8 months later, it's getting a little old that no one can pronounce my name

I can say it. I can spell it (in Spanish). I can try different ways of explaining it, like it's the letter D (pronounced "dey" in Spanish) plus the Spanish word ven. "Oh, David?" Grmph, huh, what? Were you listening? I mean, it's not a common name here, sure, but Guadalupe isn't common where I come from, and I can pronounce that. Actually Guadalupe is my dentists name. That's right, I have an Argentine dentist. I didn't recognize her as my dentist when I got to the office, since she looks about my age and I'm used to dentists being about 55 (I actually thought she was a dental assistant at first), but I have heard good things about Argentine dentists, and the prices are pretty unbelievable: like $15 for a filling with a 10-year guarantee (I was quoted $500 for 4 fillings before I left the States). Although there are certain niceties you do without, like there actually are no dental assistants - I had to hold the suction tool in my mouth while Guadalupe cleaned my teeth. The whole process feels much less formal than in the States: the TV is on the whole time (very Latin American - I think it was just background noise to her, and probably people expect it to be on so they can watch while they're being worked on, but I still almost asked her to turn it off. I mean, it's really not a distraction?); and Guadalupe exchanged small talk with me in a way that didn't feel nearly as paternal as I'm used to from my family dentist back home (from th 55 year old grandfatherly type dentist). But so far, so good - I had my teeth cleaned, they told me I have two cavities (they told me 4 in the States - are they missing something here, or are they trying to increase the bill back home? I could go either way), and I'm getting x-rayed on Monday so she can assess my wisdom teeth (the removal process, if necessary, I think will cost something like $80 for the top two teeth, which are already out, and $200 for the bottom two, which are impacted. I was quoted $2500 back home. True, I am nervous thinking that sometimes you get what you pay for, but then I also truly believe that health care generally and dental care in particular is grossly overpriced in the US).

I think I have my Brazil travel planned out: a week in Rio, a week in Salvador (Africa in Brazil) with some capoera lessons, and a week in a little beach town south of Natal to surf for a week. After that, it's off to Manaus for two weeks in the Amazon. Or at least that's the plan if I get my visa. The Brazilian consulate in Buenos Aires is notoriously finicky about visa applications - at one point, the woman looked at my papers, shuffled through them and said, "let's see... what don't you have?" like she was just waiting to find something I'd forgotten. I eventually got it turned in, but it took three visits. At first, there was a whole slew of stuff I did wrong: I didn't have my phone number in Argentina. I didn't list the address of my school (which they actually didn't even ask for on the application). My picture was too small, so I would have to get a new one. "Do you have a letter from your university proving you're a student?" she asked me. "Are you fucking serious?" I thought. I can just picture the look on the face of someone at Western, whoever I would ask - who would I ask? - for a letter proving I'm a student, and what they might actually write: "Dear Brazilian Consulate of Buenos Aires, I promise and cross my heart that Devin Malone, bla bla bla, official stationary, bla bla bla, sincerely..." Do people really ever have that? There was no mention that I would need anything like that from the perky-looking, South-Park-esque Happy Traveller Mascot on the consulate website. By the way, who cares if I'm actually a student anyways? I checked the "tourist" box on the application, and I provided four months of bank statements showing I have plenty of cash. Who cares if I clean toilets or smuggle tiger cubs or whatever? I've got cash, and there are no tigers in Brazil for me to kidnap... eventually she accepted a combination of my ISIC card and university ID card.

After my second visit, she wouldn't accept my Chilean cell number as my number in Argentina. This exchange went something like this: Her, "you need to provide a number where you can be reached in Argentina." Me, "I did, that's my cell number while I'm here." Her, "yes, but this is a Chilean number." Me, "but that's my number in Argentina, which is what you asked for, right?" Her, "show me the phone." I pull out my phone and show her the number on it and that it has signal and dials. Her - "yes, but if we need to call you, we're not calling you on that (read: we're cheap bastards who want to use your $110 application fee towards caviar at our Christmas party, not phone calls to delinquent visa applicants)." "Figure out something else," she told me. I had to go home and call my renter and get my phone number, and come back with it, because obviously calling it in would have been too easy. But hey, these guys are open 3 hours a day and probably have a lot of hard work to get done, so I understand. Oh yeah, and when you pay your application fee, you do that at a bank several blocks away, not at the consulate. Obviously.

Erin's flight was delayed, so I have another night to kill. I've kind of been waiting to do a walking tour of the city until she gets here, and it's not much fun eating out at fancy restaurants by yourself (I'm alone in the apartment now). Although I did go to a super awesome restaurant a couple nights ago with some folks from my hostel: it was called La Viruta and was on Viruta street (wow, who knew?) in Palermo. There were three of us, and it was a 30 minute wait for a table. They had a couple tables outside that they weren't really serving at, since it was pretty chilly, but we waited there anyways. In the meantime, the staff brought out three glasses of red wine, along with bread, cheese, and sausage. After we finished off those, they brought out a huge sausage off the parrilla (grill). By the time we got our table, I wasn't even that hungry anymore. When we did get our dinner, it came with a huge antipasto plate of stuff like candied garlic, pureed pumpkin, little mashed potatoes, and the like. I ordered a Caesar salad, something I hadn't had a chance to eat in a while, and it was definitely a meal for two people. They looked at us a little strange when we asked to take some of it home (doggy bags generally not being a concept here), but there was just no way we could finish everything! We had a bottle of wine, two Caesar salads, and a roast duck. It was about $11 each - the stuff we had while waiting was all gratis. I wouldn't say Argentina is cheap, exactly - it's not really - but it is excellent value.

I Officially Pass for Argentine

I claim this because I was walking by an English school yesterday, and the girl out front was trying to recruit people and asked "do you have problems with your English?" I just smiled and said no. Of course, I only really pass as Argentine until I open my mouth, or until someone looks at my shoes. Seriously, I have seen several people look at my shoes since arriving in Buenos Aires, and right now have my Backpacker Hiking Boots on, which are a pretty dead giveaway (my non-BHBs are in my bag, since they pack much easier than big boots).



Yes, I have arrived in Buenos Aires, or Paris-in-South America. The people are pale-skinned and smartly dressed, and portenos (people from Buenos) will often tell you about their Italian or Spanish family background before they cop to being South American. The city itself, too, feels very Parisian (or at least what I understand from pictures, having never been there): narrow, one-way streets punctuated with wide boulevards and avenues; roundabouts decorated with fountains and statues; buildings with ornate entrance ways, stone balconies, and marble staircases. It makes for nice walking around. I haven't really been very many places yet, since my sister is coming tomorrow and I have a lot of logistical stuff to figure out for her visit, plus I need to get my travel to Brazil figured out.

The Spanish here is a little easier to understand than Chilean Spanish, I think; the main difference being that they talk a Hell of a lot slower (the good side), and they change the pronunciation of ll and y to a "sh" sound (the bad side). But I think I can get used to "sh" a lot faster than I can get used to people who talk a mile a minute with words only used in their neighborhoods. Still though, virtually the first thing I did off the plane was ask where the Callao metro station was, which took a few tries because the girl I asked didn't understand "ca-ya-o," but when she came back with "ca-sha-o?" I realized my mistake. It's funny, the change permeates so many common words (yo, or "I/me", becomes "show;" como se llama or "what do they call you" becomes "shamma" instead of "yamma," for example), that Argentines almost sounds like they're lisping or something when you first listen to them.

Not only is it warmer here than in Vina, but they heat more buildings here. And it's hard, because I'd become so used to a 50 degree ambient temperature that my body has forgotten how to deal with a 68-degree room - starting with the UN building, but continuing with the airport and my hostel in Argentina, I've been sweating pretty hard lately. Man, what's going to happen when I get to the beach in Brazil? Also, you will always need a key to get in or out of any private building in this country. In fact, even most businesses open to the public have to buzz you in, even in the middle of the day. It's like they all sell porn or drug or something. Not that I would know anything about that.

The first thing I need to do before my sister gets here is arrange all the stuff to go to Brazil. That means getting a visa. But before I can apply for my visa, I have to get extra visa pages in my passport, because they will turn down your application if they think you don't have enough pages (I had two left). So I had to go to the US embassy first. At least there I got to use the fast-track line for US citizens and bypass the line around the block of what appeared to be mostly students applying for permission to visit the US. The consulate room was a bit of a scene, with maybe a hundred Argentines waiting to be serviced by 3 windows, where the teller would occasionally get on their speaker behind their bullet-proof glass and announce the next group of names to be helped. Everyone would go "shhh! shhh!" as they strained to listen, and then most of them would then groan as three or four people would form a cue behind the given window. Myself, I was entertained for a while watching everything: scores of excited young people, a woman at the US Citizen window getting upset and waving her arms wildly - "...because of the delay... but they told me..." (I wasn't sure what was going on, but was glad I wasn't her); the 60-some year old American ex-pat making a fool of himself by singing what sounded like old 50's Sinatra-style Spanish songs to a group of embarrassed 15 and 16 year old girls. In fact, that last bit unfolded right next to me, and I was so close to the guy, who came back twice to try and strut his stuff as the girls turned red and stifled giggles (while others in the room giggled outright), that I was embarrassed just to be next to him. I shrunk down in my chair, trying to mentally project the idea that "I am not with him; in fact I'm not actually American. I just have the passport, and am in fact a wealthy cigar importer living in Miami. Don't look at my shoes." It's not that the guy was a bad singer (in fact, he was pretty good), but the fact that he was so blatantly singing to this group of young girls, a group in an age category that nobody in their right mind would expect to react positively to such excruciatingly public attention; at least no one who knew or remembered anything about 16 year old girls. And that was the most painful thing: this guy wasn't creepy, he was clueless.

Eventually though, I grew bored with the endless bureaucracy: go to this window, turn in application; go to a second window to receive a proof of payment (ironically, extra visa pages are free, so I had to go to the cashier to get the receipt showing I hadn't paid anything); be called back to the first window just so they can tell you they're still working on the pages, etc. But now my passport has pages 1-24 PLUS pages A-Z, and a visa-sized sticker proclaiming that this passport was modified on such and such a date for such and such a reason, which is kind of cool I guess. American passports have the least number of visa pages of any country, probably since we don't travel much even when we have passports (only about 10% of US citizens have one). I guess when the bean-counters at the Congressional Budget Office figured out this move would save X dollars a year, some civic-minded senator had the foresight to insert a clause into the change that would allow the travel-happy to at least get a normal number of visa pages at no charge.

So yeah, it wasn't the most fun way to spend my first day in Buenos, but at least I'm back in a country where I can get orange juice without sugar in it (hey, I liked Chile, but the juice was awful).

Last day in Vina del mar... *tear*

Last walk on the beach. Last sunset from my apartment. Last Spanish lesson. Last chance to make out in Duff (our favorite club. Partly because it's super easy to make out. OK, mostly for that reason. I mean the Escudo tastes the same everywhere, and thy play the same 3 reggaeton songs in every club...). Overall, Chile has been kind to me, minus the cold, which hasn't been brutal, but neither has it been kind. On that note, I can't believe I'm going to spend two weeks in wintery Buenos Aires before I head to the beaches of Northern Brazil, where it'll be warm!

I guess the rain wasn't particularly kind, either. After a few days hiatus, it came back with a vengeance. Vinians are seemingly oblivious to the innovation that we might call "gutters" or "storm drains;" instead the slow pile of rain becomes rivers in the street and deceptive puddles on the sidewalks. Any surface with an incline sheds sheets of waters, with little rivers of bubbles running through them (probably a result from some industrial or auto pollution, but fun nonetheless). The parks, which have a uniform loamy sand on their footpaths, become prehistoric muddy bogs, hostile to their normal pedestrian traffic. And as everyone back home in western Washington can agree, rain in 35 degree weather is no fun.

But generally, I think I can say I'll miss Vina del Mar. I took one last walk on the beach at sunset today (just to be a TOTALLY cheesy romantic), and knew that being here in spring and summer must be one of the nicest ways you could spend your time - lacking the crowds of summer, but still with enough heat to stroll in a t-shirt. Seriously, the beach is such an awesome place; at night for being contemplative, and during the day as a public meeting spot. Beach, boardwalk, and public parks give plenty of places to stroll around with friends and family, see people, and just be social. There are carnival rides and battery-powered cars for the kids (I can't even imagine how excited I would have been at 8 years old if I had a racetrack of Power Wheels next to my house), local handicrafts, beautiful sand sculptures, tasty snacks, and surf, sand, and sun. The whole thing makes me think about how profoundly sad it is that society is so isolated in the United States: parks are for walking the dog and avoiding at night; "family" usually means just the people that live in the same house (when you see them); and our biggest concern seems to be how we can help ourselves. I think if I ever had kids, I would want to raise them someplace in addition to the US. I mean, I love my country, but there's a lot more out there.

Jason has one more week of school, and he's working on a video project where his group is investigating the concept of piropos, or Chilean pick-up lines (or something like that. Not really pick-up lines, just silly things to holler at girls to try and get them to smile. Equivalent to what construction workers do in the US, but more clever and not as ordinario). They're as many and varied as all modes of Chilean speech, and while they usually come from the guys, girls will use them as well. Pretty much, everyplace else in the world (except maybe Muslim countries, although I have no first-hand experience) are more open about sex than the US. Not just whistles on the street and piropos, but making out in a restaurant, for example, is perfectly acceptable socially. Jason says that some of the gringas in his classes are offended by the whole thing, but to me it just seems like a cultural difference - one of those things people supposedly travel to experience. In fact, when Jason told his Chilean friend that piropos are considered low-class in the US, she replied, "really? How boring." She went on to explain that while not always welcome, it always feels nice that someone thinks you're so attractive that they'll blurt out something ridiculous just to get your attention. I first became familiar with the concept when Jason and I were at a club one night, and I had had enough drinks that when Jason told me to go over to a couple of girls and ask eres de aca, o del cielo? - are you from here, or from Heaven? - that I actually did it. And what's more, it actually worked! We got invited to dance; I couldn't believe it. I told that story to a Chilean friend and tried to explain the concept of "cheesiness" with my limited Spanish vocabulary.

I still consider my Spanish to be pretty awful, especially my comprehension, although I did throw out some old flash cards today, ones I'd learned, and I was impressed at how big the stack was. But understanding people is a totally different story. Especially in Chile, where even Chileans will admit their grammar and pronunciation is bad. As yet another example, the Spanish for 10 is diez, which Chilenos tend to pronounce dii (like with a small guttural stop between the two I's), or maybe just like a long, drawn-out letter D. Basically, they're the equivalent of the mumbling Scotts of the English-speaking world (although they do say super a lot, which is cool - pronounced "sou-pear". I'm surprised I haven't been using it more; I use it a lot at home). And I just can't wait to get to Argentina tomorrow, where yo becomes cho and ll is pronounced sh instead of yu, and a factura is a pastry, even though it's a receipt everyplace else in Latin America.

Oh yeah, I'm really seriously supposed to have my interview with Omar Bello tomorrow morning. Which means I had to put off going to Buenos for a day (and days are starting to become precious at this point), and I'll be at the UN with my big red backpack. Sou-pear cool. I just hope it actually happens this time - first there was the thing with the permission to film, then he got sick on Thursday (I found out 5 minutes before I got on the bus), and then his secretary didn't call me back on Friday to let me know if he would be in, and no one was answering the phone, and I need 3 hours to get there... what a pain! I missed a week of Spanish classes for that. But it gave me more time to eat manjar ice cream, which is nice (I have it in the mall, which you'll recall is heated and thus more conducive to ice cream-eating).

Dinner at 6am

My life has become totally adjusted to the schedule of a clubber. I wake up at 2pm, have breakfast, go to Spanish class, come home for lunch at about 7pm, have elevenses before going out, and head out to the clubs with Jason. I get home usually between 5 and 7am, have a light dinner, and go to sleep to start it all over again the next day. It's honestly pretty damn tiring, and even on the days I don't go out, I have to stick to something close to that schedule - it's just how my body operates now. Unfortunately this means I see little actual natural light (fortunately I'm only here for another week and hopefully won't get rickets). And somehow, I always feel pretty busy and am trying to cram stuff together, even though I do nothing. I've barely been cooking the last week or so because I haven't gotten around to shopping for food and then actually cooking it (I've been sticking to bachelor-style stuff - like lentils and rice and hot sauce. Man I'm a lazy sod).

Chileans take elevenses in mid-evening, around 7pm usually, unlike the Brits who have their elevenses at 11am as a late morning snack. It's basically a light dinner of stuff you don't really have to cook, like bread with jam or avocado and tea. I have no idea why they still call it elevenses when it happens at 7. Must be a mutated English import or something. But there are lots of strange sayings in Latin America, especially in Chile: your soul mate, for example, is your media naranja - literally your "half orange." Because I've been feeling the pain of missing the other half of my orange... I also like chupa mas que orilla la playa, or "he drinks more than the beach." Other good sayings in Chile: mas raro que un pez con hombros, or "stranger than a fish with shoulders;" there's also an equivalent of "when pigs fly" in English: cuando bomberos tengan sueldo or, "when the firemen get paid" (firemen are all volunteers in Chile).

It's been said that the insane number of modismos, or Chilean slang, has contributed to the large number of high-quality Chilean poets, like Pablo Neruda (there are thousands of modismos, many of which are regional). I don't know if it's true, but it does make them really, really hard to understand as they rapidly fire off truncated Spanish using a lot of words I've never heard and will never even be able to use outside the country, even if I were to learn them (although it does make you sound cool to be able to throw around a few). Spanish also has a lot of weird words, like there's a word just for the spot underneath your nose where a little Hitler mustache would be. We were going through some vocabulary in my Spanish class, and my English translation needed two lines, because there's nothing even close to that in English. I guess it's a popular piercing spot; maybe so much so that the piercing vocabulary has worked itself into the common lexicon (I bet if I asked a piercer in the US they would have a word for it too. Kerry, any idea? Ask a P-Towner with a shaved head and a colander tattooed on - which is going to be my actual kitchen-utensil tattoo, I decided). But likewise, they don't have words for some stuff that we do in English - like the word for fingers is the same as the word for toes.

Chileans also love to use diminutivos, which is a modifier that makes something a smaller version of the original, e.g. chica or girl, becomes chiquita, little girl (despite the fact that there is a perfectly serviceable word that just means "little girl"). In Jason's host family, his mom is Nancy, and so is his (adult) host sister, so when they're together the mom is Nancy and the sister is Nancita. Diminutivos used in sentences always manage to throw me, just because my Spanish sucks and by the time I recognize the diminutivo I've missed trying to listen to the rest of the sentence (which I probably wouldn't have understood anyways).

In an attempt to improve my Spanish in a novel way, I'm working through a book that Jason gave me that was written for 7 year olds (laugh as hard as you want at my pun, I know it's totally awesome). It's funny though, I've tried to ask different Latinos what would be good books for my Spanish level, and they always respond that no one reads much, and that books are expensive for people here (prices are comparative to prices back home). This is true across countries, and the respondent always looks away and says it like they're a little sad about it. Maybe that's because I mostly hang out with upper-income, educated people here. Seriously though, I meet so many people here my age that have super cool and impressive sounding degrees. Particularly women; I literally think that every girl I meet here is studying biochemical engineering or in some other sort of hardcore math/science field. It's particularly strange because I never meet people studying that stuff in the states, especially women. I guess though Chileans want to have a job when they get out of college, something I don't think American students consider until the last week of the grace period on their college loans. Except maybe nursing students, who had the actual foresight to see a job market with an insatiable demand and good pay, or at least were lucky enough to happen to like wiping people's butts at the same time the economy needs more butt-wiping.

It's been getting colder here, and is around freezing at night. There's also been quite a bit of rain, although somehow I've never actually seen it. I've seen evidence of it, like 4-inch puddles in the low spots of intersections, and I've heard it pounding on the corrugated tin roof of my balcony at night, but I've never actually seen it.

Other errata: I was waiting on an empty sidewalk corner to meet up with a friend, and I saw a guy of about 60, with a grey beard and curly handlebar mustache running by. He was wearing a short-brimmed nylon cap; stuck around the cap were what looked like welding goggles. He also had a long-sleeved polyester shirt of black, fuchsia, and gold; khaki cargo-pocket shorts pulled up past his navel, and knee-high black socks. With him was a sweater-wearing dog of mixed breed, but he must have had some corgi in him though because he was running sideways (Welsh corgis were bread to herd geese, of all strange things, and tend to run a little off-kilter). It was 11pm. He was my first Latino Eccentric Old Man. I longed for my camera.

Hey, did you miss all my old ranting?

It occurred to me the other day that I haven't had a good rant for a while. Part of that is because I haven't been following news from back home or anything, and it's way easier to rant about your own culture (or at least something nebulous and abstract, like the Catholic Church). But for those of you who have missed my ranting, here are two, one which is at least tangentially related to my life here and the other not really at all. Oh yeah, some of you probably never really liked my rantings. So maybe there is something more wholesomely entertaining for you here.

Rant One: Where have all the Socks gone?
My socks have been slowly disappearing. The ones that haven't disappeared have been subjected to various tortures of too much detergent and extra-hard water in random laundromats in places like the Salar de Uyuni (it's a desert; they probably use the same water 20 times). So, I've been buying new socks. But I'm starting to think that there are no good socks in South America. I bought three pair in Bolivia, and one has been thrown out because it got holes in the heels, and the other two are going the same way - even though they're only 2 months old. And the had all these loose strings inside, which not only made them hard to get on, but also forced me to hasten their self-destruction as my toes snagged on what was supposed to be holding the damn things together. I bought three more pairs here in Chile, which ended up not even pretending to stretch to the size of an adult foot. They LOOKED like they were the same size as my other socks, but my other socks don't perfectly maintain their shape even when a big fat foot is stuffed inside. And those socks are coming apart already, even thought they're only 2 weeks old. In short, my old, US socks are outlasting my new, LA socks - even thought they were kind of old and ratty when I started the trip 8 months ago.

What gives? It's not like I don't believe that there are something like 3 big factories in Shanghai that make 99% of the worlds socks, some good, some bad. I mean, just slap a different address label on the shipping container and good socks can come to LA too! Just one more little thing that's great about living in the Land of the Free, Home of the Well-Clad Foot that we don't even realize is so awesome.

Rant Two: Was pop music always this bad?
So one song that gets a lot of air time on certain radio stations down here (like it does fucking EVERYWHERE, I understand) s that "Girlfriend" song by Avril Lavigne. Which, HOLY SHIT, JUST CAME ON THE RADIO IN HERE. Good timing. Now I can remember all the shit I hate about it... although really there are two things: first, it's stupid, insipid, and vaguely offensive (is that three things? I guess we could lump those into the general catagory of "it sucks")Basically, this song makes me think "who the fuck do you think you are, Avril?" Oh, you don't like my girlfriend? And you're obviously way, way better, because you're a "motherfucking princess," "can do it better," and "are gonna make me feel alright"? What, you think I'm such a stupid asshole or such a whimpy loser that my girlfriend is some asshole loser too? In which case, why the fuck are you interested in me anyways? This whole melodic pile of shit is just one more piece in the dynamic development of the American female into Paris Hilton-esque snotty, self-important bitches who spend all their time obsessing over their looks and wondering how they can fuck with boys and build up their egos (and not worrying about how to be engineers or doctors or something). Admittedly, boys are easy to fuck with (creating tempting targets), and have been on top for a long time; and I'm all for self-confident, assertive women, but Jesus this song makes me want to puke.

Of course, all of this assumes that Avril actually wrote this song, and actually wrote it to some unspecified audience of one because of actual emotional occurrences in her actual life - you know, the way artists create. But I think much more likely is that the lyrics were suggested to her by a room full of marketing experts, who focus-tested a group of 16 year old girls from SoCal and designed the perfectly consumable song. It's pretty much to music what Red Robin's or TGI Friday's is to restaurants.

Which leads me to the second thing I hate about that song - it's designed to be perfectly consumable, so I actually LIKE the fucking thing and it always gets stuck in my head (just like I LIKE going to Red Robin's, although it's more fun if you wear silly clothes and see how much you can abuse the bottomless fry policy). It's got the perfect formula of chorus/verse/bridge that makes it perfectly fucking catchy. It's like my own free will of musical sensibility has been hijacked by the executives of RCA, and I can't get it back until I pull the baseball bat out of my toilet and smash my radio into a thousand tiny bits. And that makes me mad.

What happens in the meadow at dusk? Everything? Or nothing?


OK, not my greatest rants, but I'm a little rusty. Please stay tuned.

Crisis resolved, but another problem just came back. No, it's not Mike. Thank God.

So the good news is I found a little produce market near my house that still has Hass avos for $680/kilo. Whew! But when I said I had gotten used to the temperature here, that was before it decide to drop to 34 degrees at night. And when I say that, I don't mean outside - recall that few buildings have heaters here, which means my apartment is 35 at night. Fortunately, I have red fleece pants and a blue thermal that make me look pretty silly (Perttu once bought me breakfast on the condition I wear them to the restaurant), but they keep me warm.

I live between two different worlds: when I go out the door of my building, if I keep going straight, it's one block to the mall. If I go the opposite direction, it's one block to the beach. I actually like them both, but for different reasons since they're pretty different places: like there's a big open space in front of the mall doors, but it's hard to actually hang out there because they don't put any benches or anything there (although lots of people hang out there anyways). But that makes sense, because the whole idea of the mall is that it's a hip, cool place - to come inside and buy stuff, not hang out in front with your friends. I mean, you can do that, and meet people, and laugh and cry and fall in love - as long as you're buying stuff while you do it. I saw a big group of teenagers hanging out in the food court, just sitting around, and mall management kicked them out - even though one of them had actually just bought a drink from one of the restaurants and the food court was half-empty. I guess they were below the allowable spending threshold (like when I used to get stoned with my friends and go to Denny's at 5am, and they would be kicking out the goth kids who would only buy dollar coffee with free refills. But that's OK, because the greasy John with coke-bottle glasses and a gravy-stained white-collar shirt who is with - but not really talking to - the call girl dressed in an old purple 80's prom dress are still at the table behind us, and the passed-out homeless guy that has filled all the chairs at his table with 20 or so grocery bags is still at the table next to us, and the waiter that is so strung out that he has to come back and ask us what we wanted three times even though it's just three milkshakes is still talking to us. GOD I miss Denny's at 5am...). Where was I? Oh right, the mall. It's a temple of commercialism, and don't try and think otherwise, or they'll boot your ass. But the mall does have central heating, a ridiculously large grocery store, and cute girls inside. So I like it for those reasons.

The beach, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of the mall. I was walking along the beach the other night, trying to figure out why I liked doing that so much. My last walk was at night, so there was no one out, and the waves were extra big - sneaking in through the dark and setting themselves off like rows of blasting caps, startling me with an exploding white sheet of foamy water, crashing down the line just like a scene from a documentary about the making of the Panama Canal or something. They made me jump more than once as they broke me out of my meditative tranquility, before settling down to a pattern of smaller waves for just enough time to lull me into another peaceful state - until the next big one comes. I think I like walks on the beach because they are basically walking meditation - also why I like them even more at night, when they're empty, the moon is out, and the lights of Valparaiso are twinkling on the hills across the bay. The beach is the opposite of the mall because unlike the mall, which is just one long ego feeder(who looks good, who's got the nicest fanny pack, does my hair still look OK? What should I buy to get the girls to talk to me, am I defined better by a Lacosta kind of look or a Pac Sun kind of look?) the beach can destroy your ego - an endless horizon, a field of stars overhead, water from half-way around the world and light from half-way across the galaxy, on a million-year-old field of glittering yellow-white sand. I don't know, it's more like it's not really offering anything, like the desperate commercialism of the mall, but it's not demanding anything either. You're allowed to just slip away, inside your own head but really someplace else. But the mall does have manjar (caramel) soft-serve ice cream...

One thing that is funny about the mall by my house though is that there is a university housed in the upper floors - University of the Americas, a private chain university, with dozens of campuses, and a new location coming soon to your area! That makes sense though, I guess. Anyways, last time I was in the mall, art classes had just gotten out, and I was watching palid, skinny students, dressed in frumpy black coats, thick glasses, and big fluffy scarves, clutching still-wet easels close to their bodies while they wound their way down the escalators through the shimmering white world of wholesale soullessness housed in a mini-galaxy displaying a complete lack of creativity, where everything is tested in focus-groups and discussed in meetings, so that each American Eagle and Ruby Tuesday will display a maximum attractiveness to Joe Average. And I thought, "man, those guys must want to shoot themselves in the face every time they go to class." But hey, here's to being poor, marginalized, and creative!

Jason and I were in line for a bar the other night, and there were maybe 20 people in front of us. Not many, except that they were letting in 4 people every half hour. Then the bouncer saw us, clinging to the very back of the line, and waved us over and motioned us inside. Being a gringo, and being presumed attractive to the other clients and presumed rich for the bar owner, has many perks.

SHIT, IT'S A CRISIS

Avocado prices have gone up 50%! The season must have ended. So now I have been forced to stop using them on my cereal, and stick to sandwiches and ice cream. Boo. Also today at the supermarket I had the deli lady measure out some chicken breasts for me (I asked for two), and then she told me how much they would cost (like they always do). I kind of squished my face up and said "okay," to which she replied entendiste? (did you understand?). I think there was some confusion: I didn't contort my face as an indication of my inability to comprehend what was being said, but just because it's kind of a weird question. How am I supposed to answer that? "No, that's too much. Go ahead and cut that one into thirds for me." Still though, every time I think my Spanish is improving Chileans let me know that it isn't. Like I went into a restaurant today, told them what I wanted, and said "para aca" which means "for here" - at least in Bolivia and Peru. In Chile they say "para servir," so when she asked me that I got confused and thought she was referencing to condiments, which had happened to me a couple days before (I don't know the word for condiments), plus I thought we had already covered the for here/to go ground. So I just said no, and so she said "para llavar?" "To go?" Oh, no, para servir is fine... damn I look like a retard right now. Again. Also, I'm good at conversation rewinds, where two other people are talking, and ten minutes later I bring up what they said at the beginning of the conversation; and sometimes I just say things that make it abundantly clear I have no idea what's going on: Them - "Hey, can you help me push my car to the gas station?" Me - "Actually, I'm from Alaska!"



My "mid-shelf" wine turned out to be overpriced bottom-shelf wine. But the upside is that you can always use crappy wine to make jote (hoe-tay), which is 3 parts red wine and 1 part Coca-Cola. Doesn't that sound revolting? I thought it did, but then I tried it and it's actually not bad at all. It's not wine anymore, but neither is it Coke. It's a whole separate beverage. Plus, nothing says fun like mixing stimulants and depressants! I saw people in Bolivia do this with red wine and orange Fanta too, but I still am a little wary of that combo. I mean come on, orange Fanta? Sounds a little ordinario to me. Oh yeah, you can buy pre-mixed jote in a box that has uncarbonated cola. But that just screams instant hangover to me. It's next to the Ice beer.



Speaking of Bolivia, I've realized that that country, combined with Peru, has seriously conditioned me to avoid talking to people in the street. A couple of times it has happened in Chile that people want to talk to me, and this fight-or-flight reaction kicks in and I just face straight ahead and say "no!" and walk away as fast as possible. One day this guy, who looked homeless, started asking me something, sort of gesturing towards himself, and I didn't even say anything. But my reaction time is instant; my internal Spanish processing isn't. I got two or three steps away, after my body had already made the "flight" decision, and then my mind came around and realized he was asking what time it was. I felt like a jerk. Another time, a couple of cute girls asked me if I had a bus card, which was weird because they don't have those here (although they do in Santiago). Once again, the inertia of my reaction wouldn't let me stop to talk to them about what they needed, which I was kicking myself for a block later: definitely worth relinquishing some bus fare for the opportunity to meet cute girls! Of course, they were probably counting on my thinking that.



The culture here is just really different: it feels like much less of a free-for-all, and there's more of a feeling of unity. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that there is little in the way of distinct indigenous subgroups, like there is in Bolivia. In fact, in many ways the dichotomy between the indians and the mestizos is what defines Bolivian political life: there's very much a feeling of "us versus them," and a strong attitude of attrition. But here there's much more of a feeling that "we are all Chileans," and it's evident in different ways. One is in the way Chileans will tolerate using taxes to provide social welfare to the poor (Chile is one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America, and also one of the most equal). Also, there's a new park going up near my apartment, and the sign proudly proclaims that the park is 100% designed and funded by the city. I'm not sure how to interpret that other than a sort of cheerleading for civic life - both in regards to public spaces and public officials. Even in little things it's more evident, like the way most Chilean pedestrians will always wait for the crosswalk signal, even with no traffic in sight, and drivers will always stop at lights and crosswalks (I'm not used to that, and have gotten several thank you-waves from drivers for my letting them pass. If they tried to have crosswalks without stop lights in Bolivia, I think the drivers would just laugh - pedestrian target practice!). Sure, this is all pretty anecdotal (like all of my observations), but there definitely feels like more of a culture of respect and less of a each-for-themselves kind of attitude. I even saw a car the other day that had those things on the doors that keep them from denting other cars - a product that seems to exist solely for people that want to watch out for other peoples property.



I think I've become accustomed to the climate here: it's about 40 degrees during the day, inside and out. I went and had coffee with a friend when I first got here, and she remarked how hot it was in the cafe, but I just thought "that's because it's 68 and there's only a handful of buildings in the whole city this warm," but now I catch myself thinking the same thing about heated buildings. It's also nice for cooking, because even if I don't realize it, my hands are so cold that I can use them to lift food straight from the frying pan without even feeling the heat.

Well, pretty much my waking life consists of eating, going to the gym, walking on the beach, and going to the clubs. Still no headway with my interview at the UN, but I'm going to Santiago on Monday I think (I need more pages in my passport), so maybe I'll stop by.