A Lesson on Perspective

The night before coming back to Santiago from my two week trip in Peru (more on that later), I was chilling in my hostel in Arica, a (terribly boring) city right at the northern border of Chile. Though I’ve gotten sick of the repeated small talk conversations that I’ve had over the semester (Where are you from? What do you study? Why Chile? Do you like Chile?), I decided to strike up a conversation with two Chilean dudes playing pool, since I’d been walking around in silence all day (traveling alone sucks).

To start the game, they spread the balls around the edges of the table, instead of setting up the triangle that I associate with pool. I asked them how they played, and it turns out that in their version, the goal is to hit the balls in numerical order. If you hit one in out of order, you get negative points of the value of the ball.

Anyway, the point of the story isn’t that I learned a new way to play pool, but that I had one of those cultural realizations that studying abroad is supposedly full of. Contrary to what I used to believe about myself, turns out I’m not a very observant person, so I haven’t really had many of those moments. I also don’t really like making big cultural generalizations, since each individual is a unique person that although shaped by the culture(s) they come from, can’t be defined just by that. At the end of the day, it was a reminder that what one person considers normal may not be at all for another. At some points during my stay here, I had trouble understanding some aspects of Chilean culture, just because it’s so different from what I’m used to, and at certain points, I couldn’t help but compare and missing the way I was used to things. When I was struggling, my program director told me it’s a matter of perspective: you’ve got to learn to see things from another point of view. And the pool experience was just another reminder of that: it’s not better or worse, just different.

More random thoughts about my experiences here coming soon. I have a little over two weeks to sit on my butt so I’ll take advantage of that to post some pretty pictures and fun stories. Here’s one to start:

Gracias

Nos queda poco tiempo juntos en Chile y quisiera decir unas palabras de agradecimiento.

Al principio del programa, yo estaba muy nerviosa sobre haciendo nuevos amigos, ya que soy bastante tímida en grupos grandes. De hecho, me di cuenta en los primeros meses la importancia que doy a sentir parte de un grupo, ya que mi grupo de amigos en Wash U ha cambiado en mi familia. Por mucho tiempo no sentí que tuve la misma acá; sentí que era amiga con todos, pero sin amigos super cercanos a quienes pudiera confiarme.

Aunque tal vez fuera tarde, me di cuenta de que a ustedes les importo después de mi mini-panic attack cuando desaparecí del mundo en los comienzos de mayo. Había sentido super sola en ese momento porque me sentía que la comunicación con mis amigos de Wash U no era lo que esperaba y no sabía con quién pudiera hablar, lo cual realmente fue una estupidez porque podría haber hablado con cualquier de ustedes. Leer sus mensajes de apoyo y preocupación me hizo dar cuenta de que he encontrado verdaderos amigos en ustedes y que puedo confiar en ustedes aunque solo hemos conocido por cinco meses.

Lo he pasado increíble con ustedes, con muchas risas, bromas, referencias de películas, carretes locos, noches no tan locas, tanto como conversaciones serias sobre nuestra experiencia y la vida en general. No puedo imaginar mi experiencia sin ustedes y me alegro mucho haber tenido la oportunidad de compartir estos seis meses con ustedes.

Cuando yo piense en mi experiencia acá en 20, 30 años, voy a pensar en ustedes más que nada. Realmente han cambiado mi vida y han sido una parte fundamental de mi experiencia. Gracias por todo chicos.

Another Reality

The past weekend, I got to see a side of Santiago that I’ve been mostly shielded from. Santiago  is a city markedly divided along socioeconomic lines. Eastward of Plaza Italia lies the barrio alto, or the rich neighborhoods, and I’ve been lucky enough to live the past six months in one of these neighborhoods. Here there are nice apartments, cute houses, well-kept lawns, no trash on the streets; basically, where everyone hopes to live. Go west and southward, and the landscape changes drastically, with many sectors that I’ve been told specifically are “bad” neighborhoods that I should avoid.

I visited a neighborhood about half an hour outside of central Santiago by train, and what I saw reminded me why Chile still isn’t considered a developed country. I was greeted with views like this:

I didn’t feel particularly comfortable taking pictures of people houses, but generally they looked something like this.

These are sights that I remember seeing when I lived in Kenya and Zambia, but the sad reality is that it exists here in Chile too, tucked away into the corners of the city to make it easier to forget. When I talked to a young mom living there (I would guess late 20’s, early 30’s), she told me that she was born there and would die there. The sense of hopelessness was palpable and so saddening. Her entire house was basically twice the size of my room and of course there were no heating system (and it gets cold here during the winter). Despite having so little, she insisted that I eat an entire bowl of stew that she had made, and I was touched by her generosity.

Every country struggles with poverty, to different degrees, and seeing that of Chile with my own eyes was definitely one of the most valuable experiences I’ve had during my time here.

Turmoil

So, it’s been almost a month since I posted about becoming better at updating… and I guess I haven’t been too great about that. School has gotten busy and I’m usually pretty tired by time I get home so I prefer just to lay around in my bed and waste time, since writing takes brainpower.

Today was an emotionally exhausting day, to put it lightly. After a visit to the General Cemetery of Santiago, a fascinating place that is divided along socioeconomic lines just as the city itself is, we went to Villa Grimaldi, one of the biggest torture centers during the Pinochet dictatorship, now reconstructed into a memorial park.

We were lucky enough to have a guided tour by a torture survivor, who described to us in graphic detail the different methods of torture used to get information out of supposed subversives during this time (generally people of influence from the left-wing). The torturers would bring people to the brink of death, letting them hang out to life by a thread so they could be tortured again the next day.

There were no pictures, no videos, and only one replica of a tiny cell that people were punished in if they didn’t give enough information to the secret police, since all the other buildings were destroyed towards the end of the dictatorship. Yet in his soft, calm voice, Pedro painted such a vivid picture that had me wincing and left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth. Our group is usually pretty lively; I have never heard the 19 of us be more silent.

I still don’t know where I stand on the whole Pinochet-Allende debate, as although torture and human rights violations are unacceptable, I don’t think we can write off the people who truly believe that Chilean quality of life was bettered by Pinochet. Yes, for those tortured or who lost loved ones, that is an unthinkable perspective, but the Chilean economy was failing during Allende’s presidency, with people dying from malnutrition and starvation and inflation at an all-time high.

I’m not trying to sound as if I know very much about this whole conflict, because I really don’t. I’ve learned bits and bobs in a few classes, but not enough in-depth to really figure out my stance on the issue.

All of this, and to think the dictatorship ended just over 20 years ago. Memory is an interesting thing. Even today, there are some people of the older generation that will deny that these human rights violations ever happened.

I don’t know where I’m trying to get with this post. It’s hard to describe what we all went through today, and I’m sure each one of us experienced it differently, but it was definitely one of the most thought-provoking days of my time here. My heart goes out to those tortured, killed, and their loved ones; no one should ever have to go through something like that. Thank you, Pedro, who found it in his heart to revisit these horrible days to tell his story to a bunch of strangers.

Blogging 2.0

I have been informed that people still read this. Whoops. Aight. Fresh start y’all. Let’s start off with bits and bobs of things that have happened in the last three months.

February: I spent the entire month traveling, since the semester here starts in March. For the first few weeks, I bopped around Argentina, and for the second half I went to Torres del Paine and saw beautiful places like this:

Just chillin’ with some horsies.

Looking back I’m reminded of how beautiful it all was. It was probably one of the most strenuous things I have ever done considering I could barely pick up my backpack for the first few days and there were times when I was cursing to myself every three steps, but so so worth it.

Next stop was El Calafate, a small touristy town in southern Argentina that is, to put it nicely, a dump. The town revolves around one main street that has a million stores selling artisanal crafts (aka stuff that was manufactured in a factory and made to look like handiwork) and everything is more expensive because of it’s touristy nature. Nonetheless, I got to go to a music festival which involved the election of the queen of the lake region and near death by moshpit. Oh, and went trekking on a glacier. Casual.

This went on for three hours. I was not a happy camper.

We ended up having to rent a tent and spend the night at the municipal gym, since every single bed in every single hostel was booked out because of the music festival. Just when I thought I was done with camping after Torres del Paine.

Walkin’ in a winter wonderland.

And I also got to see wild penguins! This was back in southern Chile, right before I flew back up to Santiago.

March: The semester finally started, which I’ve already talked/ranted about quite extensively in one of my posts. Going to class hasn’t been the highlight of my time here, but it is what it is.

Oh and we also celebrated my 21st! Since I wasn’t at home for my birthday, my host mom wanted to celebrate once I got back.

At the end of the month I went to La Serena with a couple friends, a city 8 hours north by bus. It was a pretty chill weekend, involving connecting with the homeland at a Japanese garden!

Anyway, don’t want to overwhelm you with too many pictures in one post, so I’ll save my April summary for another day.

The Mikster is back for some serious blogging yall. Get excited. And thanks for reading 🙂

On homesickness

Things I miss:

• Syllabi that makes sense. Out of my five classes here, one gave us a syllabus at the beginning of the semester with dates of evaluations and reading assignments for each class. The rest decide as we go along, or better yet, have not told us at all how/when we are going to be evaluated. I understand the benefit of having flexibility in terms of due dates and assignments, but after a certain point it just seems like pure laziness/disorganization on the part of the professor.
• Vegetables. Since salads in Chile consist of lettuce or tomato with salt and oil, I’m really starting to miss some good ol’ spinach and carrots. Not sure why those were the two veggies to pop into mind, but it is what it is.
• Asian food. Not like it’s that great in St. Louis either but better than here. (To be fair, I’ve only had Chinese food twice here and only once it wasn’t great.)
• Olin library. Yeah, yeah, probably the nerdiest thing to say but I get nothing done here since I find studying in my room impossible. You’d think I’d have adapted by now, but nope, my bed is still way too comfortable to be conducive to schoolwork.
• Quality Powerpoints. There’s bad powerpoints, and then there’s Chilean powerpoints.
• Blending in. Sure, it can be fun to talk to people who initiate conversation solely because you’re foreign, but sometimes I just want to dance and not have everyone in the discotheque stare at me, expecting me to don a suit and sunglasses when Gangnam Style comes on. Not an exaggeration.
• Seeing people I know around campus. And not having to take public transport to get to school.
• Coffee. Sometimes I just wanna go to Whispers and get my tall ice mocha with soymilk, ya know?
• Caring about my classes. Pass/Fail is a recipe for disaster. I chose blogging over studying for an exam I am royally screwed for.
• My homies. Even though being away has given me some perspective on what friendship really means.

Living the fob life

So we’ve been here almost three months, and we are fast approaching the half-way point of our program. At this point, I feel pretty comfortable here: I can navigate the metro system perfectly and am improving with the buses, I’m getting by in my classes (which doesn’t sound positive but all but one class is pass/fail so I have pretty low standards), I’ve been told multiple times that my Spanish is good (maybe people are just being polite, but whatever, I’ll take it), I usually know which way is north (figuring out that you can use the Andes to figure out which way is east was revolutionary; sadly enough, I only realized this a few weeks ago), and I feel comfortable in my homestay (so comfortable that I go to the kitchen for midnight snacks, so maybe it was better the way it used to be.)

That being said, I still have moments where I realize that I still have no idea what I am doing. Such a moment came in a class yesterday. It was the first day of class, since for a reason that is unknown to me the Social Sciences Department in La Chile decided not to have classes for the first three weeks of the semester (even though all the other departments did – one of the many struggles I’ve had with understanding U Chile’s system). The class was supposed to start last week, but, surprise surprise, got cancelled because of a student protest.

Side note on student protests: Chilean students and politics have not mixed well for who knows how long. From what I understood over a dinner conversation, the education system here is basically a for-profit business, with some schools being owned by companies that are looking to make money. I guess I don’t know enough about the US system to make a fair judgment, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t fly in the US. Regardless, the Chilean education system is one of my potential thesis topics, so I’ll keep you posted! Anyway, students are currently fighting for free, high-quality education, and seeing that this is election year, student protests have been pretty frequent.

So anyway, here I was in this class called “Social Movements, Political Parties, and Militancy in Chile,” ready with my newly purchased notebook to do some serious learning. In my other classes, I would say I understand around 85% of the lecture, if not more. This one? Not so much. The professor went on some shpiel about the different political parties pre-Pinochet, while I sat there, completely clueless and dumbfounded. Definitely didn’t help that the kid next to me was scribbling away while I wrote maybe five words every ten minutes.

It was one of those lectures that once I missed one thing, I wouldn’t understand the next thing he said, so I basically sat in the classroom for three hours not understanding what in the world was going on and getting more depressed with each passing minute. I mean, I’ve been here for three months, I should have enough of a grasp of the language to understand what’s going on, right?

I don’t know what it was; it may have been the combination of being tired and also the fact that it was a Thursday afternoon (read: how it feels to have class on Friday afternoon), or the fact that we were going over a lot of political theory (which I’m not a fan of in any language), but I felt like a complete fob (which technically I still kind of am). I was even planning how to make an early escape, since at the end of class we went around the room talking about what we thought was interesting about the things some dude named Lechner said, and I literally had nothing to say. I didn’t get the guts to actually do it, and it just so turns out that the professor picked me to have the final words, to which I said: “To be honest, I don’t really have much to say because I didn’t understand much, but hopefully once I read the lecture I’ll be able to contribute more.”

Luckily, turns out the professor’s a nice guy and seemed to understand that it was difficult for me, and offered to recommend some books about the history of Chile so I have more of a foundation. Right after that, one of the students in the class (who are all Chilean except for me) piped up and asked if he could give the recommendations to all the students, since it was hard for them to follow some parts as well. Hurray! I’m not a complete failure!

Anyway, enough Debbie-downering for the day. Life is good because tomorrow the craziness of LOLLAPALOOZA CHILE 2013 begins!

Jelly? Yeah, you should be.

Winos

Ever since coming to Chile, I’ve become somewhat of a wine enthusiast. It all started on my third day in Chile, at my host mom’s ex-husband’s birthday party. At first they offered me beer, which to their horror, I politely declined, and then they offered me wine. Though at the time I was not a huge fan of wine (probably because the “wine” I was accustomed to drinking comes in a box), I figured I couldn’t say no twice, and took it. A truly life-changing moment.

Now, I’ve come so far to even make my own wine! Case in point:

We were in a grape stomping competition representing Team USA against two Chileans. The rules are simple enough: the first team to fill the jug with grape juice wins. WE WON!

This was at a wine festival called the Fiesta de la Vendimia about an hour outside of Santiago, where over 20 vineyards participated to showcase their wines. For 4000 Chilean pesos (less than $9), you get a very pretty wine glass which you use to try four glasses of wines of your choosing. Most of the vineyards were very generous with their samples (you could ask just to try one before deciding you wanted to use your ticket on it), so I definitely ended up drinking more than four glasses of wine. Not complaining.

Today, we visited a vineyard called Casas del Bosque and got to harvest some grapes!

The fruits of my labor. (I’m so witty, I know.)

We then went to work separating the good grapes from the ugly, diseased ones.

This is actually a TON harder than it looks – the grapes move through the machine super quickly, and a lot of the bad ones slip by your fingers. I highly doubt they’ll be using our produce to make any quality wine.

And then we worked on drinking wine. A lot of it. Not a bad day, I’d say.

Back to Reality

I survived my first full week of school y’all! It involved: standing in line for two hours to sign up for a class, hauling my butt across the city only to be told that my class doesn’t start until next week, and feeling completely incompetent being the only foreigner in one of my classes and understanding at most half of what my classmates were saying. Oh, and skipping class 😛 (Just one! Come on, everyone knows that the “study” in study abroad isn’t a real thing.)

I don’t want to bore you with the details of school, but I’m taking classes at two universities: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (aka La Católica) and Universidad de Chile (aka La Chile). The past week and a half we’ve basically been shopping for classes, since next Tuesday is the last day we can add/drop classes at La Católica. As of right now, at La Católica I’m taking a history/literature class for our program, a Spanish literature class, and a class called Women and Society in Chile. The last class is designed for foreigners, which means the professor speaks. so. so. slowly and translates words such as excepciones (which means exceptions, I had no idea!). Hopefully sooner or later she’ll figure out that we’re actually decent at Spanish, or else this class is going to be painful in a completely different way.

In La Chile, I actually still have no idea what I’m going to be taking, since I haven’t had the patience to click through the registration website to see which classes actually have a defined schedule. Oh, and a few days ago we got an e-mail saying that Political Science classes in La Chile probably won’t start until April. But the registration period ends in March. Yup, makes sense to me.

Speaking of La Chile, they take freshman hazing to a whole new level.

Some poor freshman rolling around in fruit and having flour and syrup being poured on her. Every department has a different (usually very public) hazing activity – I also saw some freshies in ripped up clothing, covered in paint roaming the streets asking people for money so they could get their belongings back.

The aftermath.

Scavenger hunts are looking pretty tame now, huh?

March Madness

Okay, so I get that everyone back at Wash U is going through hell week right now, seeing it’s the week before spring break, but us noobs in Chile are also going through somewhat of a hell week: course registration. I’ve probably spent the past 5 hours looking through course listings and course evaluations by past students on our program, and I still have no idea what I’m doing. This is due in part to the atrocity of the course listings book for la Universidad de Chile, one of the two universities where I want to take classes. Here’s the information we have: Class name and code, section, hours per week, credits, and if we’re lucky, a course description. Professor: TBD. Room: TBD. And best of all: Schedule: TBD.

So here I am, trying to juggle classes between two universities, except I have no idea when the classes at one of the universities meets. So we’re basically supposed to blindly pick classes based on their names since, again, descriptions are few and far between, go meet with a professor tomorrow and ask for the schedules (which means the schedules have been determined and they’re just hiding them from us – anyone sensing a conspiracy?), and hope it fits into our schedule with the other classes we’ve registered for. Seems like a flawless system to me.

So to escape from this stress, I’ve decided to remember the good old days of summer break (aka February), since I didn’t write very much during those days.

After attending the Super Bowl and being super classy at some vineyards in Mendoza, we moved on to Córdoba, the second biggest city in Argentina. It’s not a tourist destination, so there’s not much to do in the city – some churches, plazas, and middle-aged women huddled around a TV.

They were watching some singer on the TV – reminds me of the middle-aged women in Japan who go cray for K-pop.

Lucky for us, nighttime was a different story. There was an international food fair going on that night about an hour away by bus, so we headed over there with some people from the hostel (which was super cool by the way, if you ever find yourself in Córdoba stay at Che Salguero Youth Hostel). It was basically like Taste of St. Louis, but with each stand representing a different country.

Anyone fancy a pig on a stick?

We ended up at the Cuba station, and I got myself a mojito. But not just any mojito…

A giant mojito! Plus you get a discount if you get a refill. What a (dangerous) deal.

I drank that all by myself, and proceeded to get a strawberry daiquiri in the same cup a few hours later. (I think y’all know what happened after that.) Safe to say, I was well on my way to drinking 21 drinks in the week of my 21st birthday.

We made some friends too!

Apparently here it’s acceptable for kids to be out dancing at 2AM coz this champ was definitely getting his groove on.

It worked! I feel less stressed already. Expect more rants in the coming days when we actually register for classes, which from what I’ve heard is a ridiculous process in and of itself. But for now, I’ll leave you here with this:

You can’t tell, but they were probably in their mid-60s. That is what I call: rockin’ it.