CROOKED COMPASS

Book launch: Santiago en 100 Palabras 2009-2010

2011-12-13T10:30:00.006-05:00

Live in the 56-2? Need a holiday gift for a friend, an enemy, the lady at the fruit stand who always throws in a free clementine, or yourself? Well, get thee to Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral or Metro Baquedano on Tuesday, December 27 from noon onward and snag a FREE copy of Santiago en 100 Palabras: los mejores 100 cuentos V.

Honestly, I would be posting this even if there weren't a bit of shameless self promotion involved. I love Santiago en 100 Palabras. I would pepper spray a crowd, Black Friday style, to get my hands on one of those little books. OK, not really. But I might elbow a little.

I was bummed when the book launch, originally slated for September, was postponed indefinitely. Nevertheless, it looks like something good has come of the delay. Even though I think Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral is pretty neat, I was disappointed back in September when I learned that the distribution of the book would occur exclusively within the building...or at least that seemed to be the plan. It was a departure from previous launches, which had taken place inside subway stations across the city. I loved these subway launches because they seemed to epitomize what Santiago en 100 Palabras has always been about: demonstrating that there are stories everywhere, not just within the confines of the spaces and institutions where we traditionally look for them. Obviously, making people go to a spiffy new cultural center to get the book would have been to completely miss the point. Perhaps the contest organizers came to the same conclusion over the past few months -- or, more realistically, realized it would be next to impossible to get people to go to an event two days after Christmas --because they'll be handing out books at Metro Baquedano now as well. Bien hecho.

So, there you have it. Books on the subway and at GAM. After you grab yours, start writing: December 27 is also the launch date of the next version of the Santiago en 100 Palabras contest!

Santiago en 100 Palabras: Hombres

2011-10-07T23:58:00.004-04:00

Hombres

En mi trabajo conozco a muchos hombres. Los conozco en callejones, en los costados de las carreteras, en piezas con olor a moho y sudor. Una vez conocí a uno en un penthouse donde había un tucán enjaulado. Sí, es difícil, pero me las arreglo para que no se note. Por ejemplo, dejé de maquillarme después de la primera noche, cuando conocí a un cumpleañero adolescente con cachetes de querubín. El rímel trazó surcos negros en mis mejillas cuando escribí en el expediente: “sobredosis fatal.”

**A few years ago, I submitted this to the Chilean short story contest Santiago en 100 Palabras, which I love almost as much as I love a giant spoonful of peanut butter. Nope, it didn't win. The upside? I get to publish it here instead of laboring over an original post and falling asleep at the keyboard.

Ever dreamed of seeing your words emblazoned above the doors of a subway car? If so, you're in luck: Santiago en 100 Palabras will be launching their 2011 contest any day now. (Not so) Coincidentally, they will simultaneously launch a little book of stories that there's a super secret special reason why you should snag.

Anyone else have a story to share? Please link or share in the comments section! Don't post anything you're planning to submit this year; you won't want there to be any exclusivity issues when you win!

Local tourist: Brighton Beach

2011-05-16T12:41:00.001-04:00

My grandfather sailed to the States from Russia as a toddler in 1912. Unfortunately, he died before I was old enough to ask him everything I now wish I could about our ancestors and his experiences growing up as an immigrant in Detroit. I don't know exactly why his family left the Volga basin; I was once told they were ever-so-politely ushered from the premises due to involvement in clandestine political activity, but I recently began to suspect that this story may have been concocted to tickle the imagination of a preteen with an unhealthy thirst for novels set in war zones. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the question was left unanswered in a brief family history written by a relative I never met. Said document did, however, inform me that a few of my relatives learned the hard way that stealing wood from the tsar's forest would get you shipped off to Siberia. Something to keep in mind.

Even though I'm aware of very few of the specifics of my own Russian heritage, I've always had a very romantic -- and very amateur -- fascination with my grandfather's homeland. I have a small collection of matryoshka dolls that occupies a shelf in the computer room at my house in Minneapolis -- the very room where, back in middle school, I harnessed the power of dial-up internet to learn how to scrawl out my name in Cyrillic letters. Years later, my Bulgarian friend V. joined the literacy effort, a move I'm sure he regretted every time I attempted to stammer my way through one of his newspapers or books. At one point, we got it in our heads that we were going to learn Russian, win the lottery, and ride the Trans-Siberian Railroad out into the sunrise. We ordered workbooks.

I never made it past Lesson One. (If you ever need to know how to say "this is a modem" in Russian, I'm your woman.) Nevertheless, I still firmly believe that one day I will learn Russian -- or at least enough Russian to book a ticket on the Trans-Siberian. In the meantime, I have Brighton Beach.

Brighton Beach is a neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn known for its large Russian-speaking community. I've been wanting to explore the neighborhood ever since I caught a glimpse of a few Russian storefront signs during a recent visit to Coney Island. Yesterday, with finals at last behind me (!!!), I had my chance.

A few blocks after stepping off the subway at Avenue X, I began spotting Cyrillic on store awnings and bus stop ads. Pretty soon, I was hearing Russian everywhere. I wandered into the Black Sea Bookstore at the corner of Coney Island and Brighton Beach Avenues and, after flashing an apologetic smile at a staff member who addressed me in Russian, asked to see books for children learning to read. Although it immediately became clear that even the most basic Russian kids' books were beyond me, the very friendly and patient staff dug out this cheery animal flashcard set, for which I gladly forked over $4.99:

My new menagerie and I set out for a stroll along Brighton Beach Avenue, a bustling commercial artery lined with specialty food stores, European shoe shops and lots and lots of pharmacies. I stopped in at M & I Specialty Foods, where the upstairs buffet was nothing to write home about but the bounty of Russian edibles was delirium inducing -- especially the extremely well-stocked candy mezzanine. Next was the enormous St. Petersburg, where I browsed long aisles of CDs, vintage Soviet posters, and books; the children's selection was, predictably, just as intimidating as Black Sea's.

Afterword, I took the animals to the boardwalk, where we strolled past beachside Russian restaurants

and visited the most elaborately decorated public bathroom I've ever seen.

When I got home, I flipped through my new flashcards and encountered a problem: It's hard to learn a word from a picture if you can't tell what the picture is. Most of the animals on the cards are your garden variety tigers and hippos, but this one, on the other hand, had me puzzled:

My guess was "evil fish," but a translation website tells me that "pike" is more like it. Which raises another question: How copious is Russian preschoolers' knowledge of fish species? Call me a sorry excuse for a Minnesotan, but they're all still just "fishies" to me.

In addition to making patent my woeful ignorance of all things scaled, my trip to Brighton Beach rekindled my urge to get serious about learning Russian. To be honest, I doubt this is a very realistic goal at the moment -- but I did pull out my old workbook this morning. So, if anyone out there knows of a Russian book in which a pike and a hippo discuss their new modem, please pass along the title. I just might be able to read it!

Esquina

2011-05-09T13:05:00.007-04:00

Los citaron por ingerir alcohol en la vía pública. Miraban con los cuerpos paralizados y los ojos en grande mientras un carabinero vaciaba la botella en la calle. Él era estudiante de intercambio y ella temía que lo echaran del país.

Cuando los cabos los dejaron con dos citaciones escritas y un par de miradas reprobatorias, el terror se trizó en risas frenéticas y después en besos con sabor a piscola. El saberse cómplices en la transgresión los subió a una ola de euforia que los depositó en un cuarto de motel donde pasaron dos horas comiendo maní salado y besándose entre carcajadas.

Durante los años siguientes marcaron el aniversario de su iniciación delictual compartiendo una botella en la esquina de la citación. El día de su matrimonio se detuvieron rumbo a la recepción y le pidieron a la fotógrafa que les sacara una foto ahí. Después la enmarcaron y la colocaron en el velador: él le pasaba una botella mientras ella se reía con la cabeza echada hacia atrás y el viento le levantaba el velo blanco.

Cuando llegaron los hijos dejaron de visitar la esquina. La foto seguía en el velador, recuerdo de un tiempo prístino que no conocía ni deudas ni ojeras.

Una noche de verano se pelearon. Los niños andaban en la playa con sus tíos y las paredes de sus piezas vacías vibraban con la fuerza de gritos en dos idiomas. Él miraba en silencio por la ventana de la cocina cuando ella lo cogió de la mano y sin pronunciar palabra lo guió al auto.

Se demoraron veinte minutos silenciosos en llegar. Se estacionaron frente a la botillería, donde compraron una Coca de tres litros y una botella de pisco barato. Caminaron dos cuadras y se sentaron en la esquina que no habían visto en años.

Echaron un poco de bebida a la calle y la reemplazaron con pisco. Pasó muchas veces entre ellos la botella sin que la acompañaran palabras. De vez en cuando, le echaban un poco más de pisco y la revolvían suavemente mientras se sonreían. En algún momento, el silencio se derritió en risas.

Al amanecer, él miraba por la ventana de la comisaría con el cuerpo paralizado mientras un carabinero tecleaba conducir en estado de embriaguez. En una sala aséptica y fría, ella miraba el techo con los ojos en grande mientras el examinador médico firmaba un certificado de fallecimiento.

~~~

The back story: This semester, I've developed the dirty little habit of scribbling stories in Spanish in the back pages of my notebooks when I get bored in class. This one was inspired by a certain three-liter concoction some friends and I may or may not have mixed up one night on a street corner in Santiago. Hey, I never said I was classy. Spanish is not my first language, so please be kind!

However, please do not hold back your constructive criticism! The blogosphere is brimming with great writers and readers, so I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. I'm particularly curious about whether you found the ending confusing. It strikes me now that the use of the word "paralizado" could give rise to befuddlement.

What about you, gentle reader? Have you ever felt the urge to write about your adoptive city in your adoptive language?

Coney Island

2011-05-01T22:24:00.007-04:00

I've been wanting to visit Coney Island since before I moved to New York. I've never been particularly enamored of theme parks (the Minnesota State Fair Midway being a notable and obvious exception), but something about devouring cotton candy on the boardwalk while watching aged but luminous carnival rides light up the night sky has always held a certain mystique for me. This past week, nearly nine months after arriving in NYC, I finally went. Unfortunately, end-of-semester insanity didn't allow me to spend much time immersed in the bright lights, but I was there long enough to confirm that I'm getting old: The legendary Cyclone made my neck hurt like no roller coaster ever has. In any case, my Coney Island dream was fulfilled, cotton candy and all. Maybe I'll even make it back for the Mermaid Parade next month.

The earthquake jacket

2011-02-27T12:25:00.008-05:00

One year ago today, Chile shook.

After the earth stopped moving, my Chilean roommate told me to put on "evacuation clothes," a phrase I'm guessing means more to seismically schooled Chileans than novice gringas. I figured he was referring to something that would protect me from the elements better than bare feet and pajamas, so I threw together an outfit that included this jacket, pictured here in Central Park:

In the end, we didn't have to evacuate, but I kept the jacket on as we sat around the radio in the dark and listened to the first news reports and, after the power came back on, swept up the chunks of plaster that had fallen from the walls. I kept it on after the sun rose and began to shine through the blanket of dust that hung over the city; I kept it on when I went out to survey the damage around the neighborhood and felt the summer day begin to heat up. I wore that jacket for the better part of the next few days; I even slept in it sometimes. When I wasn't wearing it, it was usually close at hand.

Of the people I know, those who suffered the most anxiety after February 27, 2010 were those who had been on the upper floors of tall buildings when the quake hit. In Chile, tall buildings are designed to dance; the fact that they're flexible that makes them less likely to suffer serious damage during an earthquake. Ironically, what makes these buildings safe is precisely what makes them terrifying places to be when the earth starts to shift. "I had completely accepted that I was going to die," a resident of one of the upper floors of a Santiago apartment tower told me at a Chilean independence day celebration in New York last September.

After the earthquake, many of these people tried to feel safer by staying with relatives in one-story houses or by making sure they were never in their apartments alone. I was at ground level when the tectonic plates did their dance and am therefore convinced that my experience was not nearly as frightening as that of those who were higher up at the time. Still, I was rattled, and I think the jacket was what made me aware of it. I realized that the jacket made me feel safe; I was like a two-year-old with a blankie that had snaps and a zipper.

Interestingly, I wasn't the only one who looked for security in clothing. Over the next couple days, I noticed that people were walking around bundled up in the middle of summer. Maybe we wanted to ensure we were prepared in the case of a violent aftershock; maybe the 8.8 experience had simply left us all feeling chilly. Whatever the reason, a lot of santiaguinos tried to wear safety in the days following the earthquake. It may have looked strange, but it made a whole lot of sense.

For me, it's easy to talk about the Chilean earthquake as if it were a thing of the past, but there are still so many people -- like those who lost loved ones or saw their homes crumble around them -- for whom last year's disaster is a living daily reality. Here's hoping they feel some warmth today.

The language bomb

2011-01-25T18:19:00.001-05:00

We all have vindication fantasies. For some people, they involve telling off a loathsome ex or showing up smokin' hot to a high school reunion and breezing past former rivals with a triumphal strut. Call me strange, but my vindication fantasy involves dropping a language bomb.

You know, a language bomb. Leaving someone numb with surprise and embarrassment when you reveal that yes, you speak their language and yes, you understood every nasty word they just said about you.

Looking back, I'm surprised that the nearly five years I spent living in South America didn't provide me with more opportunities to indulge my fantasy. If people were talking smack about me, they were considerate enough to do it out of my earshot. While I was frequently afforded the satisfaction of firing back in fluent Spanish at people who addressed me as they would a toddler, I was never able to experience the supreme vindication of looking the owners of vile tongues in the eye, cocking an eyebrow and saying, "Careful with the assumptions you make."

I was given the opportunity to do so today. On my way home from class, I stopped at a deli to buy a sandwich. Several feet away at the other end of the counter was another customer who was talking with someone who appeared to be a deli employee. I only saw the customer from behind, and we didn't acknowledge one another.

Immediately after placing my (hefty) order, I heard someone say (in English), "That's breakfast, lunch and dinner!" I assumed it was the customer at the other end of the counter, but my first thought was that he'd been addressing the person he'd been talking with before, not me. My second thought was that he may have been alluding to my order and that, if he had, the comment hadn't exactly been a polite one. My third thought was that, in actuality, he may have been addressing me directly. My fourth thought came in the form of a decision to adopt my habitual modus operandi: When it comes to unsolicited comments from strange men who may or may not be speaking to me, I opt to ignore and await further evidence.

My doubts about the comment's intended recipient were dissolved when the man launched into a tirade -- in Spanish this time -- about how insulted he was that I'd ignored him. Addressing the person he'd been speaking with before, he indicated who I was, what I'd ordered (this part involved an impressive abundance of detail), what he'd said, and the fact that I hadn't responded. The diatribe culminated in a declaration: "They're racist."

Of course! Not responding to random comments that someone shouts down a deli counter at me clearly makes me racist. Never mind that I hadn't seen the color of the customer's skin or had the slightest idea what languages he spoke. Never mind that I hadn't even known he'd been talking to me. Never mind that he'd been the one to make ungrounded assumptions about what I could and couldn't understand based on my appearance. I'm obviously racist. And not just me. I and whoever else falls within the scope of they. People with my skin tone? Women? Panini lovers? People wearing leg warmers? The mystery remains.

I was incensed. And damn it, I was going to tell him. In Spanish, so there would be no question as to the fact that I'd understood everything he'd just accused me of. At the time, I didn't see it as the fulfillment of a vindication fantasy but rather as simply setting things straight.

"I didn't know you were talking to me," I called over to him in Spanish.

Alas, the record was not to be set straight, because he didn't hear me. Or perhaps he did and decided to give me a taste of my own medicine by ignoring me. In any case, he continued his conversation and made no indication that my words had registered. I tried to get his attention again when he passed me on his way out, but he didn't appear to hear me then, either.

As I stood fuming by the counter, waiting for my giant sandwich, it occurred to me that I'd just witnessed the implosion of my vindication fantasy. I'd experienced the rage of having been wronged while being denied the satisfaction of vindicating myself. At the same time, I realized that the other customer -- still under the impression that I'd ignored him because he was Hispanic -- was probably also seething and contemplating all the things he wished he'd said to me. If the issues underlying the misunderstanding weren't so socially, politically and emotionally charged, there would be humor in the situation.

Looking back, the following things occur to me:

1) If the deli customer had previously been discriminated against because of his ethnicity or language, it's understandable that he might attribute my lack of response to prejudice. That doesn't change the fact that he jumped to some very hasty and incorrect assumptions about me, though.

2) I could have stood to have lightened up when it came to the "breakfast, lunch and dinner" comment. The guy probably meant it to be funny, not offensive. If one of my friends had said something like that to me, I probably would have laughed.

3) Everyone at the deli probably thinks I'm racist now.

What about you? Do you think I had the right to be pissed at the guy for trash talking me in Spanish? How would you have responded? Have you ever dropped a language bomb? Did it detonate?

The spiral

2011-01-11T23:15:00.000-05:00

I plan to spend the rest of this week spiraling ever more deliriously downward into an abyss of torment and despair (I'm writing two huge papers), so I probably won't be posting anything meaty until next week. Until then, here are a few snaps of things that have caught my attention over the past few weeks. Enjoy:

Merry Christmas to you too, La Guardia.

Being the only person stuck in the library over break feels awesome.

Like Ben Covington of Felicity fame, I couldn't wait "to see this place when it snows." I always liked Noel Crane better, though.

I used to live somewhere that looked somewhat like this. :)

Love and the post-apocalyptic city

2010-12-30T01:39:00.000-05:00

I know, I know: It's been a while. I'm so much taller than the last time you saw me. Unfortunately, finals, papers, travel and the holidays (hope yours have been happy!) have come between this blog and me of late. This means that I've had a lot of time to accumulate ideas for this post and become indecisive about which one to roll with. For example, I'm tempted to uncork a bottle of palabras reguleques about this charming development, but I'll restrain myself for the time being and turn instead to something I've been thinking about for a while and would be interested to hear others' take on.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were talking about breakups. We discussed how the death of a relationship not only breaks hearts but also spills ink over maps. Faster than he or she can say, "It's not you, it's me," your ex sinks a scalpel into your city. Amputated are the place where you met and the restaurant where you had your first date, summarily extracted your favorite movie theater and the park where you used to people watch on weekends. As if watching an air raid from above, you stand by helplessly as entire patches of territory vanish into blackout. Simply put, there are places you can no longer bring yourself to go.

My friend and I agreed that this is nothing short of a travesty. Your ex already took your heart/your sweatshirt/the best three and a half months of your youth; he or she should not be able to take your city as well. So what do you do when you find yourself squinting into the smoking post-apocalyptic wreckage of your rose-tinted urban paradise? In my opinion? Reclaim it.

See, when I was studying abroad in Santiago, I liked a boy who took me to a plaza. My crush never amounted to much, but that plaza -- which I neither could nor wanted to avoid -- remained haunted by the Ghost of Infatuations Past. Until the day when I decided I'd had enough and ceremoniously crisscrossed the plaza on my bike. And just like that, the plaza was mine again. As silly as it sounds, the debris strewn across that bombarded square reassembled itself into a lovely fountain and one of the city's most breathtaking churches. The plaza was back on my map. In time, I introduced it to new people who helped me create new memories there. Take that, apocalypse.

It strikes me that making a conscious effort to reclaim lost territory may be especially important for those who are new to a city. Relationships -- romantic and otherwise -- are key to recent arrivals' mapmaking process: When you're a newcomer, you see what people show you, and your experience of your new surroundings is strongly mediated by the paths your guides map out for you. If one of these guides decides to leave the tour early -- carrying your pride and your favorite DVD -- chances are you'll simply never retrace your steps. Your map will spread like vines around an obstacle, creeping around the edges of the blackout zone without ever venturing inside. When you find yourself heartbroken in familiar territory, on the other hand, your roots may already penetrate too deeply into the fallout zone to be torn out completely.

Then again, maybe not. What about you? Have you ever exorcised a haunted plaza? How do you return stolen spaces to your map? Do expats/newcomers face a specific set of challenges when confronting the post-apocalyptic city? Which is worse: for someone to trample the landmarks you've known since childhood or to grind a sprouting map back into the ground?

Missing unicorn

2010-11-02T15:21:00.000-04:00

New York City is a living bulletin board. The announcements, ads, posters and graffiti with which people adorn the walls of this city are enough to make even the shortest stroll fascinating. At first, I thought this flier posted by someone requesting live bedbugs took the cake.

That is, until I saw this:

I called, of course. About the unicorn, not the bedbugs. I mean, how could I not after spotting her waiting for the La Guardia shuttle bus with a sleazy guy and overhearing them mention Vegas?

Becoming an anecdote

2010-10-29T10:59:00.000-04:00

Kyle's recent post about her dance party of one reminded me of one of my favorite moments from the nearly four years I lived in Santiago. (The biggest excitement I've had here in New York over the past several days has been trying out a new reading room in the library, so unfortunately, you're stuck with nostalgia this time around.)

I'm guessing that everyone who's ever lived in a city with a subway system has a favorite station. It might be the station closest to your apartment, the one with the prettiest tiles on the walls, the one where you and your significant other met up before your first date or the one where peoplewatching is at its most fascinating. Within the Santiago Metro system, there are a few stations particularly close to my heart. One of them falls at a point on the line where the track travels above ground.

A good friend of mine lives right next to the station and can see onto the platform from his bedroom window. After visiting him during one of my last weeks in Santiago, I crossed the street, swiped through the Metro turnstile and, once I was down on the platform, looked up to his window and, per tradition, waved goodbye.

However, a simple wave didn't seem to suffice this time around. I was leaving Santiago in a few short weeks, making this one of the last times I would set foot in my favorite Metro station. Plus, there was a really good song playing on my iPod. I was going to go out with a bang.

It started with a general rock-out: hips swaying, hands in the air. Then came the robot, the Egyptian and Saturday Night Fever. Across the street, my friend was breaking it down just as hard in his bedroom window, but very few of the waiting passengers who were casting curious glances my way could see him; to them, I was just a crazy, vaguely foreign-looking woman who apparently believed she'd stumbled into the world's most poorly choreographed iPod commercial.

I was disappointed when the train pulled up and cut our dance party short, but I rolled away satisfied that I now had yet another reason to love my favorite station. It had become -- and forever will remain -- the site of the most badass dance party the Santiago Metro has ever seen.

Around the same time, I etched my initials into a square of wet cement. Unfortunately, "wet" in this case meant "half dry," so the result wasn't nearly as aesthetically pleasing as I'd hoped. Still, I relished the idea of leaving a permanent mark on the city that had left such an important mark on me. My interest in nostalgic vandalism had actually been sparked a few years earlier, when I'd accidentally planted my foot square in the middle of a patch of wet cement on a sidewalk in Santiago's Recoleta neighborhood; it was my first taste of the thrill of altering the urban landscape. (I've been back to the area many times since but was never able to identify the imprint of the bottom of my flip-flop. I choose to believe it's because I haven't looked hard enough and not because they smoothed the cement over after I marred it.)

When I think about it now, though, doing the robot in a Metro station may be an even more effective way of accomplishing urban immortality. Cement can be recast, but memories of people acting like lunatics in public last a long time. If even just one of my dance party witnesses now associates that Metro station with spontaneous rug-cutting, I've done my job. I've done it even better if my friend and I contributed to the belief that the Metro and public spaces like it are just as open to the absurd as to the everyday.

In class, we've been giving presentations that are supposed to end with discussion questions, and I've gotten into the habit. Plus, I'm genuinely interested in your answers to the following: What's your favorite subway station and why? (I can't name mine here because I don't want the world -- I'm probably overestimating my readership just slightly -- to know exactly where to stand in order to see into my friend's bedroom.) Where's the strangest place you've ever had a dance party? Do you feel that being foreign (if you live in a place where you are) makes you more or less inhibited about going nuts in public? Have you ever tried to leave your mark on a city or place, through vandalism, vogueing or otherwise?

Reactivating the beast gene

2010-10-01T02:13:00.000-04:00

Back in August, my mom came out to New York to help my sister and me move into our apartment. One evening, she came across me sitting on the living room floor surrounded by wooden planks and piles of screws -- put simply, in the throes of Ikea despair. Her words of encouragement? "It looks like when God was handing out the beast gene, he stopped after he got to me."

My mom isn't the only one who's implied lately that I'm a wuss. While chatting on Skype the other night, V. and I started reminiscing about the time we hauled his furniture down the street in Santiago when he moved to a new house a few blocks away. (Two days later, his new room was rendered uninhabitable by the earthquake.) He admitted that my endurance had surprised him that day because, and I quote, "you don't do anything."

Anything in the way of exercise, he clarified.

Come on, V. That's not entirely true. Back in Santiago, I rode a bike, walked a lot and had a job that kept me on my feet (literally) for nine hours each day. In Minneapolis this summer, I walked around the lake occasionally and paid a few visits to the elliptical machine. It's true, however, that it's been a while since there's been anything systematic about my exercise. In other words, I don't have a fitness regimen.

I think I need one. At first, I thought fitness would take care of itself in New York. (I also thought I would paint my entire apartment before moving in and have a thriving herb garden up on the rooftop. Alas.) I would, after all, be walking everywhere, right? And wouldn't the plethora of health food options available inspire me to master some healthy recipes?

Not exactly. Sure, I could walk everywhere and spend hours each week chopping cabbage and cooking quinoa. However, the truth is that I'm frequently either too exhausted or in too much of a hurry to do either. There are many days when my only exercise involves hustling to the subway and my only meals are those I can grab on the go. The result: I've been feeling crazed and out of shape. I need to exercise, and I need a routine.

So I've decided to try running. Again. I made my first attempt freshman year of college. I figured that if my roommate could make it to crew practice before dawn each morning, I could at least do a few laps around the neighborhood. Easier said than done in a neighborhood full of hills, treacherously uneven sidewalks and trees that drop softball-sized seed pods everywhere. My career as a runner lasted all of two weeks.

My second try took place halfway across the world. My family and I were on vacation in Spain, and I'd decided that taking morning jogs would be an invigorating way to see the sights. Unfortunately for me, a record-breaking heat wave hit Europe that summer. The one time I actually rolled out of bed early enough to catch some cool air, I got so lost amid the steep, tangled streets of Granada that I had to take a cab back to the hotel. You know, like seasoned athletes do.

Here in New York, it's not as easy to blame my failures on a sinister conspiracy between urban planners and climactic conditions. There are plenty of flat, well-paved and attractive places to run here. Among them is Central Park, where I decided to give running another go this week. Surprisingly, I started off OK. What's encouraging about Central Park is that for every intimidating leave-you-in-my-New-Balance-dust marathoner, there's a novice runner like me. On the day of my first run, there was also a woman who was at least seven months pregnant and put me to shame.

I guess I still have a long way to go.

Any tips, seasoned runners? How can a flojita like me get in the habit without burning out or getting injured?

Half a decade of Dieciochos

2010-09-19T01:04:00.000-04:00

I just got home from celebrating Chilean independence (to be referred to henceforth as el Dieciocho or las Fiestas Patrias) in New York City. Paying homage to my adoptive country required graciously accepting a free pisco sour refill, so I apologize if the writing in this post is rather uninspired. As for the story of my night out, it will have to wait for later this week; some of the events that transpired were quite unexpected, and I'd like to be able to do them justice. Also, I'd like to combine the story with a restaurant review, which I think will take more time than I'm willing to stay awake right now.

As an appetizer, I leave you with the Tales of Dieciochos Past. Tikitikitiii.

2004 - My first Dieciocho was, sorry to say, anticlimactic. I'd arrived in Santiago less than two months earlier and had been too busy trying to find my way home from all the places where I'd gotten lost to make a real Fiestas Patrias plan. A fellow exchange student's host family had clued her in to the fonda (public Fiestas Patrias party) being held at Parque Intercomunal de La Reina, now called Parque Padre Hurtado, so a group of us boarded a big yellow city bus (those were the days) and headed up there. Since we weren't exactly sure what one was supposed to do at a fonda, we spent most of the afternoon waiting in line for anticuchos (meat shishkabobs) and plastic cups of chicha. Since the La Reina fonda was a family affair, we were left with a thirst for mischief but -- as is the way of college students -- didn't get organized in time to go anywhere other than the Empanadium in Las Condes.

2005 - Back for my senior year in the States, I bought a horrifically overpriced bottle of pisco at the seedy yet beloved liquor store near campus and tried to make my roommates drink it with me. They hated it, although they were too polite to say so. My mistake was starting them not with the cocktail-style pisco sour but with Piscola, a low-budget favorite that involves mixing pisco with Coke or Sprite (the latter is my favorite). The thing is that piscola, in my opinion, is not very good in itself. Piscola is good if you associate it with good memories, which it is particularly skilled at evoking. It's a drink that's made and shared at backyard cookouts, impromptu gatherings, and university concerts, events that leave you thinking back warmly on the company and -- yes -- on that warmly tingling burn your drink left at the back of your throat.

2006 - I was living in Quito and, as I recall, did nothing special to celebrate. I may have sought out a Chilean empanada, which are easier to find in Quito than you might think.

2007 - I had just returned to the States in Quito and was too busy wallowing to do much of anything.

2008 - This was the year I learned to dance cueca. A friend had happened upon an instructional DVD that we replayed until we had it down. Of course, cueca -- like Spanish -- is a lot harder in the real world than in the classroom, so my grand premiere at one of the infamous Parque O'Higgins fondas was more than a bit fumbling. Still, I'd dared to get out on the floor, which was more than I'd been able to say in the past.

V. and I both lived within a few blocks of Parque O'Higgins at the time and, as a result, spent more time at this fonda than we ended up wishing we had. If you want to party with the crowds, have your choice of low-cost fondas and drink chicha from the barrel, this is the place to go. After a bit, though, the teeming activity can get overwhelming, especially if you go at night. I wish I'd gone during the day, when kite-flying on the green is the activity of choice.

2009 - Another busy year. This one involved failed kite flying and an Andean dance party. Details here.

2010 - Coming soon.

Felices Fiestas Patrias, everyone. I hope you have a wonderful weekend celebrating (or not celebrating) however you choose to. If you happen to be in Chile, fly a kite and drink a glass of chicha for me.

Canciones pa'l recuerdo

2010-09-15T19:52:00.000-04:00

In which Leigh dates herself

The other day, my sister, Q. -- queen of both Latin pop and bursting spontaneously into song -- busted out a superb rendition of "Angel" by Mexican singer Belinda. I hadn't heard the song in ages, but it immediately transported me back to the days when I was an exchange student in Santiago and the then-teenage pop starlet's voice chirped from what seemed to be every speaker in the city. I've heard that smell is the sense most tightly tied to memory, but if my response to "Angel" is any indication, hearing is right up there with it.

I began compiling a mental list of other songs that could act as trans-hemispheric time machines. Most of them are lip-smackingly cheesy. Not all of them are in Spanish. Hardly any of them are Chilean. They are, however, the songs that consumers of mainstream Santiago media heard during that time, whether on TV, in the Metro, on pop radio stations or at dance clubs. If you lived in Chile at or around the time I studied abroad there -- which I think a sizable slice of my blog readership did -- you'll recognize them and, I hope, have a little laugh.

So, here you have 'em: canciones pa'l recuerdo.

What songs take you back?

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

The world's most awkward bookmark

2010-09-13T21:06:00.001-04:00

This weekend, I spoke with someone who had recently read an article that affirmed that yes, people actually do judge you by what you read on the subway. Instead of pondering ways to conceal an Us Weekly inside a New England Journal of Medicine, I immediately wondered if people were also judging me by my bookmark.

My bookmark looks like this.

That's right. These days, one can enjoy an absorbing work of literature while simultaneously learning which of his or her moles are cancerous. And, thanks to this party favor from my dermatologist, now not even reading can distract me from the fact that my skin is a ticking time bomb.

Not only can I not avoid contemplating my impending death by mole, but it's impossible for me to make it through my commute without feeling some very befuddled stares creeping over my shoulder. I tend to read with my bookmark marking the page I'm on, so if a fellow passenger happens to take a glance at what I'm reading -- as I almost always do if the person next to me has a book open on his or her lap -- he or she comes face-to-face with an illustrated guide to melanoma.

"Why not just flip the bookmark over?" you may ask. Fair enough. If I do, curious fellow passengers get to look at this

and draw their own conclusions about why I'm keeping my place with what appears to be a comic strip of a naked man examining himself with a hand mirror.

Since I don't have plans to replace a perfectly good bookmark, I'm trying to make peace with it. I don't try to cover it up on the subway anymore. In fact, I'm trying to embrace my role as a walking, reading public service announcement. The truth is that I've probably been more conscientious about applying sunscreen since I began spending prolonged periods of time staring at Mr. Hand Mirror; maybe my fellow passengers will be, too.

If you recognize any of the moles on my bookmark, get yourself checked out by a dermatologist. Don't forget to ask for a free bookmark.

The huacho convention

2010-09-05T08:39:00.000-04:00

In Chile, "huacho" is a potentially derogatory word for a child born out of wedlock. Strangely enough, it's also a term of endearment, regardless of the target's parents' marital status. I call my ex-boyfriend "little bastard" to this day, and we parted on completely amicable terms.

The word figures prominently in the song "Me quieren en Chile" by the California band Los Abandoned. The verse in question goes like this:

Yo no soy de Chile, no soy de Francia
Yo no soy de España ni de L.A.
Por la puta que soy huachita
Puta madre, no más
Por la puta que soy huachita
Puta madre, no más

Or, roughly translated and shortchanging the multiple meanings that Spanish speakers will pick up in the last line:

I'm not from Chile, I'm not from France
I'm not from Spain nor from L.A.
Damn it, I'm a little bastard
To hell with it all
Damn it, I'm a little bastard
To hell with it all

It's not hard to see why this song resonated with me when I stumbled across it a few weeks ago. I could just as easily call myself "huachita" (like my ex-boyfriend does) and substitute Minneapolis, Quito and New York for the last three places mentioned in the song. I might even have to add another slot for Washington, D.C.

I am from Minneapolis, of course. I have a "City of Lakes" poster hanging in my entryway and an "I Love Mpls" print framed on my bookcase. Minneapolis was and will always be my first home. It's the place where my family is based and where I absorbed and internalized the values and customs that characterize me to this day.

However, I think many other people who have spent significant periods of time living abroad would agree that you never truly go home. While I'll probably always call Minneapolis "home," it will never be as invisible to me as it was before I left it. When I was growing up, I hardly ever noticed my surroundings, much less analyzed them, because they were what was and had always been. I didn't stop to ponder the lakes or the parkways or my favorite spots around town any more than a bear stops to ponder the woods. I was in my habitat and didn't know another one.

This changed somewhat when I went off to college in D.C., where I pined for Minnesotans' relaxed pace of conversation and virtually unfailing willingness to hold doors open for others. Nevertheless, the true shift came after I'd spent a few years living in South America. Whenever I visited Minneapolis, I was able to see it with the eyes of an outside observer. How lucky we are to live in a city brimming with water and trees; how wasteful we are to crisscross through it in cars. Simultaneously, I realized that I was not a regular Minneapolitan anymore. During the time I'd been away, my city and its residents had experienced things together -- snowstorms, a catastrophic bridge collapse, years of pop culture -- to which I would never be able to fully relate. Similarly, I'd lived things abroad that no one who'd never experienced anything similar would ever truly understand, no matter how hard I tried to explain.

And my homes away from home and I have shared a lot of things. Quito and I watched thunderstorms roll down the mountains the same time every afternoon. Santiago and I felt the earth shake beneath us. I care about these cities and a lot of the people in them, which, I suppose, makes them homes as well. I'm sure these places have shaped me in more ways that I know.

But, of course, they'll never be home for me like they are to the people who grew up there. The latter have shared so many things that I never will and have a relationship to their cities and cultures that I had to learn like a second language.

Which brings me to another component of expat bastardom: We are linguistic huachos. As a gringo friend and I once discussed in Santiago, one language is no longer sufficient. We talked about how, after years of living in Chile, there were certain concepts we felt we couldn't adequately express in either English or Spanish alone and that those who were in the best position to be able to communicate with us were gringos who had lived in Chile or Chileans who had lived in the States. I mean, sometimes you just need to be able to say, "Puta la weá, it was so awkward, but me dio lata irme" and have someone understand you.

The Los Abandoned song perfectly illustrates the plight of the linguistic huacho, because "puta madre," an expletive in Chile, can also mean "awesome" in Spain. We would have to know where the singer is from to know for sure whether she thinks being a huachita is sh*tty or the sh*t, and since -- by her own admission -- she is from nowhere, we can't know what she means.

In Chile, kids who can't identify their fathers are labeled "huachos" by the insensitive. I'm hereby expropriating the slur and applying it --as a term of endearment, of course -- to those of us unable to define ourselves as the offspring of a single place and a single language. I would hazard the claim that this includes many expats, although we obviously don't experience it in the same way children raised bilingually or in immigrant communities do.

I, for one, am happy to be a huacha. Multiple homes and languages mean a lot of goodbyes and a lot of stammering, but they also mean a lot of unique relationships and a lot of ways to express oneself.

I suppose it would have been more accurate for me to say that I'm happy being a huacha most of the time. There have been moments when I have doubted my ability to relate to or express myself to anyone. However, I take comfort in knowing that there are a lot of other huachos out there -- and that they probably feel the exact same way.

Take my new classmates. After our first department meeting last week, a group of us went out for dessert. As I listened to the others talk about their lives between bites, I realized that I was in the midst of people just like me: people who had bounced from place to place and taken a part of themselves from each pushpin on their personal maps. Paris, Philadelphia, the Dominican Republic, New York, Miami, Minneapolis, Santiago de Compostela and Santiago de Chile: All made their presence known through tales and through language. In the middle of New York, city of huachos, a tableful of huachos were eating pie.

I think we're going to get along just fine.

Letters from Gotham

2010-09-01T10:03:00.000-04:00

If I haven't posted for a while, it's because I've been frozen into the icy cistern at the bottom of the ninth circle of Ikea hell. I've been in New York City for more than a week now and can honestly say I know my way around the labyrinthine Swedish superstore in New Jersey better than around my new neighborhood. Luckily, Q. and I -- with the help of our lovely mother, who turned out to be a beast with a power drill -- now have a couch to sit on and beds to sleep in. We even have some pictures on the walls courtesy of this up-and-coming Minneapolis artist, whose City of Lakes print is the first thing you see when you walk in our apartment door.

Since I've spent the past several days on the floor doing battle with products with names like Linnarp and Micke, I haven't had much time to get my bearings. This goes for both the city and my university, the latter of which seems to think me more self-sufficient than I really am. Unfortunately, I was absent the day they handed out the get-your-grad-school-life-in-order instinct. If I hadn't stopped by my department to speak to one of my future professors the other day, I would have registered for all the wrong classes.

To the university's credit, they hosted an ice cream social for us newbies. They also held an orientation meeting in which they made it clear that there's a support system in place to lend us a hand if we ever need it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disoriented on my way home. And that's when it happened: As I was leaving the subway, a woman stopped me and asked me for directions. And -- get this -- I actually knew what to tell her.

I would feel a rush of self-satisfaction whenever this happened to me in Chile, and I felt it again here in New York. I may be disoriented, but I guess I hide it well!

My virtual paranoia

2010-08-17T13:02:00.000-04:00

You've probably noticed that the anecdotes that appear on this blog include quite a bit of self-deprecation (or self-congratulation, as the case may be) but hardly any personal detail. For example, I've posted about nasty clients I encountered at my last Chilean job but refused to indicate what type of job I had. I even deleted comments that alluded to it (sorry). I wrote a fair amount about my neighborhood in Santiago but didn't say which one it was. (What up, Estación Central?) And, of course, it's not a coincidence that nearly all the photos I post of myself don't include a full frontal view of my face. I'm not just being emo.

People might wonder -- with good reason -- why I'm so paranoid. It's not like I'm a celebrity or anything. Why would anyone want to waste their time stalking me online?

I'd like to ask the person who tried. I don't want to get into the sordid details, but a few years ago, a person contacted my employer in Chile seeking information about me and claiming we'd had a class together when I'd studied abroad. To make a long story short, I corresponded with this person for a few days online, all the while feeling guilty that I didn't remember her. The reason for this soon became obvious: I'd never met her at all. I realized this person had found sufficient information about me online to track me down and was now posing as someone she wasn't in order to achieve who knows what.

So I became paranoid. I wasn't that I was particularly afraid of this person, who dropped off the radar -- except for a minor Facebook incident -- when I cut off communication. The experience, however, made me aware of how easy it is for strangers to use the internet to both investigate and deceive you. The truth is that if anyone truly wanted to stalk me online, he or she could almost certainly find a way to do so; I decided, though, that I wasn't going to give potential stalkers any extra help by posting personal details on my blog.

This has made it impossible for me to share things about my life that I really would have liked to. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to blog about the outrageous experiences I had at my last Chilean job. Every time, though, I had to hold back: Even if I hadn't given the name of my company (which, needless to say, one should never do on a personal blog), the rubric I worked in was small enough that it would have been easy to guess where to find me from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day. The same goes now for the Ph.D. program I'm about to start. Although it will probably become pretty obvious what I'm studying and where, I'm not comfortable publishing that information just yet.

Honestly, I wish I were, because -- call me voyeuristic -- I think learning details about other people's lives is part of what's so fun about reading blogs. Still, I think it's necessary to maintain a filter. I've seen blogs in which people have written things like, "Hey, friends and family! I got to India last night and spent today getting all my stuff organized in my new apartment. Here's the address so you can write me." I probably should have posted a comment along the lines of, "Are you insane?! Get your home address OFF THE INTERNET!" I've also read posts by people who identify their companies by name and proceed to bitch about their jobs. Bad move, amigos.

What do you think? Where should bloggers draw the line when it comes to sharing personal information? Is there any aspect of your life you would never consider making public?

A Ph.D. in crayons

2010-08-16T16:50:00.001-04:00

In about a week, my sister, Q., and I will be moving into an apartment in New York City and starting our respective school years. At present, said apartment is completely empty aside from basic kitchen appliances and a few ceiling fans. Therefore, last week we decided to make that greatest of twenty-something pilgrimages: a trip to Bed, Bath & Beyond.

We piled our cart high with pillows and bedbug-proof mattress covers and struggled to maneuver it around displays of such enticing items as University of Minnesota Snuggies, butt-lifting underwear and something called the Pasta Boat. We must have looked lost (or like prime targets), because every employee we passed asked us if we needed help finding anything.

"Are you shopping for college?" one of them asked.

My mom, who was with us, explained that my sister was getting her master's and I my Ph.D.

The employee looked at me aghast. "A Ph.D. in crayons?" she demanded.

I'll admit that I can look young for my age. I don't say this in a "look how well I withstand the signs of aging" way; apparently, there's something about my face infantile enough to have made people assume I was in high school during and well after college and that I'm too young for big grown-up tasks like buying alcohol in countries where the drinking age is 18 and getting advanced degrees.

I'm sure I'll end up being grateful for this a few years down the line, but right now, being babyfaced sometimes results in people not taking me seriously – like the client at my last job who told me I “wouldn’t know anything about” a topic I wrote my undergraduate thesis on.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t feel like a child sometimes, too. I was pretty good at keeping things running smoothly in Chile and Ecuador, but the fact that I’ve lived so many of the past several years abroad means I don’t really know how to be an adult in the U.S. I went straight from the protected island of college to a series of adventures in destinations south, and although I got jobs, opened accounts and rented apartments, everything seemed too transitory and precarious to fit into a stereotypical portrait of adult life. While some of my friends in the States were buying and decorating homes, I was renting furnished rooms in other people’s houses or – in the case of Ecuador – filling my apartment with cheap furniture I hoped to be able to resell when I left in a few months’ time. While some people my age were advancing along the hallowed road of “building a career,” I was working quirky jobs that, although rewarding, were more like tiles in a mosaic than rungs on a ladder.

Of course, I don’t subscribe to the idea that stasis is the key ingredient to adulthood. I would also hazard to claim that my unconventional experiences have made me more self-reliant than going a more traditional route would have. In other words, I’m prepared to take on adult responsibility, but I just don’t know how to do it here yet. I could tell you all about talking down your rent in Ecuador and could show you the statements from my Chilean retirement savings fund, but I still get nervous whenever I have to write or deposit a check in the U.S. And it is a bit unnerving to know that this new educational endeavor falls completely under my responsibility, both academically and financially: My fellowship is mine to keep or lose, and a lot more independence and self-discipline are going to be demanded of me than when I was a perennially sweatshirt-clad undergrad who spent hours in the cafeteria getting sugar highs from the impressive array of frozen-yogurt toppings. All of this makes me wonder if I'll be able to prove myself any older than the employee at Bed, Bath & Beyond assumed I was.

So stay tuned for my adventures in crayons, alternately titled “Little Leigh does Big-Girl Things.” No posts about writing checks: I promise.

Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 4: Say yes

2010-08-06T23:55:00.000-04:00

That’s right: more tips for exchange students. In case you haven’t noticed, nostalgia for Chile has coincided with excessive amounts of free time to create very favorable conditions for blogging. Below are links to previous posts full of unsolicited advice:

Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 1: Stick around
Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 2: Academics
Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 3: Go extracurricular

Today’s tip: Say yes. I have to admit that I didn’t think this one up on my own. “Say yes” was actually a piece of advice given to me by a coworker in Ecuador. She was also from the States and explained that in order to meet people in her new country, she had decided shortly after arriving that she would say “yes” whenever a friend invited her out. As a result, she said, she made a lot of Ecuadorian friends – among them the man she eventually married.

I hadn’t met my coworker yet when I was an exchange student in Chile, but looking back, I operated according to a similar logic while studying abroad. I had arrived in Chile determined to make Chilean friends and integrate myself into local life, and I knew that this was going to require me to “put myself out there” – as my mom likes to say – more than I was accustomed to doing. See, I’m not the world’s most social person. In college, I much preferred staying in with my roommates to making a half-day production of going out to the neighborhood bars a lot of my classmates packed into once they turned twenty-one. To this day, any social outing that involves a significant amount of preparation and energy investment awakens in me a vague sense of foreboding.

I knew I had to get past this while studying abroad. Not only would avoiding situations in which I felt socially awkward prevent me from making Chilean friends, but I quickly learned that it would prevent me from leaving the house at all. (Unpleasant but necessary news flash: Being an exchange student is AWKWARD with capital everything.)

So I started saying yes. When someone invited me somewhere, I tried to repress my concerns about how out of place I would feel and just go. And it actually paid off. One particularly illustrative example is the story of my first judo barbecue.

It was my second semester in Chile, and I had decided to lower my stress level a bit by taking a judo class at one of the universities where I was enrolled. A few weeks into the semester, I was having a great time getting my ass kicked but had yet to reap the bounty of social benefits I had hoped getting involved in an extracurricular would provide me. I had become friendly with only one of my classmates: C., one of the only other female judokas.

When the upperclassmen in judo announced they would be hosting a barbecue for the entire class, C. and I took an “I’ll go if you’ll go” approach. Both of us enjoyed the company of the other students, but neither of us knew them well. We figured going as a pair would shield us from the uncomfortable prospect of not having anyone to talk to.

The afternoon of the barbecue, I boarded the bus with my violin case in hand (at the time, I was taking lessons with a music professor kind enough to put up with my chronic lack of practicing) and set off in the direction of what I thought was going to be the beginning of my new and improved Chilean social life. However, just after I’d arrived at the designated meet-up spot – I was one of the first, as gringas and gringos almost always are – C. called me and told me she wouldn’t be able to make it after all. (Another unpleasant but necessary news flash: This WILL happen to you in Chile.)

So there I was, a solitary gringa with a violin case standing around waiting for a bunch of people I didn’t know to show up. I felt extremely awkward and wanted to leave. Luckily, I managed to remind myself why I had gone in the first place and decided to stick it out.

It ended up being a blast. My classmates were much more inclusive of me than I had expected them to be; I even ended up performing an impromptu violin solo. To be honest, I don’t think I would have been nearly as sociable if I’d had C.’s shoulder to lean on the whole time.

That first judo barbecue ended up marking the beginning of a few important long-term friendships. The barbecue itself wasn’t enough: I knew that if I wanted to keep the ball rolling, I had to keep saying yes. That’s why, in the coming weeks, I found myself going out dancing until dawn with my new judo friends and, once I knew them better, running panting with them onto the last outbound train of the night in order to make it to a party in the country. Each time, I could have come up with a million reasons to say no: I was tired; I wasn’t dressed right; I wasn’t going to know many people. In spite of it all, I went the spontaneous route and have never regretted it.

Several years later, I went to a birthday party in honor of O., a classmate with whom I’d initiated a friendship at that fateful barbecue, and mentioned to him how happy I was that I’d decided to take judo. “We wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t,” I said.

“You mean if you hadn’t been social,” he corrected. “If you hadn’t gone to that barbecue, we would have just been classmates, not friends.”

He was absolutely right. As it turned out, “being social” that one afternoon had consequences that were much more far reaching than I’d ever imagined. A few years later, I was strolling near the Santísimo Sacramento church in downtown Santiago with my then boyfriend when it occurred to me that I would never have met him – two and half years after the barbecue through that classic chain of friends of friends – had I decided to take my violin case and go home.

“What are you smiling about?” he chided.

And I told him the long story that had brought us to where we were.

As you can see, embracing spontaneity worked well for me. I’d like to emphasize, however, that spontaneity is not the same as recklessness. I would never advise you to hop on a midnight train with people you didn’t know and trust or say yes to anything you felt would put your safety at risk. I would also maintain that, under some circumstances, you should say no to an invitation: The idea of study abroad isn’t to wreck your health or fail out, after all. I would, however, advocate pushing your social boundaries a bit: for example, by going salsa dancing even if you have two left feet or going to a party with your host sister even if you’re afraid of making embarrassing errors in Spanish. I think most of the people I know who have studied abroad in Chile would agree that, when it comes to making Chilean friends, the exchange student usually has to take the initiative. And you certainly can’t do that if you’re sitting at home.

Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 3: Go extracurricular

2010-07-31T02:21:00.000-04:00

This is the third of my series of tips for exchange students in Chile. Here are my previous posts on the subject:

Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 1: Stick around
Tips or exchange students in Chile, Part 2: Academics

Part 1 includes a disclaimer you should read if you plan on taking any of my advice seriously. Here’s the short version: Everyone has different goals when studying abroad, all equally valid. The tips I offer on this blog are things that helped me have a fantastic experience and are directed primarily at people who arrive in Chile with objectives similar to my own. In other words, my advice – like that erectile dysfunction pill you just saw advertised on TV – is not for everyone.

Last time, I offered some pointers on how to have a successful academic experience in Chile. In this post, I’ll make a case for what I believe is one of the primary ways to have a successful non-academic experience in Chile: signing up for an extracurricular.

Even if doing so earns you a giant bruise. I spent several weeks of my second semester in Chile with a rock-hard purple knob under the skin of my shin. I remember wincing as my host father, a physical therapist, palpated it for a few seconds before diagnosing a hematoma. The thing hurt – but it was worth it.

My multicolored injury was the direct result of one of the best decisions I made while studying abroad: enrolling in a judo class at one of the Chilean universities where I was studying. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’d overburdened myself academically my first semester and was hoping that signing up for a sports class would help me lighten my load and be more social. I’d never done judo before. I chose it because it fit comfortably into my schedule, not because I had any reason to believe I would be particularly good at it.

And I wasn’t. I spent four hours a week being slammed onto the mat and held there in a lock. My one advantage was scrappiness; I couldn’t take anyone down, but I could wriggle as if my life depended on it. It was during one such struggle that a particularly bony classmate ended up smashing an elbow into my shin.

Luckily for me, I was permitted short breaks between ass kickings. Between waiting in line to tumble and setting up and disassembling the mat, my classmates and I had plenty of time to get to know one another. The fact that nearly all of us were stumbling home in pain every night provided a good conversation starter.

We continued developing our friendships off the mat. We went out for beer after class and organized barbecues on the weekends – a few of us even hit the dance floor at Santiago’s notorious Blondie night club.

I doubt any of this would have happened in my dialectology course. The laid-back dynamic of the judo class fostered this kind of interaction – and it ended up making my semester. The hematoma was a small price to pay for all the laughter I shared with my partners in pain, one of whom remains a very close friend of mine to this day.

A year or two ago, the university bulldozed the gym where my judo class convened. I teared up when I heard.

It was actually a desire to write about how important judo was to my time in Chile that gave me the idea to write these “Tips for exchange students in Chile” posts in the first place. The afternoons I spent getting slammed convinced me that participating in some kind of extracurricular activity is key to having a successful study abroad experience.

The fact that clubs and sports aren’t as visible a presence on university campuses in Chile as they are in the States – you probably won’t find bulletin boards plastered with neon fliers for bhangra dance workshops and beer-fueled kickball tournaments – doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to become involved in. Below are just a few of the activities that will help you explore your interests, meet people who share them and become part of a community in your host city.

1. Recreational classes. Many Chilean universities offer courses in sports, dance, art and even mountaineering. The latter, along with Latin dance, was particularly popular among my fellow exchange students at the Universidad Católica; a lot of Chileans sign up, too. Not only do classes like these allow you to relieve the stress you’ve accumulated while hunching over books, squinting at maps of bus routes and trying to teach baristas how to spell your name, but they provide an ideal space within which to make friends.

Whether or not you’ll receive college credit for these classes depends on your home university’s policies. My school didn’t give me credit for my judo class – I was only able to convince the registrar’s office to allow me to enroll in it because I was ahead on credits – but other colleges may have.

If you can’t find a class you like at your host school, check out those offered by cultural centers, the local municipal government, or independent groups. Tiny grassroots cultural collectives are renowned for offering an array of free or low-cost classes. For example, a gringo friend of mine in Santiago recently made the (downright badass) decision to enroll in an independent poetry workshop – in Spanish. A few years ago, I took photography and co-taught an English class at a squat (okupa).

A brief note on okupas: They provide a range of critical perspectives and can bring artistic learning and performance within the reach of those whose access would otherwise be limited. They are also technically illegal. Police raid them sometimes. Additionally, they tend to be housed in structures that aren’t subjected to routine safety checks. While I encourage exploration of grassroots cultural initiatives, I would advise you to think twice before doing anything that would put your immigration status or physical wellbeing at risk. If you feel uncomfortable or get bad vibes anywhere, leave.

2. Sports teams. Some Chilean schools participate in inter-university and intramural sports leagues. For example, I have a Chilean friend who plays for her department’s team in the Universidad de Chile’s intramural women’s basketball league. I never joined any sports teams while in Chile, but I know some former exchange students who did. (Could one of them please expand on this in the comments section, please?) There are also some neighborhood soccer leagues in Santiago, but I don’t know much about them and am not sure what kind of opportunities they offer for female players.

3. Volunteering. There’s a plethora (love that word) of ways for exchange students to participate in volunteer projects in Chile. Organizations like Cruz Roja, Un Techo Para Chile and Hogar de Cristo – to name just a few of the big ones -- rely heavily on college students to fill their ranks. Additionally, student federations – like the Universidad de Chile’s FECh and the Universidad Católica’s FEUC – organize community service trips during school breaks. I went on one such trip a few years ago (after graduating from college) and found myself wishing I’d had the good sense to do something similar during my summer break (December through February) the year I studied abroad. Not only did I get to know a new area of the country and lend a hand there, but I also met dozens of students passionate about making a difference.

If you’re not going to be around during break, find out if your host school has a group that does volunteer work on weekends. One such group is Remolino, an NGO run by Universidad de Chile students.

These days, Chile needs volunteers more than ever. So get out there and do your part – and meet other conscientious people in the process.

4. Religious organizations. I have to admit that I don’t know much about these – taking an Arabic class at an Orthodox church was as close as I got – but I do know they’re around. A number of students from my exchange program got involved with a citywide campus ministry group and made a lot of friends that way. The Universidad Católica organizes mission trips during school breaks.

When it comes to religion, Santiago is more diverse than meets the eye; for example, it has a Jewish community, Greek and Arab Orthodox churches and at least one mosque. Finding communities that are neither Catholic nor Protestant just takes a bit more looking.

One more word of advice: Don’t just go by what I have to say. Check out the tips Heather, Andrea and K (can I use your full first name?) – all of whom have studied in Chile or are currently doing so – have posted on their blogs.

Former exchange students of the world, unite in the comments section!

Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 2: Academics

2010-07-25T11:07:00.000-04:00

This is the second installment of my new series of tips for foreign exchange students in Chile. You can read my first entry -- and a disclaimer -- here. Other former exchange students have left their own tips in the comments section, so be sure to check them out.

Since being an exchange student typically involves studying, I thought I'd offer some tips on how to handle academics in Chile. Before I start, I'd like to reiterate the word of caution I issued in my previous post: What I'm about to suggest are things that worked for me when I was an undergraduate exchange student in Santiago a few years ago. I was a Spanish major, and one of my goals for my study abroad experience was academic growth. Not every exchange student has -- nor should have -- this same goal. For example, plenty of exchange students decide to minimize their academic load in order to have more free time to explore, travel and -- yes -- party. Students who wish to go this route may not find the following tips useful. However, those who want to have academics be a (relatively) significant part of their study abroad experience might benefit from them.

I see a number of benefits to the latter path. Virtually no one wants to spend all of his or her time abroad locked in a library -- I certainly wouldn't recommend it -- but there are important reasons to take school seriously while in Chile. First of all, many exchange students have immediate access to Chile's top-ranked universities, among them the Universidad de Chile and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. These schools have great professors who offer quality classes; in other words, you can learn a lot. What's more, many Chilean college hopefuls would give their right arms to get into the selective schools that exchange students are accepted into automatically. So respect them and their professors by acknowledging the opportunity you’ve been given and make an effort. You don’t have to spend every night studying till dawn: Just take things seriously and be willing to learn. If you show up to class and don’t blow off your assignments, you’ll give your fellow exchange students a good name and help prove that “los de intercambio” can be a positive -- as opposed to irritating -- addition to campus life.

Additionally, Chilean university students do a lot of group work. This gives you both the obligation to pull your weight and the opportunity to make Chilean friends. I myself became good friends with a Chilean student with whom I worked on a few group projects; had we not been committed to working hard together, this probably wouldn't have happened. Plus, it goes without saying that involving yourself in group work with Chileans -- in addition to going to class, doing the reading and completing your assignments -- is a great way to improve your Spanish skills.

Finally, putting in a decent academic effort while studying abroad in Chile can help you out in the future. The effect your grades will have on your final transcript depends on your home university's policies. My university printed my Chilean grades on my transcript but did not factor them into my GPA. Other universities don't differentiate between grades earned at home and grades earned abroad: All of them end up in your average. Regardless of how your school does it, it's obvious that decent grades -- and the possibility of getting a recommendation, if need be, from one of your Chilean professors -- can't hurt when it comes time to apply for jobs or to grad school. I honestly don't think I would have gotten into the Ph.D. program I'm about to start had I returned from my year abroad with nothing to show for myself academically.

I don't think I would have applied, either. I finished my sophomore year in college (relatively) convinced that I wanted to go to law school. Only after taking some challenging courses in Chile -- and challenging myself to do well in them -- did I recognize that I was more of a literature person after all. Had I not arrived at this realization, my post-college life probably would have been very different: no Ecuador, no Chilean redux, and a lot less writing. A lot of people expect their study abroad experience to have a profound effect on their world view; if you take it seriously and are open minded, it can turn your life plans upside down as well.

Convinced? If so, I humbly submit the following recommendations:

1. Directly matriculate if you can. Direct matriculation means enrolling in normal classes at Chilean universities as opposed to taking courses offered by your exchange program or designed specifically for foreigners. Not only will you probably be more challenged in regular classes, but you'll meet more Chileans and get an idea of how a Chilean university works.

Obviously, this isn't always feasible if you don't speak much Spanish when you arrive in Chile. This is all the more reason to study abroad for two semesters: After spending the first term getting your language level up, you can directly matriculate the second.

To be clear, I think courses offered by exchange programs can be valuable too. My program offered a great service learning class that I'm very glad I took. However, directly matriculating provides you with a chance to expand your Chilean world -- academically, socially, culturally and geographically (see #4) -- that I believe should be seized.

2. If you choose to directly matriculate, don't limit yourself to "gringo classes." You know the ones. They have titles like "Chilean history and culture" and "Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral." In theory, they're open to both Chileans and foreigners, but you don't see many of the former there. I'm not saying you have to avoid these classes completely: After all, they deal with material that interests a lot of exchange students. I've also heard foreign students say they can offer a welcome break from an otherwise challenging course lineup. No shame in that. However, they are, unsurprisingly, full of other exchange students, meaning interaction with Chileans will be minimal and the temptation to revert to your native language strong. Therefore, you'll probably want to make sure that you don't fill your schedule exclusively with classes like these.

3. But don't stretch yourself too thin. After all, school is just one part of what Chile has to offer. You'll want to make sure you have enough time to explore your host city, do some traveling and make new friends. You know, to have fun and what not.

My first semester in Chile, I took on a bit too much. Not only did my U.S. university require me to take five classes, but -- as a Chilean classmate observed and pointed out to me -- I felt I had to prove something. I wanted to show everyone that the stereotype of the perennially partying, rarely present exchange student was off base; I wanted to show everyone that exchange students were capable of anything. As you might imagine, this required a lot of studying. Don't get me wrong; I was finding time to have fun, but I found myself wishing I could have found more.

While planning my schedule for the following semester, I made sure not to overburden myself. The main way in which I did this was by taking a sports class, which I'll post about in detail in a future entry. Not only did I have less homework, but I was socializing and relieving stress at the same time. Highly recommended!

4. Careful with campus hopping. The physical organization of universities in Santiago is different from that of many U.S. colleges. Instead of concentrating nearly all departments on a single campus, Santiago schools (with a few exceptions) are divided into a number of campuses scattered throughout the city, sometimes very far from one another. At the Universidad de Chile, for example, health sciences majors study in Independencia, on Santiago's north side, while veterinary and agriculture students have class in La Pintana, on the city's southern edge.

Many exchange students have the opportunity -- uncommon among their Chilean peers -- to take classes at any of their host university's campuses. Some are even allowed to take classes at multiple universities. This gives them the chance to experience the often intriguing differences between campus and schools -- and to see a lot of the city while they're at it. If you plan to take advantage of this possibility, be advised that a significant amount of travel time may be involved -- and plan accordingly. Don't leave such a small window between classes that you won't have time to check out a library book or talk to your professors or classmates before sprinting off to the bus stop.

Also, keep in mind that most Chilean students take the vast majority of their courses within their department and, as a result, spend most of their time together in one place. If you're constantly commuting between campuses, it can be difficult to integrate yourself into this dynamic. If you're interested in a particular department and want to get to know its students and professors, take a couple classes there and schedule them in such a way that you can stick around campus for a while. Even though Chilean students don't live on campus, there's a lot more to Chilean campus life than classes. Don't miss out on it because you're spending all day on the bus!

5. Make the first move. While exchange students may have been a novelty at Chilean universities several years ago, this is no longer the case. At the campuses where most exchange students end up, Chilean students are used to having foreigners around. In most cases, your classmates will have seen dozens like you before (no offense), so you won't exactly be a curiosity. They also will have noticed that many exchange students tend to stick together -- sad but true -- and limit their interactions with Chileans. As a result, they won't necessarily approach you to give you an unsolicited warm welcome and ask if there's anything you need.

But there obviously will be things you'll need. You'll need, for example, to have someone explain where you can find Thursday's reading, how to get photocopies made (essential knowledge for any student in Chile), and -- of course -- what the professor just said. Chilean students, in my experience, are usually more than willing to help. In most cases, though, you'll have to make the first move. It's nothing personal; they just won't know you want to talk to them unless you do. So don't be shy about asking a classmate to accompany you to the photocopy machine after class; you're not being a nuisance. He or she is probably heading there anyway. Not only will you learn how to get your copies, but you'll also have an in when group project time rolls around.

And as long as you've got the whole copier thing figured out, don't be ashamed to ask to photocopy a classmate's notes if you missed a class or didn't understand it. If you'd prefer an explanation, ask for one, either from a classmate, a T.A. (very common) or your professor. No one's expecting you to be perfect, so be assertive and ask away!

6. Be patient, keep an open mind, and have a sense of humor. Chilean universities are different from those in the States (and from those in other countries, I would imagine), so there will almost certainly be times when you'll feel a) frustrated b) confused c) overwhelmed or d) frustrated, confused and overwhelmed. Don't worry: If you're willing to laugh and ask for a hand, it'll pass before you know it.

Like before, I'd like to invite other former exchange students to leave their opinions and tips in the comments section. It's been great reading your feedback on my previous post, and I'm sure readers will appreciate your good advice. Please keep it coming!

Tips for exchange students in Chile, Part 1: Stick around

2010-07-24T11:29:00.000-04:00

I've been wanting to blog my tips for exchange students in Chile for a while now. If people out there are anything like me -- who's been googling phrases like "my NYC apartment search" for months now -- they do at least a mild amount of Web scouring before moving to a new place. I'm guessing that a number of future exchange students in Chile -- who should be packing up and shipping south right about now -- are currently doing this very thing. It's in honor of them -- and of anyone else who happens to be interested -- that I present the first of my tips for foreign students in Chile: Stick around.

Before I get into what I mean by this, I'll start with a disclaimer. I spent two undergraduate semesters studying in Santiago a few years ago. I loved it. This leads me -- correctly or not -- to believe that I did something right and am therefore entitled to give advice.

I was so happy with my study abroad experience because I was able to meet the goals I set for myself before leaving home, which included the following:

- Deepen my knowledge and understanding of Chilean culture and history.

-Grow academically by taking challenging courses that would allow me to achieve the previous goal and advance as a Spanish major.

- Experience and integrate myself into -- to the degree that such a thing is possible -- the daily life of a university student in Santiago. If we're going to get rigorous, I should acknowledge that there is no such thing as a uniform "daily life of a university student in Santiago" since Chilean students, like students everywhere, come from a wide variety of backgrounds and face unique sets of circumstances. Still, I believe many of these students share certain experiences as a result of being inserted in a specific educational system inside a larger social and cultural context, and I wanted to have these experiences, too.

-Make Chilean friends.

-Have a blast.

Of course, the fact that these were my goals does not mean that they will or should be shared by other exchange students. I met plenty of foreign students who were much more interested in the Chilean wilderness than the Chilean classroom, which I find perfectly valid. Had these students done the things that made my study abroad experience so marvelous for me, they probably would have been miserable. In short, the tips I give on this blog will probably only be useful to those who have study abroad goals similar to my own. I'm not saying these goals are better than others; part of what's so great about being a foreign student is that you meet a vast array of people with different backgrounds and interests. I'm just clarifying that my advice is meant to help foreign students in Chile meet objectives that might not be shared by everyone.

If you plan to study in Chile and share one of the goals listed above, I recommend you stick around -- in a number of ways. First, if you can, try to stay in Chile for a full academic year. I know this isn't possible for everyone, especially for students in prerequisite-heavy programs like premed (although I do know a premed student who pulled it off). I also know that plenty of exchange students leave Chile enriched and fulfilled after one semester.

In my case, however, staying for a full year was the best decision I could have made. I feel that I truly hit my stride in Santiago -- in terms of being comfortable enough with the language, city, culture and education system to feel I was living there instead of simply visiting -- about a month and half before the end of my first semester. Things just clicked. I raised my hand to comment in class, zig-zagged confidently through the city aboard its speeding yellow buses, and noticed that my conversations with Chileans were much more spontaneous and animated than when I'd first arrived (although I continued to make my fair share of mistakes and by no means understood everything!). As far as my social life went, I wasn't surrounded by thousands of Chilean friends, but I was becoming close to those I did have. Knowing that I would be around for a while allowed me to invest the time and effort necessary to begin building long-term friendships. Additionally, the fact that I was feeling increasingly competent linguistically and culturally made me more confident in social situations involving meeting new people.

I would have been devastated to have had to leave Chile just a few short weeks after all of this fell into place. Luckily, I had another six months to put everything I'd learned to work -- and it was worth it.

Whether or not you can stick around in Chile for a full year, you can decide where to spend the time you do have. I humbly suggest that you spend a great deal of it in the city where you're studying. Yes, this contradicts the commonly held belief that exchange students should take advantage of any and all opportunities to travel. After all, it's not every day you're within bussing distance of Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil, not to mention all the phenomenal natural and cultural attractions Chile has to offer, right?

Some of my fellow exchange students in Santiago traveled outside of the city almost every weekend. If your goals for your Chilean experience include maximizing travel and bonding with the other members of your exchange group, you should do this. If, on the other hand, you're more of an "integrate into daily life" type and are looking to make friends with Chileans in your host city, you should try to stay in town -- at least some of the time.

There are a few reasons for this. First of all, if you're gone every weekend, you're limiting your possibilities for social interaction with Chileans (unless, of course, you're traveling with them). Chilean students who are from the city where they go to school tend to stick around most weekends, and you'll have more opportunities to socialize with them if you do, too.

Second, leaving your host city every weekend can warp your perception of it. If you study in Santiago during the week and flee from it as soon as your last class gets out, you're diminishing your chances of associating Santiago with anything other than weekday stress. If, on the other hand, you use some of your weekends to explore and experience Santiago -- by visiting its parks, markets, museums and neighborhoods, peoplewatching at its sidewalk cafes or dancing at its salsa clubs -- you might just begin to see Santiago as a place to work and play.

I'm not saying exchange students should never travel. I think they absolutely should if they can. It was by traveling with other exchange students that I discovered some of my favorite places in Chile, Chiloé being the reining champion of them all. However, I spent the vast majority of my weekends in Santiago and, as a result, got to know my host city and befriend a number of its inhabitants. When it comes to studying abroad, I would recommend that the same policy be applied to traveling as to drinking pisco: Do it in moderation.

This is especially important to keep in mind, I think, for exchange students in Santiago, who are exposed early on to the notion that the "real Chile" -- the only Chile worth experiencing -- lies outside the capital. While I agree that exchange students -- and all visitors -- should make an effort to see what the rest of Chile has to offer, I think the idea that Santiago is little more than a bland jumping-off point is completely absurd. Santiago is interesting. Santiago is fun. You just have to give it a chance. And it's hard to do that if you spend all your down time elsewhere.

Finally, if you're staying with a host family, I recommend sticking around there, too -- at least a couple nights a week. When you're in a new city in a new country -- especially one where eating out is substantially cheaper than it is at home -- it's tempting to skip your host parents' homecooked meals in favor of bar or restaurant fare. And, by all means, you should go out. I would be contradicting my previous point if I didn't encourage you to explore your host city's culinary offerings. But make sure you eat some meals with your host family, too. As awkward as your interactions with your host family may seem to you, chances are that they're hosting you because they want to -- there are other ways to make extra cash, after all -- and are genuinely interested in hearing about your experiences in their country. If my interactions with my own Chilean host family are any indication, they're also eager to have a positive impact on your stay. So at least let them try by spending some time with them. You could learn a lot about Chile in the process.

I've seen it happen: exchange students leaving Santiago disappointed because they felt they hadn't forged a connection with the city and its residents. Maybe they just didn't like Santiago. That's fine. But I think a great deal of this disappointment could have been avoided had these people stayed stationary long enough to appreciate what was around them. The entire concept of foreign study is based on mobility, but it's impossible to drink everything in if you never allow yourself to stand still.

Most of the foreigner-in-Chile bloggers I know were exchange students at some point, so I hope they'll comment on this entry to let me know whether or not they agree with the views I've expressed here. Former exchange students in Chile, do you have any other tips to offer those who are about to embark on the same journey? Please share!

Volunteer for earthquake relief work in Chile

2010-07-16T12:22:00.001-04:00

After the 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile in February, I received a number of e-mails from readers interested in volunteering in affected communities. I was touched to see how many people, including some who lived thousands of miles away, wanted to help.

Months later, there's still a lot of work to be done. One of the groups that has continuously participated in the recovery effort is the University of Chile's student federation, the FECh. Immediately after the disaster, the group mobilized volunteers to collect and distribute aid; since then, FECh volunteers have made weekend trips to affected areas. Now that winter break is coming up for Chile's students, the FECh is planning a weeklong trip to Region VI's Paredones. From July 24 to 31, volunteers will work patching up emergency housing -- a very necessary task now that the cold, rainy season is at its height -- and participating in a number of other activities, such as workshops for local kids.

If you're in Chile and have some time on your hands, this would be a great way to make a difference. I think it would be especially ideal for exchange students who have a break between semesters. Looking back, I wish I'd signed up for trabajos voluntarios back when I was studying abroad: Not only is it a great way to give back to the country that's taken you in, but it's a perfect environment within which to make Chilean friends.

Most FECh volunteers are Chilean undergraduates. However, you don't have to fit this description to participate in their volunteer activities. I've joined up twice -- once for a two-week summer project in Region IV's Canela and again for earthquake relief work -- and was neither a student nor Chilean at the time. I've found that meeting the general description of "young person" works.

More information on the trip, including sign-up instructions, is available here.

My Quito apartment

2010-07-12T19:41:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I mentioned that I tried to be quite thorough while reading and signing the lease for my sister's and my apartment in New York City. I also promised to share the story of the horrendous Quito landlord who made me the fastidious monster I am. Here it is.

The summer after graduating from college, I moved to Quito, Ecuador to teach English. Throughout senior year, I had watched my classmates spend hours visiting our university's career center, combing through online job listings and primping and preparing for interviews -- and decided I wanted nothing to do with it. Call it Peter Pan syndrome, but I was not ready to enter a world that would require me to wear collared shirts. Fresh off my year abroad in Chile, I was certain I was destined for more adventure in far-off lands.

So it was that I signed up for a program that offered teaching certification and job placement services in Quito. A few states away, my soon-to-be-roommate, C., was doing the same thing. The program placed us with Ecuadorian host families for the first month of our stay: C. in La Gasca, a neighborhood that creeps up the foothills of the volcano that towers over Quito's west side, and me in nearby La Granja. For us, it was a good area in which to live. It was easily accessible by public transportation, yet its corner stores, quiet streets and hidden parks lent it an air of peaceful seclusion. It was calmer and reportedly safer than the colonial city center and the teeming streets of the touristy La Mariscal district. It was, in other words, a true neighborhood, one we could easily envision ourselves becoming a part of. Plus, its slight elevation provided gorgeous views of the rest of the city.

When it came time for us to find our own housing, we decided we wanted to stick around. We devoted a pair of wet, foggy afternoons to trudging up the area's steep streets visiting apartments we'd found listed in the paper. There were a handful that we liked well enough, but the instant we stepped into the first floor of a duplex in the Las Casas neighborhood, we were in love. Hardwood floors and a large built-in bookcase lent the apartment a distinct vintage charm. The crowning glory of the place was the fireplace that promised to warm our guests at the gatherings we pictured ourselves hosting in the enormous living room.

On top of it all, the owner of the house -- a sweet older Ecuadorian man who lived upstairs -- seemed like he would be an ideal landlord. He offered us peppermints and even agreed to allow us to pay a lower rent until we got established at our teaching jobs. The fireplace, he assured us, was in perfect working order. A few days later, we signed the lease and enthusiastically began setting up our new home.

Almost immediately, there were signs we should have run away screaming from this stranger with candy. About a week after we moved in, I awoke to the sound of pounding outside my bedroom window. When I pulled back the curtain and peered outside, I saw our landlord hammering wooden planks together outside the doorless shed where he kept the washer and drier. Befuddled, I stepped outside to ask what he was doing.

"Building a wall in front of the washer and drier," he replied. "You used them, and that's not OK. So I'm building a wall."

I was taken aback. When C. and I had first visited the apartment and expressed concerns about not having a place to wash our clothes, the landlord had said we could use the machines in the shed. "But you told us we could use them," I said.

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did," I protested. "I remember it perfectly."

At this point, a strange thing happened: The landlord's eternally silent wife -- whom he always shooed away, claiming she was too deaf to understand a thing -- took my hand and gave me what I can only describe as a permeating knowing stare. It was a gesture I would soon come to understand.

The landlord refused to cede. We didn't know if his repeated denials regarding the washer and drier were due to a memory lapse -- he was, after all, over 80 -- or to the fact that he had made a promise he had never intended to keep. Unfortunately, we had taken him at his word and hadn't insisted that a clause about the washer and drier be added to the lease, so we had no written proof that he had ever given us permission. In the end, we buckled down and started taking our clothes to a nearby laundromat.

If our problems had ended there, things probably would have been OK. Unfortunately, our landlord had more surprises up his sleeve (or tucked away under the sweater vests he always wore). C. and I would arrive home to find our porch light bulb -- which we left on for safety reasons when we went out at night -- unscrewed and sitting on the windowsill. When we confronted our landlord about it, he claimed our safety precautions were running up his electricity bill. Then don't rent out the first floor of your house, I seethed silently.

At first, we assumed we were being subjected to the inexcusable but understandable whims of a possibly senile man with an unpleasant disposition. We realized we were wrong the night we invited two friends over and finally put our beloved fireplace to use -- and saw the entire apartment fill with smoke before our eyes. When we asked our landlord about the problem, he suddenly remembered that the chimney of the fireplace he'd assured us was in working order -- the fireplace that had sold us on the apartment -- had been covered over years before. It was now obvious that we'd fallen into the trap of someone who had knowingly deceived us in order to secure our lease signatures.

And things only got worse from there. According to our contract, our rent was due on the fifth of each month, a date we never missed. This, of course, didn't stop our landlord from ringing our doorbell at the break of dawn on the first and demanding that we pay up. On one occasion, he even held his finger over the bell -- without letting go -- at 7 a.m. until I stumbled out of bed, opened the door, told him never to treat us this way again, and promptly closed the door in his face (not my best moment). Early another morning, he began pounding on my bedroom window when I didn't answer the door.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when C. arrived home from work one afternoon to find her mother, who was visiting from the U.S., mopping up an inch of standing water in our bathroom. Our landlord and a neighborhood car mechanic -- the former could never be bothered to hire actual plumbers or home repair workers -- had come in earlier to fix our malfunctioning toilet and had proceeded to flood the bathroom and track a trail of mud through our living room. Incensed, I went upstairs to our landlord's apartment, which was plastered with images of the Virgin Mary; apparently, he'd skipped over the "love thy neighbor" part while crafting his brand of devout Catholicism. I calmly told him that we appreciated the repair but that, if one were necessary in the future, we would expect him to leave our living space in the condition he'd found it.

"Why should I clean up when there are two young women living downstairs?" he demanded.

That was it. We were done. We were no longer willing to live under the same roof as -- and pay rent to -- a person who routinely harassed and disrespected us. I went downtown to Inquilinato, a government office charged with protecting renters' rights. When I explained our situation to an official, he recommended we break our lease and be done with it; the law would be on our side.

This is exactly what we did. Shortly thereafter, we moved into a cozy apartment just two blocks away (although we, wishing to break ties completely with Sir Lies-a-Lot, practiced a bit of dishonesty ourselves and told him we were moving out of the neighborhood). The night before we left, I went to the corner store across the street to return some recyclable soda bottles. The store owner, whom we'd befriended during our months of residency in the Ninth Circle, confided to me that not one of the renters she'd seen move into our house had stayed the full length of his or her lease. Apparently, we weren't the first people our landlord had scared away.

C. and I spent the rest of our time in Quito living in an apartment and neighborhood we loved. I can't imagine how different our experience might have been had we elected to tough it out at the duplex. Looking back, there were signs that our first landlord was suffering from some kind of mental illness; whether or not this disorder was associated with his advanced age, I'll never be sure. Whatever the cause of his behavior, however, I see no reason why we should have put up with the treatment we received. Leaving that apartment was the best decision we could have made.

As much as I resented him at the time, that nightmare of a landlord taught me to be damn assertive, a quality that has served me well during the years I've spent living abroad. He also taught me the importance of putting everything in writing, as unnecessary as it might seem. Had we insisted that he give us written permission to use the washer and drier, the onset of hostilities may have been delayed somewhat.

So take a lesson from me: If you're planning to sign a lease abroad (or anywhere), make sure everything is written down. And if a sweet old man offers you a peppermint while pointing out the working fireplace in a spacious first-floor apartment in Las Casas, don't believe a word he says.

My NYC apartment

2010-07-05T16:42:00.001-04:00

Just a few days after arriving, exhausted, in Minneapolis from Santiago last weekend, I slumped, still exhausted, onto yet another airplane. The fatigue was worth it, though: Within 24 hours, my sister, Q., and I had signed the lease for the apartment we'll share in New York City starting in August.

Unfortunately, I wasn't as involved in the apartment search as I would have liked to be. While I've heard many people gripe about the tedium of sorting through listings and making appointments, I actually enjoy house hunting. I've even toured apartments I have no interest in renting simply because the writer in me can't resist imagining all the possible lives that could transpire within their walls . Therefore, I would have liked to accompany Q. on her marathon run of apartment visits, but I wasn't able to make it to New York in time. By the time I arrived, essentially all that was left for me to do was approve the apartment that had emerged as Q.'s favorite.

Luckily, I really liked it. It met my two primary aesthetic requirements: hardwood floors and plenty of natural light (call me impractical, but I couldn't care less about the number of bathrooms). Even better, it's located in an older building (we all know how I feel about new apartment towers) on a pleasantly leafy street and has views that actually include trees.

The apartment has another feature which, like the bathrooms, doesn't rank high on my priority list but constitutes a surprising benefit all the same: a dishwasher. Unless you count my family home in Minneapolis, I haven't lived in a place with a dishwasher since I moved to Ecuador in 2006. During the fourteen months I lived in Quito, I never once saw a dishwasher in a private home. I saw a few in Santiago, including at my host family's house, but the vast majority of people I know in Chile rock the sink after dinner. When I expressed doubts as to whether we really needed such a luxury, I was told that many New York City building owners are installing dishwashers in an attempt to curb rat and cockroach infestations; apparently, not everyone washes the dishes.

When it came time to sign the lease, I tried everyone's patience by reading very carefully through all the articles of the contract and asking a slew of specific questions. The reason for this is pushing 90 and, as far as I know, still terrorizing tenants on Quito's west side. One of these days, I plan to devote an entire entry to the duplicitous landlord who made my life a living infierno until my roommate and I had the good sense to move. Despite the anguish this man put us through, I am grateful to him for teaching me the value of being an assertive renter, requesting clarification and insisting that everything be put in writing.

Up next are furnishing and decorating -- quite the tasks when you consider that neither Q. nor I own any furniture. Oh, well. At least we have somewhere to wash the dishes.

Northern disorientation

2010-06-28T11:19:00.000-04:00

My being back in the States means my mom and I can now sit down together to view one of our favorite types of television programming: true-crime episodes of Dateline. Last night, I felt exhaustion began to sink in as we watched a report on the murder of a former professional athlete. Just as an investigator was beginning to express doubts about police's conclusions about the culprit, I sank into a syrupy fog of semi-consciousness that didn't end until the show did and my mom wondered aloud, "What did they conclude?"

"Que no sabían nada," I murmured through the haze. After a few seconds, I sat bolt upright. "What did I just say?"

"I don't know," my mom replied.

"Was it in Spanish?"

"I just know that I didn't understand it."

It's not the first time my mom has had to put up with episodes of linguistic disorientation. After arriving home after my junior year abroad in Chile, I promptly fell asleep on the couch. My mom told me that when she tried to wake me up, I started babbling in Spanish with a terrified expression on my face. Over the next few weeks, she occasionally had to ask me to clarify what I was trying to say because I was unknowingly importing grammatical structures from Spanish.

Of all my returns from South America, the one I made after study abroad was probably the rockiest in terms of language readjustment. I had lived with Chileans all year and had had relatively limited interaction with other English speakers during my second semester. Since I had been one of the last of my exchange group to leave Chile, I had spoken hardly any English at all during my last two weeks in the country. The result was that when another passenger offered to help me with my (grossly overweight) suitcase at the baggage carousel in Minneapolis, no words came out when I opened my mouth to thank him. My brain knew that I had to speak English now but hadn’t yet unearthed the necessary vocabulary.

The language transition wasn’t too difficult when I returned after fourteen months in Quito; I’d been working as an English teacher and living with an English-speaking roommate. And aside from last night’s Dateline stumble, things haven’t been so rough this time around. I lived with Chileans in Santiago and worked a job that required me to speak Spanish about 95 percent of the time, but I hung out with English-speaking friends from time to time and had home internet access – which I hadn’t had in Quito or while studying abroad in Chile – that allowed me to consume a fair amount of English-language media. Who knows? Maybe writing this blog even helped ward off English atrophy.

I suppose the real test of the health of my English will be when I start grad school in the fall. I’m actually a bit concerned about this because nearly all of my recent academic work – both at college, where I majored in Spanish, and in the diploma program I completed last year at a Chilean university – has been in Spanish. Let’s hope I show enough dexterity in my native language to produce written work that doesn’t resemble a high school essay. And that I stop scaring my mom.

Adios, Santiago querido

2010-06-25T17:50:00.000-04:00

I’m writing from the international terminal of the Santiago airport. I’ve been here many times, but this time is different: In two hours, I’ll be leaving Chile for good.

No, not really. I have no doubt I’ll be back. After all, I’ve lived a long and formative period of my life here. If you follow this blog all the way back to the womb, you'll see that I've called this country home since October of 2007 -- and that's not counting the year I spent studying here in college. That's a total of nearly four years, four extremely important years if you believe -- as I do -- that a person's twenties are vital when it comes to becoming who he or she is. Santiago is the city where I began to come into my own; I honestly believe that I would be a different person today if I had confronted the challenges of young adulthood somewhere else. New York City will undoubtedly play a major role in this continuing evolution, but Santiago will always have the advantage of having started the ball rolling.

I've written before about the mixed emotions I have about leaving Chile. In the interest of not breaking down and bawling here in the terminal, I'm not going to get into those emotions here. I will, however, include a sappy but very fitting quote I just happened to come across the other day. According to Lawrence Durrell, "A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants." If loving one inhabitant makes a city a world, loving many makes Santiago a universe -- one I'll definitely be back to.

And, in order to rescue this entry from complete and utter sapdom, I'll toss in my four main gripes about what otherwise is a decent airport terminal: It's hot, there's hardly anything to eat, there are no drinking fountains, and the guy sitting next to me has a scary-sounding phlegm cough that he's not covering up. Is it time to board yet?

By the way, I stole the title of this post from this famous Chilean cueca. Of the landmarks mentioned in the song, Quinta Normal and San Pablo con Matucana have special places in my heart.

What winning looks like

2010-06-17T18:07:00.000-04:00

Wednesday was a big day for Chilean soccer. The national team's 1-0 victory over Honduras was the first World Cup win the country has been able to celebrate in almost 50 years. And celebrate Chileans did.

I just happened to be snapping a photo of this street corner in western Santiago's Yungay neighborhood when this car zoomed by. I've always wondered how many traffic accidents Chilean fans' love of mobile flag flying causes each year.

This seems like a safer place to wave the red, white and blue.

The salesperson at this hat kiosk outside Estacion Central was hesitant to let me take a photo of her heads until I told her I had a blog about Chile.

As you can see from the banner flying on the balcony, not even an 8.8 earthquake can stop diehard fans.

And, alas, more soccer-spawned sexism. These posters are advertising a mystery Father's Day promotion (I visited the website and still have no idea what it is) that promises soccer to men and "relaxation" to women. The man's poster is the same color as the national team's jersey and is headed by the phrase: "World Cup + Father's Day: Welcome to Paradise." The woman, on the other hand, stands awash in the sky blue of saintly motherhood below the phrase: "World Cup + Father's Day: You Deserve Heaven." In other words, "You're a Saint." Which you obviously are for putting up with your man's obvious love of soccer, which you obviously don't share, all while slaving over that enormous Father's Day luncheon.

Chile didn't pull out its best game on Wednesday, in my opinion. Let's just hope they were saving it for upcoming rivals Switzerland and Spain!

Of soccer and sexism

2010-06-11T09:31:00.000-04:00

Chile has come down with a serious case of World Cup fever. It's been several years since the national team has qualified to participate, so everybody is anxious to see how "La Roja," revitalized by the leadership of coach Marcelo Bielsa, will fare. Red jerseys are flying off the racks, players' faces are being plastered on everything from Coke bottles to supermarket displays of men's razors, and everyone is discussing the best way to stay awake all night in preparation for the early-morning game broadcasts. It's an electric atmosphere that I'm excited to be a part of.

There's one thing I'm not thrilled about, however: the fact that the World Cup craze, in addition to fueling enthusiasm for soccer, has also intensified the Chilean media's already pervasive objectification of women. Television channel Canal 13 -- owned by Chile's Catholic University -- provided ample evidence of this the other day. Around lunchtime, Canal 13 camera crews set up and broadcast impromptu pep rallies in the Plaza de Armas, downtown Santiago's central square, and the La Vega food market. The group that gathered in the Plaza de Armas was almost exclusively male -- except, that is, for the women who paraded through the crowd in tight, tiny outfits based on the national flags of World Cup teams. Within seconds, the men in the crowd had transitioned from jumping and cheering for the Chilean team to leering and whistling at the group of women. I remember watching one woman -- probably freezing in the winter cold in her crop top and short skirt -- maintaining her smile as one of the men repeatedly tried to grab and kiss her. No one tried to stop him.

When the show cut to the rally outside La Vega, I was pleased to see that the women present -- who appeared to be market workers -- were participating as fans and not as eye candy. Oh, how wrong I was. Before long, these women too were urged to parade in front of their male counterparts to garner applause.

I couldn't watch anymore. I didn't need to. The message was clear: The only place for women at a sports-related event is as entertainment for men. We're obviously not there to support our team; we're there to be oggled. Not only that: Treating women as sex objects, segments like this imply, is a natural and even necessary part of being a sports fan.

But Canal 13 didn't stop there. Later that night, the talk show Tonka Tanka -- presided over by the generally well-respected and well-liked female host Tonka Tomicic -- featured a group of women in loin cloths performing a dance to the official song of this year's World Cup, Shakira's "Waka Waka." Obviously, sexism was only one of the objectionable elements involved here.

And it's not just TV. As one might expect, the mannequins in department store display windows here are decked out to support La Roja. While both male and female mannequins sport the national team's jersey, the way in which they wear it is frequently very different. The plastic men wear it the way the players do; comfortably loose. The plastic women, on the other hand, wear it hiked up to reveal their stomachs, pulled tight across their chests and knotted in back. And, of course, the ensemble wouldn't be complete without a pair of jeans unzipped to reveal -- that's right -- La Roja underwear.

See, ladies? You can be soccer fans, too! Just make sure you're sexy ones.

In no way do I believe that the female body is something to be ashamed of and covered up. What I do have a problem with is the objectification of women's bodies for mass consumption. And that is exactly what the World Cup media blitz is doing in Chile. Aside from the fact that sex indeed sells, this can be explained -- I believe -- by the male-dominated culture surrounding soccer here. The next time you walk past a pickup game or kids' soccer clinic at a Chilean park, check out the gender of the participants. If I had 100 pesos for every woman (myself excluded) I've seen taking part . . . I'd be poor. Men here are expected to be into soccer; although there are female fans and players (the latter of whom receive a miniscule amount of media attention in comparison to their male counterparts), the same expectation does not apply to women. Case in point: When my (male Chilean) roommate and I sat down to have a drink with our three new (male Chilean) roommates, one of the latter asked him if he liked soccer but didn't address the same question to me. A Chilean TV commercial I recently saw reinforces this stereotype: A woman gets increasingly frustrated while struggling to understand soccer before finally deciding she doesn't care. Lucky for her and women everywhere, this channel didn't get the rights to broadcast World Cup games and will be showing programs that won't make our pretty little heads explode.

It's far from shocking that the male-dominated -- and heteronormative -- universe of Chilean soccer fandom would incorporate women on its own terms: as objects of the male gaze. Which, in the end, is what soccer itself is perceived to be.

Sorry, Canal 13. I, for one, will be watching Chile's games in a red T-shirt. And I'm not going to knot it above my belly button.

I'm well aware that sports-related sexism is not limited to Chile. This ad proves as much. Therefore, I'd be interested to hear what people living both here and in other countries have to say on this topic. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

So I guess this is real after all

2010-06-09T15:19:00.000-04:00

As most of you know, I'm leaving Chile in a few weeks. Come to think of it, though, I wouldn't be surprised if many of you didn't know, because I don't talk or write about it much. That's because I'm in denial.

When people ask me what I've been up to since I quit my job, I generally respond that I've been preparing for the big move. The truth of this statement depends on your perspective. If you consider taking meandering bike rides through the city and staring wistfully at the Andes preparation, then yes, I've been preparing. However, if your idea of preparation includes sorting through and packing the physical evidence of the past three years of my life, then I have not been preparing at all.

This afternoon, a friend stopped by my house and took away some of my stuff. His haul included a giant paper mache lamp, magenta curtains and some Saint Patrick's Day costume glasses. Although I'd been emotionally preparing myself for the inevitable for quite some time, his visit was my first move toward initiating the physical process of leaving.

I think I know why I've been putting it off. Ever since I was little, I've been extremely sensitive to the sentimental value of objects. I'm not a big shopper and would not consider myself materialistic; however, when an object represents an important moment or period in my life, I find it incredibly difficult to let go. For example, I've held onto dingy shoes because they've tread foreign soil and notebooks from high school because they're a testament to who I was at that point in my life. When I see hoarders interviewed on TV, I frequently understand exactly what they're talking about when they explain their reasons for refusing to throw out items everyone else finds useless.

Don't worry: My house isn't packed with empty soup cans and floor-to-ceiling stacks of old newspapers. I've been so mobile over the past few years that I've had to learn to look past my emotional attachment to things when the time comes to move out. This doesn't mean it's easy. Although I consider my tendency to find magic in places and everyday objects a gift when it comes to creative activities like writing and photography, it can be a curse when it comes to moving forward.

I think I was so afraid to begin sorting because I felt that doing so would be like watching a slow parade of significant moments in the Chilean life I'm leaving behind. As the process continues, I know that practically every item I unearth will embody a memory that I'll be afraid will vanish forever if I don't hang onto the object itself.

I've had to try to make myself comfortable with the idea of forgetting. After all, if I refuse to let some things escape my brain, there won't be as much room to remember the most important aspect of my life in Chile: the people who have made it what it is. I like to think that every time those people draw their magenta curtains or put on their sparky green sunglasses, they'll remember me, too.

Random thing that irks me about Santiago: no shows

2010-05-31T12:37:00.001-04:00

I was so excited to go out Thursday night. I mean, beyond excited. The reason: I had plans to dance till dawn to what promised to be one of the most ridiculously awesome musical fusions ever spun: Balkan gypsy cumbia.

I had stumbled across a flier for the Balkan cumbia event while scrolling through the event listings on Saborizante and had been looking forward to it for the better part of a month. I had rounded up a group of similarly enthused would-be Balkumbia dancers, among them a few actual Balkans. I was so intent on having a blast that I even called the venue earlier Thursday evening to make sure the event was still on. It was.

So you can only imagine my surprise when I skipped up to the front door of the venue with a shivering, anxious group of people behind me and peered onto a virtually empty dance floor with '90s indie rock blaring from the speakers overhead. When I asked where the Balkan gypsy cumbia was, a staff member told me there had been "a change."

A change my ass.

"But I called to confirm!" I wailed to no one in particular as we all shuffled back out into the cold.

"Don't worry," someone else said. "These things happen."

Apparently, they do, because I quickly realized that I was the only one pissed off. Everyone else was disappointed, of course, but they were perfectly content to just head to another bar and order cheap beer.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that the others were used to this. After all, Thursday wasn't the first time this had happened to me in Chile. While we roamed the streets in search of a back-up plan, I thought back to the night I'd walked into a certain Santiago concert venue (*cough* Galpon Victor Jara *cough*) revved up to see a band two friends had been raving about. An hour and two underwhelming opening bands later, event organizers announced that the band we had all come to see would not be performing because the venue couldn't pay them: Not enough tickets had been sold. When my friends and I went to get our refunds, we were told that there would be none.

If this isn't robbery, I don't know what is. I'm sorry (actually, I'm not), but if you're a venue and schedule an event, it's your responsibility to promote it if you want it to be profitable. And if you end up losing money, that's just part of the risk you take on. You can't just cancel when it suits you and blame it on all those jerk customers who didn't bother to show up and give you money.

Anyone who moves to Chile from the States (or from a number of other countries, I would imagine) quickly realizes that social arrangements tend to be more fluid here. As every exchange student eventually learns, the fact that those nice kids from history class said you all should hang out over the weekend in no way means that it will actually happen (unless you take some serious initiative). It's certainly frustrating, but it's not impossible to get used to -- and can even work to your advantage if you're looking for a way to get out of plans.

I feel, however, that I shouldn't have to adapt myself to this type of fluidity when it comes to scheduled events. Canceling a concert, book launch or Balkan gypsy cumbia party at the last minute is just plain unprofessional.

I'm not saying this kind of thing is universal in Chile. I've been to plenty of decently organized events here. Still, I've had enough not-so-decent experiences to call my attention. Something I've noticed is that, in these cases, I get incensed while nearly everyone else seems simply resigned. As open as I try to be, I guess there are just some things about Chile I'll never get used to.

Cheap flicks in Santiago

2010-05-26T16:01:00.000-04:00

The past few weeks have brought with them the chilly temperatures, gray skies and rain that signal the arrival of winter in Santiago. As a result, I've pulled my wool leg warmers out of storage, begun sleeping with a rubber pouch filled with hot water (my beloved guatero), and given whole new meaning to the term "mismatched layers." I've also found that I can't always rally up the courage to plan a night on the town that involves sidewalk tables or frigid midnight strolls. Therefore, I've been seeing a lot of movies.

If you're like me, you might be feeling the need to hunker down in a comfortable seat in a cozy movie theater instead of pounding back a freezing bottle of Escudo on a pub terrace. And, if you're like me, you're probably feeling the need to do so cheaply. When it comes down to it, going to commercial multiplexes in Chile is almost as expensive as doing so in the States, especially if you choose a theater in a wealthier neighborhood (yep, the prices are different). But fear not: There are plenty of places to take in cheap flicks in this fair city. Below are some of the ones I've found.

1. Matucana 100. This publicly funded cultural center shows movies for 500 pesos in a small but comfy viewing room. I've been there three times in the past two weeks. They're showing Hitchcock, Spike Lee and Coen brothers movies right now and have a documentary series coming up next month.

2. Biblioteca de Santiago. Oh, how I love thee. Located just across the street from Matucana 100, this public library has an underground auditorium that occasionally hosts film series and festivals. Oftentimes, viewers are asked to make a voluntary donation instead of paying an entrance fee.

3. Centro Cultural Palacio la Moneda. This relatively new cultural center is located beneath the La Moneda presidential palace. (Imagine someone suggesting building a publicly accessible cultural center directly under the White House. Ha.) The Cineteca Nacional shows some movies for 2,000 pesos (1,000 for students and seniors) and others (in a smaller room) for free. On the schedule for this month is Te creis la mas linda pero eris la mas puta, a Chilean film which, if you hang on past the first 20 minutes, offers up a lot of good laughs.

4. Centro Arte Alameda. The prices at this theater are relatively low compared to those at the multiplexes. Plus, the movies are generally of a different sort: Centro Arte Alameda shows a lot of Chilean and independent films and socially minded documentaries. If you can prove that you live or work in Santiago Centro, you can get in for 1,000 pesos. If you see a film in Sala 2, be prepared to put up with a moderate level of background noise from the meeting space below.

5. Other cultural centers and institutes. Some independent cultural centers host screenings. Plaza Brasil's Taller Sol traditionally has projected movies onto an outdoor screen in the summer but apparently ran into trouble for unauthorized use of public space (even though they didn't charge). Language and culture institutes like Chileno-Norteamericano, Chileno-Britanico and Goethe Institut also routinely host film series.

6. Commercial theaters on discount day. Wednesday is cheap movie day in Santiago, with most theaters posting lower prices. The Cinemundo at Mall Plaza Alameda in Estacion Central offers a 2 for 1 deal for most 2-D films on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

7. Film festivals. As it happens, one of these, the Festival de Cine Social y Antisocial (FECISO), is going on this week at the University of Chile's Cineteca and in outdoor spaces in Santiago's southern neighborhoods, primarily La Pintana. While the University of Chile has published a schedule of the films being shown at its Juan Gomez Millas campus in Nunoa, FECISO organizers seemed to have dropped the ball over at their own website and blog. If you're interested in going out to a neighborhood screening, I would recommend e-mailing festivaldecinesocial (at) gmail (dot) com for more information. It's a great opportunity to see free movies (a number of which you probably won't get to see anywhere else) and get to know and draw your own conclusions about neighborhoods that are routinely stigmatized in the media. I froze my butt off when I went last year, so bundle up!

8. Special events. Check event pages like Revolver, Saborizante and Estoy for listings.

Happy viewing! I'm off to get my boots repaired...because it's officially boot season.

The next hemisphere

2010-05-22T11:47:00.000-04:00

This morning I opened a new e-mail account. This new address, unlike the six I already have, ends in .edu.

That´s right: Come August, I will be back-to-school shopping. Fortunately, this process will not involve replacing last year´s cracked protractor or begging my mom to let me shorten my uniform skirt. Instead, it will involve making the necessary preparations for my big move to...drumroll, please...NEW YORK CITY!

While I don´t want to be too specific right now about what and where I´ll be studying, I can say that I´ll be enrolling in an MA/PhD program in a humanities field. I´m kinda sorta THRILLED -- and more than kinda sorta terrified. More than anything, though, I´m just a bit shocked that it all worked out.

About a year and a half ago, my brain started to itch. It´s not that there´s not plenty here to keep it on its toes -- just finding the @ symbol on a keyboard here is a task worthy of Einstein -- but I found myself missing the academic world. Shortly thereafter, I enrolled in a two-semester gender studies program at a Chilean university. The diploma not only gave me the opportunity to explore issues I´d been interested in for a long time but also served to confirm my inkling that it was time to go back to school. I found I was delighted to sit up in bed reading, roam the world with highlighter stains on my fingers and, perhaps most of all, begin to reclaim the academic Spanish that I felt had been evaporating since I graduated from college. I realized it was all definitely something I could get used to again.

When I began researching academic programs in my area of interest, I was daunted to learn that most of them -- and nearly the only ones that offer financial aid -- are joint master´s and doctoral programs that generally take a minimum of five years to complete. I was confident that my college grades and post-graduate experience would have given me a decent shot at being accepted into an M.A. program, but a doctorate? That´s what experts get, I thought. That´s what people with years and years of work experience get. I, on the other hand, am a recent grad working quaint jobs and having adventures in South America. I knew a Ph.D. would almost certainly be in my future if I chose to pursue the career path that interests me; I just never expected it to be so soon. I didn´t feel worthy yet.

But, after receiving encouragement from some of my former professors, I decided to give it a go. I chose to apply to universities in the States both because that´s where some of the strongest programs in my field are and because I didn´t feel I could commit to another five years (the approximate total amount of time I've been living abroad) so far away from my family and U.S. friends.

The application process was surreal because I felt so removed from it all. While applying to undergrad, I met regularly with my high school's college counselor, attended information sessions, read SAT prep books and went on campus tours. I felt that the information I needed was readily available to me and that I had at least some degree of control over my fate. This time around, though, I was applying alone to schools I'd never visited -- and that were thousands of miles away. Even though I was able to research programs and faculty online and at Chilean libraries, the physical distance involved made me feel like I was sending applications to Oz or the North Pole: Were these places I was dreaming about actually real? Plus, although I received wonderful advice and support from many people, including the professors who wrote my recommendations and gave me feedback on my personal statement, I had the impression of being a lot more on my own than I was when applying to undergrad; there wasn't an entire institutional structure designed to make sure I succeeded.

After I'd sent in all my applications (thank goodness for online apps!), I began mentally preparing myself for what I thought was a very real possibility: not getting in anywhere. I tend to be pretty hard on myself and don't deal especially well with failure, so I figured I should start the emotional beef-up early.

Rather unbelievably, none of this was necessary. When I got my first acceptance e-mail, I whooped and did a celebratory dance around my kitchen. In the end, I went three for four on my applications and was faced with the very difficult (albeit extremely fortunate) task of making a decision. Since I'd only applied to programs I really liked, this caused me no small amount of anguish. It had been easier when all the decisions had been in the admissions committees' hands.

My decision was tough, but I'm happy with it. I'll be part of a wonderful department and be living in one of the most exciting cities on earth. What's more, I'll get to live with my awesome sister, who will be a grad student at another NYC university.

Of course, I'll be very sad to leave Chile. However, I think the fact that I'll be moving on to something new in a dynamic new environment will make it easier. When I left Chile after finishing my year abroad, I was devastated and sank into something of a funk. Looking back, I think this was because I was abandoning a place where everything was new and exciting -- and where I'd changed a lot -- and returning somewhere (college) that I felt didn't hold as many surprises and opportunities for non-academic growth. I may not have been right about this, but it was how I felt at the time.

This time around, however, the situation is very different. I'll be starting an important life project in a city that has just as many new experiences to offer as a foreign country. I'll have something to look forward to and not just something to look back on.

I first visited New York City my freshman year in college. While sitting out on a friend's fire escape at midnight watching the street bubble with activity below, I suspected that I might just be able to get used to this.

You'll have to stay tuned to find out if I was right. Even though I started this blog in order to write about my life in Chile, I think my experiences as a New York City newcomer will certainly be worth sharing as well. So get ready for Leigh's adventures in a whole new hemisphere!

Oh, and if you're a New Yorker and have any tips about making the big move, please drop me a line!

The price of "culture"

2010-05-19T21:56:00.000-04:00

I took a trip this week (more on that soon), so I was a few days late in returning some library books. At the University of Chile, I would have been summarily executed, but luckily, I only had to deal with the Biblioteca de Santiago and their 100-peso-per-day fine this time around. After relinquishing a few coins, I was handed this receipt:

Apparently, I had bought myself 600 pesos worth of "CULTURE" (quotation marks included). This could be the perfect catalyst for a culture-as-commodity discussion, but for now, I'm going to limit myself to saying that I found it hilarious.

So watch out, kids. Your taste for "culture" could get you into trouble -- especially if you don't return it to its designated slot on time.

The corner

2010-05-11T01:09:00.001-04:00

Those who have been reading this blog from the beginning know that I took this picture of the Santiago skyline from my friend A.'s balcony in 2006. When I wasn't looking, the PhotoShop monster attacked it and made it look like this:

For a long time, I've been meaning to take a camera over to A.'s and snap a shot of the exact same patch of sky to see how much has changed. Regardless of whether or not it would be evident in that particular photograph, the area has undergone significant transformations in recent years. The low rooftops of old houses and modestly sized apartment buildings now hunker in the shadows of towering high rises. When I used to live in the neighborhood, I looked on through narrowed eyes as the most garish of them all -- which I began to refer to as "El Falo" -- climbed higher and higher each day.

You don't have to have been following this blog from the beginning to know that I've been completely bewitched by the soul of Santiago's historic neighborhoods and consider this type of concrete colonization a travesty. Back when A. and I were neighbors, I used to glare at these looming invaders as if they were my personal enemies.

Strangely enough, I never felt any kind of resentment toward A.'s building, which is new(ish) and tall (although, at under ten stories, it is dwarfed by the likes of El Falo). This is probably because I have a lot of fond memories of his apartment, due in no small part to the balcony.

I met A. when I was studying abroad and we were both students in a judo (a.k.a. Leigh gets her ass kicked) class at one of the Chilean universities I attended. After class, we would frequently go over to his apartment and do some homework, then mix up a couple piscolas and drink them on the balcony. All told, we stood out there for hours absorbing nighttime views of Santiago. We would squint out at the tiny lights of the ski resorts in the mountains, try to point out faraway buildings we knew, and speculate about what people were doing behind their drawn curtains. On one occasion, we even bent over backwards and contemplated the city upside down. A.'s balcony was pivotal to the development of my awareness of and love for Santiago; as much as I hate to admit it, I never could have experienced the same perspective from street level.

Recently, my friend F., who used to live in the neighborhood but moved out long before I met her, was telling me about her family's old house. When I asked if it was still standing, she told me it had been bulldozed years ago to make way for a new apartment building. Given recent development activity in the area, this didn't surprise me. What did surprise me, however, was her old address: The house used to stand on the same corner where A.'s building now does.

I'm still struck by the coincidence. There are six million people in this city. What are the chances that I would befriend two who had lived in the same place but years apart? My conclusion: There is a certain street corner in a certain neighborhood in a certain city that tends to produce people who are important to me. I find myself actually believing in the mysticism of it all. This is not the case with A., who told me that I should think instead of all the people who live or have lived there whom I have never met and therefore are not directly important to me. I, however, maintain that I have a special connection to that patch of earth.

Regardless of whether or not I'm right, there is a certain poignancy to it, one that resonates deeply with my current situation. I'll be leaving Santiago soon and don't know how much time will have passed or how much will have changed by the time I return. Maybe my friends' corner will be home to a completely different structure -- or to no structure at all. Whatever I find there in the future, though, I have no doubt that it will be meaningful to me, even if only because I find some way to give it meaning.

Based on the way she's described it to me, F.'s old house was one I would have been enraged to see flattened so A.'s building could go up. If it hadn't been bulldozed, though, I wouldn't know what Santiago looks like upside down. So I guess the lesson is this: No matter how much Santiago changes, there is something about this corner of the world that will always resonate with me.

Language treason

2010-05-06T10:46:00.001-04:00

On my way home from work a few weeks ago, I just happened to sit next to a Chilean Metro passenger who got off at the same stop I did. As we were walking down the platform toward the exit, he turned to me and inquired (in English), "Can I ask you something?"

It wasn't that difficult to realize how he'd known I was an English speaker: The entire time I'd been sitting next to him, I'd had the English translation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire open on my lap.

Instead of responding in English, though, I answered in Spanish. In the amount of time it took us to reach the exit and go our separate ways, it emerged -- also in Spanish -- that he had seen the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- the first book in Larsson's Milennium trilogy -- while living in Norway last year and that yes, I was from the States.

While walking home from the Metro station, I replayed the conversation and pondered my choice of language. It hadn't been the first time I'd responded in Spanish to a question asked in English. Why is it, I wondered, that I tend to avoid my native language?

One could argue that an obvious reason is safety. Let's face it: While being foreign can be an advantage in some situations, it can make you more vulnerable in others. This was the reason I muttered "no" and walked away several months back when a guy approached me on the street late at night and asked if I spoke English.

It turned out that the guy was a lost Israeli tourist. I learned this when he followed me down the street (which provoked a brief moment of panic on my part) and asked me in broken Spanish if I knew where his hostel was. The hostel was just a few houses down from the apartment where I was living at the time, so I offered to walk with him. Unfortunately, this meant I faced a dilemma: His hostel and my apartment were five blocks away, which meant that there would undoubtedly by conversation involved. I had to decide whether to fess up or keep up the act.

I chose the latter because I was too embarrassed to tell him, "Hey, I actually do speak English. I lied to you back there because I thought you wanted to rob me." Looking back, this is exactly what I should have said, but it didn't seem that way at the time. What followed were five blocks of really slow Spanish and really exaggerated hand gestures. With each step we took, I felt even more absurd. Unfortunately, I was in too deep to quit.

But back to the guy on the Metro. Safety was -- as it always is -- a concern, although I was pretty sure he wasn't going to pull a knife on me on a subway platform with a bunch of witnesses looking on. Additionally, all my defenses tend to spring into place when strange men address me in English because it's something that smarmy guys have been known to do to hit on me. I've long since learned that muttering a curt answer in Spanish is usually a relatively effective way of letting a guy know that I'm not digging his "I could be your tour guide in Chile and in love" vibe.

To be honest, it also boils down to a matter of pride. I've worked damn hard to be able to speak good Spanish. While my high school classmates were watching Dawson's Creek, I was biting my nails to Mexican soap operas (even if I was taping Dawson's in the other room). I sought out bilingual summer jobs and read in Spanish for fun. I was a Spanish major in college, and while studying abroad in Chile, I intentionally took hard classes because I knew they would help me improve my language skills. After graduation, I moved to a Spanish-speaking country and have been living in one ever since. In other words, I've invested a heck of a lot of time in learning Spanish and, yes, am proud of the level I've achieved. This may be why I find it insulting when someone assumes I'm clueless just because the way I look or some other detail about me leads him or her to suspect that I may have been born elsewhere. Sometimes I have to remind myself that the people who make this assumption usually have kind intentions or that they may actually not be making an assumption at all; maybe, like me, they've busted their asses learning a foreign language and just want to practice it.

I would like to say that the list of factors behind my aversion to speaking English with strangers stops there, but as long as we're being honest, I have to admit that I don't think it does. Recently, another expat and I were discussing how living abroad has made us more comfortable with being the odd person out. We acknowledged that, no matter how long we live in Chile, we will always be foreign, different, odd. Furthermore, we arrived at the conclusion that this difference does not stay behind at customs but rather follows us home during trips to the U.S.; if Chileans cannot fully relate to us because they do not share our background, people in the States cannot fully relate to us because they do not share our present.

You would think that someone who’s recognized this and accepted it not only as isolating – which it can be – but as tremendously enriching as well would not care about fitting in with the crowd. However, the truth is that being the out-of-place element gets old after awhile. Most of the time, I love being a foreigner in Chile (or, if I’m in Minnesota, a local who has lived abroad), but there are times when the appeal of fitting in is hard to resist; alas, we never truly leave middle school. When a stranger speaks to me in English in Chile, it reminds me that I’ve chosen a misfit’s fate – and that it’s no longer optional.

Perhaps this would not bother me as much if I wore the signs of my otherness more visibly – as blonde hair or six feet of height, for example. If I had no hope of blending in, maybe I wouldn’t want to. Don’t get me wrong: There are plenty of Chileans who have been able to guess just by looking at me that I’m foreign. Other times, however, the evidence lies solely on my tongue. Even though I do have an accent, though, I always feel like less of a curiosity when I’m speaking the local language.

Whenever this happens, I feel as though I’ve somehow betrayed my native language. I love English. Yes, it’s the language of Shakespeare, but it’s also the language of my family and childhood friends and the language through which I learned to interpret the world and express my feelings about it. It seems wrong to deny my affiliation with it.

So here are my questions for you, expats: Do you ever feel that you’ve betrayed your native language? Have you resigned yourself to always being a square peg in a round hole?

If George Washington had attended the University of Chile

2010-04-21T19:56:00.001-04:00

In which Leigh is suspected of attempting to bribe a librarian

Today was my day off, so I did what any self-declared nerd would do when faced with 24 hours devoid of responsibilities: get up early and bike to the library. I don't know if I've established this already on this blog, but I love the Biblioteca de Santiago. Its resources are by no means limitless, but it has a big, sunny room on the third floor that houses a decent collection of contemporary Chilean literature, which is usually what I'm looking for. Today I picked up two books I've had my eye on for a while: Nona Fernandez's 10 de Julio Huamachuco and Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai (the latter can be read in a day and, in my opinion, does not disappoint).

But I digress. While roaming the aisles of the literature room at the Biblioteca de Santiago, I thought back to a recent CNN.com article about the $4,577 late fee President George Washington apparently has racked up at the New York City public library by failing to return two books he checked out in 1789. Specifically, they were due back on November 2, 1789, which means they are exactly 220 years and 170 days overdue.

When I first read this article, I was reminded of the punishment the University of Chile library system inflicts on delinquent borrowers. Deeming fines either elitist or ineffective, administrators instead suspend users' library privileges for three days for each day a book is overdue. That means that if you borrow three books and return them all two days late, you can't check anything out for another 3 x 3 x 2 = 18 days.

I was unaware of this policy when I started out as an exchange student at the University of Chile. Therefore, my jaw literally dropped when I returned some materials a few days late and the librarian informed me that, instead of paying the small fine I was expecting, I was to be stripped of my library privileges for the next three weeks.

"B-But isn't there a fine I can pay?" I stammered.

"We don't have fines here."

"It's just that I really need to check out books."

"You'll have to ask a friend to check them out for you."

"Isn't there any way I can get around this?"

I had been referring to a pardon, a notarized declaration of repentance, imprisonment or community service, but certainly not to a bribe. However, judging by the look on her face -- somewhere between amused and offended -- the librarian had assumed I'd been offering the latter.

"No," she said, and I walked out with my face burning.

So now you know, George Washington. The next time you're 220 years and 170 days late in returning two books to the University of Chile, you won't be able to get off by forking over $4,577. You'll have your library privileges suspended for the next 1,322 years and 8 months.

By the way, I would highly recommend that anyone sticking around in Santiago for awhile apply for a library card at either the Biblioteca de Santiago or the Bibliometro (where punishment is meted out as fines and not suspensions, by the way). Once you have membership at one, it's easier to sign up at the other. You usually need to present your carnet (Chilean national ID card; I'm not sure if they accept passports, but it's worth a try) and proof of address, like a utility bill in your name or a certificate from the police. If I remember correctly, the Bibliometro accepted my visa registry certificate (you know, the one they give you at Policia Internacional with your photo and address on it) as proof of address.

However you do it, though, don't let this country's outlandishly high book prices prevent you from enjoying Chilean literature!

Random thing I love about Santiago: dramatic corner store names

2010-04-14T22:55:00.000-04:00

I used to live down the block from a corner shop/liquor store called El Esfuerzo. I always thought the name, which means "effort," was fitting because El Esfuerzo was a lone soldier, a tiny old adobe structure resiliently standing its ground on a street increasingly overrun by concrete giants.

I've noticed that a lot of neighborhood shops in Santiago, including liquor stores (botillerias), have heroic names like this. El Esfuerzo and El Progreso are among the most common. These names probably refer to the hard work of the families who run them or to that of their clients, residents of the middle- and working-class neighborhoods where most businesses with names like this tend to be located (at least I have yet to see an El Esfuerzo in a wealthy area). However, I'm sure shop owners must have considered the fact that some of the beverages they dispense may decrease their clients' esfuerzo and thereby limit their progreso. Maybe that's why some simply avoid the irony and christen their stores with names allusive to sublime states, like El Cielo (Heaven). An (imaginary?) botilleria called El Cielo, dicho sea de paso, inspired the title of a collection of short stories by contemporary Chilean writer Nona Fernandez.

Not all botillerias have epic names, though. While on the bus this evening, I grinned appreciatively at a lighted sign that proclaimed "BOTILLERIA TOO EL RATO." "Todo el rato" (d's between vowels tend to disappear in spoken Chilean Spanish) literally means "all the time" but sometimes is used more like "all the way" or "totally" in informal speech, as in:

Juan: Te gusta La Noche ?
Pancha: Claro, po. La Noche to'o el rato!

Too El Rato strikes me as the perfect name for a botilleria because it's a phrase I can see spilling nonstop from the lips of the intoxicated. As for "effort" and "progress"...maybe when the hangover wears off.

My new commute

2010-04-08T21:31:00.001-04:00

Like so many other santiaguinas and santiaguinos, I work far from where I live. This means that one of the first things I do every morning is squeeze myself into a crowded, overheated subway car, then get off some time later and squeeze myself onto a crowded, overheated bus. I love public transportation, but there is very little to love about this commute. By the time I get to work, I feel like I've lost a fight. I can only imagine what it's like for people who don't look up maps of bus routes online for fun.

Needless to say, the routine was wearing on me, and I needed a change. That's when BiciMetro came into my life. For those who don't know, BiciMetro is a recently instituted program that allows Metro riders to store their bikes for the day at select stations around the city. I hadn't used it before because I was afraid that adding yet another mode of transport to my commute would lengthen it substantially, but when I plotted everything out, I concluded that the difference, if it existed at all, would be minimal and well worth the exercise. Plus, a couple minutes would be a small price to play for cutting my Metro time down to a fraction of what it had been before and moving it to a much less congested stretch of track.

My plan was to try BiciMetro on Tuesday, but my tire went flat about two blocks from my house and I was forced to turn around. Things went much more smoothly today, when my new tire and I (my fashionably eclectic bike now has one city tire and one mountain bike tire) set off from home and pulled up about 15 minutes later outside the BiciMetro, a locked room where bikes hang from the ceiling in individual padlocked lockers. Since my work day starts a bit later than most people's, I was worried that all the lockers would be full by the time I got there, but I arrived to find only one other slot taken.

I signed up, got a receipt, left my bike and got on the Metro. On my way home at night, I bought a ticket for 300 pesos (about US$0.60) at the Metro ticket counter and exchanged it for my bike. As I pedaled home, I thought about the positive impact the change had made on my day. Not only had I actually been excited to get out of bed and commute, but I had arrived at work with more energy and a better attitude. Also, it felt great to know that I was getting exercise while communing with the city I love. I have tomorrow off work, but I think I'll find an excuse to use BiciMetro anyway.

I'm surprised that so few people seem to use the BiciMetro nearest me. Of course, it does imply an extra cost (300 pesos per day or 1000 pesos for a five-day pass) that I'm sure a lot of people would rather avoid. Also, BiciMetros tend to be located in outlying areas whose residents have long commutes that they may not be willing to make longer by trading a bus for a bike. Still, the benefits are enough for me to encourage anyone who lives reasonably close to a BiciMetro to use it, even if just for fun every once in awhile. There's nothing quite like deepening your relationship with a city by traversing it on two wheels.

When pig heads fly

2010-04-03T17:41:00.000-04:00

Three new roommates recently moved into the house where I live. This, of course, means that I can no longer walk across the patio in my bra or have an extra bedroom devoted exclusively to watching movies and dancing cumbia. All in all, though, I think having more people around will be a positive change, especially since rainy Chilean winters, one of which is fast approaching, lend themselves to reclusive behavior.

All three of my new housemates are first-year students at a university here in Santiago. The other day, one of them came home and took a 30-minute shower. Afterword, he explained that he had been trying to scrub the smell of fish out of his skin.

For it is indeed the fishiest time of the year. It is also a time of flour-caked hair, torn clothing and the innards of raw eggs. That's right: It's the beginning of the school year, and Chilean freshmen must suffer. Chilean freshmen like my roommate, who got fish heads AND A PIG HEAD thrown at him on one of his first days of school. Freshmen like those who prowl the streets barefoot begging for change so they can buy their shoes back from the upperclassmen. Freshmen like the guy who had chemicals thrown on his face a few years ago or the woman who was hit by a train and killed during a hazing activity in 2000.

I haven't seen the shoeless student beggars out on the streets this year. What I don't know is whether this is because I was out of the country during most universities' first week of school or because the February 27 earthquake has had a sobering effect on would-be tormentors. This would be the perfect time for upperclassmen to follow Universidad Catolica Silva Henriquez's lead and replace hazing with organized community service activities. God knows there are plenty of people in this country who could use help and would be able to put to much better use the food hazing wastes and the clothing it destroys. Additionally, I believe incoming students would bond much more effectively while working together in pursuit of a common goal than while ducking out of the way of fresh batches of raw seafood. However, my roommate's experience makes it obvious that not everyone feels the same way.

Earthquake aside, what maddens me most about hazing (or mechoneo, as it's called here) is that it seems completely and totally incompatible with the ideals many university students profess. I'd be willing to bet that some of the students lobbing fish heads at freshmen have also spoken out in support of issues of students' rights and social justice. How can you fight for increased assistance for economically disadvantaged students one minute and shred their clothes and waste food the next? How can you clamor for increased solidarity while orchestrating an initiation ritual based on humiliation? In my humble opinion, the whole thing is more rancid than rotten fish.

The Mysteries of Santiago

2010-03-31T10:14:00.000-04:00

I recently found a copy of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh at The Strand in New York City. In the book, a motley group of eccentric new friends help the protagonist, the Washingtonian Art, discover the hidden charms of his adoptive city. Even though Art has spent four years studying in Pittsburgh, he begins his final summer in the city oblivious to such marvels as the mysterious Lost Neighborhood and the Cloud Factory, whose smokestack hiccups perfect white puffs into the sky. Art begins to see this city with different eyes: At one point, as he looks out over the city from his front steps, "[f]our years of familiarity and unconcern with Pittsburgh turned suddenly to arousal and love, and I hugged myself."

Like Art's, my days in my adoptive city are numbered. I generally don't like to post about things on my blog until they're set in stone, but suffice it to say that within a few months, it's very likely that I will be posting from another hemisphere. As evidenced by my temporary disappearance from the blogging world, I've recently spent some time outside of Chile, part of which was spent negotiating the terms of my departure from this long, skinny land.

I have, as one might expect, mixed emotions about this. I'm very excited about beginning This Next Stage in My Life but very sad to be leaving the country I've called home for the past two and a half years (three and a half, if you count my junior year abroad). Being the nostalgic, sentimental person that I am, I'm prepared for this to involve no small amount of blubbering and an even less small amount of wistfully staring off into space. While I know that a certain degree of melancholy is inevitable, though, I don't want to spend my remaining time Chile steeped in the type of funk that overcame me during the final days of my study abroad experience, when I was so anguished that my hair literally started falling out.

I would rather have a last hurrah similar to Art's and spend the next few months discovering all the Mysteries of Santiago that the hulking girth of work, study, and routine have elbowed outside of my realm of vision.

I'm already privy to a few of these mysteries. I know, for example, that one can purchase delicious mote con huesillo at the south entrance to Parque Quinta Normal. I know that southwestern Santiago Centro is dotted with abandoned factories which, although they don't produce clouds, exercise a silent and oxidized draw of their own. I've eaten lunch at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that requires a password and purchased used paperbacks at hole-in-the-wall shops populated by dusty towers of books and booksellers who know their contents like they know the lines on their palms. I know where to send an international fax on a Sunday afternoon and know that there's nothing like a steaming sopaipilla from a street cart at the end of a rough day...even if I invariably get the hiccups after gobbling it down. I know that if the city falls silent at just the right time, you can hear the deliciously spooky whistle of a late-night train leaving Estacion Central.

I'm confident that everyone who has lived in this city has his or her own collection of mysteries. So, as someone who wants to make the most of her remaining time here, I'm inviting you to share them, either in the comments or in a post of your own. What special, surprising or enigmatic discoveries have you made in Santiago? Between us, I'm sure we have more than enough to write a book.

Busiest post-earthquake day yet

2010-03-03T19:56:00.000-05:00

In which Leigh does the following while wearing a sequined fanny pack

I haven't written many day-in-review posts on this blog, probably because readers would be bored stiff by how routine the majority of my days are. ("She got up, took the Metro to work and spent the day daydreaming about peanut butter again? I'd rather be checking my Facebook.") However, 8.8 earthquakes tend to leave routines in shambles, so this one might actually be interesting.

Wednesday was, up until that point, the busiest day I'd had since the earthquake. Shortly after I woke up, the owners of my house came over to tell me that there was structural damage to one of the walls in my bedroom (the one right next to my bed, as it turns out) and that I would have to move myself and all my things into another room as quickly as possible. When you look at the wall, it's not that surprising:

Since strong aftershocks are still common and probably will be for quite a while longer, I knew it was in my best interest to get as far away from that wall as possible. One of the owners of the house helped me set up temporary camp in another room. I was very lucky to only have to move down the hallway. A friend of mine had moved into a new pension the day before the earthquake, only to be told a few days later that structural damage had rendered his room uninhabitable. We spent yesterday hauling all his things into another house. Infinitely worse off, of course, are the thousands of people who lost their homes and have nowhere to go.

Once the move was complete, I headed back to the FECh to volunteer. This time, we were sent to collect supplies outside a supermarket in Maipu, an area none of the four people in my group was particularly familiar with. We arrived to find the supermarket closed. Refusing to resign ourselves to defeat, we hopped on a bus and backtracked to another supermarket we'd seen on the way; there was already another group there collecting donations. Another bus ride later, we'd arrived at a third supermarket, this one located in a strip mall. The supervisor at the supermarket told us we would have to get authorization from the mall administrator, whose office, due to the fact that most of the building's entrances were closed because of the earthquake, was a serpentine 10-minute walk away.

So we walked. When we arrived at the administrator's third-floor office, we were told to wait. So we waited. We waited for a long time. While we were waiting, a strong aftershock made the entire building rattle; just as we were all about to head for the stairs, it stopped. And we waited some more.

Finally, the administrator appeared. I hadn't even finished introducing the group when he interrupted me and said, "You're not going to get authorization." He proceeded to explain that the mall planned to launch a campaign a few days later to benefit the Cruz Roja and that until then, he wanted people to "forget." When I tried to explain that we didn't even want to go inside the mall -- just collect donations outside the supermarket -- he interrupted again and repeated that we were not going to get authorization.

I gave him my iciest glare as we walked out of the office. I was so angry that I was tempted to rip my volunteer credential off my shirt, scribble "Forget what?" on the back and tape it to the office door. It had my full name and identification number on it, though, so I chickened out.

"Forget what? That half of the country is in shambles?" one of my groupmates demanded once we were outside.

We were all disgusted, both by the disrespectful manner in which we'd been dismissed and by what we felt to have been the administrator's less-than-altruistic motivations. Don't get me wrong. I think it's great that his mall wants to work with the Cruz Roja. But on Wednesday, they weren't doing it yet. Meanwhile, FECh volunteers were loading donations into trucks and taking them directly to affected areas. Instead of allowing people to assist in that effort by donating a packet of pasta or a bar of soap on their way out of the supermarket, however, the administrator wanted them not to donate anything until they could do so in the name of the mall -- which, coincidentally, would bring them to the mall on a weekend.

Who knows. Maybe he reasoned that people would donate more if they had the entire day to shop and had been motivated by the nationwide telethon, which Chilean TV personality Don Francisco was scheduled to host on Friday and Saturday. Maybe the administrator really was trying to act in the best interest of those in need. Still, the word "forget" left a sour taste in my mouth, one that I still haven't been able to brush entirely away.

By then, it was obvious that the Great Supermarket Odyssey had come to an end. Two of my groupmates headed home, while another volunteer and I went back to the FECh headquarters to see what needed to be done.

A lot, as it turned out. I started out organizing boxes and then became part of an "assembly line" that passed along bottles of water and boxes of rice, pasta, flour and other necessities. Finally, I was given the task of boxing up toys and school supplies. Seeing the entire compound full of donations and teeming with volunteers was extremely heartening after such a frustrating day; people hadn't forgotten.

Want to volunteer for Chile earthquake relief work?

2010-03-03T07:24:00.000-05:00

Twitter and Facebook are filled with posts from people looking for ways to volunteer in the aftermath of the 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile on Saturday. It was through social media that I learned about the relief efforts being coordinated by the University of Chile's student federation, the FECh. Yesterday afternoon, I decided to head over to their headquarters at Periodista Jose Carrasco Tapia 9 (off Vicuna Mackenna near Metro Baquedano). The area was swarming with young people dropping off donations, loading trucks and organizing themselves into work teams. After completing a brief registration, I joined one of the teams, and we set off for Rotonda Quilin in Penalolen.

Once there, we split up into smaller groups, some of which carried boxes into nearby neighborhoods and went door-to-door collecting non-perishable food, cleaning and hygiene supplies, clothing and blankets for the residents of towns hit particularly hard by the quake. Unfortunately, these groups ran into a bit of difficulty because apparently there have been cases of scam artists going door-to-door collecting money for "earthquake victims." Even so, the FECh groups managed to bring back quite a haul.

I was assigned to a group that set up at the entrance of a Lider supermarket. We informed the people walking in that we were collecting supplies for earthquake victims and collected their donations as they walked out. Some people's generosity was extremely touching. A guy in a cast hobbled up to us with a full shopping basket and proceeded to hand over everything he'd bought. One woman donated about half of the contents of her full cart, while another went home and returned with two giant bags of clothing. And a little girl toddled over and silently handed over her juice boxes.

I know Lider has not received very positive treatment on this blog in the past, but I have to say that the manager on duty was wonderful to us. Volunteers have been kicked out of other supermarkets, but this guy even made an announcement letting customers know what we were collecting. Points for the Rotonda Quilin Lider.

If you're looking for ways to help in Santiago and are relatively close to student age, the FECh is a great option. They don't require you to be a University of Chile student; yesterday, I met a lot of volunteers who were current or former students of other universities and institutes. The sign-up process is quick, and you get to work immediately. If you're not too keen on standing at the entrance of a Lider, there are other activities in which you can participate. Today, for example, I've been slated for some kind of mystery activity involving bikes and shovels. If you want more specific information, call up the FECh at (02) 977-1932 or visit them at the address given above. If you choose to do the latter, you can bring a donation to drop off.

If you're looking for more ways to help, check out Clare, Emily and Kyle's posts on how to get involved. Radio Cooperativa has a nifty little sidebar in which you can learn about relief efforts and the state of different services (airports, transportation, commerce, etc.).

Also, Colegio San Ignacio El Bosque (Pocuro 2801, Providencia) is collecting supplies for earthquake victims.

How to help Chile earthquake victims

2010-03-01T13:17:00.000-05:00

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me just how lucky I am. Neither I nor anyone I know was hurt in the 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile early Saturday morning, at least not that I'm aware of at the moment. The house where I live suffered some damage, but it was minor compared to the destruction I've seen on TV and around the city. I had electricity, running water and internet within hours of the earthquake and have quick, reliable access to public transportation.

So many people in this country are experiencing a very different reality right now. There are people in Concepcion without food, water or shelter. When I arrived at work today, I learned that most of my coworkers still had no electricity at home and that one of them had lost her house. Her entire house. It just fell down.

So what I and all the other lucky people out there have to do now is help. I feel that the media here has been so focused on reporting the tragedy that they haven't devoted enough time to spreading the word about how we can support relief efforts. Here are some options:

1. Drop off clothing, blankets, diapers, cleaning supplies and non-perishable food at the Cruz Roja warehouse at Seminario 973 in Nunoa. It's very easy to get there by Metro (Irarrazaval, now in service) or bus (Grecia, Irarrazaval or Vicuna Mackenna). When I went to drop off food this morning, the volunteers working there said people had been throwing donations over the warehouse gate the night before. It's great to hear that so many people want to help.

2. Drop these items off at the headquarters of the University of Chile's student federation, the FECh, located at Periodista Jose Carrasco Tapia 9 (Metro Baquedano). Student groups are taking donations to affected areas like Parral.

3. Hop on your bike and bring these items to Plaza Italia (Metro Baquedano) tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8 p.m. Everyone will then pedal to Cruz Roja together.

4. Donate to Cruz Roja. From Chile: BancoEstado account 362883, RUT 70512100-1, finanzas@cruzroja.cl. From abroad: CitiBank account 9941973331, ABA 021000089.

5. Read about other ways to help here (Google's earthquake relief page), here (Publimetro) and here (Emol). Clare and Emily have also posted about how to lend a hand.

6. Spread the word! I've learned more about relief efforts through Twitter and Facebook than through news broadcasts. Those of us lucky enough to have internet should use it to help those in need.

Thank you!

Photos of Chile earthquake damage

2010-02-28T11:27:00.000-05:00

Read my account of yesterday's earthquake here.

Central Chile's older buildings took quite a beating in the earthquake that struck early yesterday morning. A lot of older structures were built with materials, like adobe, that don't always hold up so well to shaking ground. It saddens me to know that so many of the historic Santiago neighborhoods I love may never be the same again.

I live in an old house that suffered some damage: large cracks in the walls, a burst water pipe, fallen ribbing and a small chunk of the facade missing. All of the damage occurred in the older part of the house, where the walls are made of brick reinforced with mud and straw. The back part of the house, built later with more modern materials, suffered not a single crack (although a few more paint chips fell from a preexisting one).

My conclusion is that whoever built this house all those years ago did a good job. It's been through at least two other strong earthquakes and is in a lot better shape than some of the toppling or cracked new apartment buildings I've seen on the news. I guess mud and straw can be stronger than one might think.

Below are some photos of the damage to my house.

A number of the columns holding up the grape trellis in the patio cracked during the earthquake. My roommate, his girlfriend and I were standing a few feet away from this one.

Below are two photos of the room that suffered the heaviest damage during the earthquake. Luckily, no one was sleeping there at the time.

The earthquake

2010-02-27T08:32:00.000-05:00

At about 3:30 a.m. this morning, plate tectonics caught up with central Chile. Common wisdom holds that the area is hit by a major earthquake about once every 20 years, which means that the region, which last suffered a major earthquake in 1985, was "overdue." It wasn't unusual to hear people warn that the big one would strike "any day now."

As you probably already know from news reports, "any day now" turned out to be today. I awoke in a bed that was rocking back and forth. I'm pretty used to minor tremors by now, though, so I didn't think much of it until I realized it wasn't stopping. My cue to jump out of bed was when the entire house started to make noise. Windows buzzed and ceilings creaked as I bolted toward the doorway, which I'd heard was one of the safest places to stand indoors during an earthquake.

When I called out for my roommate, he and his girlfriend shouted for me to come stand with them in another doorway. When I arrived, they looked frazzled. Seeing that these two Chileans, for whom seismic activity has always been just another part of life, were nervous was what made me realize that this was for real.

Before I knew it, we were all running out onto the patio. I wasn't -- and am still not -- sure that this was a safe thing to do, since I knew that a lot of earthquake injuries take place when people run outside and are hit by falling debris. As the wood beams stacked against the patio wall clattered to the ground and the trellis rained grapes, we stood hanging onto each other until the ground stopped rocking and the house stopped creaking behind us.

When we finally reentered the house, paint chips crunched under our feet, and I could hear water rushing down a newly forged crack in one of the walls. My roommate and his girlfriend told me to put on evacuation clothes so we could leave the house. I wasn't convinced that going out onto the street was such a good idea, but I was in no state to question Chileans on the subject. Not quite sure what evacuation clothes were, I put on jeans, a sweatshirt and tennis shoes. I then quickly stuffed my pockets with what I considered the essentials: my Chilean identity card, my cell phone, the first bill I could grab -- which ended up being worth $2000 pesos, or about US$4 -- and Chapstick. That's right: When people start talking evacuation, my first thoughts are of Chapstick.

As it turned out, we weren't evacuated. Instead, we spent the next hour or so sitting around a pair of candles (I'm starting to question a lot of our choices) chatting as the aftershocks made the earth shiver beneath us. Since we had no cell phone service, internet or television, our only means of access to information about what had just happened was my battery-powered radio, which had taken a nose dive from a dresser but was still in working order. From it, we learned that the earthquake's epicenter was located offshore a handful of hours south of Santiago; it was very strong here, so I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been down there. We also heard the first reports of earthquake-related deaths.

It was only after the power came back on that we were able to assess the damage the house had sustained. Huge cracks scarred the walls, chunks of which had fallen away. Pieces of furniture, many of them large and heavy, had traveled across the floor. Drawers had slid open and objects had fallen to the ground. Perhaps most frighteningly, two of the columns holding up the trellis on the patio were deeply cracked. We had been standing just a few feet away from them.

We set to the task of cleaning up the rubble. Everything in my room seemed to be covered in dust. While I was sweeping chunks of plaster into a pile around 7:30 a.m., my cell phone alarm rang, reminding me that I was scheduled to show up at work shortly thereafter. (Yes, I work on Saturdays. Don't be jealous.) After unsuccessfully trying to get in touch both with my company and with the main operator at the building where I work, though, I decided there was no way in hell I was making the commute. After all, public transportation was spotty at best, and President Bachelet had issued a statement asking people to stay at home if possible. I also figured that there was no way my company could expect me to show up for work in a crowded building where damages hadn't yet been carefully assessed.

Instead of going to work, I grabbed my video camera and headed out into the neighborhood. A water pipe had burst and had created a fast-flowing river on the side of the street. Soaking in this river were downed cables, which had been hanging low enough over the street after the quake for a bus to tear them down. Half of the facade of the building on the corner was lying in boulders on the sidewalk. Down the street, I could see into the inside of a house whose outer wall had crumbled. Other houses, like mine, had smaller chunks missing from their facades.

This may sound disastrous, but it's nothing compared to what happened further south near the epicenter. All reports indicate that this was a true tragedy for many people. It's difficult to imagine that at about this time last year, I was on vacation near Talca, a city that charmed me with a historic center that is now heaped in rubble.

Please send good vibes Chile's way. Meanwhile, I'm going to try to sleep for the first time since 3:30 a.m. Then I'm going to research earthquake safety. What I found most frightening about this experience was not the earth moving beneath my feet but rather the fact that everyone seems to have conflicting ideas about what the safest course of action is in these cases. Next time, should I head for the doorway, make a run for the patio or dive under the table? Time to read up.

How to cry on Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T18:54:00.000-05:00

What, you might be wondering, does a single gringa do on Valentine's Day in Chile? Take pictures of her feet, obviously.

That and prepare one of her favorite Chilean dishes, porotos granados.

I stuffed my bags full of the necessary ingredients this morning at the neighborhood street market, where one of the vendors gave me an extra nectarine "because it's Valentine's Day" and proceeded to ask if I was married. Back at home, I set to work stringing beans, shucking corn and chopping hot peppers, pumpkin and onions.

The latter vegetable was the first to give me trouble. As eyes tend to do in the presence of onions, mine began to sting and water. And, as people tend to do when their eyes sting and water, I started rubbing at mine.

Bad idea, Leigh. Especially when your fingers are covered in the blood of the hot peppers you've just butchered.

It was ten times worse than being tear gassed because I couldn't run away from it while sputtering "Pacos culia'os." As I stumbled blindly toward the bathroom with my eyes and forehead burning, I couldn't help but almost feel sorry for the guy I pepper sprayed in the face several months back -- as almost sorry as you can almost feel for a guy who almost dragged you into the dark to do God knows what.

I fumbled around at the sink until I managed to turn on the faucet. The water I began splashing over my face seemed to do little good, however. It occurred to me that my fingers were still covered in pepper juice and that I was actually making things worse for myself by using them to try to cleanse my eyes. Thus, I did what the information on the package of my pepper spray canister warned me not to do: wash affected skin with soap. This may be why my hands are currently peppered with (no pun intended) red blotches that sting like hell. In retrospect, I should have just run out into the patio and put my entire face under the hose, but heads smeared with burning pepper juice do not tend to think logically.

I spent several minutes dousing my face and eyes with water. Eventually, the pain subsided enough to allow me to return to the kitchen and continue cooking. Every so often, I would fill a glass with water and pour it over my face, then return to the stove to stir the ingredients while a steady stream of water dripped from my chin.

About half an hour later, I finally sat down with a plate of porotos and a DVD of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which begins as follows: "Random thoughts for Valentine's Day 2004. Today is a day invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap."

In case anyone out there wants to try his or her luck with hot peppers, here's the recipe I followed. I added a bit of garlic.

My life as Panchita

2010-01-24T22:58:00.000-05:00

So a gringa and a Bulgarian called to order a pizza in Chile. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, right? In this case, it's the beginning of the story of my alter ego.

Her name is Panchita Perez, and she was, indeed, born from a delivery order. My Bulgarian friend V. and I had decided we were hungry and that only the good people at Telepizza could ease our suffering. After no small amount of negotiation -- to call my pizza topping preferences picky would be quite an understatement -- we dialed them up.

The placing of the order was simple enough. The difficulties began when the Telepizza employee asked V. for his name. It was only after repeating, repeating again, spelling and respelling that he was finally able to hang up.

"Next time you should just say your name is Juan Diaz," I said.

It certainly would make ordering pizza easier. Like me, V. has a first name that's unusual even in his home country and a Slavic last name that strikes fear into the hearts of the uninitiated. This means that both of us have spent sizable chunks of our lives spelling out our names in the air and explaining our family histories to strangers. Chileans have called me everything from Lily to Lisa to Light to Leich (pronounced like a phlegm cough) to Bruce to But You Don't Look Asian to Is That Your Stage Name, and sometimes I just don't care enough to go through the arduous process of correcting them. My Ecuadorian former roommate, for example, thought my name was Liz for about three months.

It's not like nobody's ever gotten my name wrong in the States (Leia, as in Princess Leia, stands out). Here in Chile, though, it's a lot more difficult to convince people that a female member of the species can in fact have a monosyllabic name that is not also a word (i.e., Luz, Paz and Sol). At some point, I decided that in order to store up the energy necessary to correct people's pronunciation of my name when it matters (for example, at work or on first dates with a future), I had to stop correcting them when it doesn't (for example, when ordering a pizza). In order for this to be feasible, however, I would have to change my name entirely.

Thus was born Panchita Perez. People have told me this is hardly believable, but I figure that it's my fake name and I can do whatever I want.

Shortly after the delivery order that began it all, V. took his new identity on a test run at the Domino's in San Miguel (we eat a lot of pizza). "Juan Diaz," he replied when the cashier asked for his name.

When a Domino's employee called out for Juan when our pizza was ready, a little boy near us perked up and tugged on his dad's sleeve. "No, son, his name's Juan, too," the father replied, motioning to V. It took all the self control we could muster not to burst out laughing.

Panchita's test run didn't go as smoothly. "What?" the cashier at the food court asked when I told him my name.

"Pancha," I repeated.

He wrote it down, but there was no way in hell he believed it.

OK, so maybe Pancha wasn't the best choice. After all, having a fake name that everyone asks you to repeat isn't the best way to avoid having to repeat your name. The good news is that Pancha is a nickname for Francisca, which has proved a much more viable alias. Now all I have to do is remember where I'm Leigh (the coffee shop near work) and where I'm Francisca (the pizza place near work).

This will prevent me from making the same mistake as V. "Juan Diaz," he replied when an employee at a pasta bar near his house asked for his name.

The employee glanced up with a raised eyebrow. "You changed your name."

Lying solo

2010-01-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

One of the many ways in which living abroad has changed me has been by forcing me to become more comfortable with my own company. Since before coming to Chile, I have enjoyed spending a certain amount of time each day alone with my thoughts; if I can't, I become anxious and, I would venture to say, a bit unpleasant to be around. However, living in Santiago and Quito has taken my alone time to a whole new level.

First of all, I have a more limited support system abroad than I do in the States. This isn't to say that there aren't people here and in Ecuador whom I laugh with, confide in, trust and love. It's just that there are fewer of them. This means that frequently, I deal alone with problems that, were I in the States, I would discuss with family or friends. I've had to learn to trust my own instincts, form my own criteria and analyze my own decision-making process. The fact that I've been able to successfully take on challenges --negotiating my rent, assembling a bed, standing up for myself when I feel I've been scammed -- by myself means that I've grown more confident in my own capabilities. Additionally, reflecting on things like cultural differences, my home and host countries' places on the world stage, and my place in Chile has made me spend a lot more time inside my own head -- and realize that I'm pretty comfortable in there. That's fortunate, because judging from the blank stares I get whenever I try to crack jokes around here, very few others would be.

The result of all this is not constant loneliness -- although there certainly is some loneliness involved -- but rather the realization that I rather enjoy my own company. Last year, this led me to try something that, despite having moved halfway across the world by myself twice, I'd never done before: going on vacation alone. I guess I'd just always assumed that travel was something people did with other people.

This changed last year. I made my first solo excursion last February, when I spend four days traveling by myself in southern Chile's Chiloe archipelago. I made my second this past weekend, when I ditched Santiago for Laguna Verde, a small beach town just south of Valparaiso.

"Why?" the server at Laguna Verde's vegetarian restaurant demanded to know when I told her I was traveling alone. Her surprise probably stemmed from the fact that this is not something many women do in Chile.

"Because I needed to relax," I replied.

This was absolutely true. Work, school and other projects had conspired to not allow me a moment's peace for the past eight months, and the stress had taken its toll. I needed a few days to sleep, read and just plain lie around on my own.

Laguna Verde turned out to be the perfect place to do this. The town is tiny, and the only paved road is the one that goes into and out of it. Don't let the presence of a vegetarian restaurant fool you: Aside from a handful of places that rent rooms and cabins, tourism infrastructure is minimal. The beach, which borders a large cove, is long enough to afford visitors with personal space.

Since Sunday was election day in Chile, the beach was virtually empty -- as virtually empty as a beach on Chile's central coast can be on a weekend in the summertime, in any case -- meaning that my weekend looked like this:

Bliss.

Of course, even while stretched out in the sand, I made sure to always be aware of my surroundings. Contrary to popular belief, I try to be careful about safety and realize that a young woman traveling alone in a foreign country unfortunately faces certain risks. I probably would have thought twice about traveling alone had I been less confident in my Spanish and in my experience living and traveling in Chile. Before I left for Laguna Verde, I e-mailed both my mom and a friend in Santiago letting them know where I was going, when I was going there, where I was staying, and when they should expect another e-mail letting them know I had returned safely to Santiago. During the trip, I tried not to broadcast the fact that I was alone, and I had an "I'm traveling with my boyfriend but he's sick and is resting back in the room" story ready, although I never had to use it. And I made sure to return to the lovely Hosteria El Tilo before dark.

Safety concerns aside (not that they ever really can be), I really enjoy traveling alone. There's no schedule to follow but my own. There's also no pressure to be the "perfect" tourist -- i.e., going on a hike in the hills when all I really want to do is lie around. And, perhaps most importantly, I have plenty of quality time to spend with myself.

Anyone else care to share solo travel experiences?

Please help Haiti!

2010-01-13T20:27:00.001-05:00

In which I give up on my dream of becoming a ninja

2010-01-02T23:23:00.000-05:00

I once read about a study in which an orangutan was placed in a room with a couple of crates on the floor and a bushel of bananas hanging from the ceiling. The aim of the study was to observe how the animal used the materials at hand to try to get to the food. In the end, the orangutan was smart -- or hungry -- enough to stack the crates on top of one another and climb the resulting tower until s/he could reach the bananas.

I was reminded of this study this evening when I found myself in a similar predicament. Unfortunately, there was no food involved, but my problem-solving skills were definitely being put to the test.

I should preface this story by establishing that I love living in an older house. You just don't find the same combination of hardwood floors, high ceilings and huge internal patios in Santiago's newer buildings. The downside, however, is that the years appear to have warped a few of the wooden doors and their frames. This is especially noticeable when the weather changes and the wood swells or contracts accordingly. Whenever it rains, I know I'm in for a shoving match with the front door.

Apparently the heat had gotten to the bathroom door today, because when I turned the knob to exit into the hallway, the door didn't budge. So I turned the knob harder. Nothing. Tried to wedge the door open from the side. Still nothing. Pounded on the door with both fists and shouted expletives at it. Nope.

I was trapped in my bathroom.

I leaned back against the door with a sigh and surveyed the situation. Nobody else was home to come to my rescue. There was a window that opened out into the aforementioned internal patio, but it was too high for me to hoist myself up to from the ground. I had at my disposal a trash can too unstable to stand on and a toilet far enough away from the window to require a jump.

I couldn't help thinking that if this had been a movie, the room would be filling with water or hourglass sand. And that the orangutan would have figured this out by now.

Figuring that a change of perspective couldn't hurt, I climbed up onto the toilet and stood staring at the window. I could reach the windowsill if I extended my arms and leaned forward, but the rest of me would have to be briefly airborne if I wanted it to get there, too. Seeing no other option, I channeled my inner Spiderman and jumped.

The sharp pain that bit into my stomach when I hit the windowsill reminded me that I was no superhero. I knew I was strong enough to pull myself up onto the ledge, but every time I started to wriggle upward, I felt like I was scraping my internal organs against pavement.

After I slumped wincing back down to the ground, I checked out my stomach in the mirror. I looked -- and, hours later, still look -- like I'd lost a fight. Apparently, I could rule out a career as a circus performer, SWAT team leader or ninja.

Vocational crisis aside, I still had an escape to plot. I could have really used some crates.

When I looked around, though, all I had were towels. And then I had an orangutan moment.

I folded up one of the towels and draped it over the window ledge, then stuffed the other one into the front of my shirt. The result was a painless second leap for the window. Anyone who had seen me climbing up onto the ledge and out onto the patio would have surely wondered what kind of ninja act that frazzled pregnant gringa thought she was pulling.

So it was that I shuffled back to the house sore and dirty but free. A few minutes later, my roommate walked in the front door.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T10:37:00.000-05:00

The title says it all! I hope this new decade gets off to a wonderful start for all of you, wherever in the world you may be. I've enjoyed sharing this past year with you, both those I've met in person and those I've gotten to know through your posts and comments.

My new year's blog resolutions: blog more and be less flakey when it comes to comments. A lot of you have left me kind, funny and insightful comments I haven't been able to respond to. Please know that it's not because I don't read or care about readers' comments: todo lo contrario. It's just that my full-time job, part-time studies and array of side projects have made it difficult for me to find time to blog for the past few months. The good news is that after just a few more edits, I'll be able to e-mail off my last paper for school, so I should be starting the new year with considerably less stress and considerably more time. So get ready: lengthier and more frequent navel gazing coming soon!

Gringo con-man

2009-12-12T10:24:00.000-05:00

Abby's post on how living in Santiago has forced her to be less gullible made me think back to a particularly memorable experience I had while living in Quito. One afternoon, I was preparing to board the bus to go to work when a gringo approached me and said, in English, "Hey, I'm really sorry to have to do this, but some guys just stole my friend's and my jackets on the bus. Our passports and all our money were in the pockets. Do you think you could help us out with a few coins?"

It wasn't that hard to believe. Petty street crime is relatively common in Quito, and most of my friends -- Ecuadorian and foreign alike -- who had lived there for extended periods of time had had a cell phone or wallet swiped at some point. Fortunately, I went an entire 14 months without losing so much as a quarter -- unless, of course you count all the times I was charged the "gringo price."

But back to this particular gringo. Like I said, what he was claiming was completely conceivable. And I'm all for lending a hand to another foreigner in need. Still, I didn't give him any money because 1) my bus was about to leave, 2) I didn't feel comfortable pulling my wallet out on a busy street corner and 3) call me cynical, but something about the situation just seemed off. There was something a bit too unshaken and a bit too practiced about the whole thing.

"I'm really sorry that happened to you. Good luck," I said to him as I boarded the bus.

Later that day, I mentioned what had happened to my coworkers. "Yeah, there's a gringo that does that," one of them said.

"You mean he makes up stories about getting robbed to get money from other gringos?" I demanded, taken aback.

"Yep. He hangs out in La Mariscal (a touristy, bar-filled area of Quito) and does that."

Holy crap. I had considered the possibility that the guy had blown all his money partying the night before or something like that, but it had never occurred to me that tricking other gringos was the way he financed what apparently was a long-term stay in Quito.

I was pissed. I began preparing a speech for the next time I saw him. It went a little something like this: "Hey, did you ever find your jacket? Oh, that's too bad. I know how frustrating it is when someone tries to take advantage of you just because you're foreign. But Quito's still great, isn't it? I like it so much that I decided to live here. I have a lot of gringo friends who did, too. You know how we support ourselves? We got jobs, which is pretty damn easy for gringos to do here. With that in mind, don't you feel a tad bit guilty about tricking other people into financing your awesome vacation in a country where there is so much real poverty? So no, I will not help you out with a few coins."

Unfortunately, I never saw the guy again. So if a short gringo with dirty-blonde dreadlocks asks you for money in Quito after feeding you a story about a jacket, would you mind giving him the speech for me?

March against gender violence

2009-11-28T11:26:00.000-05:00

November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Here in Santiago, the Red Chilena contra la Violencia Domestica y Sexual commemorated the day with a candlelight march down the Alameda, the city's main east-west thoroughfare. The march, symbolically, ended in front of the La Moneda presidential palace, where participating groups gathered on the grass and spread their banners. One group set up rows of candles to commemorate victims of femicide -- women whose murder, usually at the hands of current or former husbands or boyfriends, was related to unequal relationships of power between genders -- and another gathered signatures for a petition to make the HPV vaccine free.

The turnout was decent, although I think the ranks would have swelled even more if the march had been more highly publicized beforehand. Most of the people I spoke with about it had no idea it was going to happen. As I was walking down the Alameda to join up with the march that night, I saw a man glance down the street toward the crowd and heard him ask, "Was there a game or something?"

Publicized or not, I hope the march helped raised consciousness about gender violence in a country where at least one television network considers this comedy.

Below are more photos from the march. I lost my Photoshop when the good people at the computer repair center deleted my entire hard drive, so here they are in all their naked glory:

When good intentions go bad

2009-11-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

I went to a party last week (gasp). When the time came to leave, I got in a car with a group of people who had agreed to drop me off at a major street where I could catch a bus home. Since it wasn't that late and buses run on said major street all night, I didn't anticipate any problems.

The late-night bus thing is pretty much standard procedure for me by now. I'll be straight: My Chilean salary simply cannot finance boatloads of cab rides. And, since the phrase "Just crash here" hasn't appealed to me for a few years, I go Transantiago, frequently by myself.

Chileans think I'm insane. Even more insane than they think I am for moving down here on my own. How could I possibly even consider taking the bus home by myself? Don't I know how many people are lurking in the shadows waiting to attack me? After all, I am foreign and female -- that most perilous of combinations. I should be afraid. Very afraid.

And I did end up being afraid last Friday -- for slightly different reasons.

When we pulled up to Major Street X, I got out of the car and headed toward the nearest bus stop, grateful that the others appeared to be letting me go without a fight.

Not so fast. One of the other passengers, a guy who had had a handful too many shots of tequila back at the party, got out too and began to follow me.

"Thanks, but it's really not necessary," I said.

I was told the guy's house was on the way to mine and that he would ride with my until his stop. "It's more for his protection than yours," someone whispered.

OK, I figured. I supposed there was no harm in him riding with me if he was heading in the same direction anyway.

The car pulled away, and I continued toward the bus stop. But alas, we couldn't go to that bus stop because my chaperone considered it unsafe. During our trek to the next bus stop -- a few blocks down a stretch of sidewalk that I consider sketchier -- I learned my white knight was from southern Chile and had been living in Santiago for four years -- enough time, apparently, to learn to be terrified of the city. As he tried to convince me to be terrified, too, I stood shivering and craning my neck to see down the street, praying the bus would come quickly and all this would be over soon.

The bus did come, but this was far from over. Soon after we had wedged ourselves onto the crowded bus, I learned that my new friend was one of the many Chileans who enjoy practicing English when drunk. And this guy enjoyed practicing it loudly. As the bus hurtled onward, each bump in the road threatening to launch me into the driver's lap, he treated me and everyone around us to an English-language panegyric lauding the bravery I had displayed by coming down to Chile all by myself.

My irritation quickly turned to anxiety when it occurred to me that the person who thought he was keeping me safe was actually putting me in danger. Despite what most people I know consider my dangerously irresponsible penchant for independence, I'm willing to admit that, the world being what it is, foreign women have to be careful. I realize that many assailants would consider me an easy and profitable target. With this in mind, I try not to call attention to myself when I'm in situations in which I'm potentially vulnerable, such as late-night bus rides. I keep calm, walk confidently, and don't yell in English about how I'm foreign and came down to Chile all by myself. Obviously, my tipsy companion did not find it necessary to take the same precautions.

For the record, I don't believe that Santiago all night buses are packed with shady characters waiting for an opportunity to attack someone. Still, if one of our dozens of fellow passengers had just so happened to be such a shady character, my amigo would have been providing him or her with quite an enticing scenario. Well, I was going to head home early and watch late-night variety shows with my mom, but now that I think about it, I might as well jump that gringa and that drunk guy.

I heaved a sigh of relief when the bus pulled off to my chaperone's stop. After I gave him the customary cheek air-peck goodbye, though, he didn't move.

"This is your stop," I said in Spanish.

It didn't matter, he explained in English, because he was going to escort me all the way home.

Oh God.

"Look," I said as the bus pulled out of the stop. "I appreciate the gesture, but I don't need your protection. Please get off the bus now."

He didn't, of course. And since it would have just aggravated the sitution to tell him that drawing the entire bus's attention to us was not doing me any favors where safety was concerned, I grit my teeth and endured several more blocks of loud, drunken English. I felt extremely, dangerously exposed.

When we finally got off the bus at my stop -- by ourselves, thank goodness -- I pointed out the bus stop where he would have to wait after dropping me off at my house. He scoffed, apparently insulted that I had felt the need to worry about his safety.

Luckily, our short walk to my house was uneventful. But I couldn't help wondering if I wouldn't have been safer simply taking the bus home by myself as I'd originally planned.

This wasn't the first time I'd pondered this. A few months ago, I found myself standing on a street corner at midnight in San Bernardo, which is so far south that only a slice of it appears on most maps of Santiago. A coworker had invited me to a club for a friend's birthday party, but the club had refused to let us in because one of the members of our group had a broken leg and was apparently too much of a liability for them to deal with. So it was that we ended up shivering on a street corner debating what to do next.

Anyone who has ever participated in a Great Chilean Plans Debate knows that they are rarely brief. As the minutes stretched on and I got colder, I noticed that express buses were passing regularly on their way downtown.

My coworker's eyes widened when I told her I was going to hop on a bus and head home. Me on a bus alone? No way in hell. The group was going to come up with a safer alternative.

About 20 minutes later, the safer alternative arrived. It was a pickup truck that was going to take us to one of the partygoers' apartments. Yep, all 12 of us. Yep, all at once.

As the truck accelerated onto the highway with all of us smashed into the bed (disclaimer: NEVER DO THIS), every instinct inside me was screaming that I should have just gotten on a damn bus. There was absolutely no way in hell, heaven or limbo that this was safer than my original plan. I lack scientific proof of this, but I'm positive I was more likely to get horrendously injured in that truck than I would have been to get robbed on the bus.

Nobody else seemed to understand this, though. To them, it was other people I had to be afraid of, not a multi-fatality rollover crash. And I suddenly despised Chile's crime-packed sensationalist TV news shows more than ever before.

Miraculously, we made it safely to our destination, a public housing project in Puente Alto. Already exhausted from silently willing the truck not to flip, I was ready to call it a night after about an hour of dancing. I announced my intention to catch a colectivo (multi-passenger taxi) and head home.

Absolutely not, I was told.

"You have to listen to them," my coworker told me. "They live here."

In the end, I did listen to them and crashed in the birthday girl's apartment, which was a few blocs over. Thinking back, I'm really glad I did. I had never been to the area before; how could I have presumed to know enough about it to strike out on my own at 3 a.m.?

You have to listen to them. They live here. I think about that advice a lot and wonder if it's always true. Should I, as a foreigner, always take Chileans' safety advice? On the one hand, the fact that they've lived here their entire lives means they know a lot of things I don't, like where not to take colectivos at 3 a.m. On the other hand, I don't find non-crime-related safety consciousness to be high here (seatbelts and bike helmets, anyone?). As illustrated in this entry, some of the alternatives Chileans suggest to your hazardously independent ways can be more dangerous than what you originally had planned.

But, drunk guys and pickup trucks aside, I don't think it would hurt me to swallow my pride and listen a bit more. After all, someone did try to attack me once while I was waiting for a bus in the middle of the night. I took him down, but I might not be as lucky next time. I think I need to work on learning to be more flexible -- sleeping on a trusted friend's couch isn't that bad, is it? -- while paying close attention to my instincts (no more drunk escorts, thank you very much).

What do you think?

Just what the doctor ordered

2009-11-08T18:07:00.001-05:00

While standing in line at the pharmacy counter this afternoon, I noticed a set of purple boxes stacked inside a display case. The featured product? NastiGrip.

Finally! A medicine that promises to make every santiaguin@'s daily commute less harrowing by painlessly eliminating those pesky public transportation passengers who apparently cannot resist the compulsion to enclose certain parts of neighboring bodies in their nasty grip (or use a packed bus as an excuse to rub up against them from behind, which also counts). I can picture the animated graphics now: squeeze-poised hands being surrounded and pulverized by armies of valiant purple dots. Oh, the relief of knowing one's ass is (not literally) in such good hands.

OK, I don't have to explain to the Spanish speakers out there that NastiGrip is actually flu medicine. "Gripe" is Spanish for flu, and as for Nasti -- well, I guess I don't have any idea where they got that from.

Oh, well. Until science gets its act together, I guess we'll have to find other ways to defend ourselves against rush-hour molestation. Wouldn't it be nice if you could simply pop a pill and make that slimy fellow passenger and his/her grasping hands dissolve like bothersome nasal congestion? Hopefully, our children will know just such a world.

Has anyone else out there come across humorous product names in foreign countries? I'll throw in another one: I always feel self-conscious when I sit down at a Chilean restaurant and order a bottle of Pap.

The Athenian plague

2009-11-03T19:54:00.000-05:00

Back in high school, we learned about a deadly plague that struck ancient Athens. One of the signs a person was doomed was if he or she was overcome by insatiable thirst.

If Santiago were ancient Athens, I would be on my way out, because that's how I feel most of the time here. Glancing around the cafeteria at work the other day, I discovered a possible reason why.

Lunch at the cafeteria comes with a small cup of suspiciously fluorescent juice. I usually finish mine off within the first few minutes of starting to eat. As I eyed the trays of those around me last week, however, I realized that even those who were a number of bites ahead of me had nearly full glasses in front of them.

This seemed to confirm what I had long suspected: Apparently, I consume more liquid than most Chileans, or at least the ones I've come in contact with. When eating with Chileans, I am almost always the first to finish off a beverage. Back when I lived with my host family, I would frequently be on my second refill before anyone else even finished their first glass of juice. It was the same way in Ecuador.

Well, one might say, the reason is simple. As a glutton from the land of supersizing, it's only natural that you would ingest anything and everything in greater quantities and at a greater speed than people from countries with less opulent consumption habits. Not so, I would have to contest. I don't notice myself eating more than the people around me, and when it comes to speed, I'm actually a slower eater than many of the Chileans I've dined with.

Well then, one might say, it must be because of money. As a spoiled gringa from the land of plenty, you're probably unaware that powdered pineapple juice -- that beloved Chilean classic --does not grow on trees. While I'm not ready to give up on my dream of a powdered-pineapple-juice tree, I don't think this is the case, either. I drink more and drink faster even when it comes to tapwater. When I see Chileans drinking tapwater, that is.

Which is rare. Drinking just plain water does not seem to be nearly as common down here as it is in the States. In fact, people seem to prefer the hydrating powers of pop, caffeinated black tea and uber-concentrated "fruit" juices. My coworkers, all Chilean, look at me like I'm nuts when I fill up my mug with water instead of tea in the morning. My former boss once even asked, "But isn't that bad for you?"

Yes, I know. I'm really trying to quit water and replace it with something healthier, like Fanta.

I must be missing something here. I honestly don't know how this entire country hasn't long since died of dehydration. Do buildings have some secret room where Chileans guzzle water on the sly? Can anyone out there enlighten me on Chilean drinking habits?

One thing's for sure: The next time the Athenian plague strikes Santiago, no one else will bat an eyelash.

Birth control pills in Chile

2009-10-19T21:33:00.001-04:00

**DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical professional or anything close. The following are my personal opinions and should not be considered medical advice. **

While waiting at the pharmacy counter the other day, I heard the young woman next to me ask for "the cheapest birth control pills you have."

Birth control pills are available without a prescription here in Chile. This means you can simply walk into a pharmacy and ask for the pill you want -- or, in the case of my fellow customer, whichever costs less -- without having to set foot inside a doctor's office.*

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I believe contraception should be readily available to women and men who wish to use it. Selling birth control pills over the counter makes them more accessible to women without the means or the time to make a doctor's appointment. It also makes them much easier to obtain for girls and women who wish to keep their decision to go on birth control private. On a more symbolic level, there's a lot to be said for being able to take the pill without having to ask anyone's permission first.

On the other hand, I can't help but suspect that this system makes it easy for women and their partners to make important decisions about their reproductive health without being properly informed. At the risk of sounding like the condescending voiceover on a TV commercial, I'd like to remind everyone that every birth control pill is different. Different pills have different doses of hormones, different modes of use and different potiential side effects. A pill that works swimmingly for one woman may be detrimental to the health of another. That's why part of a gynecologist's job is -- or should be, in my opinion -- to help patients choose a birth control method that is right for them.

It strikes me that a woman who asks for "the cheapest birth control pills you have" is very likely not making an informed decision. Of course, she has the right to make a choice based on whatever criteria she wants. Certainly, cost is an important factor for many women, especially given the fact that Chile's public health insurance provider, FONASA, does not cover birth control pills purchased in pharmacies.** Still, I'd be willing to bet there's more than one low(er)-cost pill out there, meaning women and couples on limited budgets still have options to weigh. But it can be difficult to know what your options are when nobody tells you, especially when it comes to a specialized field like medicine.

Of course, one could make the argument that consumers have the responsibility to inform themselves. As long as information is freely and widely available and easy to understand, I would tend to agree. However, I don't think this is the case when it comes to medication. As anyone who's ever glanced at them knows, the informational pamphlets that come with medication aren't exactly easy reading for those of us without medical training. Searching for information on the internet -- which, it should be noted, not everyone is able to do -- presents its own problems. First off all, it can be difficult to separate reliable information from B.S. Plus, when you research a product on its own website, you're getting your information from a company that wants you to buy what it's selling.

This lack of access to reliable information is even more worrying to me when I consider the spotty reputation of sexual education in Chilean schools and the misinformation about reproductive health -- "But virgins can't use tampons!" -- that circulates here and in the world in general.

I'm not saying that selling birth control pills over the counter is necessarily a bad idea. Like I said before, I think it has a number of benefits. What I do think is a bad idea, however, is selling birth control pills over the counter without providing women and their partners every opportunity to make informed choices. I'm guessing that whoever sold my fellow customer her birth control pills didn't ask her about her medical history, other medications she may have been taking, or whether or not she smoked (which a lot of young Chilean women do) -- factors that, as far as I know, are generally thought to be important when a woman is considering hormonal contraception.

But what if the pharmacy employee had been required to ask her if she had any questions about the pill or how to use it? If the pharmacy had been required to have someone on hand who was qualified to give detailed answers to all these questions? If pharmacies, educational and medical facilities, government agencies and NGOs distributed accurate and user-friendly information about birth control options in multiple formats, including on the radio, the internet and TV? And what if --gasp! -- prices were low (or nonexistant) enough so that monetary considerations would never have to outweigh health-related ones? Maybe then the young woman at the pharmacy would have asked for whichever pill she considered right for her and not whichever one was cheapest.

Needless to say, this is a topic that requires more than one opinion. So please, share. What do you think of the birth control situation in Chile (or in whichever country you happen to inhabit)? Any suggestions as to how to improve things? Is there a Chilean health insurance provider that covers birth control? Obviously, I'm not going to demand that anyone share his or her personal experiences, but if you want to, please feel free to do so.

*To get the morning-after pill, however, you have to make an appointment with a doctor, get a prescription, and find a pharmacy that has the pill in stock.

**In theory, women who have public health insurance are able to get free birth control pills at their local public clinic (consultorio). However, I don't know what pills consultorios give out or how many options they offer. Also, many consultorios operate on a "first come, first served" basis when it comes to appointments, and not all women are able to get up at the break of dawn to stand in line.

Overheard in Santiago, part 2

2009-10-15T22:07:00.000-04:00

20-something guy: The classical composers were real musicians. Like Vivaldi and Paganini on the violin.
20-something guy's friend: Yeah, and the deaf guy.
20-something guy: The deaf guy had this thing with music. He would have no idea what it sounded like and it would come out incredible. You know why he went deaf?
20-something guy's friend: No, why?
20-something guy: Syphilis.

Overheard on the 506 bus

Gringo pesa'o

2009-10-07T22:06:00.000-04:00

Many gringa bloggers have observed that santiaguinos can, at times, seem cold, brusque, or borderline surly. While I certainly don't see Santiago as a six-million-contender cage fight, I sometimes feel here like I did when I was living in a major city on the East Coast of the United States: Things move faster and people are more stressed out than I'm used to.

Because of this, I was a bit nervous when I started at my current job, which involves a lot of face-to-face interaction with the company's clients. I was worried that Santiago's stressed out, overworked and overcaffeinated would consider me the perfect dumpster for their accumulated tension. As it turns out, I've been pleasantly surprised by my clients, the vast majority of whom are patient, friendly and understanding.

Of course, there are exceptions. Like the delightful man who treated me to ten minutes of condescension and riddled me with orders like "move over." My boss later told me the charmer had been a member of Pinochet's cabinet.

The fact that people like him stand out in my memory goes to show that they are uncommon. Like I said before, most of the clients I deal with treat me with respect. Today, however, I found myself dealing with another exception to the norm.

When I saw him approaching, I immediately began to ponder, "Is he or isn't he?" -- gringo, that is. He was relatively tall, relatively blonde, and relatively light skinned -- but then again, so are a lot of Chileans.

I smiled and greeted him in Spanish. He did not greet me back, instead emphatically stating a single word: "English." Not "do you speak English?". Not "(Sorry,) I don't speak Spanish." Just "English."

Aside from resolving my uncertainty about his nationality, he'd started me wondering if I just might have another ass on my hands. I find it incredibly presumptuous when gringo travelers expect people in their host countries to understand English. Of course, I did understand the guy, but the point is that he had no reason to suspect I was a native English speaker. While I'm neither tall nor blonde, I would place my look solidly in the "is she or isn't she?" category, so I would have understood his assumption had we been in a hostel or a gringo bar. But we were in the Chilean work environment that I share with an exclusively Chilean team of coworkers. I wasn't wearing a "Kiss me, I'm bilingual!" pin or anything like that. In fact, most of the foreign clients I deal with don't even catch on that I'm not Chilean unless I tell them -- although they do ask me where I learned my wonderful English.

Still, I wasn't ready to peg Mr. English as a presumptuous prick just yet. If he thought I didn't speak English, I reasoned, he may be trying to simplify things for me by saying as few words as possible. So I pulled out my "Wow, where did you learn?" English and asked him what I could help him with.

He formulated a two- to three-word request, and I listed possible solutions -- none of which met his needs, apparently, which is fine. However, what I do not find fine is muttering "OK" and walking out of the room without bothering to thank the person who tried to help you.

My lips actually began forming the word as I watched him leave: "pesa'o." Literally: heavy. Figuratively: mean. That gringo had been mean to me.

I suppose coming across a rude gringo shouldn't have shocked me that much. After all, we foreigners are just as capable of being pesa'o as santiaguinos. I just hadn't come across a mean gringo at work yet. It may all boil down to simple mathematics: Since our Chilean clients vastly outnumber our foreign ones, it's much more probable that I'll encounter a Chilean meanie than a gringo one. Also, the gringo clients tend to be on vacation or business trips, so chances are that they're not as stressed out as their santiaguino counterparts. I'm not going to venture to say that people from the States generally act more respectfully than Chileans toward the people who provide them with customer service, because I simply haven't found that to be the case.

Maybe I was just expecting a little gringo solidarity, that superficial but real connection that tends to form between two people who find themselves together in a strange land. Of course, it would have been unfair of me to expect this from Mr. English, who had no way of knowing I was foreign, too -- at least before I switched to English. In any case, he was mean, and he caught me off guard.

Shortly after my run-in with Mr. English, I got on the Metro and headed home for the day. The universe was on my side, because I got a coveted seat. When the train arrived at my stop, I stood up and realized there was a pregnant woman standing standing beside me. I'd been so absorbed in my trashy magazine that I hadn't noticed her standing there, probably waiting for me to offer her my seat. As I exited onto the platform, I imagined my fellow passengers thinking to themselves, "Qué pesá."

I guess not everyone who comes across as mean intends to be. Maybe I should cut Mr. English some slack.

In which "Vitacura" and "bargains" appear in the same sentence

2009-09-30T22:05:00.000-04:00

This evening, I went to a book fair in Vitacura, a part of Santiago I rarely visit. In fact, before today, I'm pretty sure it had been five years since I´d last set foot there.

I suppose it's all for the best, because, as the municipality with the highest per capita income in Chile,* Vitacura is out of my price range. I confirmed this today while walking up Alonso de Córdova, were I passed Louis Vuitton, Salvatore Ferragamo and Armani boutiques on my way to the fair. By the time I arrived at the tent that housed the event, I was convinced that the prices of the books were going to be just as exhorbitant as those of the designer bags in the shop windows.

I wasn't entirely torn up about it, though, because the primary reason I had come to the fair was to attend a book launch -- which, I learned when I arrived, had been suspended until further notice because "the authors couldn´t make it." Thus, I was left to wander around the tent and be tempted.

The Ferial del Libro de Vitacura -- yes, that´s Ferial -- pleasantly surprised me. It´s smaller and much more manageable than the gargantuan Feria del Libro de Santiago. Sure, most of the merchandise is marked down just slightly from bookstore prices, but good things come to those who dig: I strolled out of the tent with three books that had cost me a grand total of $4.990 pesos, or under US$10. So, it would seem that there are bargains to be found in Vitacura -- at least until Sunday. Also, the fair is set up on the edge of the lovely Parque Bicentenario, where I´d never been before.

The most humorous moment of the night was when a salesman tried to pitch me an English course. I jumped slightly when he appeared out of nowhere and intercepted me as I rounded a corner.

"Can I ask you a question? Do you speak English?"

I´m used to people asking me if I speak Spanish, so this threw me off a bit. "Yes," I replied apprehensively, hoping I wasn´t about to be drafted into translation duty. The last time that happened, I was stuck in a police station until midnight...but that´s another story.

"Would you like to perfect it?"

I grinned.

*According to the 2006 CASEN survey, if anyone wants to get rigorous.

The monophonic symphony

2009-09-22T22:35:00.001-04:00

Back in the days when Santiago city buses were yellow, many passengers engaged in an activity that oh-so-efficiently accomplished two things at once: keeping them entertained during the ride and aggravating the caca out of everyone around them. These considerate individuals took it upon themselves to treat their fellow passengers to a medley of five-second snippets of the contents of their ringtone libraries.

Bear in mind that this was a few years ago, so we're not talking symphonic masterpieces here. We're talking the Nokia jingle and monophonic tunes with names like "Summer Breeze." In other words, abrasively, unbearably obnoxious. I would tense up every time I saw a cell phone emerge from a a pocket or purse, praying its owner was not responding to a sudden urge to take ringtone inventory.

Fortunately, this custom seems to have disappeared with time. I can think of a few possible explanations for this. First, mp3 players and iPods have since provided Chileans with much snazzier ways to entertain themselves on the bus. And why flip through a list of ringtones when you can take photos, play Tetris and send e-mails on your cell phone instead? Also, Santiago's new buses have very few seats, meaning most people are too concentrated staying upright to get extremely bored. Who said Transantiago doesn't have its benefits?

Just when I thought I was in the clear, I went to the immigration office (Extranjeria)* last week to address what ended up being unfounded visa-related hysteria. I was sitting in the waiting room when I heard it: Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture -- about four seconds of it. Then the opening stanzas of the theme from The Simpsons. Then the chorus from Good Charlotte's "I Just Wanna Live." In all their monophonic glory. The DJ: the guy seated in front of me.

Apparently, the public ringtone roll call is alive and well in other countries. Or at least at Extranjeria, where the wait is longer and more eyeball-twitchingly boring than the vast majority of bus rides. And when you're sitting in a hard plastic chair waiting for strangers to decide your future, there's nothing like fragments of high-pitched electronic melodies to calm your nerves.

*Some tips about Extranjeria: Go early, go with a book, and -- when in doubt -- go in person. The information I've received over the telephone has rarely been correct.

The List

2009-09-20T22:18:00.000-04:00

When my sister and I were (not so) little, we used to watch the Nickelodeon show Hey Arnold! (when we weren't watching Mexican soap operas, that is). In one episode, Arnold resolves to complete every activity on a list that supposedly consitutes a recipe for a perfect Saturday. As one might expect, misadventures and life lessons ensue.

I set out to complete a list of my own this past weekend, when Chile celebrated its independence. As those who have lived here know, saying the Fiestas Patrias are a big deal in Chile is an understatement. And since I never know which September 18 will be my last in Chile, I try to live it up each year. This time around, I had compiled a mental checklist of activities that, in my mind, stood to make this year's Fiestas Patrias memorable:

1. Spend time with friends. OK, kind of an obvious one. Part of what made this round of Fiestas Patrias so enjoyable for me, though, was the fact that I was able to spend it with a wide variety of people: workmates, new friends, old friends, friends I hadn't seen for months, and people I met along the way. The marathonic nature of Chile's September celebrations lends itself to this. This and severe hangovers, which -- luckily -- did not afflict me this year.

2. Eat ungodly amounts of food off a grill. Mission accomplished. Twice.

3. Drink chicha. This sweet alcoholic cider isn't something I would necessarily keep in my fridge year round, but it is just as much a Fiestas Patrias staple as empanadas or meat kabobs. I also had the pleasure of ingesting navegado, which is red wine boiled with sugar and orange slices -- a tasty and efficient way to warm up when the coals under the grill start burning low.

4. Fly a kite. OK, I'll admit it: V. and I didn't actually fly kites in the strict sense of the world. We yanked furiously on their strings in a completely fruitless effort to keep them from nosediving into the ground. Never mind that the seven-year-olds next to us were enjoying some success; we blame lack of wind and faulty kite mechanics.

5. Dance cueca. In all fairness to the cueca, one or both of the previous two words should be in quotes. I know the basic steps and the order in which they come, things I learned on the "Learn to Dance Cueca" DVD a friend sometimes busts out at barbecues. When it comes to dancing with style, however, I'm pretty sure my cueca skills are on par with my kite-flying prowess. Still, if the lights are dim and there are enough people on the dance floor, I dive in. I did so on Friday night at a fonda (public Fiestas Patrias party) in a small (and smoke free -- yay!) bar near downtown Santiago, where two of the four invited bands got heels stomping and handkerchiefs spinning to the beat of Chile's national dance.

If my life were a Nickelodeon cartoon, I would have learned that no list makes for a perfect Fiestas Patrias. In real life, though, I had a pretty damn good time. Tikitikitiiiii!

Terror rides the bus, and I use Neutrogena

2009-09-08T10:52:00.001-04:00

Chilean writer José Donoso was once given morphine after undergoing a medical procedure. He had an adverse reaction that brought on a series of paranoid hallucinations, or so the story goes. They say this drug-induced delirium inspired the nightmarish narration of El Mudito, protagonist of my beloved El obsceno pájaro de la noche.

When I was in seventh grade, I was given morphine after having ankle surgery. Instead of writing a master work of literature, however, I consumed an entire box of orange Popsicles and had a pizza delivered to my hospital room at midnight. The following morning, I was unable to produce a coherent protest when a troika of clowns appeared in the doorway brandishing a giant pair of plastic scissors and announcing it was time of cut off my cast.

As you might imagine, this experience only exacerbated my preexisiting fear of clowns. It´s not that I´m convinced they´re going to murder me in my sleep...although I wouldn´t put it past them. What distresses me about clowns is exactly what gives them such great potential as social critics: Safe behind layers of facepaint, they shine the spotlight on others, exposing and manipulating them as they see fit. To put it dramatically, they draw you against your will into a game they control.

This is precisely what clowns do when they perform on busses in Santiago. They incorporate the captive passengers into their routines, even those passengers who, like me, stare fixedly out the window and try to will the plastic seats into absorbing them. Of the people who laugh, I wonder how many actually find the routines funny and how many are simply relieved not to have been singled out...yet. I think it's safe to say that these situations are even more distressing for those of us who, due to certain linguistic factors, may find ourselves at a disadvantage when it comes to witty banter.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I got on the bus a few days ago to find a clown standing in the aisle, patiently awaiting his audience/victims/next meal. "There's a seat here!" he called out to me as I passed, patting his lap.

Oh God.

I hunched down in my seat, arms firmly crossed and gaze firmly diverted. The clown's routine began with mother-in-law jokes, then progressed into an analysis of the relationship between cleanliness and gender. When he started asking female passengers what brand of soap they used, I knew I was screwed.

"Neutrogena," I replied when, inevitably, he got around to me. I pronounced it "Neu-TRO-he-na," the way they say it in Ecuador, silently praying that it was the way they said it here, too. I learned that not all dialects hispanisize foreign brand names the same way when I asked for a tube of Col-GAH-te in a Chilean pharmacy and the attendant arched her eyebrows in disdain and asked if I meant COL-gait.

"What?" the clown demanded.

Shit.

"Neu-TRO-he-na."

"Is that a Peruvian soap?"

(Passengers laugh.)

"No." Just say as little as possible, Leigh, and he won't notice your accent and be suddenly inspired to perform a routine about gringas who use Peruvian soap and can't stand their mothers-in-law.

"Where is that soap from?"

"I don't know."

I held my breath until the clown turned to someone else and the crisis could officially be declared averted.

When the clown walked up the aisle asking for coins at the end of his routine, I didn't give him one, convinced that looking his way would be tantamount to offering myself up as a target for whatever else he may have had planned.

"Quit causing problems," he muttered.

(Passengers laugh.)

Send in your stories!

2009-09-03T22:09:00.001-04:00

Just a reminder to all you writers out there that tomorrow is the deadline to send in your stories to the Santiago en 100 Palabras contest. As has been previously established, I'm something of a fan. This year, the organizers have made what I think is a wonderful change: You no longer need a Chilean RUT (identity card number) to participate. Who says only legal residents have something to say about this city?

Speaking of Santiago en 100 Palabras, does anyone else think it would be fun to create an English version (without the contest aspect) in the blogosphere?

Sunday in the ´hood (part 2)

2009-08-25T14:18:00.000-04:00

Previously, on Leigh´s blog...

Buoyed by neighborhood pride and surrounded by all things edible, I invited a friend over for dinner.

I hadn´t seen this particular friend in a while, so I kind of went all out. I spent the afternoon chopping, frying, boiling and seasoning. I set up my stereo speakers in the dining room and rolled my gas heater in to warm the area up. I cleaned.

My friend was scheduled to arrive between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. At some point during this interval, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet for the second time in as many months. Seconds later, there was a knock at my front door. As I scuttled toward the foyer with my keys, the pounding grew more insistent.

While I turned the key in the lock, I arrived at the conclusion that my friend, who always calls instead of knocking, must have called me while my cell phone was on its diving adventure.

Leigh: Hi, sorry. Did you call? I dropped my phone in the toilet.

Leigh´s friend: No. I couldn´t call because someone just stole my cell phone.

Great, yet another person taking a swipe at my neighborhood.

Leigh: Quit messing around.

Leigh´s friend: I´m not. A group of like 15 kids just pulled a knife on me and stole all my stuff.

I didn´t believe him until he opened his backpack, which was completely empty except for the carton of peach juice he had brought for dinner. All that was left in his pockets were his keys.

I was floored. My friend had been robbed by an adolescent mob just steps from my house before 8:00 p.m. While walking, just as I had instructed him, along the most well-lit streets in the area. Could it be that all those people who had spoken negatively about my neighborhood had been right?

I´m still not convinced. Of course, no neighborhood is perfect, and mine suffers from certain difficulties that aren´t as present in wealthier areas. But people get robbed all over this city, even in its most exclusive corners. The difference is that when it happens there, people assume it´s because thieves from other areas have astutely zeroed in on the places where the most profit is to be made. When it happens here, though, it´s because the neighborhood is bad. Period. Regardless of how kind its residents are or how awesome its street market is. I prefer to focus on the latter characteristics.

Still, the fact remains that this group of kids chose to carry out their activities in my neighborhood (we came to the conclusion that they may very well not be from around here, since if you rob one of your neighbors, you run the risk of him/her and his/her entire family knowing where to track you down**). And they chose to target my friend. It sickened me to envision someone pulling a knife on him and enraged me to think about how much time he´s going to have to spend standing in line to get new ID cards and a new student transportation pass. It also enfuriated me to think that the same guys who robbed him probably intended to do the same to my neighbors, who, in general, are people who work their asses off for what little they have.

So it was that I made my second call to the Chilean police. Unlike the first, this was not a 133 (911) call, but rather a ring to the nearest police station. Like the first call, however, this one led to consequences that deserve their own blog post. So stay tuned...

**Case in point: A coworker once was held up at gunpoint by a group of would-be thieves who apologized profusely and ran away when she told them she lived in the neighborhood.

Sunday in the ´hood (part 1)

2009-08-19T21:54:00.000-04:00

A lot of people raise their eyebrows when I tell them where I live. Not because Santiago doesn´t boast a slew of areas with sketchier reputations; it does. Some of the people taken aback by my address even come from them. I think their reaction is simply due to the fact that people don´t expect gringas/os to live in working class neighborhoods like mine, regardless if that´s where our levels of income place us.

Whenever I´m confronted with a cocked eyebrow, I jump to my barrio´s defense by telling the truth: Aside from catcalls, I´ve never been the target of any kind of aggression there. What´s more, there are people who have gone out of their way to be kind to me. If there´s time, I tack on a bit about the neighborhood´s underappreciated historical value.

Not to worry. This isn´t the part where I pontificate about how much more "authentic" my Chilean experience is than that of foreigners who choose to live in wealthier areas. Providencia and Las Condes are in Chile too, after all. However, I do believe that living where I do has brought me in touch, at least in part, with a reality that is both literally and figuratively miles away from the more exclusive corners of this city. Part of this reality: bitchin´ street markets.

Sunday afternoon, I staggered through the door of my house weighed down by bags whose contents included lentils, nail polish, tomatoes, garlic, a purple dish towel and a pot of honey. I had been eyeing some potted plants as well, but bringing them home to join the growing family on my patio would have involved sprouting a few extra arms. One possible solution would have been to purchase the barbecue grill someone had been selling on the curb, stuff everything inside and roll it all home, but I hadn´t been thinking very creatively at the time. Plus, I´m pretty sure we already have a grill.

While strolling between the dozens of stalls while dodging (and envying) gaggles of cotton candy-brandishing children, I felt a surge of neighborhood pride. It seemed as if the whole barrio had turned out to make the week´s purchases, joke with the vendors or just enjoy a Sunday stroll. Say what you will about my neighborhood; you can´t find festive street markets like this everywhere, especially not in areas where people generally have enough money to pay exhorbitant supermarket produce prices.

I was so delighted by the wealth of edible objects that surrounded me that I decided to invite a friend over for dinner. And this, dear reader, is where things get interesting. Stay tuned for Part 2.

Mea culpa

2009-08-07T00:28:00.000-04:00

Aparte de saludarl@s, I'm writing to apologize for the following:

1) Having written little of substance these past few weeks. And for having been terribly remiss when it comes to commenting on your blogs and responding to the comments you leave me. I'm sorry. I fully intend to right my ways. In my defense, all I can say is that working full time (and believe me, Chilean full time is longer than U.S. full time) while writing two term papers has left me with very little time for much else. After I turn the last of them in next week, though, I'll be free to finish up the numerous half-written entries I have queued up.

2) Enabling comment moderation. This is not my way of silencing everyone who disagrees with me. I did it to have more control over how much personal information about me appears on the internet. As some of you know, my desire to do so stems half from an actual creepy experience and half from good old-fashioned paranoia. So, don't worry: As long as you keep it respectful and don't mention my home address or place of employment, I won't censor you.

Disease for sale

2009-07-30T00:31:00.001-04:00

Way back when, I blogged about a guy who tried to sell me a pair of very possibly used underwear near Estacion Mapocho. Today, I came across a set of similarly attractive products lined up on a street vendor's blanket: dented, dirty and very possibly used surgical masks.

Damn. It being the end of the month and all, I can't afford a pair of men's briefs and a filthy swine flu mask. Any thoughts on which I should choose? I'm going to go sleep on it now.

On the Chilean runway - part two

2009-07-26T03:01:00.000-04:00

Good morning, boys and girls. It's time for part two of On the Chilean Runway.

As has been previously established, the streets of Santiago are fertile soil for inventive fashion statements. This weekend alone, I've noticed two particular styles that hold their own against even the most glaringly neon of fanny packs:

1. Gring@s in shorts. I work in an area frequented by fellow gring@s. With a new semester poised to begin in August, gaggles of eager exchange students (ah, those were the days) have caused the area's foreign population to swell even further.

Fresh exchange students are easy to distinguish from tourists because 1) they travel in groups the size of the freshman hordes that show up outside senior parties the first week of college, 2) they engage in animated getting-to-know-you-in-an-awkward-new-setting conversation ("Do you guys say 'pop' or 'soda' in Connecticut?"), and 3) they drink in their surroundings deliberately, visibly filing away each new piece of information for future use.

I've spotted dozens of newbie exchange students this past week. And a few of them have been wearing shorts.

Dude. You guys. It's cold. Below-freezing-at-night cold. Top-story-on-the-evening-news cold. Wear-leggings-and-two-pairs-of-socks-under-your-pants cold. I know you're suffering in those shorts. I know you did enough climate research before you came here to know you would be. I know there's at least one pair of jeans in the half-unpacked duffel in your room at your host family's house. What I don't know is why you're not wearing them.

2. A chilena in pajamas. Last night, I went to a gas station to buy liquor (yes, it has come to that). The place was populated by a handful of other people with the same idea -- and with a chilena dressed in tennis shoes and a pair of bright orange polarfleece pajamas.

I would think nothing of this if someone did it in the States. But, while I would hardly say they dress formally, Santiaguinos tend to be more reticent about letting the world see them in their grungiest. When I walk to the bakery in my sweatpants in the morning, I can't help but feel underdressed. And if, on top of that, if I'm not wearing earrings -- well, I might as well be naked.

So, like the Egyptian pyamids and my short-clad compatriots, the chilena in the orange pajamas is a mystery.

Start preparing your resume

2009-07-19T17:34:00.000-04:00

Santiago is papered with sketchy notices, like fliers proclaiming "WORK VISAS! TODAY ONLY!" in confidence-inspiring blue marker or offering "attractive women ages 18-30" a "pleasant environment" with lodging and high wages.

While perusing the bulletin board at the bakery this afternoon, I came across another one to add to the list:

WANTED: FOREIGNERS TO CARRY OUT INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES.

So fear not, unemployed gring@. There's a job with your name on it here in Santiago. There's even a guy with a blue marker you can talk to about a work visa.

Luxury in a 12-pack

2009-07-05T21:26:00.001-04:00

This is what the high life looks like:

Yep, that's a whole 12 rolls. Of the soft kind. And yep, I bought them all at once.

The toilet paper aisle wasn't the only place I splurged this weekend. I also bought the pictured fingerless gloves (or "arm warmers," as the package dubbed them) from a stand outside the bus terminal, brought home an entire kilo of apples from the street market, and rolled up to the grocery store checkout line with a box of multigrain Cheerios in my shopping cart.

You guessed it: I got paid. For the first time since I quit my previous job in January, I received compensation for a month of full-time employment.

My time between jobs wasn't completely devoid of economic activity. I taught an English class twice a week and did occasional translations. However, the money I pieced together at the end of each month usually didn't even go far enough to cover my (low) rent, which meant I had to start trimming my savings -- or, more realistically, hacking away at them.

As is to be expected, I tried to find ways to cut costs. Why buy Q-tips when I had a stack full of only moderately abrasive kitchen napkins with which to remove my eye makeup? Why buy real fruit juice if I could add water to flavored powder?

I carefully planned my transportation routes so as only to have to pay one fare. I hung onto dairy products longer than advisable. At one point, I dug into my coin jar and spent the next few days carrying a plastic bag full of change around in my purse.

For the record, I'm aware that this was not real poverty. I could have always picked up more English classes or sawed a few branches off my savings if things had gotten serious. But there's no denying that I had very little money to spend on non-essentials. Now that I have a few pesos to my name again, I'm afraid I'll get so giddy over being able to buy useless things like fingerless gloves that I'll get carried away. The truth is that even though I am making money, I'm not making very much of it, which means I'll have to be prudent if I want to be able to 1) save and 2) set aside a slice of my budget pie for books.

Also for the record, I'm aware that the outfit I'm wearing in the above photo is, in the words of Dwight K. Schrute, "a ridiculous choice for this climate." The two sweaters I wore over it all day wouldn't have let my arm warmers show in their full glory.

Sunburst

2009-07-01T22:22:00.001-04:00

Every once in a while, Santiago shows its benevolent side and grants us a brief respite from winter. The sunlight that soaks up the previous day's puddles doesn't quite qualify as warm, but at least it tries. Today was one such day, and it felt like this:

Unfortunately, these also seem to be the days when I leave the house with rain boots and an umbrella, congratulating myself on how prepared I am.

Oh, well.

The difference a raincoat makes

2009-06-25T21:58:00.000-04:00

It rained in Santiago last weekend. And, true to form, I had lost my umbrella. Thus, when I left my house on Saturday morning, the only thing standing between me and Liquid Apocalypse was the oversize hooded camping raincoat I bought in middle school. I would have looked like a serial killer had it not been for my polka-dotted rain boots.

Despite the fact that it rains all winter here, you don't see many raincoats on the streets of Santiago (although snazzy rain boots are all the rage). Santiaguinos seem to have a strong preference for umbrellas or, in their absence, simply walking in light rain.

There is, however, a group of people that do pile on the rain gear in Santiago: gringos. An outdoorsy raincoat is about as much of a gringo giveaway as a pair of high-tech cross-trainers. It makes sense: Most tourists come to Chile planning to have at least some contact with nature, and they come prepared. It's not uncommon to see pairs of hooded visitors plodding through the city while shielding their maps from the rain.

I didn't have a map on Saturday, but I sure had a raincoat. I'm neither tall nor particularly light-haired and therefore am frequently assumed to be Chilean until I open my mouth (or so I've been told), but my water-resistant apparel pushed me over the line into Unmistakable Gringadom. As I walked past Cerro Santa Lucia, a man approached me with a handful of fliers and pointed across the street to one of the city's biggest artisan fairs. "Across the street, there are handicrafts from all over Latin America," he informed me in slow, percussive Spanish.

"Yeah, I've already been there," I said. The raincoat, I thought as I walked on.

Moments later, at the bus stop, a taxi slowed and idled in front of me. This is what virtually every free cab did to me in Quito, where I did look very obviously foreign. They rarely do it to me in Santiago unless it's late at night. And unless I'm wearing a raincoat, apparently. Eventually, this particular Santiago cab driver realized I wasn't going to ask him to drive me back to my hotel and moved on.

It's amazing the effect a single garment can have on the way people perceive and treat you, huh?

Woodpeckers from space

2009-06-19T21:44:00.000-04:00

This week at work (yep, I've been frequenting a place that meets that description), we've been listening to Radio X, a station that seems to specialize in funk, showtunes, "Video Killed the Radio Star" and "Runaway Train." I much prefer it to the station we were listening to last week, Radio Amadeus, which broadcasts uninterrupted elevator music with lyrics that include "shoobady bah baaaah."

Say what you will about Radio Amadeus, but it was Radio X that played the following song this afternoon:

This is not the first time a Chilean soundtrack has left me grasping for an explanation -- any explanation. After "Woodpeckers from Space" came into my life, I started to suspect that these (in my view) questionable music choices may have less to do with DJs' filters than with cold, hard economics. I'd be willing to bet that the rights to "Woodpeckers from Space" are significantly more affordable than those to...well, most other songs.

In my fantasy, the stereo speakers at work emit what I consider the more pleasant sounds of Radio Uno, Radio Horizonte, Rock and Pop or FM Tiempo. However, since the chances of this actually happening are about the same as the chances of me making it through the next six months without getting tear gassed...fly on, spacepecker, fly on.

P.S. I know it goes without saying, but I won't be offering many details about my job on this blog. I've already been internet stalked once, and it's not an experience I'd care to repeat. Suffice it to say that 1) it's not teaching English and 2) it's something I've always wanted to do.

Love of person vs. love of place: Chilean men revisited

2009-06-14T23:38:00.000-04:00

One of the entries that soak up the most hits on this blog is the group post on Chilean men that several gringa-in-Chile bloggers participated in last year. It doesn't surprise me. Before I first left for Chile -- and, a few years later, for Ecuador -- I too prowled Google for sneak peeks at the dating scene I was soon to confront. To be honest, I didn't learn much, probably because many of the expat blogs I came across were written by people who were married or in stable relationships, not hitting the bars. And those who were on the prowl were wise enough to keep the details to a minimum.

Sorry to disappoint, but I will be doing the same. I can, however, address a broader issue I've been thinking about recently: love of person vs. love of place.

For me, the experience that best illustrates this dilemma is a date I went on when I was studying abroad in Santiago. It was a second date with a very esthetically pleasing young man who picked me up at my host family's house and took me to the movies. For two agonizing hours, I sat stone-still in front of the screen debating whether or not I should continue to let the guy's uninvited hand sit awkwardly atop my own or banish it to the other side of the armrest. Unfortunately, I chose the former.

It was even more unbearable than our first date, when he spent an hour and a half spinning an epic tale that involved the glories of his teen modeling career, the droves of people who worshiped him when he was in a band, and his disdain for a younger brother who was a self-centered asshole for -- gasp! -- wanting to go to college. By the time he finally asked me a question, I was too disgusted to answer in detail.

I know what you're thinking. Why, oh why, would I grace the jerk with a second chance? No, it wasn't the fact that he was attractive. The real reason, as ridiculous as it sounds, was this: While strolling through one of my favorite areas in Santiago a few weeks after we'd first met, I had bumped into him on the sidewalk in front of his family's mechanic shop. That's it. Really.

I wasn't always great at pickin' 'em when I was 20. But I did have a journal (oh, if only I had it with me and could quote from it now!) in which I arrived at what I considered some pretty sage late-night insights. Among them was this one, which I remember scribbling down after that excruciating second date: I did not like this guy. What I liked was the fact that I had bumped into him on the street. In front of the family-owned mechanic shop where he worked. In a neighborhood I loved.

As I believe has been clearly established in this blog, I'm a sucker for chance meetings, urban landscapes and grittiness. Knowing this, it’s not difficult to see just how much of a recipe for disaster this situation was. Already on a high while strolling through one of my favorite neighborhoods, I just happened to bump into someone I knew. Not only did this make me feel ever so integrated into my adopted surroundings, but it also – at least in my gleeful imaginings – opened the door to a part of Chile I had yet to experience. I pictured myself hanging out in the mechanic shop, gazing out into the neighborhood while listening to my charming boyfriend play guitar and getting to know his undoubtedly equally charming family. Collectively, they would welcome me into a world that most exchange students would never get to see, and by golly, I would feel special.

Luckily, I snapped the hell out of it before it was too late. But I would be lying if I said Mr. Teen Model was the only guy I’ve tricked myself into thinking I liked during my expat career. That time, it was a mechanic shop. On other occasions, it’s been aging houses, midnight architectural tours and a salsa club with wooden floors. In each case, I eventually arrived at the (painful) realization that what was truly making me happy was where I was, not the person I was there with. I’m not saying these guys didn’t have anything to offer; they just weren’t right for me, which my passionate love of place blinded me to for a while.

Anyone who’s ever walked down the street with me knows that buildings, cobblestones, graffiti, windows and cracked cement often distract me to the point of robbing me of the ability to carry on a coherent conversation. Therefore, I may be more prone to love-of-place/love-of-person confusion than most. That said, I think anyone who ventures abroad – or undertakes a dramatic change of scenery within his or her home country – is vulnerable to making this mistake. Think about it: You’re alone. You get lost. You’re frequently confused and frequently confusing. You miss your family, friends, dog and everything else you’ve left behind. Why wouldn’t you want to be with someone who could not only provide you with the affection and sense of belonging you crave but also help integrate you into the surroundings you’re coming to love?

Because dating someone from your new country/city/neighborhood does help you integrate. Your boyfriend introduces you to his group of friends. Your girlfriend’s family invites you to their Sunday lunches. While you and your significant other enjoy (insert local specialty dish) at (insert low-profile local eatery), s/he offers a local perspective on (insert topic). And, of course, all in (insert local language/dialect). But dating is not the only way to integrate yourself (if integration is what you’re going for), and if you don’t have real feelings for the person involved, it’s not the right way.

I’m not saying it’s impossible for love of person and love of place to coincide. I know a number of happy cross-cultural couples who are a testament to the fact that they can. But I also know that for exchange students and expats, conditions are ripe for the development of relationships that don’t quite gel but are difficult to end because “So-and-so is this country for me!”

If this post has proven anything, it’s that I may not be the best source of dating advice. But, as someone who’s been there, I have this to say to those who haven’t: Date abroad, but bring your criteria with you. If you wouldn’t have a romantic interest in this person at home, s/he probably won’t be right for you here, regardless of how quaint his or her street is or how beautiful that beach s/he took you to was. Obviously, going abroad involves meeting and forming relationships with people who may be very different from those you left behind, but that doesn’t mean you can’t value and seek out the same qualities (compassion, intelligence, humor, insight, etc.) in a foreign partner as you would in someone who shares your background. Linguistic and cultural differences require an open mind, but certain things – like what your gut tells you – need no translation.

Metro from the crypt

2009-06-05T21:09:00.000-04:00

Sick of Metro stories yet? I hope not, because since my life has taken a turn for the busier this past week, I've been spending a lot more time aboard everybody's favorite underground train. In other words, it's likely that you'll be hearing a lot about my adventures in the kingdom of Bip! cards and orange plastic seats.

Despite the countless times I've traveled on the Santiago Metro over the past few years, I've never once heard the conductors do what I would if I had their job: get creative when announcing the names of the stations. It must take a heck of a lot of self control to rattle off the same rosary of station names for hours each day without adding a personal touch.

The first time I heard a subway driver snap was in D.C. He announced each station with a raspy, ominous voice similar to that of the mummy from Tales from the Crypt. I broke into a smile when he hissed, "Next stop: Metro Centaaaaaaaah," and I continued to grin contentedly as the train hurtled forward toward what apparently was grisly doom.

Ever since then, I've been waiting. And on Friday, I got my reward. It wasn't exactly Tales from the Crypt, but the the sing-song exaggerated formality with which the driver proclaimed, "Los Heroeees, combinacioooooon con la Linea Dossssss" made me smile long enough to forget how much my feet hurt. Something tells me the driver knew what it was like to be trapped in an underground tangle of elbows at 8:30 p.m. and wanted to do his part by reminding us that it was, after all, Friday.

Mr. Darcy on the Metro

2009-05-29T19:52:00.000-04:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a handsome man wearing a top hat on the Santiago subway, must be in want of a gringa to fall in love with him. And so it transpired yesterday, when I saw Mr. Darcy on the Metro.

I had just stepped into my carriage (subway car) when I noticed him sitting staidly in an orange plastic seat. There was nothing exceptional about his clothing -- except for the Austenesque top hat that towered over the balding heads of the two men flanking him.

Handsome, handsomely sedate and wearing a handsome top hat. This was none other than Mr. Darcy.

Looking back, there were a number of ways I could have started a conversation, including, "Hey, I like your hat" (the witty banter would have come later). Nevertheless, I succumbed to shyness and hurried away to the nearest handrail.

How despicably I have acted, Jane. And I don't just regret it because he was cute. It takes a brave spirit to wear a top hat in a city where people tend to stare at the outlandishly dressed.

So if you see a guy walking around Santiago in a top hat, give him my e-mail, please.

Jesus on rye

2009-05-28T09:49:00.000-04:00

Remember Navy Jesus One? If so, it may interest you to know that I've finally learned what they sell: sandwiches and salads.

That's right. It's a deli called Navy Jesus One. Oh, and they deliver. Perhaps the placing of an order would sound something like this:

"Hello, I'd like to place an order for delivery."
"Which sandwich would you like?"
"The navy Jesus one."

Mystery solved. But a new question arises: Are the sandwiches made with Communion wafers?

I find it amazing how many businesses here in Chile choose to christen (no pun intended) themselves with incorrect or just plain strange English. The name Navy Jesus One is so delightfully ridiculous that I suspect logic was hardly a concern for whoever thought it up. But you would think someone would check with a native English speaker -- and believe me, they're not hard to find in Santiago -- before naming their clothing store chain Fashion's Park or investing in a fluorescent sign proclaiming "Nigth Club." I know I would consult with a native Spanish speaker before printing a Spanish menu or opening a business with a Spanish name. That way, I would be sure to avoid the fate of the U.S. Mexican restaurant Vicki wrote about in the comments of my Navy Jesus One post.

Boo!

2009-05-19T07:56:00.001-04:00

People aren´t afraid of me very often. I have a relatively tranquil disposition and a more-than-relatively short body. My weapons arsenal is limited to pepper spray and my vendettas to the administrators of Santiago´s Galpón Victor Jara concert hall (more on that another time).

This week, however, this harmless little gringa got scary. Not by growing several inches or spontaneously developing a penchant for violence. Apparently, all one needs to do to strike fear into the hearts of Chileans is come back from a trip to the United States.

I first knew Chile was suspicious of me when a flight attendant handed me a batch of Chilean customs and immigration forms that included, for the first time, a health questionnaire. As a "traveler arriving from an infected area," I was asked whether I'd experienced sore throat, vomiting, muscle pain or a variety of other symptoms within the past 10 days. Luckily, I was able to check an honest "none of the above" and banish fears of being dragged away by men in hazmat suits.

Upon arriving in Chile, the passengers on my flight filed one by one in front of a thermal camera. Apparently fever free, I continued to immigration, where an official in a surgical mask stamped my passport.

I remained a deadly threat after leaving the airport as well. Upon hearing that I had just returned from a visit home, people take a step back only half-jokingly.

With so many people afraid of me, I've started to become afraid of myself. I feel an inexplicable inner certainty that swine flu is not the way I go. However, that doesn't mean I can't unknowingly infect slews of people who may not be as lucky, right? I've started standing a bit further back when I talk to people and have become paranoid about what I touch. For example, after blowing my nose while teaching yesterday, I spent the rest of the class avoiding touching anything with the hand that had held the tissue.

Now that there have been a handful of swine flu cases confirmed in Chile, I'm afraid of other people too. Yesterday I wore mittens, both because it was cold in the morning and because I didn't want to touch the handrails in the Metro. When someone sneezed at the bus stop, I moved away quickly, forfeiting a coveted spot in the shade. I hold my breath whenever someone coughs or sniffles and immediately grow wary of the puffy-eyed.

Am I being ridiculous? It's been known to happen.

I've heard people theorize that swine flu is part of a worldwide conspiracy to make us afraid of one another while distracting us from real problems that no surgical mask can fend off. If this is true, then congratulations, shadow government. I raise my glass to you with a mittened hand.

(I took this photo at a Labor Day march I'll blog about at some point.)