A few day's worth of stuff...

It's been a while since I've written anything, so I think I'll just do a day - by- day.

Wednesdays I don't have class until 6:30 at night, so I've decided to make Wednesdays my "exploring Santiago" days. I currently have a list of about 40 sights and events I want to make sure and experience/see while I'm in Santiago, and this can make for a pretty full Wednesday as I discovered last week. I ended up going to the Cathedral and exploring around a little bit -- I went to Mass there two Sundays ago before going to the soccer game, but I didn't have time to look around and it's huge so there was a lot to see. The cathedral is in the Plaza de Armas, which is one of the oldest parts of the city and sort of a cultural center downtown. After the Cathedral I tried to go visit the Museo de Historia Nacional, which is also supposed to be in the Plaza, but I couldn’t find it, which is odd. I have its address, but along the whole section of street where it should be only exists a boardwalk of hotdog stands, and when I asked someone where it was they sent me down the street to another museum. The other museum they sent me to, El Museo de Santiago, is housed in a restored colonial house, La Casa Colorado, and it’s pretty cool and also on my list, so I went and explored there with KellyAnne instead of continuing to search for the other museum.

Next we walked to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, which is kind of a long ways away, because we had gotten an email from the University telling us there would be a Brasilian performance art piece there on that day. We went to the performance art, which was actually participatory, and spent several hours listening –and understanding!!—a Brasilian artist speaking Portuguese and explaining the piece to us. It was supposed to be an exploration of communication and how people relate, and it’s kind of hard to describe what we did, but it was basically pouring cups of water into other people’s cups with our eyes closed while dancing around. It sounds strange, I know, but it’s really pretty much impossible to explain. It was, however, really neat and I’m glad we went.

After that we walked the entire distance of Parque Forestal, a park in the middle of the city that stretches from El Museo de Bellas Artes clear to La Plaza Italia. We walked there because KellyAnne had class at one of the University campuses near that area. During the walk I happened to see a Turkish coffee press in the window of a variety store and I went in and bought it for about 7 bucks, which was an awesome price. Honestly, I would have paid four times that to have real coffee –the coffee here is just instant coffee grounds and it’s AWFUL. We were both starving, so we got something to eat and then she went to class. I had some time to kill, a few hours before my class, so I walked down La Alameda (the main street through the heart of downtown) to La Iglesia San Fransico, the oldest church in the country. It was built during the years between 1572-1618.

Afterwards, I went to my class, which was actually pretty interesting (it’s a class about the culture of Chile, and before it was mostly just the professor lecturing about the Mapuche, which is the Indian population of Chile, but it’s now changed to him talking much more about modern history and the cultural affects, which is fascinating. It’s amazing how much the dictatorships have affected the culture – and it’s especially interesting because there’s a huge mix of foreign and Chilean students in the class, so we get lots of perspectives and opinions – but I digress). After that, I met KellyAnne and three people who live in her house with her (Rafa, a Mexican and Paulina and Melanie, two French girls) at an “alternative” movie theater downtown where we watched a Peruvian movie. By now it was about 10:30 and I was exhausted from walking all over the town all day long, so I went home. When we left the movie there was a band setting up to play later that night, and we originally planned on coming back around 12 to watch them, but by the time I got home I realized I was too beat to leave again.

Thursday I went to class….and didn’t do anything more exciting than that. I had Fonologia first, which is actually pretty interesting, and then went to Salsa in the neighborhood Bellavista. Luckily Salsa has gotten quite fun, and last time I had a really good partner which makes a world of difference. Maybe one of these weekends I’ll get up enough courage to go to one of the Salsa clubs with some people from my class and see what happens…although I don’t know if I’m brave enough to or not.

After Salsa class I went wandering around downtown because I didn’t have anything better to do and I still have a huge list of things I want to see downtown. I tried to go to a pair of museum in El Barrio Brasil, a funky-artsy type neighborhood downtown, but they were setting up a new exhibit so they told me I would benefit more if I came back another day after they’d finished with the exhibit. Oh, yeah, and after my Fonologia class on Thursday I spoke with one of my fellow American classmates, Fred, about visiting La Serena, an area to the north that’s supposed to be really scenic and neat, because I was thinking about going that weekend. He gave me all kinds of details about his visit, and apparently he had a really great time, but he also told me that he was planning on going to Pichilemu, a beach town to the south a few hours that he’d visited once already. He raved about how nice it was for a while, and suggested that I go check it out some time. Since it’s a few hours closer than La Serena I changed my mind and decided to go to Pichilemu for the weekend.

So….Friday afternoon/morning KellyAnne, Fred and I left Santiago on bus for Pichilemu. It was about a 5 hour trip because our bus got a flat tire once and then broke down at the very end. It broke down about 22 km from Pichilemu, and we were going to have to wait for an indefinite period of time for another bus to come pick us up, so the three of us decided to hitchhike. We started walking, and walked for about 4 km before someone in a pickup stopped for us. Don’t worry, we didn’t get in the cab or anything and there were three of us and one of them so we weren’t terribly worried. I know I probably shouldn’t even share this part of the story, but it’s what we did, so sorry Mom and Dad but now you know. Honestly, hitchhiking here in general has a reputation of being very safe.

Anyhow, we arrived in Pichilemu and Fred told us that he had a Chilean friend with a beach house there. His friend, Ricardo, had told him that he was welcome to use the house any time he wanted to, but we couldn’t get a hold of the friend now. Even though he had told us that, we didn’t want to just go stay in his house without talking to him first, so we tried to call him for quite a while. Apparently Ricardo lives in Santiago but comes to Pichilemu to surf (it’s actually a world-famous surfing spot—Jack Johnson included footage of it in one of his films) and just generally hang out. He does, however, have a “key keeper” in Pichilemu for people just like us who want to use the house. Dubiously enough, the key-keeper’s name is “Equis,” which is how you pronounce the letter “X” in Spanish. Yeah. Anyhow, we also couldn’t get a hold of X, but when we went to check out the house before going to get something to eat we found several picture windows unlocked and even one bathroom window wide open. We didn’t really want to carry all of our stuff with us to dinner, so we decided to just stash it in the house while we ate.

During dinner Ricardo finally called Fred back and gave us permission, so it felt a lot less like breaking and entering, which felt much better. We ate a really awesome “expensive” fresh seafood dinner at a relatively nice restaurant with an ocean view – by “expensive” I mean that my cioppino-style soup, along with fresh bread and a drink cost all of eight dollars. Afterwards we went to the supermarket and bought groceries for the next day and some Pisco and papaya juice to make Serena Libres, then spent the evening hanging out in the house chatting and getting to know each other –since we really didn’t know Fred that well to begin with.

The next day Fred stayed in the house and studied while KellyAnne and I spent the day at the beach. We went to a place called “Punto de Lobos” which means “Seal Point,” it’s a gorgeous rock cliff over the ocean, with a ton of surfers and beautiful views. I can’t explain how much it reminded me of home – everything – I mean everything—looked exactly like Pacific City, the Chilean version. It was a lot less developed – the roads are mostly dirt and it’s a lot more what we would consider “run down,” but it obviously mostly exists for the tourists in the summer and fishermen year –round. We met some local surfers our age and the three of us hung out with them that night. One of them actually has a surf-school in the summer and offered to take me out and teach me the next day, but he kind of got creepy the more time we spent with him that night and I decided I’d rather not let him have an excuse to put his hands on me in the water the next day, even if it was going to be a free surfing lesson. Sunday we slept in late, made breakfast and went to the beach again to try and study a bit (but obviously that’s pretty much a lost cause) then got on the bus and came back home. The whole time we were there the weather was incredible, and it felt just like being home for the summer again. It was a really nice (and important for me) break from the city, which was exactly what I needed and wanted. Even though we had a place to stay for free, unfortunately we only had enough gas to cook and not enough to heat the water, so none of us ended up taking a shower all weekend long. Like camping, I suppose, but coming back into the city and getting on public transportation I felt like everyone probably thought I was a bum because I smelled and looked so filthy. Oh well.

So that was my weekend. I’ve kind of given up on posting pictures on my blog, because they take FOREVER to load, and I’m currently in the process of finding another online photo-hosting service that’s quick. I’ve tried Flickr and Photobucket, but both of them are just as slow. I know it doesn’t have to be that slow, because Facebook is super fast at uploading pictures, but only other members can see them so that won’t help. Anyhow, as soon as I figure out where I’m going to post albums I’ll let you all know.

Oh, and my biology professor told me today that when we have our tests (our first one is coming up) I can write in English….HOORAY!!