More Exploration

Last weekend we had a beautiful day for our tour of Valparaíso, which was postponed 3 weeks ago because of weather. There are only 19 students on our program, but we got a full-size tour bus—I was surprised because we were going up in the cerros, where the roads are world-famous for being very steep and narrow. But, all Chilean bus drivers are dauntless, and we made it around some crazy curves and past some rushed micro conductors.

Our first stop was La Sebastiana, one of Pablo Neruda’s houses. It has an absolutely beautiful view of the hills and the bay. Four stories tall, with about one room on each floor, the house is full of stuff Neruda collected throughout his life; for example, a porcelain cow, with removable lid, in which he used to mix drinks. There are lots of big windows and some portholes in the stairways, because the house was designed with a nautical theme in mind; Neruda said he loved to go on voyages, but mostly imaginary ones. Standing by his writing desk on the top floor and watching the kites and birds over the houses with the ocean beyond, it was lovely.

Next we took a walking tour of Cerro Concepción, the part of the city that’s been named “Patrimonio Cultural de la Humanidad,” a World Heritage Site. Unlike the other cerro I’d visited, Cerro Concepción had bigger, color-coordinated houses, lots of murals, and classy restaurants and hotels—all on the sides of the steep hill. (Today I went back with friends and splurged on lunch at the place with best view…the Chilean word for how nice that was is riiiico.) It’s a charming and unique place with a lot of history—like the Anglican church that doesn’t have a steeple because it couldn’t stand out on top of a hill in a country where everyone had to be Catholic (no longer a law). And I finally got to take an ascensor (funicular railway) just like Ché does in The Motorcylce Diaries!

Now that I’ve been here for more than a month (!!), I can appreciate the differences between Viña del Mar and Valparaíso. They have pretty distinct characters. Viña is a resort town, with the beaches and some upscale hotels and restaurants near them, and with residencial sectors in the cerros and to the east, where my journalism school is. Upper-class people (class is well-defined here) generally live in Viña rather than Valpo, and it’s safer to walk around at night, which I assume is why the program placed us here. Viña is a beautiful city and I like living here, being able to walk to the beach and, I admit, to the mall, is comforting; but while it’s definitely Chilean in many ways, Viña is much more like any other city than Valpo is.

Valparaíso is totally different from and has a different feel than any other place I’ve been before. I think it’s because it’s a port city, and a very isolated one. On Cerro Concepción I really felt like I was on the edge of the world. There’s a sense of going back in history to when Valparaíso was the first port after Cape Horn, and the sailors could pick out their houses because their families painted them so brightly. The other thing about Valpo is how chaotic it is, at least in the cerros (there’s also a grid, the ‘plan’ section, which is much easier to navegate but still chaotic because of the traffic and markets). Unlike almost every other city in South America, it was never officially founded or planned out; it just expanded randomly. So a map of the cerros is a bunch of squiggly lines—and as I enjoy mentioning, the roads are super steep. Like our tour guide said, Valparaíso is a city in 3-D.

I think my Spanish is getting better gradually, and I can recognize and appreciate lots of Chilean words and the cadence of their speech, which is different from the way people talked in Spain. Watching Chilean telenovelas is fun and a good way to get used to Chilenismos. My 11-year-old Chilean sister filled up several sheets of paper explaining to me the backstories of 2 different telenovelas, but it didn’t all sink in…

Santiago

This weekend I went to Santiago with six other girls from the program. Santiago is the biggest city in Chile, located an hour and half east of Valparaíso (more or less on the other side of the country). It’s surrounded on one side by snowy mountains, on other sides by the cordillera, foothills. On the day it wasn’t pouring rain, we climbed (funicular railway-style) Cerro San Cristobal, which is a hill from which you can see the whole city—and get an idea of how huge it is!

We also visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the main art museum in Santiago. There was an interesting mixture of modern and classic, sacred and not-sacred art. Also a whole gallery filled with children’s drawings and photographs that were apparently going to be displayed in Japan. The next day we stopped by La Moneda, the government building where Salvador Allende died during the 1973 military coup. We couldn’t actually go inside, but we could enter the courtyard; there were some strange modern sculptures, which I wasn’t expecting.

Possibly the most interesting part was that I got to stay in my first hostel, and now I think I’m spoiled forever because it was really comfortable, spacious, and architecturally beautiful. Called La Casa Roja, the hostel used to be a private mansion; it had a big kitchen and we bought bread, cheese, avocados (staple Chilean food!), manjar (caramel, also a staple Chilean food), etc. and ate in the dining room. It was relaxing and we met a guy from Canada who is teaching English in the south of Chile. There were people there from Australia, Germany, England, and other places, too. Also the first night, we went to Calle (street) Pio Nono, which was packed with people at 2:00am on a Thursday, and got empanadas, of course. We found a place called Empanatodos, and I wish I could transplant it to Viña del Mar; or, even better, to Bryn Mawr.


I’m going to have another quiet week because the two journalism classes and the one art class I am now hoping to take still don’t start until next Monday. The picture is of the History building, which I think is pretty but hard work to climb when I have class at 8:15am—an hour that is quite early for most Chilenos and thus for me too while I am here.

Climbing an Urban Mountain

On the right you can see a section of my commute to class every day along the Pacific coast. It doesn’t get any better than that… Also visible in the bottom left corner are some micros, which as I mentioned before, are the exciting transportation system I use.

My family is pretty amazing, and getting to know them makes me think about what I’ve taken for granted living in the US. My Chilean mom was telling me about how difficult it was for her, at my age, to buy something as simple as a sweater or a pair of shoes. Everybody in Chile had to buy necessities on credit during the Pinochet years, and no one could get a good job unless they were in the military or had military connections, no matter how much education they had. That’s why my Chilean parents moved to Canada in 1986 (2 years before the dictatorship ended), and only moved back 2 years ago. Victoria, their daughter, was born in Canada. Ximena, my Chilean mom, was also explaining to me that only people of my generation or a little older in Chile are now able to plan for their retirement. So maybe in the future the culture will become more like the U.S. in that children will not be automatically obliged to take care of their elderly parents in their homes, as they are now. This seems to be a big controversy here; e.g., this morning I was watching the Chilean equivalent of Judge Judy, and the two women with the disagreement were sisters arguing over who will take care of their mother. And in a satirical newspaper my family showed me, there was an ad for the website www.yanoquierovivirconmisviejos.cl, or www.idontwanttolivewithmyparentsanymore.cl. Which actually probably addresses the opposite concern: young people who get married and can’t afford to move out. Both are big issues here, and seem like funny problems…but, I guess, only until it happens to you.

Yesterday I finally got to climb up into the cerros (the hills) of Valparaíso, with their jumble of colorful houses. Elizabeth and I were amazed again and again as we reached the top of one very steep incline only to discover that around the corner, the hill continued. The streets are ridiculously steep; I felt like I was walking almost straight up. It was not easy! I admire people who live there, they must have really strong legs. And excellent brakes on their cars. Many of the houses have stairways leading up to them that are extremely narrow and vertical. All of it is very photogenic. It took us about an hour of climbing to reach the top of one cerro (there are many), and I at least was exhausted, but the view was worth it. We could see Viña del Mar to the north, and Reñaca and Con Con, which are suburbs north of Viña, and the whole city of Valparaíso, and the Pacific Ocean of course. In the opposite direction we could see the snow on the tops of the real mountians in the distance. There was a rainbow around the sun and it was all beautiful. Then we walked all the way down, which was hard on the knees!

One thing I’ve been meaning to share is this video that our program directors showed us during orientation when we talked a little bit about Culture Shock. It shows the differences between Italy and the rest of Europe, but they told us it also applies to Chile versus the United States. Besides being very funny, it’s also pretty accurate. I would amend two things: you don’t acutally have to wait long for the buses here, usually not more than a minute, because there are so many of them. And while Italians have a thousand different ways to order coffee, no one here drinks real coffee because it’s too expensive for some reason. The only thing readily available is Nescafé—instant coffee. So that is one aspect of US daily life that I miss. For Chile, I would replace the variety of coffee with a variety of bottled water: for example, when we were climbing the cerro, we stopped to get some water in a tiny store almost hidden between the houses, and I figured they would have one kind of bottled water maybe. Acutally, when I asked, the woman wanted to know if I wanted mineral water, gasificado or sin gas (carbonated or not). I don’t know, water is water to me.

In Which I Wear Little Red Booties

The only stressful thing in the past few days has been the “toma de ramos,” where we sign up for classes we’re interested in. There was an academic fair with student representatives from all the different faculties, and we went around asking questions about specific courses and signing up. I actually didn’t have any problems that day—but the next day Claudio, our academic advisor, sent out an email with the start dates of all the classes that are primarily for international students—and all but one of the classes I had chosen were on the list! Which was an unhappy coincidence that I wasn’t expecting. So I’m still not sure exactly which combo of classes to take now, because I want to be with Chilean students; that’s one of the reasons I chose this program. Frustrating, but it will work out.

One of the classes I know I’m taking is with Chileans at the school of journalism: Periodismo Televisivo. I get to learn how to use the cameras and the little studio they have there, I think. Exciting! I’m also taking a mandatory Spanish grammar class with the Americans from my program, probably a poetry class and probably a course on Valparaíso history—that’s one of the classes primarily for extranjeros, but I really want to take it. I also might take a course on international politics with all Chilean students, but it looks really difficult…we get to visit first and see if the class is for us, so I can decide later.

Other than that, we’ve just been walking around Viña, sitting on the rocks by the beach, and visiting different sites. Yesterday my friend Elizabeth and I went to Palacio Riojas (photo), which is a 1907 mansion located a few blocks from my house. It was kind of an absurd experience. We paid $300 pesos (about 75 cents) to get in, and the one person working there had us sit down and put red booties over our shoes so we wouldn’t hurt the floor. So we shuffled around in our booties for about 10 minutes, and then we had seen everything there was to see and took off our booties and left. The guy seemed really happy to have someone come visit!

After that we went to the Parque Quinta Vergara because we wanted to go the art museum there (photo) but it was closed. THEN, someone tried to steal my camera: he asked if we wanted him to take a picture of us—during orientation we were told that they’ll do that and make off with your camera (before taking the picutre, I suppose). I said “No, gracias.” I was pretty excited to have thrwarted a thief.

When that happened, Elizabeth and I were taking each other’s photo in front of this tree in the Park. It has a poem on it, told from the point of view of a tree. I heard before coming that this is a country of poets, and I think it’s true. Poetry has appeared unexpectly a couple of times already, like here and elsewhere in the park, and in La Campana, the national park where we went during orientation, there was a sign with a poem along one of the mountain trails. I like it; I’m looking forward to taking poetry here.