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Sunday, May 21, 2006

Random things from the last few weeks

I realized there was a lot in Santiago that I haven’t done yet and I wanted to make sure I got around to it before I left. So one morning before class I went to Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago. He has three houses, one in Valparaiso, and one in Isla Negra. There were not many people there and so I got a private tour. The house is very cool, it has all kinds of quirky stuff in it and a lot of it is designed to look and feel like you are on a ship. He was also friends with lots of famous artists and so has a lot of really cool art around the house.

Last weekend Sasha and I went on an adventure to Pichilemu, a town on the coast that is supposed to have the best surf in Chile and in the high season is a surfer town. To make a long story short, it is about three hours from Santiago and we managed to somehow get there in eight hours after changing our mind about where we were going a million times, getting on buses that broke, wandering around bus stations… So by the time we got there it was already getting dark. So we went to an empanada place that by far had the best empanadas I have tried so far and ate empanadas on the beach. The whole time we were there it was very cold and cloudy so it was not sitting on the beach weather and so instead the next day we took a long walk down the beach, ate more empanadas and watched the surfers. The surfers who go there are amazing and really fun to watch.

It has been getting cold in Santiago. We had been having a dry and warm season so far (still dry) but now it is starting to get cold (remember that it is fall here). It doesn’t get nearly as cold here as it does at Bard (there is no snow in the city ever) but the difference is that there is no indoor heating. So basically inside is the same temperature as outside but without the wind. That means sitting around the house completely bundled up in jackets and gloves, or coming in the house and getting in bed. I can’t even imagine when it gets colder and rainy.

As I have mentioned before, the smog in Santiago is awful. As it gets colder, and with the lack of rain the smog has been really bad and almost everyday is an “environmental emergency” and you are supposed to limit your exercise outside and stuff like that but no one pays attention to that because you can’t avoid it. Getting to the beach last weekend was so nice just because we were able to breath deeply without inhaling all the fumes and smog and grossness.

This past Friday my friends Isabel and Kate and I went to an Inti-Illimani concert. Inti-Illimani is a Chilean group that is very popular here. They were all in exile during the dictatorship and have since all come back to Chile. There music sounds very traditional Andean but has lyrics that are often very political. Just being around the city you hear them a lot and they are also well known outside of Chile and in the US. The concert was really fun. There are about eight people in the group plus they have other people play with them and they all play tons of really cool instruments. At one point there were 14 people on the stage all playing different things. The other fun thing about being at the concert was the people there. It was a very mixed crowd, people of every age. Everyone knows there music and is so into it so the audience sang along with them for the most popular songs.

Saturday Sasha and I went to a place called Sanctuario de la Naturaleza (Nature Sanctuary) which is a nature reserve in the hills on the edge of Santiago. It was amazing because we took the metro, the bus, and a taxi and 45 minutes later we were still in Santiago, but out of the smog and in these beautiful mountains. We took a gorgeous six hour hike that went up and wrapped around the different mountains and we got views of the snow capped Andes. The worst part was when we got a view of Santiago. All we could see was a giant brown cloud between the mountains that was so thick you couldn’t see any of the city through it. It was nice to be out of the smog, but gross to see from a distance what I am breathing everyday.

Last night I had my first Chilean mall experience. All the malls are in a very fancy neighborhood which I haven’t been to much, and looks completely different than the other parts of Santiago I know. In the mall is all the American chains that are not downtown and being in the mall felt like I was in the US, very weird. Anyway, the purpose of going to the mall was to go bowling which was really fun even though I bowled the worst game ever.

I have about another six weeks of classes, then two more weeks with tests and final papers due. The program officially ends July 12 and then I have three weeks to travel and it looks like I will be going to travel in Argentina but I don’t really have a plan yet.

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