My Debut to the Realm of Online Writing

With the end of the semester comes the official end of my internship. In case you may have wondered what I’ve been doing other than running around the country and going out every night, I also wrote for an online magazine geared towards gringo ex-pats in Santiago.

While there’s a lot to do in this city, it’s hard to really find the good stuff unless you’re from here or hang out with the locals, who you would be unlikely to meet without knowing about these places anyway. Enter Revista Revolver. Writers (all volunteers) create articles about local things, from music and theater to food to general culture in order to help foreigners break out of the gringo bubble. I was fortunate enough to get credit for writing for them, while most others in my program were stuck in offices, usually just doing their homework.

Here are my final products thus far (I’m hoping to keep writing for them if I can find something that’s possible to do from afar):

Fast and Furious Start to Roller Derby

Rapa Nui: Life off the Mainland

Born to Share: Reviving the Past

The Completo Breakdown

Es Eso Po?

In the end, I should have gotten more articles out, but at least this is a start in a field I never would have expected to try. It’s a fun way to explore a new place and to think about the differences of the culture that you’re living in. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep doing something like this in the coming years.

For now, enjoy (or laugh at) even more of my writing! 

East of the Border

With the end of school on July 6^th, I took off to Buenos Aires, Argentina two days later to finally see a part of the country that has been right next to me my whole time in Chile, right over the mountains that I can see (on those rare smog-less days) on my walk to the Metro. While BA is not right next door (it’s 1200km/770miles across the Southern Cone), it’s a shame I haven’t seen more of Argentina. But the timing of this trip was very important, not to celebrate finishing college (which is also exciting) but to visit a good friend who just started her semester in Argentina’s capital.

So I held off going, but finally got there and got to spend time with one of my favorite AU people who I would otherwise not see for an entire year. I landed around 5:00 in the afternoon last Sunday and after grimacing while I paid the entry fee, I couldn’t help but notice that everybody working in the airport was incredibly attractive. And everybody on the bus into the city. And the Argentineans working in the hostel. I never would have expected it to be possible to have such a high concentration of super attractive people, but it is. Now I understand my Chilean friends saying Argentina is a “beautiful” country.

After getting over this shock and checking into my room with three beefy Irish guys sporting Boondock Saints-esque tattoos, I met up with Julia (my AU friend), we found a nice local looking restaurant and I got the first stereotypical steak and wine dinner. We were early to the restaurant, sitting down around 9:30. Most Argentineans don’t eat dinner until 10-10:30, and starting our meal at this time was my first lesson in how Porteños (people of Buenos Aires) just don’t sleep. Ever.

 One of the best, but slightly surreal, experiences someone could have is catching up with a close friend from DC down in one of South America’s most vibrant capitals. Much like showing my parents around Chile, meeting up with somebody out of the normal context blew my mind. With so much to talk about, we spent a long time in the restaurant conversing over absurdly large steaks and a bottle of wine until 2:00 in the morning. Then, in (what seems to be) normal Porteño fashion, went out to a bar with a group of her friends, showing up "early" yet again since bars and clubs don't really fill up until about 3:00 in the morning, which is after just about anything in the US would already be closed. I eventually got a cab back to the hostel around 6:00 in the morning, right around when most of the city was starting to think about heading home.

Unfortunately, I only had four days to see a city that requires so much more. So Julia and I met up that same morning at 11:00am, allowing ourselves a refreshing four hours of sleep. We wandered around the downtown area, doing touristy things such as sprint across Avenida 9 de Julio, the world’s widest street at 14 lanes, in order to make the impossibly short pedestrian light. If you get caught in the street, you end up playing a real-life version of Frogger. The drivers there made Santiaguino motorists seem tame.

Congressional building

An attempt at capturing the size of 9 de Julio

Congress from afar, similar to looking down Pennsylvania Avenue

Having missed breakfast, after touring three neighborhoods, we arrived to our fourth of the day, San Telmo, and finally found an affordable restaurant serving lucro, an Argentine dish of meat (of course) in some kind of soupy meat sauce (I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, other than delicious). What we intended to be a quick lunch ended up taking another three hours as the dropping temperature “forced” us to stay and sip some delicious spiked coffee. On the downside of having a relaxed lunch, it only left a few minutes to explore the neighborhood, which I found to be my favorite, with rowdy drum circles juxtaposing the old French-style houses and cobblestone streets. We wandered through an extensive antiques market with vendors pushing everything you could imagine: used leather jackets, silver and gold knives, dolls and license plates to name a few.

We didn’t have time to stick around, though, because we had to run to some other part of the city (I’m not too sure where I ended up) for a show by La Bomba de Tiempo (Time Bomb), a weekly drum group performance. It was intoxicating, and not because of the thick cloud of marijuana hanging over the crowd (don’t worry, parents, I didn’t partake). The drummers had absolute control over the crowd’s energy, inducing a semi-trance and rave-like dancing (alright, that part might have had to do with the weed). With each piece, the crowd got more excitable, and every climax evoked a greater cheer until the whole audience was jumping, swinging and shaking in what probably looked like a massive seizure to outsiders. The onda here was one that few musicians would ever be able to replicate. Here's an idea of what they sound like, but the video is far from doing the performance justice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6_71ZEoGhg

Following the concert, which finished at a mere 10:30 at night (probably still afternoon for Porteños), I returned to the hostel as its nightly party got started. After making friends with a group of Australians, I ended up going to a club and staying out this time until 7am, and got up at 10:00 again the next morning. At this point I was still surprisingly functional, despite seven hours of sleep in two nights.

I woke up for a walking tour around La Boca neighborhood, an area famous for the Boca Juniors football (soccer) club and its colorful houses. We visited the stadium and learned about how the neighborhood’s culture seems to revolve around the team. We then ate lunch and visited El Caminito (little walk), a small street where tango was born and consequently named after a tango song. This is where the colorful houses are most prominently displayed, stemming from a tradition of residents using boat crews’ spare paint for their houses. It actually reminded me of a 100 meter long version of Valparaiso, without the hills.

Boca Juniors stadium

After Julia’s class ended we met up for another carnivorous dinner, this time ordering a complete grill, in which they gave us hefty chunks of every cut of cow (including intestines, which are pretty gross), plus sausages and chicken. Needless to say, the serving platter was huge. But we managed to eat the whole thing, as well as dessert and two bottles of wine, all for about $15 each. I would have gotten heavy really quickly if I had studied there instead of Santiago.

For my last full day in Argentina, I wandered with my Australian friends around Recoleta , Buenos Aires’ insanely wealthy neighborhood. More important to us, however, was the cemetery, the architecture in which is more fascinating than in most real cities.  Rather than be a field of tombstones, the cemetery is a labyrinth of grandiose mausoleums made of marble and granite with angels soaring above them. Looking at these made it hard to remember that I was in a cemetery, until I saw the recently opened caskets as a result of grave robbers. (No photos for this one; I felt weird taking pictures of dead people)

My final day in Buenos Aires came much too quickly, considering how much just the downtown offers. I had to catch a bus to the airport at 3:00, so I got up at 10 (this time with a whole five hours of sleep) and quickly ran around the major parts of the city I had missed. There is a lot that I didn’t see, but I made sure to get to one attraction that Julia had pointed out to me earlier. It is a bookstore converted from a theater, which is a fascinating renovation. You shop for books on the mezzanines and main seating area with ornate pillars and frescos, and can grab a coffee at the café where the stage used to be, overlooking all of the action. My monstrous tourist camera was denied photos, but this page has a couple of photos to give an idea: http://argentinastravel.com/268/el-ateneo-in-buenos-aires-a-bookstore-to-end-all-bookstores/.

After staring in awe at the building for a number of minutes, I raced back to the hostel for a quick goodbye to Julia and a few other travelers that I will run into again in Cusco next week, and then caught the bus to the airport. It was a short, whirlwind five days. It all happened so fast that it feels hard to believe it even happened. Three days later, I think I’m still trying to catch up on sleep and my body trying to recover from eating almost exclusively meat. While the partying, food and concert were fantastic, the best part by far was getting to share exploring a new city with such a good friend. It’s comforting to know that, wherever we end up in the world, I’ll never be too far away from someone close.

Surf and Turf

Could it be? Posts two days in a row? You bet! While school winds down, life speeds up. More accurately, I’ve entered the, “Oh, I only have a month left with no responsibility? Time to live it up!” mentality.

Consequently, my last two weekends have been enviably eventful. Craving more after San Pedro, the next morning I joined a German friend for a day trip to Concón, a small beach town just north of Viña del Mar and Valparaíso and three hours northwest of Santiago. “But Andrew, it’s winter down there. Why would you go to the beach?” Well, we lucked out with a phenomenon equivalent to our politically incorrect “Indian summer” called El veranito de San Juan or San Juan’s mini-summer. According to some quick Wikipedia research, this happens pretty consistently around the winter solstice and The Night of San Juan (Saint John the Baptist), hence the name.

So, despite the onset of winter and some of the southern hemisphere’s longest nights, it was a beach day, with adequate temperatures to stuff the fleece into my backpack and break out my beloved flip-flops. Regardless of the weather, however, Andrea (the German) and I were going to the beach. The reason: it was finally time for me to fulfill my stereotypical looks and learn how to surf.

We arrived in Concón around 1 in the afternoon and, after a quick lunch, suited up for the frigid Pacific waters. Our instructor had us warm up with a quick jog up and down the beach, during which a family’s horse-dog Great Dane decided to join and run through our legs. We then learned the basic technique for standing up on the board while it held steady in the sand. He wasted no time in getting us into the water, though, only having us practice on dry land for about five minutes.

The Pacific Ocean during the winter is cold. Actually, it’s always cold, but now it's colder. On the bright side, it still felt warmer than the river when I went hydrospeeding in Pucón back in April. My appendages quickly numbed themselves and my wetsuit kept my body warm enough to survive, which was all I really needed, because surfing is awesome and worth the cold.

After figuring out how to jump onto the board, we swam out to the waves and stared at them stupidly until our instructor told us which ones to chase. He held the board until it was time for us to (attempt to) stand. Being awesome, I managed to stand up on the first wave I rode. And it was thrilling. While I fell a lot thereafter, I think my standing-up percentage was pretty successful. My numb feet and quickly tired muscles (I’ve slacked on exercise here) caught up to me quickly, however. Over the course of the next two hours I increasingly suffered from my right leg getting stuck under me, and I would ride out a wave sitting on the board rather than standing.

Eventually, Andrea and I decided that our inability to stand up anymore meant it was time to pack it in for the day. We changed in the surf shack where the owner blasted Sublime and talked to me about smoking his way through California, and then hobbled next door to a restaurant, ordering a mountain of empanadas and beers to reward ourselves for the day’s work.

I’ve always been one for feeling particularly sentimental about picture-perfect moments in life. This was one of them: sipping beer and eating empanadas on the beach, breathing the salt air and listening to the waves crash just a hundred meters from the table. All after my first experience with something I’ve wanted to do for years. Needless to say, I will always look back on this day very fondly.

We couldn't take pictures while surfing, so they only exist of aftwerwards

This past weekend I spent inland. My Saturday adventures started with a wine tour at the Concha y Toro vineyard, way down at the bottom of Santiago’s metro system (about 45 minutes on the metro and ten more on the bus). These vintners are apparently the second largest growers and producers in the world. So, they make a lot of wine.

The main attraction of the tour, apart from still trying to learn the basics of why certain wines taste certain ways, was the tasting session – with cheese! I’ve recently decided to try more cheeses than American and mozzarella, so learning about wine and exploring how to pair it with cheese seemed like a great opportunity. It did not disappoint. And I got to keep the cheese board, so now I can fuel the false sense of classiness innate in AU students when we have people at the apartment this fall.

Because nothing is classier than having cheese at a party

After what ended up being seven cups of wine, I met up with a friend I met in Pucón, her friends, and her friends’ friends, who are Colombian (important detail for future reference). The reason this Saturday night outing is blog-worthy is because I’m assuming at least some of the people reading this are aware of how well I dance. This, next to the naturally (and I’m pretty sure genetically pre-disposed) dancing ability of Colombians is a very stark contrast. Naturally, I wanted them to teach me. We found a salsa club in Bella Vista, a neighborhood that my host brother comically describes as “naughty,” and the Colombians proceeded to suffer through teaching me concepts of “rhythm” and “moving your hips.”

Salsa’s base consists of relatively basic steps, and then good dancers manage to add on and make it look good. My only other experience with this was the one AU Salsa Club lesson I attended in which my feet were magnetically attracted to my partners’ and she ended up punching me in the face when we tried to do a turn. Despite my gringo adversity, I’m still determined to learn!

As a result, through the course of the night, my newfound instructors matter-of-factly told me to “do what I feel” with the music, because obvio it’s that easy. I assured them that was a terrible idea. However, I did manage to graduate from pinning the Colombians’ feet under mine to occasionally kicking their toes. I consider that pretty significant. More excitingly, after a semester of South American girls taking pity on me and trying to teach me to use my hips – they moved! If I stood still, I could almost make a respectable movement, but it all disappeared when I had to use my feet as well.

Ultimately, after certainly making a fool of myself, I’d say I made progress. Even though the Colombians shook their heads exasperatedly most of the night, and probably had to ice their feet after I pummeled them, it was a good time, and there is still hope for the Andrew Shuffle, as lovingly coined by some AU friends, to not scare people away.

Thus two more things have entered my “to practice” list. As I plan out all of the things I want to learn and practice in the future, I’m having a lot of trouble finding where it will all fit. But if at the very least I get brief encounters with them throughout my life, I will be content. Getting to participate in these great things, either by bonding with current friends (surfing) or meeting new ones in the process, especially those that are willing to teach you, is what makes life so exciting. May it never end!

El Norte

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated (sorry, Mom). After my parents’ visit I settled into, more or less, a routine, writing papers and the like. However, I’ve finally returned to adventuring! It is now my final month in Chile, so I’m going into panic mode, trying to run around and do as much as possible before my return to the north.

The new marathon kicked off two weekends ago with a program trip to San Pedro de Atacama, a desert town of 2000 inhabitants a little over 1500 kilometers north of Santiago, right at the borders of Argentina and Bolivia. Its incredibly dry climate (the driest place in the world) left ancient artifacts in great condition, making it one of the most archeologically significant areas in Chile. The dryness (only 1-2 millimeters of rain per year in some spots), combined with the altitude (2400m/7900ft above sea level) make it one of the clearest skies in the world as well. Needless to say, just looking into the sky at night is an unforgettable experience, with the Milky Way, planets, satellites and infinite stars on prominent display.

Very dry

Most of the program focused on seeing the other-worldly landscapes while learning about the region’s natural history and processes (not as boring as it sounds). San Pedro and the surrounding desert are in a basin between the Andes and coastal mountain ranges, which used to be a giant salt lake. Most of that has evaporated, leaving salt flats and some lagoons, the saltiest of which was our first stop. Its concentration is similar to that of Dead Sea, so of course it was obligatory to get in to experience the super buoyancy (except for the sane, like myself, who felt fifty degrees was a little too chilly).

Those smiles are forced. Also, they're not standing

We spent our second day in the Reserva Nacional los Flamencos (National Flamingo Reserve), spreading throughout the basin and the surrounding mountains. Our first stop in the salt flats was to see, as you might imagine, flamingos. Much like the lagoon we had visited the previous day, the shallow Laguna Chaxa is more brine than water in which almost nothing can survive, except for sea monkeys. We watched the flamingos feed in the lagoon and then headed up to Lagunas Miscanti and Miñiques, which overlook the basin from an extra few thousand feet. Unlike the desert basin, the mountains receive precipitation, and we arrived to a fresh layer of snowfall at the lagoon. We had a better view of it than the brochure photographer with a rarely seen white-capped mountain looming over the glassy surface of the water.

Salt

Everybody was free to decide what to do on the morning of their third day. Most decided to go sandboarding, and while I was tempted, the prospect of visiting a geyser/hot spring park won me over. This was despite that the van picked us up at 4:00am, we would be about 14,000 feet above sea level (potential altitude sickness) and it was going to be really, really cold. So I, with three other people from AU, dragged myself out from under my three down comforters to the bitter desert night air, chewing coca leaves (they’re legal) to preempt the altitude’s ills and wearing as many layers as possible without ending up like Ralphie’s little brother in A Christmas Story.

The second hat didn't really do anything

Our two hour drive up mountain roads was a surreal enough experience. Never had I experienced such absolute darkness, where it was impossible to see anything outside of the van’s high beams. I had no idea what the terrain looked like until we descended the mountain in daylight. We pulled into the park as the sky started showing hints of blue with Venus (I think) and other planets (I have no idea how to identify them) shining brightly over the mountaintops to the east, and the occasional shooting star flitting across the still black western sky. As the group spilled out of the van, our guide informed us that it was about 20 degrees below 0 (or in Fahrenheit: 5 below). Really cold. Fun fact: we were essentially in the crater of a super volcano, much like Yellowstone, that if it erupts will cause another ice age.

Ice

Exploding Geyser

As we navigated around the bubbling vents we learned about the park’s spiritual significance to the local indigenous group who use it to communicate with their ancestors. Then, as direct sunlight broke into the crater, the geysers heated up and began their main eruption. The water only made it about a meter into the air, but still fascinating to watch. After learning more about the site’s history we went for a swim in the volcanic hot springs next to the geyser field. The absurd cold made the six feet between my clothes and the hot spring seem like a very long run. We checked the temperature after; it was -11 degrees Celsius (about 12 degrees Fahrenheit). However, it was definitely worth it as we finally warmed up in the 100 degree water.

In our descent from the volcanic mountaintop, we stopped to learn about the fauna that somehow lives at such high altitudes: vicuñas (in the same family as llamas and alpacas, as well as guanacos in southern Chile), birds, squirrel-rabbit hybrids and pumas (we didn’t see these), the extinction dangers they face and the local efforts to save them. We also stopped at a village of about 40 people for homemade goat cheese empanadas, which are the best I’ve eaten in Chile (and I’ve eaten a lot). Finally, after a long day, we returned to the hotel at 11am, before the group’s less adventurous members even woke up.

Vicuña

The lake is frozen over

I took a long nap, ate lunch and then met up with the group for our final outing of the trip: to Death Valley and the Moon Valley, the latter named so because its surface is similar to the moon’s, leading NASA to use it for equipment tests in the past. These valleys are also the aforementioned driest places in the world. Some areas actually haven’t recorded rain for decades. We first climbed Death Valley’s dunes and then moved to the Moon Valley to watch the sunset. That day was a gift for me, getting to see sunrise and sunset in two terrains vastly different from anything I had seen before.

Death Valley

Black Sand Dune: Death Valley

Moon Valley

Sadly we (or at least I) didn’t have more time to explore the town and other areas around it. There’s a lot more to learn, especially culturally because of the strong indigenous presence. Also, it’s just a great town to be in. It epitomizes the phrase buena onda (literally: good wave. Roughly: great vibes). The tour guide said it’s because of the high lithium concentration in the dust, so breathing it in makes everybody happy (this is also where most of the world’s lithium supply comes from). I also think coming from smoggy Santiago to clean, breathable air played a major part in that (the city's air quality leaves much oxygen to be desired).

My time in San Pedro was shorter than I would like, so it looks like I'll have to add it to my "return" list... Just like everywhere else in Chile. The trip was a great break from the city pace (which is still slower than DC's), and reinforced something very important for me: take a deep breath before you move on. This was literal, because you have to spend a day or two breathing very deeply (and drinking coca tea) to get used to altitude, but it helps you slow down and take in wherever you are. I'll have to remember this in my hectic final weeks in Santiago to remember to take in everything I'm doing and enjoying that instead of worrying about doing every last thing and missing out on the current enjoyment.

Besides, if I miss anything, I'll be back sooner or later...