El cantante

On my ride home from school a man boards the bus with guitar in hand. He seats himself in the back and begins playing and singing beautifully. I'm riding along with a busful of dark-haired heads, all swaying in time to the wheels of the micro. This is not where I grew up. This is not Oregon. Maybe I've become too comfortable here. I don't realize where I am. As the singer leaves the bus, I hope he knows that my lack of donation is not apathy, but rather the realization of my cultural fear.

This week

In the past week I have...

...seen a real live jackhammer! I didn't know that they exist outside of movies based in New York!

...done my taxes!

...stayed up 39 hours. I got up late on Friday, around 1 pm, and didn't go to sleep again (except for a nap on Diego's couch for like half an hour) until Saturday night at 4 am.

...gotten bangs, kind of. There was an adorable 3-year-old at Diego's house one night and she wanted to play with my hair. I let her blow-dry it even though it was dry. We got a lock caught up in the air-intake part, creating an unfixable dreadlock that had to be cut out and now is continually falling into my face.

...gotten a piercing. Kacie came over in the late afternoon on Friday and announced that we were going to the piercing store. Luckily I've been wanting one, and didn't have to decide on the spot that I wanted a vertical tragus. Don't worry, the place was really clean, and it only cost $12!

...gotten my visa! I'm finally legal!

School blog #2

A second school blog, based on the following prompt:

1. What did you assume before you left that you are not finding in your host-country,

host-culture and/or host family and friends? Why did you make those assumptions?

Chileans are always asking me this question. Marquito jokes that they live in the trees, here. Yes, but the get up by elevators, his mom adds. I have a hard time answering this question, too, mostly because I have a hard time remembering what it was that I expected. I certainly didn't expect that they lived in trees, but I think I expected a quality of life close to that of the casa de huespedes in El Salvador. A real house, maybe with a lot of open-air, and okay furniture. I think that's pretty much what we have here in Vina. I've been told that my apartment is nice and I believe it. The decorating style is much more muted than that in the USA, but I'm not missing any comforts.

I think I expected my host mom to be a little more conservative. I believe she is politically conservative, but not in all aspects of her life. She is a strong working woman and is very opinionated. I was slightly surprised that she's single, but that doesn't mean she doesn't date. She's a modern woman and very easy to get along with. I was definitely surprised that we have a woman who works for us. Many of my friends' families have nanas, too. I suppose I always considered someone who cooks and cleans for you a luxury, and maybe it is here, too, but it seems so much more normal.

I expected a little more machismo from the men. Luckily, I haven't had to deal with very much of it. Most of my Chilean friends are boys, and I've found them to be very polite and respectful, and even sensitive.

I expected the food to be a little more flavorful, more reminiscent of Mexican food, but it's not even close. There are a lot of fresh vegetables and we eat a lot of turkey, but all of it is prepared fairly simply. It's pretty easy on the stomach, and I cannot get enough of the veggies. They just seem tastier here!

One of the hardest things has been my expectations for the weather. For some reason, I thought it was going to be summer during my entire visit, but this is unfortunately not the case. Luckily, winter here isn't going to be that bad, and I don't have to write home for my puffy coat.

Santiaguito

This Friday Kacie and I flew in, exhausted, from Argentina. We rode the micro to the bus station and then parted ways- Kacie had homework waiting back in Vina, and I had plans with Marco on the other side of Santiago. Santiago is surprisingly large- 40% of the population of Chile lives there and it took me half an hour to get from one end to the other on the Subte. Marquito looked like an angel when I saw him. I missed Chile! I missed my friends!

Marquito helped me into his cousin's car and introduced me to his cousin, Tute, and his brother, Pelayo. We picked up some supplies for an asado. I spent the evening in Tute's backyard with the three boys, bantering and listening to them tease each other. Marquito drank a lot of wine and started playing Chilean songs for me and singing along. He's studying to be a chef, so the asado, which consisted of pork ribs and beef with a vegetable-shrimp topping, was superb.

Saturday morning (around 1 pm?) after my shower Marquito took me off to meet some friends and get lunch. He's pretty involved in his church, which is a sort of surprising contrast to his normal Friday-night behavior. In the parish a bunch of college-aged kids were playing music and setting up for some sort of festivity. I met the guitar player and the sax player and the singer and Marquito's best friend, Carolina, who seemed to be in charge. I haven't really spent time with Chileans on my own, without a buffer of gringos, and it was neat.

We had pizza and Carolina fixed me a fanchop - a beer with Fanta, which was surprisingly okay. Marquito and Carolina seemed to be getting into a conversation that I wouldn't understand, so I retreated to Pelayo's room for some tv. I think I fell asleep for a while, but a few hours later Marquito retrieved me for an asado at the parish. This guy is crazy about beef.

I really enjoyed being around so many young people, but Pelayo and I mostly hung back during the asado because we didn't really know anyone. The sax player (David, maybe?) kept us company for a while. A while later we all headed home for some piscolitas and I got to know a few of them a little better. Actually, they mostly grilled me and I didn't have a whole lot of time to ask questions, but you can learn about other people in that sort of conversation, too. Marquito kept calling me "la gringa," as in, "oh yeah, the gringa and I went to Con Con last weekend." Pelayo told him to knock it off because it was offensive to treat me like an object, but I think he meant it endearingly.

As we got into the conversation there are some things that stand out. Marquito is a Catholic, and I don't think he knows what Protestant means. He asked me if we believe in the saints and I said we don't celebrate them. He asked me if we believe in the Virgin and I said I don't know anything about it. He asked if we believe in Jesus and that was a little surprising. I tried to sort things out for him. The guys kept calling each other gay, and I mentioned to Pelayo, who seems a little more level-headed, that gay is a normal thing in the U.S.A. They told me they don't like gay people and I told them that it's hard for me to understand how they don't. I tried to approach it from a cultural-difference perspective, rather than a moral one; it wasn't really the right setting for that conversation.

Sunday morning was lazy until lunch with Marquito's parents. We watched a little futbol afterward until Pelayo took me to the bus station. It was a long trip home, but so relieving to get back to my own bed. It's funny how much more comfortable I feel in Chile than I did in Argentina. I could be just making it up, but Chile is starting to feel like home.

Argentina, part 2

We had a rockin' last night in Uruguay last night. Kacie hammed it up with some locals on the dancefloor at a bar near our hostel while I made some friends at the bar. We didn't sleep, but boarded a bus at 7 this morning to return to Buenos Aires.

Today we ventured into La Boca, one of the older neighborhoods in the city. We have been taking the different neighborhoods on foot, and although my legs are tired, I'm glad that we have been. Kacie walks at a very leisurely pace, and it gives us plenty of time to take everything in.

It's been interesting how much you can learn about a neighborhood by the art on the walls. In La Boca there was a lot of art dedicated to a certain teacher, and also a lot about fighting poverty. We were told by our Chilean friends that the neighborhood is a must-see, but to be careful. Walking down the street it looked like the neighborhood definitely has a drug presence, and I could see it being a big place for crime against tourists. We stopped for a chorizo sandwich and the vendor gave us some tips.

One of the most interesting parts of a huge city, in my opinion, is the variety of people you see. There are all sorts of very tanned, wrinkled poor people selling whatever they can on the side of the road. There are also plenty of bohemian/gypsies selling wares. Depending on the neighborhood, we have seen very wealthy people in designer clothes and private-school kids in uniforms. The most shocking for me was a family, including a small boy and girl under 6 years old living on the park-like median in the middle of the street that runs through the center of town. The kids didn't have shoes and appeared to be wearing burlap sacks. Another time we passed a mother carrying an infant and trailing a ways behind her was a girl, about 5 years old, leading her sister, maybe 3 years old. She stuck out her hand and asked "Una moneda, por favor?" I might have given her one, but I honestly didn't have any money with me.

¿Permiso, sabe donde estamos?

It would be much easier to blog if everything here wasn't so fun. I might have spare time to spend on the computer.

Sunday night I found myself at a long table having a tri-lingual conversation with people from England, Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. The social life in our new hostel is much more lively, and since Kacie has been feeling sick, I've been spending a lot of time socializing with the other people staying there. I especially like the night staff, David from Peru and Rudá from Brazil; they're pretty low-key guys, and have to be up all night.

One of my fellow youth leaders in Salem is from Argentina, and on Monday we took the ''tur de Christian.'' We started relatively early in the morning (early for us, around noon) and took the subway across town to see the Lagos de Palermo, a huge city park with a ton of interconnected lakes. From there we made our way back the way we came, winding through the plazas that were on nearly every block. We made our way through the cemetery where Eva Peron, 'Evita', is buried. We saw some neat sights.

In the La Recoleta neighborhood we couldn't find our destination and stopped on a bench to look at our map. An adolescent approached us and asked if he could have some money. When he wouldn't go away, we got up to leave. As we were walking away, we heard a female voice behind us shouting ''Chicas!'' We could hear this person running after us and were speeding up as inconspicuously as possible, but the shouter caught up to us. It turns out it was not another gyspy, but rather a middle-class woman who was walking her dog and had seen the interaction with the adolescent. She warned us to be careful, and pointed out certain neighborhoods where we shouldn't go. We've made a sort of list of who is safe to talk to and who isn't. Couples are usually safe, but not gyspy couples. Groups of school children, especially in uniform, are safe, so long as they aren't gypsy school children. People at work are usually okay, so long as they aren't a gyspy. We have now added 'people walking their dog,' but of course, only if they are not a gypsy.

I wear a watch every day that I bought on one of the first days in Viña before I had my phone to tell time. It has been losing time with increasing persistance. Before I left Chile, Jose Manuel set it forward 20 minutes for me, but it has since been off by as much as three hours. Kacie and I are good travel companions because we both like going at a leisurely pace without an itinerary. Vacations are for relaxing, so we mostly just do what we feel like doing. I keep wearing the watch because I think it's funny, but I like that my watch doesn't tell time. It's more appropriate for our style.

At any given point in the day, between Kacie and I there is usually less than one of us who is aware of and/or focused on where we are going. Today we got on a ferry for Uruguay, and we're going to be spending a couple of nights in Montevideo. We slept on the ride in, and someone had to wake us when we arrived in the port. We kind of stumbled off the boat, and were not entirely sure where we were. Kacie asked someone and he kind of looked us up and down and was like 'Colonia... Uruguay...' This was not our final destination so we made a kind of difficult effort to figure out why we were not in Montevideo. We slept through almost our entire bus connection, which is a shame because Uruguay is quite beautiful. The greenery and aged buildings were a welcome change after Buenos Aires.

Our hostel for tonight is much quieter than the one in B.A., and I'm going to have to wake Kacie up from a nap if I want to do anything tonight. We're considering this the vaction from our vacation, so I'm not sure she's going to want to get up.

Argentina, days 1, 2, and 3

Kacie and I were planning on heading into Santiago on Thursday to chill around before our flight on Friday, but ended up getting lazy and going to the beach instead. We didn't leave Vina until 6 or 6:30 on Friday, and got to the airport around 8:30 for our 10 o'clock flight. There was a bit of a hold-up at the airport because the Chileans were mad that I don't have my student visa yet, but I'm not sure why they wanted me to have a visa to leave the country. We flew LAN again, and again it was an exellent experience with croissant sandwiches and free wine on a flight that was only two hours. Coming into Buenos Aires was pretty impressive, the lights literally extended into a haze on the horizon; Kacie said it was the biggest city she's ever seen, and she lived in Europe for three years.

We had an adventure in the cab into town, our cab driver kept driving in-between lanes pointing out tourist attractions, but since we got in at midnight, the sights weren't very easy to see. Our hostel was a kinda neat oldish building with a spiral staircase and its own bar. Kacie thought she had reserved beds in a girls' quad, but we ended up in a coed 8 with a door that squeeked like hell, which made our midnight entrance a nuisance to our roommates. The attendant directed us to a bar downtown; we didn't realize until midway through the night that the reason why we weren't being accosted was probably because it was a gay bar. Once we were more aware of our surroundings, though, it was a blast and we didn't get home until 7ish, just in time to wake our roommates yet again.

Our hostel didn't have water for a shower and we felt quite disgusting and not entirely satisfied with the experience, so we did some research and took the subway to a new hostel. The one we're in now is pretty rockin', they have social events and we drank in the bar downstairs with a bunch of fellow hostel-ers. There are quite a few from the U.K., a couple from France, a handful from Australia, and a smattering from the rest of the globe. Kacie made some quick friends, and we went out again for the fourth night in a row.

Yesterday day was pretty neat, too. After moving into the new hostel, we were planning on showering and napping, but Kacie wanted to check out a plaza nearby. She was designated the tour guide, and we ended up missing the plaza but finding an awesome urban park, complete with live music, multiple playgrounds, and a Saturday market. The walk was a lot longer than we expected, and we satiated our hunger with a "completa," a beef sandwich with grilled onions and bell peppers. This was definitely superior to the Chilean completo. We did end up finding the plaza we initially set out for; it had a street market, too, and Kacie bought herself a mate gourd.

This morning we nearly slept through our alarm for breakfast (11 am), and could barely drag ourselves out of bed. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy our fresh-baked bread with dulce de leche, and fresh-squeezed (like, literally squeezed just there) orange juice. We went back to bed and Kacie slept until about four. I got up around 2 to buy us an Easter treat: a giant Kinder egg. As soon as I could get Kacie out of bed we trekked back to the completa stand to enjoy another steak sandwich.

Buenos Aires is amazing so far. There are parts that are a tad scary, the cars drive even more crazily than they do in Vina, and there is a lot of trash and poop on the streets. On the other hand, there are some amazing buildings and the people are interesting. I've seen multiple bongo/percussion bands just on the street. The temperature is perfect. I guess I didn't spend much time out-of-doors today, but I think one day's rest is okay after the past four weeks that I've had in South America.