Sari's Travels

4 days in Cafayate

2006-07-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

About three hours outside of Salta is a little town called Cafayate. I ended up really liking it there and stayed for four days. Me and Nancy, an English girl I met in Salta got in Monday morning and checked into a very cute hostel. It was too late to do the main excursion through the canyon and so we went and did a walk along the river. It was beautiful, the river wrapped through the mountains which were all covered in cactus.

There was not a very clearly marked path, you just had to follow the river, crossing it when you couldn´t walk on one side anymore. At the end we got to a small waterfall with a crevice behind it, so i took off my shoes and walked in to the little cave behind the waterfall.

Here are some goats we saw at the end of the walk and then some other people that were around chaced them, caught them and let us hold them.

The next day we wanted to see the main attraction, the canyon and varous rock formations that are along the main road. We decided to take the most challenging way and rent bikes. So the way it works to do it with bikes is you get on a bus at 9am with your bikes. The bus takes you 50km up the road, drops you off and then you bike the 50km (about 30 miles) back. We were told it was pretty flat with more downhills than uphills. Well for one thing it was the longest bike ride I have ever done, and there were a lot of uphills and even when it was flat the sun was beating down and you were biking against the wind, and just so tired the flat didn´t seem flat. The wind was so strong that at some points you had to actually pedal going downhill because there was so much resistance from the wind. So it was really realy hard but very worth it because it was the most beautiful place and the views made up for how challenging it is. Basically we were just biking down this road with giant rock mountains on all sides of us. Because of the minerals and the process of formation, the rocks were all different colors and had all different wierd forms.

There were also some specific formations to stop along the way. This one is this big cave/crevice thing, i don´t know how to really explain it. If you notice at the very bottom of the photo there is a very very small person, that gives you an idea of how big these formations were.

Stopping every two seconds to take pictures made for good biking breaks which were much needed. After about 6 or 7 hours of biking we made it the 50km back and basically showered and crashed for the night.

Nancy left the next morning but I had decided to stay for two more days. Still exhausted from the day before I decided to have a relaxing day. I walked around the town, went to a goat cheese making place and saw how the cheese was made, and went to a winery (there are tons in the area). That night the hostel had a barbeque and afterwards everyone sat around playing guitar and singing traditional Argentine folk music which was really nice (I was one of the few non Argentinians staying there).

The next day I decided to go back to the river and take a different path. I thought there was another path along a river that split off from the main one but it turns out that river was dry so I just walked up the middle of the dry river. The path started to go up and so I just followed it and at some point I realized I was clibing up big rocks and bolders and getting to the top of this hill. I wanted to get to the top but it started to get more and more difficult to climb the rocks and I realized that I was by myself in the middle of nowhere climbing huge rocks and that probebly wasn´t the best idea so I turned around. It was a good thing I didn´t go farther because making my way down the rocks was a lot more difficult than coming up. I safely made my way down and went and sat by the real river to eat my sandwhich and then walked back into the town with two French guys from my hostel.

Even though I have a lot more time, I decided just to come back to Buenos Aires instead of going somewhere else because I was tired of moving around so much and being on buses all the time. So I took two long bus rides last night and got back to Buenos Aires this morning and am at the same hostel I was before. I have about four days here to see more of the city, then back to Santiago on Wednesday for a night, leave Santiago Thursday and get home Friday morning...less than a week to go!

Reserva Provincial Esteros de Ibera

2006-07-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

After a night on the bus I got to Mercedes, a tiny little town where I met two English girls my age and we arranged the bus to a even smaller town, Colonia Carlos Pelegrini and tours of the nature reserve that is there. We took a van/shuttle there which took about three or four hours. We were in the middle of nowhere, the whole time we maybe passed 10 farmhouses, otherwise just open land, horses and cows. At about 3:30 in the afternoon we arrived in the town. We were staying at a place that was stables that had been converted into pretty nice rooms. We dropped off our stuff and then immediatly went on our first tour, a walk through the woods/rainforrest. On the walk, the guide pointed out lots of plants and animals. All over the town, just wandering around were these animals (I don´t remember their name)that are basically giant rodents, and they let you come close, but are not dangerous. Here is me trying to get as close as I can to one of them, it gives you an idea of their size.

We also saw lots of monkeys which I was really excited about because there is supposed to be monkeys at Iguazú falls but I didn´t see any and I had really wanted to. It was hard to get a picture of the monkeys but here are some attempts, if you can tell, the second one is of a baby clinging onto its mother.

Then we went on a boat tour in the lake, through the marshes. Here we saw more plants, lots and lots of really cool birds, deer, more giant rodent things, and most exciting of all, caimen, which are like mini crocodile alligator things. There were tons and tons of them all over the patches of land in the marshes. Most of them are about 3-4 feet long. They sit there all day in the sun and then at night go underwater and are completly harmless.

(Ahhh, it stopped uploading my pictures again...check back for a picture soon)

We started out the boat ride before sunset and were out on the water all through sunset and a little after sunset which was so beautiful.

Unfortunatly the shuttles only leave there at 4am so our choice was to just be there for the afternoon and leave the next morning or have to stay a whole day more, and there is not that much more to do so we were just there for the afternoon and then left at 4am the next morning.

I changed my plans and decided to go to Salta which is a city in the north of Argentina, a few hours south of the Bolivia border. I had originally not wanted to come here because I thought it was too far, but realized I have a lot of time and I had heard good things about it. On the bus I met two English guys who were traveling together and an English girl traveling by herself. We all had the same guide book and so were all going to the same hostel and got a room together. The three of them figured out that they were all studying medicine. A little while later two more English guys arrived and were staying in our room too. I jokingly asked the two new guys if they studied medicine, and it turns out they both do. So I am in a room filled with English med students, and me which is very strange. I have been walking around here all day and realize there is not much to do for more than a day or two but there are supposed to be these beautiful canyons about three hours from here so I think that me and the other girl in my room are going to go there tomorrow for a few days.

Iguazú Falls

2006-07-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

Before the falls, just a little more on Buenos Aires. First of all, here are the pictures of the bookstore in a theater that I mentioned before.

Day 4 in Buenos Aires I spent most of the day wandering around the neighborhood where my hostel was which on Sunday has a huge outdoor antique market and tons of antique stores with really cool stuff that was just fun to look around at. That night I went to a concert with some people from my hostel of some argentinebands whihc was fun.

Day 5 I took a train to Tigre which is a small town right outside of the city and just spent the day walking around by the river which was really pretty. At 8pm I went back to Buenos Aires and got on a 18 or so hour bus to Puerto Iguazú the town right outside the Argintine side of the falls

Iguazu Falls

The falls were amazing. There are two sides, the Argintina side and the Brazil side but I couldn´t go to the Brazil side because of complicated things with passports and visas. It turns out that the falls are the dryest they have been in 17 years, but still had tons of water and were incredible. Here are some of the "smaller" falls.
Normally the wall behind me with the waterfall would be completly covered in tons and tons of giant waterfalls, but I was happy with this. The biggest attraction is the Garganta del Diablo, which I am not sure how it can possibly be dry now. The picture doesn´t really show it but I would describe it as a giant black hole of water, it was really incredible.
It is all pretty touristy with tons and tons of people and walkways to walk by the waterfalls, though I did go early and manage to avoid some of the crowds in the first hour or two I was there. In the afternoon I got away from the super crowded touristy part and took a longer hike to a less visited waterfall. Because it has been dry, it was pretty small but what was nice was it was small enough that you could walk across the rocks and go right over to it and stick your head under. Also there were a million beautiful butterflys there that were everywhere. When I sat still long enough a bunch of them landed on my feet, hands, sholders. This one stayed on my finger for a really long time and so I decided to pose it for a picture.

I had planned to stay another night to rest and leave in the morning but the bus to the place I wanted to go only left in the evenings so I jumped on another overnight bus, transfered at 6am to another bus and finally arrived in small town to arrange a trip to a nature reserve, which I will put up more about in a post coming soon.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

2006-07-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

I finished up all my work and arrived in Buenos Aires Wednesday night and met up with my friend Jenn from my program and her friend to spend the next day with them.

Day 1 - Casa Rosada, Plaza de Mayo, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo
First we went to the Casa Rosada which is the presidential office and is actually pink (the pink house). You can´t go in except for a small museum in the back but being in the museum you don´t get any sense of the actual palace. In front of the palace is the plaza de mayo. Here is me and Jenn in the plaza in front of the Casa Rosada. The balcony on the left of the picture is where Evita Perón used to give her famous speeched and Madonna used the same balcony in the movie Evita.

We walked around the area a little and saw some churches and the really beautiful architecture around the city, waiting for 3:30. Every single Thursday at 3:30 the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo have a march around the plaza. During la Guerra Sucia (The Dirty War) when there were ¨disappearences¨ and many people were kidnapped, tourtured and killed, a group of mothers and grandmothers of the disapppeared formed to protest what was going on starting in 1977. All the mothers all wore white scarves on their heads and wore photos of their missing children and grandchildren around their necks. The people who commited these crimes have still not been brought to justice and so as a symbolic act the madres continue to protest once a week. These women were mothers and grandmothers 30 years ago and so are all really old, most of them I would guess are 80 or older but still come out every thursday. It is a small group but people still come to support them. My immpression was that they also address more current issues based on their sign they carried. After half and hour of marching one of the mothers and a palistinian woman spoke about the tourture adn disappearences happening currently in Palistine and expressing their support for and solidarity with the palistian people, particularly Palistinian mothers that have also lost their children. It was a really really amazing thing to see. These women have so much commitment to their cause and continue to protest what happened to their family and their country which takes a lot of dedication.
(Distribution of Weath Now!)

Day 2 - Around the City, cemetary, Recoleta, Museo de Bellas Artes
The day before, Jenn and her friend left and I moved hostels to be in a more central area. I decided just to spend the day exploring the city and decided to walk and ended up walking really far and was exhausted by the end of the day. I went to see if I could see a show at the famous theater opera house but nothing was playing, so hopefully I can get another chance to see something. It is a beautiful city and was really nice to walk around. I walked down to the river, throught the shopping district, and around some of the more historic areas that have beautiful European style buildings. Someone recomended that I go to a particular bookstore. It was a old theater house that has been converted into a bookstore and was so cool. It looked just like a theater but was filled with books and bookshelves instead of seats, including the balconies and on the stage is a cafe. I also went to the cemetary which is all just little mini chuch like buildings that are very fancy. I saw Evita´s grave which is where everyone flocks to and leaves flowers and things because people adore her so much. Then I went to a museum and saw an exibit by a Colombian painter, Botero which was amazing. He does all political art work about the violence in Colombia and I really liked it.

My hostel is a lot of fun and there are lots of people from all over so I have been hanging out in the hostel with all of them at night which is fun.

Day 3 - La Boca, Recoleta Feria
Saturday morning I went to La Boca which is a working class neighborhood on the river. There is one section that is really touristy selling lots of souveiners and things, and then the rest of the neighborhood is really dangerous and the police stop tourists for going in. All the houses are painted bright colors which is fun but it wasn´t so exciting, I went took a few pictures and was done. I then went to a outdoor fair/market that happens every weekend. It is a really nice market kind of hippy with lots of nice crafts, jewlery, etc. it reminded me a lot of telegraph. While I was there I ran into this girl Tess who also goes to Bard but I don´t really know but we have mutual friends. We ended up spending the afternoon together walking around the city. Argentina is supposed to have amazing steak so I went out to dinner with some people from the hostel to a good meat place but I don´t eat meat so unfortunatly I can´t tell you how Argeninian beef is but I have heard it is amazing.

it finally started working again to post pictures normally and then stopped so I couldn´t put up the pictures of around the city and of the bookstore which I really want to put up so check back i will try and get it to work again

Mendoza, Argentina

2006-07-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

(There are now some pictures up from skiing on the last post)

Last Thursday me adn my friend Kate went to Mendoza whichi s the closest city in Argentina to Santiago. I t is only a six or seven hour bus ride through the Andes mountains. I had heard before going that the bus ride is beautiful and worth going just for that. It is true, it is a gorgeous ride through the mountains. On the chilean side, huge mountains that normally would be completly covered in snow but because there hasn´t been so much now this year they were mostly just dotted with large passes of snow.

Then at some point we went into a tunnel that went straight through a mountain and emerged on the Argentina side which looked completly different. There was no snow at all but huge mountains that were all different colors, mostly shades of brown but some of them even had a green, purple or yellow shade to them. Anyway, really really beautiful ride there.

We arrived in Mendoza and met Kate´s friend David who was studying in Mendoza, found a hostel that Kate had stayed in before and got some dinner. The next day me and Kate rented bikes and went to the big park in the city. People in Mendoza are crazy drivers and don´t stop at red lights or for pedestrians and so biking through the streets was quite scary in addition to the fact that Kate´s bike seat had unnaturally bouncy shocks and so she just bounced up and down the whole ride. The park is huge and beautiful, all the paths are lined with big trees that arch over the path. After getting a little ways into the park we realized we were completly out of shape and exhausted so we stopped to have a lunch of bread, cheese and palta (avocado) and take a nap in the grass in the sun. Kate´s friend David was leaving the next day and so we went to his goodbye party which was all Argentinians, mostly his neighbors. There were little kids, teenagers, people our age, and adults there. It was so nice because they all seemed to have a relationship with him and really liked him. I was a completly different atmosphere and type of relationship than I am usedto and have in Santiago.

It was wierd being in Argentina, it was my first time leaving Chile since I got there about five months ago. It is still spanish but they have a very different accent and different words they use. I don´t use that many Chileans words but Kate does and we encountered a lot of times when they didn´t know what we meant because were using Chilean words that half the time we didn´t even know were Chile specific. It is also so much cheaper there. Although Chile is cheaper than the US, it is the most expensive country in South America and so things were much cheaper in Argentina.

The next day we planned on taking a bus in the morning so slept in and went to the bus terminal. We got there and were told that it had started snowing and they had closed the pass to Chile and it would probebly open the next day. That afternoon everyone who had come to the party was going to say goodbye to David at the bus station so we decided to go. It was pretty incredible to watch. About 18 people showed up to send him off and the genuinly really loved him and were going to miss him and there were quite a few tears. There were lots of goodbyes adn tehn everyone stood there and waved until the bus left. It was so nice and made me jelous that I don´t have a community and friends that I am that close with in Chile.

The next day we again had tickets and found out that the pass was going to be closed for at least another two or three days and we both needed to get back to Santiago, I had a paper to work on and a flight to Buenos Aires on Wednesday. So we eventually gave in and bought one-way plane tickets that were super super expensive adn way more money that I want to admit to spending on a 50 minute flight but I was just realived to be back in Santiago to finish up everything I needed to get done.

Skiing in the Andes

2006-06-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

I added pictures to this post

Ok, the last post now has most of the pictures up, so look at those. I am still working on getting photos up on this one.

Last Saturday I went skiing. Skiing in Chile is skiing in the Andes mountains. Me and a couple friends planned to go and there is a place in Santiago where they will take you up there in a bus. It turned out tons of people from my program all had the same idea because it was the first weekend the slopes were open and so there ended up being 13 of us and so we got our own minibus to ourselves. It is only about and hour and a half from Santiago to the slopes because we are so close to the mountains.

I think that the last time I went skiing was in 8th grade, so 6 or 7 years ago. There were so many of us that went that it worked out that there were people at all levels so we all had someone to ski with. I picked it up again right away...meaning I could ski and stay up but had no form, but that doesn´t really matter does it?

Because it is winter here and summer in the northern hemisphere, there are lots of Americans that come to ski. So the place was filled with Americans speaking English and all the staff speaks English, and some of them are even American. That was very wierd because you never knew whether to speak to someone in English or Spanish.

This was definitly the most beautiful place I have ever skied. When you are on the lift or at the top of a mountain you can see all the snow covered mountains.

I mostly stayed on the easier slopes because although I tried a few harder ones and could do it, it was fun to do the easy ones because I could just go really fast and have fun without being scared or worrying so much about falling. I did take a couple good spills, although surprisingly not really any on the mountain as I was going down, most were from hitting a bump at the bottom of the mountain as I was coming to a stop. But what is skiing without some good falls?

Me and Catherine who is also from Bard

There was one lift that instead of sitting on the bench and riding over the mountain, you have a pole with a disk at the end and you sit on the disk and essentially ski up the mountain while it pulls you. I did that lift twice and it was so scary, I didn´t like it. Getting on is hard and so the first time I tried I fell off right as I got on and had to try it again. Once I got on I was terrified that I would fall off when I was actually going up the hill. I was also worried about dropping my poles so I put the straps back around my wrists...bad idea. When it was time to get off I let go of the lift, but my ski poles were wrapped around it, so i let go of my poles, but they were on my wrist so i wasn´t sitting anymore but my arms were still attached. I managed to get the pole off just in time to not hit some sign and get dragged back around hanging from my arm. I did brave that lift one more time and did fine though.

The whole drive home we watched the sunset over the snowy mountains which was beautiful and nice to enjoy before entering smoggy Santiago again.

Strikes, Mines, Snow, Horses, Futbol...

2006-06-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

I figured out a different way to get photos up but they are all funny sizes, sorry. There is also one picture missing.

I haven’t been good lately about updating mainly because I haven’t really been traveling, but there are still things going on, so here is another post with lots of random things from the last few weeks.

First of all, and update on the student strikes. After three weeks of the high schools being on strike, and two weeks of most universities being on strike, the strike is finally over. The past week I barely had any classes because everyone was on strike. Last weekend, Michelle Bachelet made the students an offer that was pretty extensive. Because the offer didn’t include everything they were asking for, they rejected the offer and decided to keep striking. Bachelet said that either way she would make those changes she had offered (which included free PSU tests for low income students, along with various other things) and that she wasn’t going to offer any more. As the week went on the protests lost steam. Finally, on Friday they called off the strike because of the diminishing lack of public support. In the end the students won a fair amount of things they were asking for. Under the military dictatorship of Pinochet, the school system was decentralized so that funding was allocated by individual municipalities rather than the state. This has caused some municipalities to have much more funding for schools while others get hardly anything. One of the demands that the students made was to centralize the system again. As far as I understand, this is what happened with that. Bachelet’s original proposal didn’t address that issue, but in the end, Bachelet has promised to form a committee to reform many of the changes that were made under Pinochet’s government. This committee will have 75 representatives and 15 of them will be student representatives. That is what I understand of it, though I’m sure there is a lot more that I don’t know. I wish I had pictures of the downtown area where there are giant banners hanging off of buildings and where the protests were but I don’t so here is just some pictures of some of the high schools and universities.

When they took over the high schools, they literally took them over and kids camped out there for two weeks and they took desks and chairs and stuck them in the fences, here is a picture of that.

As I mentioned before, the smog here has been awful. Because we are surrounded by mountains the smog is worse, and it means you can’t see the mountains even though they are really really close. It has been a dry season and the lack of rain has made the smog worse. But, it started raining this past week and the rain breaks the layer of smog and it clears up a little. The most amazing thing is when there is a clear day without rain the day after a lot or rain. For one, the rain clears the smog so you can see the mountains, and if it was raining here it means it was snowing in the mountains so all of a sudden we are surrounded by beautiful snow covered mountains that you can actually see. Here is a picture I attempted to get, though my goal is to try and get a picture sometime at sunset on a nice day because they are so beautiful then.

Some other quick things about what I have been up to.

A couple of weeks ago I went with some friends to the horse races in Santiago. When you are at the track you feel like you are in the 1920’s or something because it looks like the horse races you see in movies, unfortunately the people there were not dressed like 1920’s horse race goers. It is very anti-climatic. There is a race about every half hour, it lasts for about a minute and then it is over. We wanted to try betting a little bit just for fun but the process of betting seemed too complicated, especially in Spanish.

My program arranged a trip for us to El Teniente, which is the largest open-pit copper mine in the world, and Sewell which is the now abandoned mining town. We had to get completely dressed up in mining gear (jacket, head light helmet, boots, belt, glasses, gas mask…) I think most of it was for show, not so much for safety, it was kind of ridiculous but fun. Here is me looking ridiculous in all my gear.

We got a tour of the mine though we didn’t get to see much, only the parts that are meant for tour groups, we even walked into what was kind of a museum underground inside the mine. We drove in the mine on a bus, walked around, saw some mixer thing, drove out. I wasn’t that impressed, I think it was just the fact that it was so geared towards tourists and we weren’t actually seeing what really goes on, also, our tour guide wasn’t very interesting. We then went to the mining town which now just has some cafeterias for the miners and a museum. It used to be a town where the miners and their families lived. The housing was divided by class and also by status (single men, married couples, children, etc.) There was a bowling alley in the town which was the first bowling alley in Chile. It is now basically a ghost town where miners come to eat and tour groups walk around. All in all, not my favorite trip but still interesting. Some pictures.

I have been watching the World Cup. I previously knew nothing about it but I am in Latin America (although Chile did not qualify) and some of my friends are soccer fanatics so I have been watching a bunch of the games and learning about how the World Cup functions and who might beat who, etc. Monday we went to an Irish pub to watch the US game and it was filled with Americans speaking English which was very weird.

La Educación en Paro

2006-06-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

So this week there has been lots of huge national protests going on in Chile. You have probably not heard about them because they have not been covered in the mainstream US media, though the BBC and other sources have some articles if you are interested in reading more. These protests have been organized and lead by high school students. It is pretty amazing because they have coordinated at a national level and the past couple days protests have happened everywhere in Chile but the center of the protests are here in Santiago.

The issues: I still do not have a really good understanding of the issues but let me explain what I know. There has been some smaller protests lately relating to the student passes (passes that let you ride the buses for a discounted student price) and the PSU exams (the university entrance exam – Chile’s SAT equivalent). The students wanted the buses to be free rather than just discounted and they wanted the PSU exams to be free (they are about $40 now). These were the starting issues and then it escalated into being about broader issues. They are now also protesting for these things, but also a change in the way the money for education is spent and how the system is organized, along with various other issues that I still am not completely clear on.

En Paro and En Tomas: Tuesday (which also was my birthday) was a national day of “paro.” En paro, essentially means on strike but it is different than “en huelga.” I guess strike refers more to a workplace whereas this was high school students. I have been trying to figure out what the equivalent word in English is and the closest thing I can come up with is a walk out, although there was no actual walking out of school, schools were just cancelled and student just didn’t go to school. So thousands of high school students had protests in the downtown area. Throughout the day, many universities declared support for the high school students and so also were “en paro.” Each department decides to individually whether or not to join and so some of my classes were cancelled and some weren’t. There were also lots of buildings that were “en tomas” which is a take over of a building, I guess kind of like a sit-in, but without the sitting in.

The protests: So protests here, especially with young people can get pretty out of hand. We were warned to stay away from the area right downtown where everything was happening and all the buses were detoured around the area and the metro skipped the two stops near all the protests. The protests get very violent from both the side of the protesters and the police. Protesters throw rocks, bottles that explode, things like that. The police however throw tear gas bombs into the crowds of protesters, have trucks that spray a hard stream of dirty water, trucks that spray tear gas, and they beat the protesters with their clubs. So it gets pretty out of control and violent. I stayed away from the protesting area but even about a mile down from the protests and on the metro I could feel faint traces of tear gas. There have also been hundreds of arrests and lots of students have been hospitalized in the last few days.

Most of the signs and banners that the protesters have and that are hung across buildings are targeting Michelle Bachelet, the president, rather than the Minister of Education who is the one who has the power to make the changes. I guess this is kind of a test for the new president to see how she will respond to the demand of the students. She has come out against how the police have been treating the protesters but I don’t know any more than that. The big day of protest was Tuesday but nothing was promised to students by the end of the day and so many of the protests have continued and school is still out in many places for the rest of the week. It is possible that if the students don’t get a response from the government by the end of the week, the Paro will continue into next week.

It is a pretty amazing movement of students, and very impressive how organized they are across the country. This has been the hot topic of conversation here for the past couple of days and probably will continue to be. As much as I want to just see the protests to see what is going on and experience it, I have been trying to avoid being near them, besides being dangerous, even just being near them you will feel the tear gas which is pretty painful. If you are interested in reading more and maybe reading a better description of the issues, try googling it or look on the BBC, Democracy Now, or Pacifica websites.

Random things from the last few weeks

2006-05-21T17:58:00.000-07:00

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.

Chiloé

2006-05-11T06:42:00.000-07:00

The last weekend that my parents visited took a bus to meet them and we drove (in a rental car) to Chiloé which is a big island right of the coast that is just a little bit south of the Lake District. I took and overnight bus to get there and the bus ride was uneventful until the end when I got up to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was occupied so I waited outside for and minute and then….Dumbledore emerged from the bathroom! (it is possible that it was Gandolf, could have been either) This guy had really long white hair and a really long white beard and was wearing a robe kind of thing with a sash tied around it, I thought it was very exciting. He was probably going to visit the Chiloé Wizarding School but who knows…

Let me start by saying that we were warned of lots of rain. In this area it rains a good portion of the year and this time of year is the start of the really heavy rain. The four days we were in the region we didn’t get a drop of rain and it was even sunny every single day, not even overcast, so we were very lucky. It did get very cold but we lucked out with having no rain. To get to Chiloé you have to take a ferry and bring your car on the ferry. This wasn’t the type of ferry that you think of when you think of big ferries that you drive you car onto the bottom and go sit up top. It was much more like a big boat that just had a giant platform to drive the cars onto and then not much else. Once we got onto the island we drove into Ancud which is the first town you get to. There was not much to do there without taking a tour and we were planning to spend the night somewhere else and so we took a look around the artisan market and the fish market and left. We considered a penguin tour but we were told there are no penguins this time of year…oh well. We drove further south to a little town called Dalcahue which is just a little fishing village that this time of year was free of tourists which was nice.

The problem we found was that the town was lacking in places to stay. There was a nice hotel but it seemed pricey and unnecessary so we found a hospedaje which is like a place that just rents out simple rooms. This particular place was run out of a restaurant as many of the hospedajes are and was slightly sketchy. We got two tiny little rooms. My room had two beds. One was like like a board, the other was way to soft and you just sunk into the bed. I chose the saggy one over the board. It got really really cold at night and no way did this place have a heater, so we were freezing! There were tons of blankets on the beds so once in bed it was fine but the problem was keeping ourselves warm and entertained until it was a reasonable hour to go to bed. Oh, the other bad idea (besides staying there) was eating dinner in their restaurant… We told the owners that we would be leaving early in the morning and they said that was fine. To come in and out you walk through the restaurant. We woke up in the morning and walked downstairs with our suitcases and the door to the restaurant is locked and beyond that the door out of the restaurant is locked. So we snooped around and found a door that lead out back where there were a lot of cats and trash, walked around the side of the building and found a gate that was unlocked and led to the street.

One of the big attractions in Chiloé are the churches. There is at least one church in every town but sometimes several (these are really small towns) and they are all the same very distinct style. Here are some examples from around the island.

Day two. The next day we went to a smaller island off of Chiloé. We also had to take a “ferry” there and this ferry was even smaller and more of just a platform than the last one. It was nice to have a car because we basically just drove around the island. There is a main road that goes through the towns but we turned of onto side roads and just saw lots of rural villages, fishing beaches, and amazing views.

That afternoon we took the ferry back to the main island and drove to Castro, probably the most well known city on the island. There are lots of spots in Castro with brightly painted houses that sit on stilts in the water. Most of these houses are pretty run down and poor but they are a huge tourist attraction, and you can see why, they are very cool.

I am a fan of reflection pictures (Becca- I’m not try to out do your picture…I liked yours a lot)

Here is a picture of the hotel we considered staying just because it looked so cool but didn’t stay in. By the way it is called El Unicornio Azul which means the blue unicorn…I think the pink unicorn would have been a more appropriate name, but maybe that’s the point.

Hotel number two. After the previous night we were more careful about picking a place to stay and found a cute little place and made sure it had a heater. So the place turned out to be perfect…but there was a huge party in a restaurant across the street that lasted all night playing loud music until about 6am and so we didn’t sleep very well.

Day three. The next day we drove to the national park on the island. We took a short hike that took us through the most dense forest I have ever seen. There we trees and vegetation everywhere, it is hard to describe and so little sunlight that gets in that even with our luck of having no rain everything is really wet and the path is very slippery. There are wooden bridges you have to walk up and down because in many parts the vegetation is so thick that tree trunks cover the ground and it can’t be cleared. I think the guide book says it was a rain forest, I don’t know what qualifies as a rain forest but I guess we were in one.

After being in the rain forest, me and my mom took a short hike out to a beautiful deserted ocean beach. About halfway there is became necessary to take off our shoes because the path went right through about 4 inch deep water, so we walked the rest of the way to the beach barefoot in the water and sand.

We left the park and drove off the island and up to Puerto Varas to spend the night. Puerto Varas is at the south end of the lake district and a city with lots of German influence (lots of German people, architecture, food, etc.) Hotel three, a hotel run by Germans turned out to be the best one so far, it was very nice…but my mom insists that that lady mumbled some mean comment under her breath but we don’t know if that actually happened. We drove into the city to have dinner. After driving around for a while looking for parking we decided to park in the underground parking lot of the supermarket. We went and had a very nice dinner but when we went to get the car, the supermarket was closed, and the parking lot was closed with one of those big metal doors that roles down covering the entrance way. There were some people cleaning up in the supermarket and so we banged on the window, and through the window tried to tell someone our car was stuck in the parking lot. He motioned to go around the back. We walked down a side street to the back exit of the parking lot and just found another locked metal door. So we started knocking on the big door, and someone actually came, opened the door, didn’t seemed phased at all and let us go get our car and didn’t make us pay for parking at all. In the US no one would ever just open the door and let you out with no fee…anyway that was an adventure.

The next day we drove further north to Valdivia, a town near the coast on a river. One of the guide books we had said it was the most beautiful city in Chile. It is a beautiful town but I don’t know if you can make that claim. But it did look completely different than any city I have seen so far in Chile. I think I have mentioned before (maybe not) that Chile reminds me a lot of California in that it has every kind of environment. The other think that is like California is that there are lots of earthquakes. In 1960, there was an earthquake in Valdivia that was the strongest earthquake that has ever been recorded in the world. Valdivia also had lots of German influence and previous to 1960 was filled with big German style mansions but most of the town was destroyed in the earthquake and so many of the buildings are newer and only a few old restored buildings remain. Unfortunately my dad woke up sick and so spent most of the day sleeping in the car. Me and my mom through the fish market along the river which was very fun.

There are lots of sea lions in the river that come and hang out outside the fish market to get the fish that the vendors toss back in. These are nothing like the sea lions at Pier 39, they were literally twice as big and a lot less noisy.

My dad worked up the energy to go on a boat ride down the river with us. The boat company couldn’t hassle anyone else into coming on the boat and so we got a private boat tour and spent most of the ride talking to the guide about Chilean politics.

To end the very nice weekend, on the overnight bus ride back to Santiago I got sick and once we got to Santiago my mom got sick too. So we all took it easy, sleeping a lot and not doing much for the day and a half my parents were in Santiago. For our last dinner together…well none of us were up for eating, so we didn’t have a last Chilean dinner.

I don’t mean to end on a bad note, but that is what happened. Besides the whole being sick thing, it was great weekend and all the bad hotels and getting locked in parking lots just added to the adventure. That was a really long post, thanks for making it to the end (if you did).

Weekend in Valparaiso

2006-05-06T19:31:00.000-07:00

We spent the first weekend my parents and Molly were here in Valparaiso. If you remember from a previous post, Valparaiso is the port town about two hours away with lots of painted houses and murals. When we first got there we went down to the port and took a guided boat tour. We were about to get in a private boat with a guy who had been hassling us until we realized he was completely ripping us off and the group tour was much cheaper. The guide spoke in Spanish and so my parents and Molly didn’t understand anything and kept asking me what he was saying but I was just enjoying the scenery and not really listening so I wasn’t much help. A picture from the boat...

The rest of the day we spent walking around in the hills with the painted houses and murals which I think are so cool and so we went back to some of the same places I had already been. Some more painted houses and mural pictures.
my mom walking down a painted street

The next day we went to Viña del Mar for the day to go to the beach. It was a beautiful day and Molly and I planned to go swimming in the water, even though we knew it would be freezing because that is what we do. We got to the beach and it turns out you are not allowed to swim, you can only wade. We heard there was a beach further down where you could swim so we started walking and realized that it was really far so we decided to just stick our feet in. Well the water was about a million times colder than we had expected and way to cold to swim (it was nice out but not that hot) and so I guess it was good we never found the swimming beach. We wandered down to the pier for lunch. Molly ordered a hamburguesa completa (a hamburger with everything on it which means mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, tomatoes, and avocado), and this is what comes…
Notice how it is significantly larger than her hand, it was probably about the size of four hamburgers and she didn’t even like it so only took about three bites of the whole thing.

The next day we went to the Open Sky Museum which is just another hill with lots of murals on houses but they were all painted as part of a project and are labeled and there are maps. These murals were all much more abstract and I didn’t like them as much though there were some that I liked and some fun houses.

And the family picture we kept meaning to take all weekend…

We came back to Santiago Sunday evening and my parents got on an overnight bus to go to the Lake District for the week. Molly wasn’t leaving until Monday night and so spent the night with me. The next day Molly and I wandered around Santiago. We went to see an exhibit of Spanish artists, Picasso, Miró and Goya. The exhibit was really good and the venue was also very cool. I forgot my camera so I don’t have any pictures but it is in this old train station that is now used for art shows and concerts. We also went and walked through the Palacio de la Moneda which is the presidential palace and is completely open to the public. Molly was only staying for a week because she had to get back to school and so I brought her to the airport Monday night to go home.

The Firestein Bilick Family Visits Chile

2006-05-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

I know it has been a really long time since I have posted anything. My parents and my sister have been around on and off for the past two and a half weeks and so I have been really busy. I plan to write about the past few weeks in a few posts so keep checking back.

Sunday about two and a half weeks ago my parents and Molly were supposed to arrive in Santiago. Their connecting flight from San Francisco to Dallas was delayed and so they missed the flight to Santiago and it only goes once a day. So instead of spending Sunday in Santiago they spent the day at a hotel in the middle of nowhere by the Dallas airport doing nothing and eating at Denny’s. Finally they got on a flight and arrived in Santiago on Monday morning. It was so nice to see them and weird to be across the world in a city that I slightly know and they don’t know at all and seeing them all. Because I traveled for four weeks before coming here I packed very light and had barely brought anything with me. They brought me a whole bag of things from home. It is so nice to just have things like your favorite clothes or bags or things like that that I had been wanting. They also brought me yummy chocolate and a bag of my mom’s homemade macaroons! Having missed a whole day of activities I planned I took them out right away to walk around the downtown. We first went to the central market which is a huge fish market with lots of seafood restaurants. It is fun and has really good food but I hate walking through there because everyone hassles you to come to their restaurant and it is really annoying. We made it through all the people hassling us and found a restaurant and had a good meal. Maybe taking them out so soon was a bad idea. As we walked around the downtown my parents and Molly all started to get really tired. They had been traveling for two days and did not have the energy to be walking around. We stopped on a bench for a break and my mom fell fast asleep, everyone was cranky, so finally they all went back to the hotel to sleep for the afternoon.

Basically the whole week consisted of seeing my family at every moment I had free, then leaving them to go to class, and then meeting them again for dinner and hanging out at the hotel until late and walking home to go to bed. So I have had not a free moment to do work or anything. Tuesday I had class all day and so they spent the day on their own and even went on the buses for the first time and got to experience some of the micro culture. Wednesday, the woman who I went to the Passover seder with took my family to a neighborhood called la Victoria for a tour kind of thing. It was a really amazing place and I am going to write a separate blog post about it so keep checking back.

Wedneday night my real family met my host family. My host parents invited my parents over for dinner. I was slightly nervous about how it was going to work out but was relieved that I wouldn’t have to be a complete translator because my host dad speaks perfect English with hardly any accent because he lived in the US for 11 year including all of college and grad school. My host mom told me she doesn’t know any English (although everyone has to take it in high school) and I had been told that my host sister speaks pretty good English but had never heard her speak it. It ended up going so well. The conversation was all in English. It turns out that my host mom understands a lot of English from learning it in school and from so much English TV and movies but we sometimes had to translate for her and we had to translate when she talked. My host sister speaks pretty good English, probably about the same level that I speak Spanish. But it was easy to have a conversation because my host dad could speak to my parents. Although I knew more or less about my host family’s politics, my parents got into detail about it and also found out all about their history which is actually really interesting. So my parents and my host family have the same politics which worked out very nicely. They also had similar experiences that they could share. Like my host dad was saying that he was in the US during the 60’s and was a hippie and then my dad said that he was a hippie in the 60’s too. Anyway it all went very well and everyone liked each other a lot.

Although I have been here for a while there are so many things in the city that I haven’t done yet. One thing I had wanted to do was go to Cerro San Cristobal which is this huge hill in the middle of the city that has a giant park on it. So Thursday we spent the morning on San Cristobal. The easiest way to get to the top of the hill is you take a funicular which is this tram/elevator type thing which takes you up to the top.

When you get to the top there is a view of the city. Santiago is a very smoggy city and some days are worse than others. The city is surrounded my mountains and you can judge how smoggy it is by how clearly you can see the mountains. When we got to the top we could not see a single mountain…pretty gross.
Molly looks ridiculous but notice how there are no mountains in the background.

Then to get around the mountain you can either walk around or take a gondola. So we took the gondola around the mountain which was a lot of fun.

I plan on going back again to explore because there is so much to do on the hill, there is lots of hiking, there are really fancy pools, there is a zoo, a Japanese garden, a botanical garden, and who knows what else. I had to run to class afterwards but my parents went to see one of Pablo Neruda’s three houses, another thing that I haven’t done yet but need to do sometime soon. Thursday night I took Molly out to meet some of my friends but unfortunately a lot of people were busy so she only met two people and we had to wake up early so we didn’t stay out for long. The next day we woke up early to take a bus to Valparaiso where we spent the weekend. More on that soon.

Passover in Chile

2006-04-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

I have a few Jewish friends in the program who were all very set on finding seders to go to in Santiago and they all somehow found them. I didn’t particularly care and didn’t have anywhere to go so figure I wouldn’t be doing anything for Passover. Then I randomly received an email inviting me to a seder. Jojo, my friend from camp and Bard was here last summer and put me in touch with this woman who grew up in the US but lives here now. I had been in contact with her about finding volunteer work and she sent me an email saying she had heard I was Jewish and did I want to come with her to her synagogue’s community seder. So Thursday night I went to meet her and her husband who is Chilean. We were supposed to meet at a Metro stop at the ticket booth. I waited there for a while and they didn’t show up. Then a voice come over the loud speaker and says that Sari Bilick (or some version of my name that was at least recognizable) should come to the ticket booth. Slightly embarrassing but I guess I didn’t know anyone so it is ok. I go to the ticket booth and they tell me that someone is waiting for me but at the other ticket booth. Who knew there were two of them? So a guard leads me to the other ticket booth on the other side of the tracks and I finally meet up with Maxine and Carlos. Around Santiago there are Estadios that have names of different countries, Estadio Palestino, Estadio España, Estadio Italia, etc. They are kind of like country clubs for people from that country. They have auditoriums, cultural events, multiple pools, gyms, etc. So this seder was at Estadio Israelita which is the Jewish community center. Besides being my first interaction with any Jews in Chile, it was the weirdest seder I had ever been to. Usually I have a seder with my family at someone’s house. This was a community seder so there was about 160 people there and so obviously less intimate. Since there were so many people, rather than everyone following along in the hagadah, we followed along with a Power Point presentation, projected onto two screens, complete with laser pointer to follow along with the songs. The Power Point also had little picture of claymation figures. When it got time for the plagues, there was a claymation video depicting all the plagues, so weird. The whole service was a mix of Spanish and Hebrew which was really interesting. It was fun to hear the story and the four questions and things like that in Spanish. So then, the weirdest part…even weirder than the Power Point. Every time we sang a song, it had a theme. The keyboardist would put on a beat, and the cantors put on costume accessories to match the theme (hats, jackets, etc.) and then they would dance with the traditional songs which were usually in Hebrew. For instance, one song had a techno beat, another was salsa, mambo, country western, opera, etc. It was so strange and pretty corney. I think the idea was to keep the kids entertained which worked pretty well, but not at all your traditional seder. I think the people at my table were slightly embarrassed that this was what I was seeing of a Chilean seder because the kept telling me that this is not what every Chilean seder was like.

I spent the night at Maxine and Carlos’s house. They live on the edge of Santiago in a really nice house with a cute garden in the back and grape vines one their patio. Carlos is an artist and has his paintings all over the house.

There is a place called Villa Grimaldi which during the military dictatorship in the 1970’s and 1980’s was one of the detention and torture camps of political prisoners. It has now been converted into a peace park to commemorate the people that were held, tortured, killed there. Every Good Friday, a group of progressive Catholics organizes a March to Villa Grimaldi. The next day I went with Maxine and Carlos to this event and met up with my friend Pesha there. There was a couple hundred people there and the march started a few blocks away and we walked to the park, stopping every once in a while so people could talk. There was lots of singing, and speeches. When we got to the park, we moved around to different places and people would talk. A couple of people who had be detained and tortured there spoke about there experiences. It was all very intense and moving. I would like to go back sometime to look around more. Here are some pictures of the event.

These plaques have the names of all the people that were killed at Villa Grimaldi. Everyone has a D.D. or a E.P. next to their name. D.D. means detained and disappeared, E.P. means political execution. In another part of the park there are other plaques with the same names but that list people by the years they were killed. The last death at Villa Grimaldi was in 1983. The detention center closed after that, but there were still many other detention centers and killings after 1983.

It is hard to see in this picture, but this is a tower that prisoners were held in.

This is one of the isolation chambers where they would keep prisoners

This is the original gate that prisoners would enter through. The gate is symbolically locked to represent that it is closed and that these gates will never open again. The park has a different entrance.

These things were horrific to see. I don’t have a picture but there is also a pool there that was used to drown prisoners. It is almost hard to believe that these things actually happened, and so recently, but then there were people talking about there personal experiences there and they are witnesses to everything that happened and it is all very real.

Las Micros

2006-04-12T18:13:00.000-07:00

I think it’s about time for a blog post on the micros. Seeing as I just wrote an essay about them for my Spanish class and they are a very important part of Santiago culture they deserve a post. So, what are the micros? Micros are the public buses. This is how I get around for the most part, so I take the micros about twice a day. They are usually yellow although there are new ones that are twice the length and white and green. We are going to ignore the new ones for now because they are stupid and not nearly as cool. Basically, foreigners either love or hate the micros, there is no in between. In case you couldn’t tell, I love the micros.

The micros are kind of like NY taxis in that there are tons of them on every street and the drivers are crazy (and they are yellow). They all have numbers but I have no idea what number micros go to my house, I just look at the sign in the window that says wear it is going to see if it is going to the right place. Whether or not you are at an official stop you usually have to flag down the micro or they might not stop. If you catch the driver’s attention and he is three lanes over, he will cross three lanes in about 10 feet to pull over, or they just stop in the middle of the street and you have to cross the three lanes of traffic to get to the door. You get on and hand the driver your 350 pesos (about 70 cents) and while driving (stick shift) he rips you a ticket, counts your money, and gives you change, all with one hand and (hopefully) still paying attention to the road, it is quite impressive. Sometimes the micro starts to move as you are getting on and you have to quickly climb on before it starts going faster. Once you are on the micro there is the chance that you can find a seat, but more likely you stand in the crowded aisles, especially if it is rush hour. When you are ready to get off you either let the driver know or push the button and hopefully they will come to a complete stop to let you off, but you never know.

Often, while you are on the micro, a vendor, musician or beggar will get on the micro. The vendors that sell ice cream or water, walk down the aisles shouting out what they have and people buy stuff. The vendors that sell random things like, books, pens, socks, best of the 80’s mix cd’s, toys, etc. walk down the aisle and hand things out. Then they give a little speech about their product and then walk back down the aisle to either get the thing back or collect money if you want to buy it. Then there are the musicians who are the most fun. They will come on and just start playing a couple of songs and then give a speech about who they are and come and collect money. Since this is a regular practice and part of the culture, a bunch of people will usually give them money. Once, these two kids who were in high school and in their school uniforms played music while I was on the micro. Since these people get on for free I think some people just use it as a way to get home and make a little extra money at the same time. Sometimes people come on to ask for money. Usually they are blind, have some kind of disability, or are asking for a particular cause. It is unclear how many of these people are legitimate and how many of them are faking it.

I know this is a very long post so don’t feel obligated to keep reading. This is the story of my craziest micro experience so far. About two weeks ago I got on the micro after class to go home. An ice cream man gets on, walks up and down the aisle, sells a few ice cream bars, and then goes to the front of the bus to wait for where he wants to get off. He is talking to the driver and after a minute or two it is clear they are arguing. All of a sudden, in the middle of the street the driver slams on his breaks, almost crashing into the car in front of us. He stands up, grabs the ice cream man by the collar and shoves him against the door, screaming at him. Then, still holding his collar, he holds up his fist and was about to punch the ice cream man in the face but stopped himself. Instead he opens the door and yells at him to get off the micro. The driver was still upset so is not paying so much attention to driving and yelling at the ice cream man out the window who was picking up dirt off the ground and throwing it at the micro. Then one of the passengers shouted that the ice cream man had a rock and was going to throw it at the micro. These little old ladies sitting next to a window, scooted away from the window to the edge of their seats and spent about two minutes holding their pocketbooks in front of their faces to protect themselves from a rock coming through the window. Luckily, nothing happened and we kept going as if nothing had happened. I was much more scared of the crazy driver than the ice cream man with the rock and so was relieved to safely get off the bus at my stop. So, a slightly scary experience, but also very entertaining and just part of the day to day micro experience. Also, it made for a good story to tell everyone.

Also, you always say las micros even though the word micro should be masculine, it is a mystery to everyone why the word has a feminine article in front of it.

Ok, that is far more than you wanted to know about the micros.

Housing!

2006-04-08T17:02:00.000-07:00

Completly unrelated to Chile, I figured out housing for next year. I am going to be living off campus in Tivoli in a four bedroom house with my friends Emma, Ariana, and one other undetermined person (probebly Rachel Schragis). So I am very excited about that because it means no more eating cafeteria food and I can cook lots of yummy food and I am living with my friends in a house! The only problem is that since the other people will all be juniors, some or all of them might abandon me in the spring to study abroad, so I have no idea who I will be living with in the spring.

P.S. Anyone need summer plans and want to travel in South America?.............

The Beach, Penguins, and Chileans

2006-04-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

It will soon be clear how these three this are related...they were all part of my weekend.

On Friday, I went to Algarrobo, a beach town about an hour and a half outside of Santiago, with Sasha, a friend of mine from Berkeley High who is also in Santiago for the semester. After very little sleep the night before, I woke up at 6 to get to the metro by 7 and get an early start. We were on one of those big tour buses and it was completly empty, only two other people were on it the whole ride. We didn´t really know what this place was, we had just heard there was a beach, some waterfalls you could walk to, and lots of penguins. We ended up not walking to the waterfalls because we weren´t sure where they were, and there were no penguins (at least not that were around this time of year and that we could see), but there were lots of beautiful beaches. Since both of us were exhausted, we found a beautiful deserted beach and we both took a nap for a while. It was so nice to wake up and feel sand on my feet and hear waves crashing and birds.

More rested than before, we headed out to some rocks on the water to look through the tide pools. There were some other people looking around at the tide pools and they seemed to know what they were doing so we went over and asked them about what they were finding...and that is how we ended up spending the whole day with three Chilean guys, Claudio, Marco, and Fidel, and a French girl, Claire. It turns out they are all students at the University of Chile and they study natural resources. They were there because that day was the lowest tide of the year and they were supposed to meet a professor later who was going to talk about the tide pools and sea creatures. So far it has been difficult to meet Chileans. There are people I talk to in classes but no one who I have really got to hang out with. Usually when you meet the Chileans who want to hang out, they are kind of sketchy. These people were all really nice and not sketchy at all and we all went to the beach together to eat lunch. Although the water was freezing, me and Sasha decided to go in, and after a while convinced all of the rest of them, except one, to get in too. After getting thrown down by two giant waves, I came out covered in sand. For the rest of the day my hair was filled with sand and my whole body caked in salt...fun.

The whole group of us then headed over to the tide pools so they could meet their professor. I ended up not going with the professor but just wandering around the tide pools on my own, occasionally running into someone who would explain to me what the things I was finding were. Here is some of the stuff in the tide pools and some of the seaweed I just thought was cool.

As they finished up their talk with the proffesor, me and sasha created some modern art with seaweed while we watched the sunset over the ocean and the waves crashing over the rocks.
In case you couldn´t tell, this is me lying next to an octopus sitting on a peace sign...

Our new Chilean friends offered us a ride back to Santiago and so we all piled into a tiny little car for the ride home. Before we left, we stopped to get seafood empanadas and ate them on the beach where there was a new moon that was a perfect crecent over the water. On the ride home, 2 km from the Santiago exit, the car ran out of gas (or at least that is what we thought happened). We pulled over to the side of the road and called the highway service. After sitting on the side of the road, in the cold, singing songs with our new friends for over an hour, the highway service came and gave us some gas but the car still wouldn´t start. After fiddling around with the engine for a while, some phone calls to Claudio´s parents who´s car it is, it finally started and we got back on the road. When we were safely back in Santiago we went out to Suezia, a neighborhood filled with a slightly touristy nightlife where you can´t walk down the street without every single bar and restaurant trying to get you to come to their place. Since we were with Chileans we didn´t stand out quite as much as the other times I have been there and so it wasn´t that bad walking through.
At the end of the night we all exchanged numbers and emails and hopefully we will all hang out again, maybe a hiking trip near Santiago, maybe camping...we´ll see. Anyway, very exciting to have met really cool Chileans and spent the whole entire day talking in Spanish which was really great since I speak all in English when I hang out with the people from my group. Me and Sasha decided that you meet cool Chileans in cool places. Rather than meeting these people in a club or bar, we had met them in tide pools which made them much cooler and more interesting people.

Saturday I did absolutly nothing which was really nice since the past couple weekends have been busy with traveling and constant plans.

Sunday, for the first time really, I went out with my host family. We drove fairly far away to go to an Argentinian restaurant. It was a huge place with about six different giant rooms and it was still hard to find a table. Every Sunday they have people in animal costumes with giant heads (kind of Disney Land style) walking around talking to all the kids. At tables where there are kids, the waiters bring out big bouncy balls with the drinks for the kids to play with. I didn´t quite get that because it seemed dangerous to have tons of kids with balls in a restaurant...but there didn´t seem to be any problems.

After lunch, we went to see March of the Penguins (Marcha de los Penguinos) which I hadn´t seen yet and just came out in theaters here. We saw it in Spanish and it was very different than what I had expected. It turns out that was because it was very different than the English version. I haven´t seen the English version, but from what I have heard, it is just Morgan Freeman narrativing about the penguins. The Spanish version there are three narrators, a woman for the female penguins, a man for the male penguins and a little kid for the babies. The narrators talk in first person like they are the penguins which was fairly corney. Like when the baby penguins first start to walk, this little kid voice says something like, ¨look, my first steps, oops I fell, look at me I´m walking.¨ Through this first person narration they still talk about the penguins but it gets kind of silly. I don´t know if the music was the same in the English version but they played really bad music with corney words in English at a bunch of points. Despite all that, I still really liked the movie because the actual footage of the penguins was amazing. So even though I didn´t get to see penguins in person at the beach, I got to see lots of them in the movie. Plus, there are lots of places in Chile with penguins so hopefully I will get another opportunity to see some in person.

The Lake District

2006-03-29T16:33:00.000-08:00

This past weekend me and my friend Laura went to the Lake District which is south of Santiago for four days. The Lake District is huge and so we chose one area to be in. We left Wednesday night and took an overnight 10 hour bus to Pucón which is a small town which is apparently really busy in the summer but this time of year was pretty empty.

Day 1
We found a place to stay, dropped off our stuff and got on another bus and took it to a tiny little “town” about half an hour away called Caburgua. Basically there is a lake. It had started to rain and so was pretty cloudy and so you couldn’t see much of the lake or the surrounding hills. The road into town literally ends at the lake, and with the clouds, everything just disappeared. Here is Laura walking out to the end of the road.

From there we decided to walk about 4 km down the road to Ojos de Caburgua which are small waterfalls. It was raining a little but we both had raincoats and so decided just to walk in the rain. All along the road were tons of blackberry bushes and so the walk took us slightly longer because we stopped about every 30 seconds to eat lots and lots of yummy blackberries. At some point we ran into a dog that decided to stay with us. This is very common that you will just find a dog when walking and it will follow you as far as you are going. At some point the dog climbed off the road into the woods. We decided to follow it and there was a path in the woods that continued parallel to the road. We then realized that all of a sudden there was a fence between us and the road because we had walked onto private property. We ended up having to hop over 3 different gates before finally getting back onto the road. At this point it was really raining and we were getting wetter. As we turned off the road to find the waterfall, some other tourists going there who saw we were very wet offered us a ride for the last part. By the time we got there we were completely soaked and decided that we couldn’t get any wetter and so we should just enjoy ourselves. We walked through the pouring rain and finally came upon this…

The picture doesn’t do it justice but we were in the middle of the woods, in the pouring rain, surrounded by crystal clear water and amazing waterfalls, it was definitely worth the trip in the rain. After getting lost finding the road, finding the right path, and then riding in the back of a pick-up for the last bit, we made it back to the road to catch the bus. We were so wet that we had to stand the whole ride back so that we didn’t get the seats wet and when we got off there were two giant puddles where we had been standing. I was wearing 5 layers of shirts and jackets and every single layer was soaked through. It took the next two days for our jeans and shoes to dry. Even with the rain, it was a lot of fun.

Day 2
We woke up the next day and the rain had cleared. With the sky clear, we realized that right there in the town you could see the giant active volcano that is nearby.

We got an early start and took a bus to Parque Nacional Huerquehue to do a 19 km (about 12 miles) lake trail. What the guide book didn’t specify was that the first 8 km or so zigzag up a really really steep hill. To give you an idea of how high we climbed… the trail started at the same level as this lake. Here is a view we had of the lake after going up hill, and we kept going up after that.

The trail takes you past two waterfalls and about 5 different lakes. The whole trail was gorgeous, taking us through dense forests with really cool trees and then came out on these lakes that were really blue and clear, right there in the middle of the mountains. Some pictures of the lakes, trees and forests.

The whole way down the hill we were at that point where your legs are so tired they feel like jello. We had to keep walking because every time we stopped we felt like we might fall over. The whole hike took us six or seven hours. We got back to Pucón, got some dinner and got into bed around 9:30, we were so exhausted. A beautiful hike, well worth the effort.

Day 3
We took a bus into another small town, Coñaripe. It turns out this is a very small town, and in the off season it is a really really small town. There were no other tourists there at all, and we couldn’t even find an open place to stay. After walking around with all our stuff for a while and getting tired of carrying it, we decided to settle down on the completely deserted lake beach. It was a beautiful day and we ended up spending the whole day on the beach in this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. The water was warm enough to swim, so of course I got in which was so nice. Floating in the middle of a giant lake surrounded by mountains. Also, from the middle of the lake I could see that same snow covered volcano…beautiful.

We ended up finding the one place open to stay the night which was just a family that rented out rooms and served breakfast.

Day 4
Our last day was the least exciting. We planned to spend the day in Villarica, another small touristy town. Again, this time of year there is not much to do and it was slightly rainy so we just ended up wandering around, walking down to the lake and then catching a bus back to Pucón where we wandered around some more and walked down to that beach too. We hung out on the lake beach (it had stopped raining by then) until it was time to catch our bus back to Santiago. Another 10 hour overnight bus arriving Monday morning. I went back to sleep for a couple hours before rushing off to Monday afternoon class.

It was an amazing trip and so much fun. It was so nice to just be traveling with one other person. The first tripI took here, traveling with five other people was a little much for me, and it is so much easier to travel with just one or two other people, especially after having spent a month traveling by myself. I am going to try and travel in small groups from now on.

Valparaiso and Viña del Mar

2006-03-20T08:25:00.000-08:00

Saturday and Sunday last week I went to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar which are two adjacent cities on the coast about two hours from Santiago. I went with my friend Kate who has a friend who is studying on the COPA program there. We got there Saturday afternoon and met up with Lee, who is Sonja's friend from Whitman who I had never met but I contacted her because she is also studying in Valparaiso. Lee showed us around for a while. The way Valparaiso is layed out is that the city is all on the water and there are lots of ports. Then a lot of the residential area is up in the hills. The touristy way to get up into the hills is to take an ascensor up. The acensores are elevators that go up the side of the hills at a slant. So we rode one of these up. This is a picture looking up at the tracks from inside the acensor, and then a picture of the asensor coming up the hill.

The area we went to was amazing. There are all these houses that are painted bright colors and everyone is different so it is just a really colorful neighborhood. Some were residential houses and some art galleries. Almost all the buildings are painted with all different kinds of murals and graffiti. Here are some pictures to give you some sense of what it was like.

We rode a different ascensor back down and Lee took us to the port which has comericial boats, private boats, and navy ships.

We also met up with Kate's friend Sammy, and after checking out a couple of full hostels for me to stay in, Sammy said I could just stay with her and Kate at her host family's house. She is living in Viña and so we took a bus over there. Although they are two separate cities, they function like one and are only a ten minute bus ride away. While Valparaiso has ports, Viña is where the beaches are. We walked down to the rocks near the beach and watched the sunset over the ocean.

The next day, Kate and I went to a museam that is inside of a mansion that was an old estate, and the land around it was a nice park where we walked around. Here is me and Kate in front of the very fancy museum building.

After that, we met up with Sammy and we all caught a bus to the National Botanical Gardens which is just a big park with trails and plants from different parts of the world. It was interesting because some parts were very manicured like your typical botanical garden, and other parts were just more like woods, with lots of trees and bushes. A lot of parts looked, smelt, and felt exactly like I was in Tilden Park in Berkeley because there were Eucaliptice trees all over and paths leading through the woods, I could have been anywhere in Tilden, but I was in Chile, very wierd. Doesn't this look like tilden?

A picture of my favorite flower we saw.
Very fun weekend, and a very easy trip. I will probebly go back a couple of times this semester because it is so close and there is so much to see.

This past weekend was an exciting eventful trip to the lake district. A post on that is coming very soon.

Classes and Mechoneo

2006-03-17T08:12:00.000-08:00

I just finished the 2nd/1st week of classes and so I decided it was time for a post. I still have one class that doesn’t start until next week and so I will tell you about that in a later post. Through COPA we have the option of taking classes at three different universities in Santiago, La Universidad de Chile (La Chile) which is the big public school and the oldest university in the country, La Universidad Católica (La Católica), which is the main Catholic university in the city, and Universidad Diego Portales which is a slightly smaller private school that is rated as one of the top private schools in the country. I chose to take classes at La Chile and Diego Portales. I wanted to take classes at La Chile for the experience, it is supposed to be full of activity, protest, cultural events, etc. I chose Diego Portales because whereas La Chile is much more disorganized, Diego Portales is more organized and has smaller classes. As it turns out, there has been some kind of internal problems within the social science department at La Chile and because of this classes are starting a few weeks late, which means they end a few weeks late, after my program ends, and so we are not allowed to take classes in the social science department. Since I am a Sociology major and take mostly social sciences, this limited my choices and I ended up not finding very many classes I wanted to take there. After visiting a couple classes I didn’t like, I am now taking only one class at La Chile which doesn’t start until next week and the rest of my classes are at Diego Portales. We are also required to take a Spanish class through the program with the other students from COPA. Oh, and all the classes are in Spanish. Ok, so here are my classes that have started already…

COPA Spanish
- This is a class with the other American students that is half grammar and half composition. We are split into three classes so there is only nine people in my class. It is annoying to have to take grammar again and do stupid exercises but it is helpful and a good opportunity to just be able to ask the professor anything we want about language, Chilean culture, Chilean words etc.

Sociología de los Medios de Comunicación (Sociology of Media)
- At Bard I have done a lot of projects for classes relating to media but never taken a media specific class so this seemed perfect. It is hard to get a sense yet of what the class will be like yet, but it focuses on different forms of media. Although we do have a section on Chile, it is much more general which is good because I can apply the class to US media as well. I am the only American in this class which is good, and will hopefully be a good opportunity for meeting Chilean students.

Familia, Género y Sociedad (Family, Gender and Society)
- This is another Sociology class that is about what it sounds like it is about. It seems like it will be a good class, focusing on structure of family, family relations, gender division of labor within the family, and alternative family structures. The second class was a background on theory. The lecture was on theorists who have studied the family and different schools of thought that relate to the family. Having just taken two different Sociology theory classes at Bard a lot of the information was familiar to me and so was easier to follow in Spanish. There is one other COPA student in this class, otherwise all Chileans.

Historia y Fotografia Chilena (Chilean History and Photography)
- This class just started last week. It is not in a specific department, it is an interdisciplinary class that is offered to students in any department. It is a class looking at Chilean history through history of photography. We are looking at a wide range of genres including art photography, travel, portrait, and journalism. There is also a “creative” element to the class. We have two photography projects where we have to take photographs on a specific subject and turn them in, in any format we want with a short paper justifying out photographs. So that should be fun. The professor is very funny and passionate about the subject matter. There are 6 or so other COPA students in this class but also lots of Chilean students. The professor loves that there are so many Americans in the class and keeps asking us questions. For example, in the last class he somehow started talking about hippies in Berkeley and then randomly turned to me and asked me if Berkeley or Stanford was a better school. So just the professor should keep us entertained throughout the semester.

My last class which is at La Chile is called Dinamicas Sociales y Transformaciones en la Ciudad Latinoamerica (Social Dynamics and Transformations in the Latin American City). More to come when that starts.

It seems like the classes will not have a lot of work. Each lecture and reading is obviously more challenging because it is in Spanish but I think my work load will be less than I am used to at Bard. Also, they are very into group and pair papers here which I don’t really understand how that works, but I guess I will find out.

For those of you that though Berkeley High Freshman Fridays were bad, that is nothing compared to the hazing that happens here with first year university students at almost all the universities in the city. It is called mechoneo and this is more or less what happens (or some variation of this)… Older students come into first year classes in the middle of class. They line everyone up and string a rope through their belt loops so they can’t get away. Then they take their backpacks and shoes. Then they cut there clothes to shreds. They cut off the legs of pants and cut up the sides of the pants, with guys they completely take their shirts, with girls the cut off the stomach and arms. Then they cover everyone in paint on their clothes, their stomachs, faces, everywhere, sometimes just paint, sometimes writing. Then they smear ketchup, mustard and flour in their hair. In the most extreme cases, they cut peoples hair off. Then they parade you through the streets and metro and send everyone out on the street in pairs to beg for money. You have to collect a certain amount of money by the end of the day in order to get your backpacks and shoes back. So everyday you see these kids on the street who are a mess, their clothes are cut up, they have no shoes, they are covered in paint and they smell disgusting from the ketchup and mustard in their hair, and they are begging for coins. It is so sad and seems horrible but I guess it is part of the university culture and some kind of initiation type thing and so people don’t mind going through it.

On another note, my weekend last week ended with another concert, a huge post-inauguration concert on the street right in front of the presidential palace. There was a giant stage and probably over ten thousand people with lots of big name Latin American artists and at the end, Bachelet spoke again. It was a lot of fun and a good way to end such an exciting weekend.

Sorry for such a long post, congratulations for making it to the end.

Evo Morales

2006-03-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw Evo Morales, Bolivia’s new president, speak at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago. Morales is number three on my list of Latin American presidents I have seen in the last seven weeks (Hugo Chavez, Michelle Bachelet, Evo Morales). Today is the inauguration of Michelle Bachelet and so presidents and important figures from around the world have come for the inauguration, including Morales. The event was very exciting. It was both a talk by Morales as well as a big concert before and after his speech with popular leftist Chilean singers. The feeling of the crowd was similar to that of the crowd when I saw Chavez but at the same time was very different. It was a small stadium, with the stage decorated with Chilean and Bolivian flags, banners depicting indigenous symbols and banners in the background from various sponsoring leftist organizations. In the crowd were various organizations and political parties who sat together waving flags and banners and with their own chants. There was a large section of the Communist Party of Chile, the Humanist Party and many others (many of which I don’t know what they are). The music was really fun, and the groups were obviously very popular because everyone was singing along, dancing, and there was even a section in the front that became a huge mosh pit.

To back track a little bit as to who Evo Morales is. Morales was just elected president of Bolivia in January. He is Latin America’s first indigenous president. Bolivia is a country full of indigenous people (I think over 50%) and has the biggest indigenous population in South America and so it was a huge victory that a president who represents the majority of people was elected. Morales ran on the platform of indigenous rights and the issue of the coca plant. I wrote some about the coca plant in one of my earlier posts and I don’t know all the details but it is a huge crop in Bolivia and its production and exportation is restricted by the US and other countries. I don’t know the details on his background but he was previously a labor leader and doesn’t have the traditional high level of education you would expect of a president.

Morales came out in full traditional outfit, which is how I think he often appears in public to emphasize the indigenous thing. He spoke about the importance of indigenous rights and having an indigenous leader. He addressed the issue of coca, and criticized the US and calling it an imperialist nation. Yet again, there was a language barrier and so I didn’t fully understand everything in his speech and missed a lot of what he said. He also spoke about an issue that I didn’t know anything about, the issue of access to the sea. Bolivia is a landlocked country which means that the transportation of goods is a huge economic burden in an already poor country because they have to cross Peru or Chile’s borders to access sea ports. Slightly over a hundred years ago, a section of Chile’s coast belonged to Bolivia, but Chile won it in a war. There is currently a movement for Bolivia to again have access to the sea either by reclaiming the land, or by just giving Bolivia a passage to the sea. Because this is a sensitive issue in Chile, Morales only hinted at it and didn’t directly address it until the crowd started chanting “Mar para Bolivia” (Sea for Boliva) and once he had the crowds support he addressed the issue. Overall the event was very exciting to be at.

Although I went with some friends from COPA, it turned out that my host family went too and ended up sitting right behind me. It ended up being a great conversation starter with my host family to talk about politics which until now was a subject we had not really talked about very much. So this week has been very exciting here in Chile and is not over yet. Right now I am watching on TV the inauguration of Bachelet which is in Valparaiso and tomorrow I will hopefully go to the post inauguration celebration in Santiago where there will be a big concert with many of the same groups playing.

¡Día Internacional de la Mujer!

2006-03-10T06:11:00.000-08:00

Wednesday was International Women’s Day. You may or may not know that in January, Chile elected a woman president. Michelle Bachelet is a socialist, a divorced single mother (a divorce law was only passed in 2004), a pediatrician, agnostic (in a very catholic country), and her family was tortured and exiled during the Pinochet dictatorship. She is part of the socialist party which is the same party that the current president, Lagos is part of. Her politics are more or less center-left, more socially liberal and economically conservative. The truth is that her politics are not that different from the current president and so people’s opinion here is just that she is just a continuation of the previous government. Although the fact that she is a woman obviously makes a difference in both Chilean and world politics. She is the first elected female president in South America (other women have succeeded their husbands). In Chile, women won the right to vote in 1935 and were not able to vote in presidential elections until 1949. When you think about it, it is pretty impressive that only 57 years later a woman was elected president. Bachelet will appoint new people to the government positions and has committed to appointing half women and half men. So although her politics may not be any more radical or left than the previous government, I think that the fact that she is a woman will be an important factor in politics. On Saturday Bachelet will be inaugurated.

Seeing as Chile is about to inaugurate a woman president (which in Spanish you can just say Presidenta and the word says it all), there was a big International Women’s Day celebration on Wednesday. I only heard about it that morning, after I had left my house so I didn’t have my camera which I am very upset about but hopefully I can get some pictures from some of my friends. One block was blocked off with a big stage set up on the sidewalk. The backdrop of the stage was photos of important Chilean women and bluntly said, “Chile Tiene Presidenta.” Female musicians from all around Latin America performed and then, Bachelet spoke! The craziest thing was that there was so little security. There was no space between the stage and the crowd and there were maybe 2 security guards on the stage, standing off to the side, and another 4 or so next to the stage in the crowd. When I heard that she was speaking I didn’t believe it because there was so little security that I assumed it must just be a rumor. I was fairly close to the stage and so I must have been not more than 50 yards away from Bachelet. Because it was International Women’s Day, she focused on the issue of women rather than strictly politics. She spoke about the importance of women having more representation in politics, about women achieving equal rights, and honoring some of the important women in Chile’s history. It was a very exciting event and great to be there experiencing an important part of Chile’s history. Tomorrow is the inauguration and on Sunday there is some kind of event open to the public that I am going to try and go to. If I get any pictures from friends I will add them to this post but I don’t know if that will actually happen.

Some other stuff…
My mom has a Chilean friend who lives in New York who I had never met before. He is in Santiago visiting family and so I went to meet him the other day for lunch. He was meeting some of his college friends for lunch and so I ended up eating lunch with nine slightly drunk Chilean men in their late 50’s which was quite the experience but really fun.

Last week me and my friend from COPA were supposed to meet and she got lost so I went to go find her where she was. As a result of her getting lost we ran across an English bookstore which was perfect because I had been looking for something to read. It turns out that every Tuesday and Thursday night the bookstore has a Spanish-English language exchange where people come, they serve coffee and tea, and you just have informal conversations in whichever language you want to practice. So last night I went and it was really fun. I was talking with some Chileans and some Americans and so we switched between Spanish and English, or sometimes the Chileans would talk to me in English and I would respond in Spanish. So I think I would like to try going to that once a week or so, they also have an open mic on Wednesdays which might be fun to go watch too.

I have now been gone for seven weeks which is the longest period of time I have been out of the country for (previously six weeks). Classes started this past week but some of my classes have not started yet so I am waiting to put up a post about them, but the ones I have gone to seem good so far. There will be more information about my classes in a later post.

Cajon de Maipo

2006-03-09T07:59:00.000-08:00

Last weekend me and five other girls from my program when to the Maipo Canyon which is about a 2 hour bus ride outside of Santiago. We left Friday evening and tood a bus to a campsite. We had borrowed a tent from one of the girl's host family which was a crazy, giant 3 room tent which was not meant for carrying around but I ended up bringing my big backpack just to carry it because it was so big. The process of trying to figure out how to set up the enormous tent was quite amusing, but we eventually figured it out.

We were in the middle of nowhere with no cities close by and so the stars were amazing. We could see so many stars and the milky way was so clear. After the whole tent ordeal, me and two other girls ended up sleeping outside anyway, under the stars which was so beautiful.

Some pictures from walking around near the river the next day...

Then we went white water rafting which was so fun. The actual rafting was amazing but the highlights were 1. when we got to jump out of the boat and just float down the river with lifejackets, and 2. when me and the two other girls on my side of the boat fell out. yup, we fell out. We hit a big rapid, the boat started to tip and next thing i knew i was in the water and as the water rushed past my face I managed to grab the boat and someone pulled me back in. It wasn't unil I was settled in the boat that I realized other people had fell out too. Anyway, it was exciting to fall out. If you want to see pictures of me all geared up in a wetsuit, water shoes, shorts, jacket, life vest, and helmet, check back, check back because I am just waiting for someone else to give me the pictures.

Also, there were grape vines growing everywhere around the rafting place with really good grapes and so we ate a ton and then took some bunches back with us to eat on the bus.

Santiago: City, Fashion, and Language

2006-03-05T18:44:00.000-08:00

It has been about a week since I moved in with my host family. Things are going great and classes start tomorrow although I still don’t really know what I am taking but hopefully I will know by the end of the week.

For the past week I have been having orientation in the morning and then exploring Santiago in the afternoons. So here are some of my first week impressions of Santiago and Chile. First of all, many Chileans keep telling me that in Chile they don’t speak Castellano, (which is what they call Spanish in most of South America because Spanish is associated with Spain) in Chile they speak Chileno. Basically this means that they speak very fast with lots of words and phrases that you will only hear in Chile and you will not learn in a Spanish class. During orientation they taught us a lot of this slang and phrases which I thought was kind of silly but it turns out that those phrases are about 50% of the average person’s vocabulary. I am starting to get used to the phrases and the accent hasn’t been too difficult to understand yet.

The City. Santiago as I learned today is split up into 53 different neighborhoods. It is a huge city with so much variety. There is a mix of architecture here. There is everything from super modern buildings, to beautiful old European looking buildings. Hear is a picture from the plaza downtown that is of a very modern building reflecting the old church across the street.

There are super turisty neighborhoods, cute areas with lots of cafes, streets lined with murals, fancy shopping areas, slums, parks, museums, everything you can think of. I still don’t feel like I have seen much of the city so my mission is to keep exploring. The city is a surprisingly clean city (at least the streets, the air is pretty polluted.) The city is surrounded on all sides by a circle of mountains. There are two different small mountains in the middle of the city that you can go to the top of and see the whole city and the mountains. I have only been to the top of Santa Lucia so far. Here is a picture from the top with some girls from my program and you can see the city and mountains in the background.

Some random observations on some of the styles here. I have seen a lot of fanny packs here. Many people wear them on the front but it is very common to see people wearing fanny packs over their shoulder like a purse. Everywhere I go I see variations on the rat tail, it seems to be very popular. There are people with a single dreadlock coming off the back of their head while the rest is short. Or people with short hair with a braid coming off the side. I also see a lot of hair wraps, sometimes as long as someone’s hair, other times more in the rat tail style. Then there are these awful pants that everyone wears that are the length of peddle pushers but are all scrunched up.

Also, whereas in Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia I stood out as a foreigner, in Santiago it is actually possible to blend in. I can more or less pass for a Chilean unless I open my mouth to speak, hang out with a large group of gringos, take out my camera, or consult my map. Seeing as I do all those things very often I guess I usually stand out as a gringa. But, the other day I was walking down the street and a woman tried to hand me a flier and said, ¨¿Quieres aprender inglès?¨ So I guess I can blend in occasionally.

This weekend I went to Cajon de Maipo right outside the city and went camping and white water rafting which was amazing. I’ll try to put up a post about it and pictures soon.

Santiago and the COPA Orientation

2006-02-26T05:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon I moved in with my host family. But to backtrack a little... I got to Santiago last Sunday and spent the day walking around. I went to this museum that had a really great exibit on pre-colonial Mexican artwork. Through email I had got in touch with another girl from the COPA program, Linda, and we met up for dinner. Linda is from LA and goes to Tufts. The next afternoon we met up and spent the day together walking around. We tried to go to Pablo Neruda´s house (one of three - they are in Santiago, Valparaiso, and Isla Negra) but it turns out that all museums are closed on Mondays (though all museums are free on Sundays so that is nice). We were hanging out at my hostal and started talking to this guy who it turned out was in our program to, his name is Zaks and he goes to Cornell. So the three of us had dinner and then I cancelled my second night at the hostal and went and stayed with Linda at a fancy hotel where she had a room that was already paid for. The next morning we made our way over to the hotel where we were supposed to meet the group for orientation. It was nice to already know three people (Linda, Zaks, and Catherine who goes to Bard) but everyone started to get to know eachother right away. There were 28 students at orientation and there are another 11 who we haven´t met yet who are here for a whole year so they have already been here for six months. So the first thing I find out is that we are all going to our host family´s house for dinner that first night. At 8:00 all the families showed up and everyone was looking around trying to recongnize each other from the pictures we recieved.

Paulina, my host mother came with her husband Jaime (who is not the father and also was not on my info sheet). Waiting for them I got really nervous but as soon as they got there and we got into the car I felt really comfortable with them. We held a conversation the whole ride to their house and I told them about my travels and my family and they told me about themselves. I felt really comfortable with my Spanish and although I was making thousands of grammer errors I could actually make myself understood. We got to their house and I met the daughters, Javiera who is 22 and Isidora who is 19 (she doesn´t live here but is around all the time) and Isadora´s boyfriend Marco. Paulina teaches at a school for mentally and physically disabled students, Jaime is and economist and a proffesor (and a musician on the side), and Javiera and Isadora are both university students. They were all so nice and welcoming. Also, they knew that I was a vegitarian and said that was fine and they don ´t eat a lot of meat anyway. I have been eating chicken and fish since traveling but I wanted to avoid red meat and this means I will be able to. So we had a very nice dinner and then they took me back to the hotel.

After one night of orientation at the hotel in Santiago, we went to Olmue which is a small town about two hours outside of orientation. Basically we just stayed in the hotel for four days except for when we had a tour of a local winery and when a couple of us walked into town. On the tour of the winery we stopped in an area that was just filled with eucaliptice trees. Everyone was so fascinated by the trees and the smell but to me it just looked and smelt like Berkeley and Tilden Park. Orientation was conducted exclusively in Spanish. Of course all the socializing was in English but otherwise all in Spanish. It consisted of sitting in a conference room for many hours a day learning some useful things and some not useful things. We had workshops on safety, culture shock, living with a family, chilean specific words and slang (including a whole half hour on curse words). We also got detailed information about the three universities where we can take classes and how to register. For those of you who are familiar with the crazyness of Bard registration, I think this will be like Bard registration but less organized and at multiple schools and in different parts of the city. The people on the program are all really nice and it was good to have time to get to know people. The only danger is that you end up only hanging out with them and not meeting any Chileans.

Yesterday orientation ended and our host families picked us up at the bus. When I got back to my house they had a bunch of friends over and we had a big afternoon bar-b-que which was nice. In terms of Spanish: if I speak I can make myself understood with lots of grammer errors, if they speak to me I can understand, and if they talk to each other I get very lost and catch parts of the conversation here and there but if I concentrate really hard I can get a general sense of what they are talking about, but not the specifics. All in all I would say that is pretty good for my first day and hopefully it will get better. Also, everyone but the mother speaks English so I can ask words if I don´t know them but it is also good because they haven´t spoke any English to me so that I can practice my Spanish.

I have the weekend free to get settled. Next week is orientations for all the universities and I have to figure out classes. Also, I created a Skype account. It is free internet calling so if anyone wants to talk to me you should download Skype and we can talk for free. It is not set up completly yet because I still need to buy a microphone but my username is sarifb. Also in the next couple of days I will be getting a cell phone so email me if you want the number.

PS Has anyone ever heard of underwater hockey? It is a sport that Linda started to play over her break when she was in LA and it is basically hockey at the bottom of a pool, it sounded crazy and I had never heard of it before.

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia and the "Driest Desert in the World" (Chile)

2006-02-14T13:08:00.000-08:00

Yay, I can finally post because I found a computer fast enough to upload all these pictures!

On Saturday (a week ago) I left for a three day tour of Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni salt flats) and the surrounding area in Bolivia. The tours are in a 4-wheel drive SUV kind of car. The guide books all warn about sketchy trucks, bad drivers, breakdowns, not enough food etc. So I left for the tour not really knowing what to expect and not getting my hopes up. It turned out to be fantastic. Yes, the drive was slightly sketchy and I could have eaten a lot more than we were served, but we didn´t have any accidents, and we only broke down once and were back on the road in 15 minutes. The trip is 7 people and a driver (not so much a guide because they don´t really tell you much) on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The whole trip was so beautiful, we drove through so many different types of places, all very different. I think that the best way for me to describe the whole thing is through pictures.

This is the Salar de Uyuni, it is a 12,000 sq. km. salt flat which is where most of the salt in Bolivia is mined from. I guess in the winter it looks more like salt plains but this time of year (summer) it is covered by a couple of inches of rain water which makes the most beautiful reflections. You can see every mountain and every cloud reflected in the salar and you cant tell how far away they are or where the sky starts and ends. Here is an attempt to get a picture of the reflection.

It was also fun to take pictures of our own reflection although the picture doesnt look as good as it really looked. We just took off our shoes and walked through the water over the salt and by the time we got back in the truck our legs were caked in salt up to our knees.

There were also buildings make completly of salt, they were made of bricks of salt and then all the tables and chairs inside were all made of blocks of salt. They sold little souveneirs made of salt and we were all hoping to buy salt shakers made of salt but it seems they dont make those, you would think they would, I bet they would sell big to to the tourists.

The drive was through flat desert type areas sometimes with vegetation, sometimes without and always with mountains (sometimes snow covered) in the background. This is an example of a typical scene out the window.

So we were driving through these flat areas and then all of a sudden we came upon this... Just rocks of all shapes and sizes everywhere fore miles.
At other points we came across similar areas but where the rocks were more like boulders and everywhere as well.

Then we would come across many lakes. This is where we stopped for lunch the second day. Like the salt flats, most of the lakes have an amazing reflection and the mountains and clouds always seem to be situated perfectly to get a spectacular reflection.

Late in the day we stoped at the Arbol de Piedra (tree of stone) which is just a big stone that slightly resembles a tree with lots of other bolders around (they are on the other side so you cant see the rest of them in the picture). Then right in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the summer, it started to snow. It was so surreal. It was just flurries but later that night it snowed for real, which meant it was very cold and there were minimal blankets which just means sleeping in a lot of clothes. The snow is not so strange when you take into consideration the altitude we were at. On the third day we got to about 4,900 m (that is really high).

This is another lake, Laguna Colorada (colored lake) which although appears to be muddy in this picture is actually a vibrant red color with patches of blues and purples.

At this lake as well as many others we saw lots of flamingos, there were always hundreds of them and they were always to far away to get good pictures but this was one of my lucky ones where they were starting to fly away, scared by all the tourists but I managed to get them just in time.

The next morning we woke up bright and early to see the geysers at their most active time of day. Where the geysers were was completly snowy and so we all bundled up and walked through the snow. The geysers are extreamly hot and so the snow was melted around them but a couple feet away we were surrounded by snow and snowy mountains.

This is the group of us and the car we spent three days in. As you can see, we are all unprepared for snow and so bundled up in what clothes and hats we have because it was really cold.

We got back into the car, drove through the snow for litterally only ten minutes and were here...
Natural hotsprings with the most gorgeous view. Considering we had just been in the snow you would think it would be cold but the water was about 33 degrees C which is something really hot in F, I still havent figured out the metric conversions.

The last stop on the tour was the Laguna Verde (Green Lake). You may notice that the lake is not at all green. This is because they lake turns green when it is oxidized by the wind and so you can actually see it changing colors. Unfortunatly the wind was not strong enought while I was there and so I did not get to see it green but it was still beautiful and yet again had a great reflection of the snowy mountains.

From there I took a bus into San Pedro de Atacama in the North of Chile. This area is known as the "Driest desert in the world" yet it rained every afternoon I was there and I was almost stranded there because of the rain. The whole area is completly unprepared for rain. Most of the building dont have really roofs and so it was difficult to find a restaurant for dinner that didnt have water pouring in from the "roof." The roads around there were closed because of the weather and my bus to Santiago was cancelled. There was about a day of panic where I was sure I wouldnt get to my orientation on time but luckily I had given myself extra time and the roads opened later in the day. While I was there I did go to Valle de la Luna for the sunset which was beautiful and had the added bonus of the sunset on one side and a very bright double rainbow on the other side.

So I was able to get a bus about 4 hours south to a nothing town where I had to stay a day and a half, two nights to wait for a bus to Santiago. The good thing was that it had a beach, so I went to the beach for about half the day. I ended up getting one of the worst sunburns I have ever had despite constantly putting on sunscreen but it was nice to spend a day at the beach. I then took an 18 hour bus ride to Santiago and arrived this morning. I just wandered around the downtown area this afternoon and tonight I am meeting a girl from my program for dinner who is also here early. Tuesday morning is the start 0f my orientation.

Lake Titicaca, Peru and La Paz, Bolivia

2006-02-09T11:31:00.000-08:00

After leaving Cuzco I spent two days touring Lake Titicaca. As I was leaving my hostel I ran into Jon from Canada (living in Chicago) who was on my bus and also going to do tour of Lake Titicaca. So we booked a tour together once we got to Puno, the port town on the Peru side of the lake. Lake Titicaca is a huge lake inbetween Peru and Bolivia with small and bigger islands all around. I was only on the Peru side. My tour was one night two days. The first day we left on a small boat with 25 passengers. On the boat I ended up meeting lots of people. I ended up spending a lot of time with some girls from Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland. The boat first stops at the floating islands which are islands made completely out of reeds and all the houses and structures on them are also made of reeds. Here is an example of one of the houses.

These people live on these tiny islands and if they have electricity it is just what can be run on two tiny solar panels. In recent years their lives have been taken over by tourism and they rely on selling crafts to tourists as their main means of survival. The islands are really cool to see but also felt like you were invading someone's home, seeing as only two or three families live on the smaller islands.

Our next stop was a bigger island, Amantani where we spent the night with host families. The boat we were on was soooo slow and so it takes about three to four hours to get there although it is not all that far. The boat ride was freezing and everyone bundled up in all their layers and crowded into the inside part of the boat. In Amantani we were met by the host mothers who took us to their houses. Each house has a separate room with about 4 beds to host tourists and then they serve you three meals. Jon and I stayed with a woman named Justa and her seven year old son Henderson. None of the houses on the island have electricity and they are all constructed simply with mud and sticks or concrete and have outhouses in the back. The whole experience of staying with a family was slightly awkward. The families rely on tourists as a huge source of money and so have people stay at their houses once a week this time of year, and a few times a week in the high season. And so whereas we were there to experience the culture and talk to the people, they are really only doing it for the money and so have no interest in talking to us. When we were called down for meals we would try and make conversation by telling them about ourselves or asking them questions, the questions were always answered with a simple yes or a no, which made it clear they didn't want to engage in conversation. After a really good, but slightly awkward lunch we met up with the rest of our group who had all had similar experiences talking to their host families. Our guide took us on a hike to the top of the island were there were some ruins and great views of the lake. This picture is at the ruins just about sunset with two of the Norwegian girls, the Icelandic girl, and Jon from Canada.

Henderson, the boy who lived in the house we were at was very excited for us to take pictures of him so here is a picture of us.

So, we were told that every night, all the tourists go to a party that the host families have. Our guide told us that our families will give us the traditional clothes to wear and we wear these to the party. We all felt slightly wired about dressing up in the traditional clothes. Basically it is a party created for the tourists where they play traditional music, you do traditional dance and wear traditional clothes, so it is like this fake show of the culture for all the gringos to experience. Anyway, it was rude not to take the clothes so all 50 or so tourists were dressed up. My host mother would come up to me during the party to do the traditional dance with me and while dancing just had the most plain, bored expression on her face. Can you imagine doing the whole thing at least once a week, they must get sick of it. Anyway we had fun. Here is a picture of me and the three German girls on the left and the Swedish girl on the right all dressed up. They tied the skirts on so tight and then wrapped the sashes around your waist even tighter that it was slightly hard to breath.

The next morning we left on the boat and went to Taquile, another larger island. We walked around this island, visited the local craft markets, and had lunch. After we left the island we had another three hour boat ride back to the city. This time however it was hot out and so most people were sitting outside, and I sat on the roof deck. At some point a girl asked the guide if it was possible to stop and jump in the water for a minute. He warned that it was cold but we didnÂ´t care and so the driverstoppedd the boat and seven of us jumped off of the roof deck into the really cold water for about a minute or two before we all quickly got back in the boat before we becamecompletelyy numb. Very nice and refreshing.

I decide to go to Bolivia which was not part of my original plan. I had heard that La Paz was fun and the salt lakes south of La Paz are supposed to be amazing. So I am now in La Paz, I came here with Jon and Heida who is from Iceland. I am only here for a day and a half, I am leaving tomorrow morning. It has been fun to just walk around the city. It is a big city and you can buy anything here. Today I went to the Cocamuseumm. Coca is a plant they have all over Peru and Bolivia and you are supposed to drink tea make with it or chew the leaves to help with altitude sickness. The tea is served everywhere and so I have had ita lott. It is also the plant that cocaine is made from. Themuseumm gives a whole history of its uses including drugs, medicinal purposes, altitude, and Coca-Cola (notice the name). We have all heard that Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it but doesnÂ´t anymore, but what I didnÂ´t know is that it still has coca leaves in it for taste. Also, Freud discovered the chemical in the plant that is made into cocaine. I spent a while walking around the city, through the black market (that is officially what the area is called) where you can buy anything, and through other markets. I also walked through tcemeteryary. Tcemeteryary here is not like acemeteriesies I have seen in the US. It is filled with these above ground buildings where coffins are inserted and then the family creates an alter in a window in front so that you have these buildings with a grid of hundreds of alters decorated with flowers, saints, objects, etc. Across the street from tcemeteryary is a big flower market so that people can go buy flowers to bring to tcemeteryary, anyway it was very interesting. So La Paz has been fun, although it has been raining on and off so you get pretty wet walking around the city. I´m off to meet some people for dinner and then catch an early bus tomorrow morning to Uyuni where I will hopefully find a tour to the salt lakes.

Machu Picchu

2006-02-07T17:46:00.000-08:00

Sorry I am getting behind on my blog posting. So this is the classic view of Machu Picchu. I went last thursday and friday, although I was only there on friday but you have to go to the town a day early so you can get in early before the crowds come. I ended up meeting a guy from Australia who was staying in my hostal and he had a tour booked so I went along with him and another American guy from New Jersey ended up coming with us too.
I had seen so many pictures of Machu Picchu I thought maybe it wouldn´t be that great but it was amazing. Actually walking around in the ruins is nothing like looking at pictures. We had a really great guide who has been giving tours for 25 years. Machu Picchu was a sacred site for the Inka and only priests, and high class important people lived there and other people did religious pilgramages there. The history is all so interesting. One of the most amazing and beautiful things about it is the location. It is surrounded by three huge mountains and a river. We hiked around and from the higher points and the peaks of some of the mountains you get the most spectacular views of the surrounding area as well as the ruins. The one main hike we did was to the sun gate which over looks all the ruins and apparently is amazing at sunrise but we were there in the afternoon. One the walk up we saw lots of llamas and managed to take some pictures with them.

I spent two more days in Cuzco, one walking around and going to some museamus and churches, the next day I went on a tour of the sacred valley, which is just the area around Cuzco with lots more ruins. When I first got to my hostal it was pretty empty but the last couple of days I was there, lots of people came. I met a bunch of people traveling on their own from, Australia, London, Manchester, San Diego, Amsterdam, and Korea and we all went out to a club one night. So I got to experience the Cuzco night life which everyone talks about. The clubs are completly geared towards tourists and so play all songs that everyone will know the words to, from oldies, to grease, to brittany spears, and everything in between. It has been nice to finally be meeting people and having other people to do things in the day with and just hang out with.

Cuzco Pictures

2006-02-07T17:19:00.000-08:00

Sorry, it won´t let me add these to the previous post so i had to put them separatly

This is the main plaza in Cuzco at sunrise. This is the view from the balcony of my hotel. Why was I up at 5am for sunrise? This was the morning I went to Machu Picchu and that is when I had to get up.

Just another view of the plaza during the day from a cafe I had lunch at one day.

This is an example of the Inka walls I wrote about in my

And, so that you know that I am actually here, this is a picture of me at one of the many ruins right outside of Cuzco.

The End of the WSF

2006-01-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

The day after I heard Chavez speak I tried to go to some Venezuela-specific events to get a better sense of the politics. I went to a panel discussion about "Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights in Venezuela." Each panel talked about the situation of a various aspect of the society, women, labor, education, etc. The talk was good in that it gave a good explanation of each of this things, yet again it was hard to follow the Spanish. Later I went to a film called Venezuela Rising (Venezuela Crece). It was made by Americans but this was the first time it had ever been shown in English. The film makers were in Caracas for 9 days around the election in August 2004 to recall Chavez in which the opposition lost. The film was really interesting and did a really good job at giving a history of the current political situation. Although it focused on the Chavez supporters it also interviewed people from the opposition. The opposition interviewed were mostly upper-middle class people who were concerned that Chavez was only helping the poor. Although I didn't talk to people who opposed Chavez, other people who did heard all kinds of other arguments against him that are different than those in the film. To answer some of my questions I had after hearing Chavez speak, the film interviewed a lot of people who live in the really poor barrios surrounding Caracas who talked about their improved health systems, schools, free food centers, etc. and communities of people that had formed around the new services being provided in these slums. Driving down the highway in Caracas you can see the slums. Unlike in the US where you can usually assume that richer people live in the hills, in Caracas the hills are the slums. From a distance all you see is little shacks that look like they are about to fall over that are so close together and on such steep hills that they look like they are stacked up. Someone pointed out that the colors these houses are painted and they way they are stacked up make them look dr. seuss-ish (in a weird sort of way). Here's some pictures though they don't quite show it.

I don't know if I mentioned before that we moved to a different youth camp that was much more centrally located, dryer (except the first night when it poured) and had much more going on. One morning I woke up at 9 in the morning to music and realized that the music had been going all night through to the morning. There was much more of a social scene at this camp and it was easy to meet people. Besides people from Venezuela I met so many people from Colombia as well as a lot from Brazil. I guess that makes sense because those are the two bordering countries. Here is some pictures of the youth camp.

Yesterday was the last day of the conference and I decided I was ready to move on from Venezuela. I am now in the Lima, Peru airport where I am spending the night before catching a plane to Cuzco, Peru in the morning. From there, we'll see.

I wanted to put up some more pictures from the WSF but I am having problems with uploading more. I will try to do one additional Caracas post with pictures.

Hugo Chavez

2006-01-28T05:31:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to hear Chavez, the president of Venezuela speak. THe event as a whole was like nothing I have ever seen. The closest thing I can compare it to is a large protest in that there were thousands of people are chanting, waving banners and signs, singing and cheering, except this was not a protest but a government sponsered event with the president, nothing like you would see in the US. The event took place in a huge dome stadium. I got there about an hour and a half early to make sure I got in. The "pre-show" consisted of various performances of Venezuelan music groups as well as a Brazilian musician. They sang songs about Che and songs about Chavez that everyone knew the words to and sang along. Every few minutes a group of people would start a chant, "Chavez no se va!" "El pueblo unido jamas será vencido" and lots of others. Finally Chavez came on stage greeted by chanting, whistles, clapping and overall excitement. With him on stage were various people from around the world such as leftist writers, political figures, Che Guevarras daughter, and Cindy Sheehan. Cindy Sheehan spent weeks waiting to meet with Bush and he refused to meet with her and here she was sitting next to Chavez and being congradulated by him (At some point he told her that he loved her and he called her Ms. Hope in comparison to Bush who he constantly refers to as Mr. Danger). Chavezs speech, meant for the WSF audience, focused on Latin America and world politics rather than focusing on Venezuela. He was very critical of Bush, and the war in Iraq. He mentioned past and present leaders such as Che, Simon Bolivar, and Fidel Castro. He quoted, Marx, Chompski, Hobbes, and Harry Belafonte (about Bush being the biggest terrorist in the world). He is a very articulate and powerful speaker and what he said was all really interesting, thoughtful and I agreed with most of it. I dont think I know enough about what is going on in Venezuela to have a good sense of whether what he says is being put into practice and to what extent though. The overall event was amazing to experience. The support and enthusiasm that people have for their president is nothing like you would ever see in the US. I am going to try and post some pictures from the event in the next couple of days but I dont know if I will be able to on these computers.

The World Social Forum

2006-01-27T12:24:00.000-08:00

Today is the third day of the actual events of the World Social Forum. The actual events of the forum are mixed. I have showed up at ones that were
canceled, there have been ones that werent very interesting, and then some that were great. The majority of workshops are in Spanish and some have translators availible if anyone wants them, some dont. Most of the ones I have been to have been all in Spanish with no translations. Some highlights: Yesterday I attended a panel talk (that I unfortunatly had to leave early) that was about the media crisis and alternative media. Most of the panel members were American and many talked about the lack of media coverage of Latin American politics in main stream media in the US, why Latin America is ignored and about alternative sources that do cover these topics. Today I went to a talk on human rights at the US-Mexico border. Although it was a lot of information I knew, it was interesting to hear the problems at the border being described as human rights abuses and the ways in which deportation and arrests of undocumented immigrants effect the border communities in the US.

Last night I finally met up with the CAS and Evergreen groups and so spent some time with Jesse, Eli, Hannah and Sophie. I tagged along with 50 global exchange people and got free dinner.

Besides specific forum events, beign here has been amazing. Everyday I meet
lots of people from all over the world (though the majority are from Latin America, the US, and Canada). Everyone is really friendly and wants to talk
about politics, or about why you are in Venezuela, or recomend workshops, etc.
In addition to the lectures and panel disscussions there are constantly films
and concerts.

This morning the Bard group decided to pack up our wet and muddy tents and move to the other youth camp which is in the center of the city. We had all been
reluctant to move because of the hassel of packing up but once we got there it
was clear that it was the right choice. This camp is dry, centrally located, and there is much more activities there. So we will stay there for the rest of the time.

Random story. Yesterday I was sitting next to a woman and I heard her mention
San Francisco so I asked here where she was from. She lives in Oakland and we
talked for a while. At some point it came up that I went to Bard and it turns out she graduated from Bard too. She hasnt had any connection to Bard since she
graduated and so was excited to hear about it. Also, (for those of you who know Bard) when she was at Bard, Blithewood was a dorm and she lived there!! Anyway, it is a small world, even when I am in another country thousands of miles from Berkeley and Bard.

Arriving in Caracas

2006-01-25T15:18:00.000-08:00

I left from the San Francisco airport early Monday morning. I had a layover in Atlanta where I met a lot of people on my flight who were also going to the World Social Forum in Venezuela. When the plane landed at midnight I connected up with a group of kids who were also planning to stay at the youth camp. WSF volunteers met the plane and provided free buses to the city. Normally it would be a 45 minute drive but the main highway from the airport is closed because part of the highway is breaking. So the ride took about 3 hours through small towns going up and down hills on a curvy road. The fog and curves in the road made the ride slightly nerve racking but we got to the city safely at 5am. We were dropped off at a central location and from there a group of 8 of us took a cab to the park where we thought the youth camp was. At 5:30 in the morning we found nothing but joggers, hundreds of them, it was so wierd, do people go jogging that early in the morning in the US too and I just dont notice them? Anyway, no one seemed to know anything about the WSF so we figured we were in the wrong place. We picked a spot in the park and settled down to rest until the internet cafes opened and we could try and figure out where to go and whereto meet people we were meeting. I spent the rest of the morning standing on lines to register, lines to pay, lots of really long lines. At various points we all split up and went our own ways.

Right after registration I ran into some of the Bard people I was supposed to meet up with. Once the Bard group was together we tried to find an event that was part of an Alternative Social Forum, but couldnt find it. At this point I was still carrying my 40 pound backpack, hadnt slept except a few hours on the plane and bus, and had been walking all day. I split off from the group and went to settle into the youth camp where I got to bed early to catch up on my sleep. The camp is up in the hills where there is a lot more rain than in the city and so the whole camp is wet and muddy and I woke up with my feet wet because the water had come into the tent and into my sleeping bag. Oh well. There were no real events yesterday, mostly just registration. Today was the start of activities, more on that later.

Host Family

2006-01-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

Today I got an email with information about the host family I will be living with in Chile for the semester. I will be living in a neighborhood in Santiago called Providencia with a woman who works as a school psychologist and her two daughters, one is 22 and studies English, the other is 19. The email had some basic information and even a picture. I emailed the family to tell them about myself and sent them a picture of me. So, I now have a place where I will be living which is really exciting and makes the trip seem a little more real. I leave in three days and it hasn't quite felt real yet.

Welcome to my blog

2006-01-13T19:33:00.000-08:00

So I have decided to keep a blog during my semester in Chile to keep you all informed about what I am up to. I will try to update it as often as I can with writing and photos so keep checking back for new postings.