Mendoza!

Hola mis compañeros,

So I realize that I am finding it much harder to update this thing than originally anticipated, although I shouldn’t considering how I’ve never managed to keep any kind of a journal for more than a week.

Firstly, I have a cold. According to Chileans, this is due to the following circumstances:

1) 1. Not wearing shoes in the house

2) 2. Not wearing a coat when it’s 75 degrees out

3) 3. Crossing the mountains

4) 4. Not wearing shoes in the house

5) 5. Not eating enough

6) 6. Not wearing a scarf

7) 7. Not wearing shoes in the house

And I will be cured if I just:

1) 1. Drink copious amounts of tea with honey and lemon

2) 2. Put honey in and on everything that I eat, which should include lots of fruit and toast

3) 3. Wear shoes in the house

4) 4. Stay in bed all day without moving

5) 5. Honeyhoneyhoneyhoneyhoney

I just got back from Mendoza, Argentina, which was a lovely experience. We went with this group from the Universidad Católica, mostly exchange students from all over and a few Chileans. The first thing I learned was that Chileans are the Germans of South America. Compared to the Argentineans, Chileans are super well organized, super punctual, and less friendly. Customs getting into Argentina were pretty disorganized; our bags didn’t even get glanced at for animal/vegetable-product contraband, yet it took us like 3 hours to get through. To get back into Chile, the inspection was significantly more rigorous, and the time spent, much less. To the Chilean definition of on time (20-30 minutes late) the Argentineans add an extra 40 minutes. And I got service with a smile, which was a happy change.

My favorite parts of Argentina: The food. The first night we went to a tenedor libre which literally means “free fork” but is actually a buffet. It was so much food, and all of it was so delicious! This perhaps was in part due to the fact that I was starving, but it all was just so good to me. As was the very nice cabernet sauvignon we had with it. And it was so cheap! And the second night, I know it will be hard to believe, but because Argentina is known for its meat, we went to a parrillada, where basically they serve you chunks of meat. And I ate a whole chunk of meat by myself and enjoyed it. It had some really good pepper sauce on it. Matched with the house Malbec, it was perfect. PS, wine with dinner, a fabulous idea. Here is a picture of me looking happy in Mendoza:

The wine tour: We went on a tour of a few viñedos, or vineyards, one very modern and one more of an artisan traditional place. Both were really cool, as the pictures I’m putting up will attest. Also, the wines we tried there were delicious. We also went to an olivería, where they grow olives and make olive oil. They fed us bread with sundried tomatoes and olive oil. Such a simple, delicious snack. And the cheapness! I can’t get over it, the wines at these places, where they’ve been aged for a year in oak barrels and left to ‘develop’ for another 4 years only cost like $10. No joke.

My least favorite part of Argentina: Okay, so in Mendoza, apparently the place to go on a Saturday night are these night clubs way out on the outskirts of town, like a half hour away. In order to facilitate travel to these places, there are bus companies that will pick you up in downtown Mendoza and take you there, then return to give you a ride back later. And when I say later, I mean 6:30 in the morning. So yes, I was out dancing until 6:30 in the morning Saturday night. I mean, this is all well and good, everyone likes dancing, except for the Argentinean boys. The last few hours I was there, I could not walk 20 feet without being grabbed by multiple guys asking me to dance (‘asking’ might not be the right word… more like demanding). If I was dancing with my girlfriends, guys would come up behind me and grab me and, I kid you not, lick the back of my sweaty neck. It was gross. I could not move for fear of harassment from these boys. And they don’t get the hint. You start dancing with someone else and they just follow. But that was the only dark spot on what was, on the whole, a lovely trip and a lovely night out on the town. Hey, at least I got plenty of practice at ditching random guys…

Well anyway, now I must mess around with pictures; I’m adding another three albums, recounting an asado at my prof’s house, our trip to the world’s largest underground copper mine and it’s ghost town, and of course, Mendoza.

PS, if anyone would like some Chilean wine as a souvenir let me know. It’s cheap here, and it’s good.

Oh the days of totalitarian military control...

So my host dad worked for the government during the military dictatorship. Well actually, he worked in the same government job under Allende, then Pinochet, then for another few years in the democracy after the end of the dictatorship. And according to him, yeah, Pinochet had some issues with human rights, but it was only the poor people who died. No joke. Oh, and all the political dissidents just got exiled, not killed. He says working under Allende sucked because everyone walked around with guns, but that under Pinochet, there was much less corruption, and better working conditions. Today he says the whole government is all about stealing, and while there may be some truth to that, Chile has the least corrupt government in Latin America. Also, apparently Chile under Pinochet was a utopian society where everyone who worked hard was rewarded with promotions and more money, regardless of race, religion or political affiliation. And the neoliberal policies instituted under the Pinochet regime along with the policy changes that keep the current government from changing much are the best thing ever. True, Chile has a good economy right now, but it is also locked into an economic policy it cannot free itself from, and that could eventually strangle it. Of course, my host dad is also a Bush supporter and fan of his foreign policy and all around enamored of the United States and our neoliberal economics. He wants the United States to make Chile just a satellite country that happens to speak a different language. The only way for Chile to develop is if outsiders come in and do it for them, preferably Americans, but he wouldn’t say no to Europeans. Yeah sure, it may screw over some people, but they’re mostly just the poor ones so it doesn’t matter.

Chile’s political climate with respect to the military dictatorship and the current Bachelet government is really weird. Talking about politics is generally a no-no, because the country is still divided over Pinochet. As in, a lot of people look back on those years as ‘the good old days’ and see nothing good coming from the current left-of-center government. Also, there are both the tortured and the torturers walking around on the streets in Santiago. There is no really large effort to address the human rights violations here like there are in other countries. Chile is not like Argentina, where the whole country generally agrees that there were human rights violations during the dictatorship and these need to be unearthed and discussed. In Chile, yes there are movements for discovering the truth, but there is no national drive to look at the events of the dictatorship. The country is fractured over Pinochet, and no one talks about it. Also the fact that the country has a female president is apparently just a big practical joke on the part of the youth here. Voting is mandatory, so the youth, disillusioned with politics, decided to elect a woman. So no one likes her, and everyone is sick of the current coalition that’s been in power for the last 15 years or so. It’s looking like they might switch over and elect people from the more conservative party in the next election.

So that’s my rant on politics in Chile, hope you enjoyed. I have to say, I’m a little freaked out to live with my host dad who was clearly a supporter of the military government. Freaked out more in ‘oh my gosh these people do actually exist’ rather than actually feeling uncomfortable. So now I feel like I’ve been given a very interesting opportunity to observe someone with a completely different world outlook. I’ve lived all my life in liberal places with little or no contact with seriously different political views. Because when I say conservative here, I’m not talking like a republican. I’m talking like as far right as you can go. Republicans and democrats are really not radically different, especially in comparison with the extreme political parties of other countries. So I suppose I’ll take advantage of this glimpse inside a completely foreign political mind.

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head

Today it is cloudy for the first day since I’ve been here. Living in Santiago is very much like living in a climate-controlled bubble most of the time. Every day it gets up to about 80 degrees during the day and down to around 50 at night, but it is always sunny and the sky always clear. It does, in fact, freak me out a little bit that there are clouds, after living here for a month. But apparently we’re getting on toward winter and it’s supposed to be rainy this year.

Speaking of rain, that’s basically all it did while I was in Patagonia this weekend. The end of the world was very damp. And cold. And involved eating large amounts of peanut butter and trail mix, and living with three sweatshirts on at all times. However, the views were gorgeous. The sky there is ever-changing, so sunset is a spectacle. Watching the sun reflect off these snow-covered mountains and bouncing off the clouds turning the sky into a spectrum of deep violet to turquoise is amazing, and most definitely not something that can be caught on film. A fact that didn’t end up concerning me much since I realized my camera’s batteries were dead about fifteen minutes after we got to the national park. I’ll just have to rely on others for a photographic account of the adventure.

There was also no pressing need to speak Spanish while there since 95% of the people we saw were foreigners, either from Europe or the US, with some people from Israel and other parts of Latin America thrown in. I also met far more students studying abroad with programs in Santiago in Patagonia than I have while actually in Santiago, including some that we met at a hostel and whose program office is right across the hall from ours. So, while traveling to Patagonia did not necessarily put me into contact with Chileans, I at least met some nice Americans.

I do now know a Chilean guy in one of my classes! For my jazz class we have a group project to do, and we had to pick groups on Monday. Being the optimist that I am, I went in thinking “oh shit oh shit I freaking hate the world no one is going to want to work with the stupid gringa I’m just going to end up working by myself because I’m a loser screw Chile screw these cliquey students screw this class I freaking hate this bullshit.” And then this kid named Pablo asked if I’d work with him. To which I responded with a somewhat vacant stare because I hadn’t had any coffee yet, and that combined with the shock of not being a social outcast caused me to lose all of my comprehension and speaking skills, in both Spanish and English. So now we’re doing a project on Cannonball Adderley and he greets me when I come into class. He’s really nice, so I guess working with a linguistically challenged gringa is enough of a novelty to be entertaining, because my sparkling personality has yet to show itself. But I feel much less like a loser in that class now.

On Saturday I’m visiting the deepest copper mine in the world and the city that sprang up around it, home to the first bowling alley in Chile. The town, Sewell, was home to many transplanted families from the States, so it’ll be like mini-America. Kind of like the Disneyworld “it’s a small world after all” version of American life. I really hope we get to take a boat ride through it and marvel at the intricacies of American culture. We’ll just have to be careful not to fall off the edge into the squalid living conditions of the people who actually worked in the mine. It’ll be fun.