ok, so, my mom (real mom, not any of this funny foreign host relation business) was telling me that one of the things that she remembers most about Chile is the decided lack of anything other than NesCafé as a coffee option. This is a curious fact since some of the world’s biggest and best coffee producers are on the same continent (and yeah, I know it is big, but it isn’t as though all the coffee is grown in Kenya), like Ecuador, Colombia, and Brasil. But, I have figured out that you don’t need coffee when you have mate!! Mate is this Uruguayan tea that has this whole involved ritual which I am not going to explain, but is really cool, and when it is flavoured and has a little sugar (which is not traditionally added, but bitter is not one of my favourite tastes), it is yummy. I had the misfortune of drinking a lot of it one night when I got to playing poker (sorry kids, all clothes were kept on our bodies, there was no nudity involved) with the boys and when I got home at about 2.30 that night, proceeded to stay awake for another hour and a half, my mind absolutely buzzing. It isn’t like coffee, which has absolutely no effect on me or my level of sueño and in some produces a buzz and makes them jittery, it just keeps you awake. Keep a watch out for lots of mate coming to a Tower quad near you soon.

Hmm, seems that I have overstepped the limits of the appropriate length of the weblog (a limit that I just made up on the spot, based on the fact that I am really supposed to be editing a paper right now that I need to turn in today before I leave for the week).