La Serena

This weekend all the gringos went up to La Serena, a town with lots of beaches and churches with interesting architecture. It was a trip already paid for with our program fees, so even more fun! I swam in the very cold ocean, made a huge nacho feast with friends because we miss Mexican food, went to a pretty Japanese garden, and briefly experienced the strangest internet café ever—“Infernet”, which was Hell-themed and had a grim reaper in the doorway and homemade devils and flames on the ceilings.

We drove through the Valle de Elqui, which is known for its pisco vineyards. Part of it was dammed up to create a beautiful lake with blue-green water. In this area we went to a restaurant that cooks everything with solar ovens. The birthplace of Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral is in a nearby town, so we went to a museum honoring her. We also took a trip to an observatory called Mamalluca (great name), and I got to see the craters on the moon and four moons of Jupiter with a telescope! Plus the guys who explained the astronomical stuff to us played us a concert at the end (for some reason?) with Andean flutes, etc.

On the way back to Viña del Mar, we stopped at Parque Nacional Fray Jorge, which is the desert but right by the ocean. There is a perpetual fog on top of the mountains closest to the shore, and this creates a microclimate similar to the climate of the south of Chile, which I guess would be like a temperate rainforest; except it doesn’t actually rain soooo I don’t know what you would call it. It was beautiful and really interesting because all the plants get their water from the cloud, so they’ve adapted to that. Plus it was bizarre because the rest of the park was sunny and dry!

Now I’m back and this week I have two news reports to film and edit for Television Journalism. One is with two Chilean students, about the financial and general problems that public hospitals are having in Chile, so we’re going to a hospital to interview a doctor (hopefully) and patients. The other is my final project that I’m doing by myself, about what the international students think about Chileans. I finished all the interviewing and now have to edit it. Unbelievably, I only have two more weeks of classes after this one, so it’s time to wrap up school!

Sand Dunes in Con Con

I have been here for over 3 months, and just last week I finally went to Con Con and Reñaca, which are the beach towns north of Viña del Mar. There are some amazing sand dunes that we climbed, with views of all of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar and even the rural country north of the cities. It was a cloudy day but the view was still incredible. Running down the sand dunes was also fun! Climbing back up was a lot harder.

Right below the dunes were some large rocks on the shoreline, so we climbed around them, too (we were in a climbing mood). There was black volcanic rock and a lighter-colored rock, and you could see where the volcanic rock had oozed into the cracks in the other rock and hardened. I had never seen anything like it before! The waves were crashing in all around us. We also saw a rock with about 40 sea lions on it. The last thing we did in Con Con was get an empanada because the best empanadas are supposed to be there—and yes, my crab and cheese one was muy rica.

Yesterday…I was a bunch of grapes (un racimo de uvas) for Halloween. My little sister Victoria and my mom Ximena helped me out a lot. Ximena sewed the balloons to a shirt and Victoria helped me paint the leaves for my head and also painted my face—which I thought was a little bit much but I went along with it. I went to a party thrown by the Chilean host brother of a friend…I was one of 3 finalists in a very informal costume contest, so I guess it turned out pretty well!

Mendoza, Argentina

This weekend I tried to pack all of Argentina into two days, which obviously was not enough time—but we did do a lot in 48 hours. I went with 5 friends to Mendoza, which is about 7 hours by bus from Viña, over the Andes. It’s different from Valparaíso in that it’s very flat, in a desert, bigger and more cosmopolitan. I liked it a lot because there were big trees lining every street, beautiful plazas and lots of people out all the time.

The Mendoza region is known for its wine, so one thing we did was take a bus (probably the hardest part of the trip was figuring out how to catch this bus) to Maipu, a town surrounded by vineyards. We went to a bodega/museum and had a short tour of the vineyard and museum, then got to taste a wine they make there—amazingly this was all free; Argentina in general was really cheap!

Another typically Argentinean thing we did was see some tango at a dinner and performance place. It was really intense! Also there was singing and at the end the singer called up one person from each table to sing karaoke with him…so my friend Alysha impressed everyone with her Spanish and singing skills. We learned a song of which afterwards we could only remember the first line: “Por una cabeza!” Other Argentinean experience: had a tasty steak. It was good but I was more impressed by the large amounts of delicious bread we got at restaurants and the hostel. Argentines definitely love their meat, though; there were lots of outdoor restaurants, so walking down the street we could see people devouring steaks all around us. That was a difference from Chile. Also I think Mendoza has the most dangerous sidewalks of any city I know: there are 3-foot deep trenches running along between the sidewalks and the streets in most places (for water, although there was no water in them), plus random deep holes in other places. A friend of one of my friends, who’s studying in Mendoza, said she had seen at least 3 people fall in. South America is different...

And the other thing we did, which I had always wanted to do: paragliding! I got to fly over the precordillera, the foothills of the Andes. I was surprised that I wasn’t afraid at all once I was actually up in the air: only the running off the cliff part was a little scary (I didn’t have to do any work: my guide was sitting behind me and controlled everything). It was beautiful and peaceful.

Returning yesterday, we crossed the border again on top of the Andes surrounded by snow. The road was really twisty in parts! There were lots of pretty, skinny waterfalls coming down through the mountains because of melting snow. So…the little slice of Argentina that I saw was great and I wish I could easily have spent a whole week just in Mendoza.

10 Unrelated, Odd Things

1) On Wednesday nights, I walk to my poetry class in the Art school at the end of a short street in Viña. This week I noticed a life-size pickup truck made entirely of cardboard parallel parked in a row of normal cars on the street. I assume it’s an art project.
2) My host dad and the food he aquires: the family and I are currently working on finishing a wheel of artesan goat cheese that he drove an hour or more into the country to get, and which I estimate weighs at least 10 lbs. He also got a giant bag of at least 100 avocados for really cheap somewhere (I just found out that half an avocado has 22% of your DV of fat, oops!! That’s a lot for a fruit!! That also must be why they’re so delicious).
3) I saw my television journalism professor on UCV channel 18 one night this week, and I didn’t even realize he actually did reporting. My favorite was hearing the report about the vice presidential debate because of the way he pronounced “Sarah Palin” and “Joe Biden.”
4) The spanish translation of the title of the movie “Lost in Translation” is “Perdidos en Tokio”.
5) For our Spanish class, which is all people from our program, we have to make a video using Chilean spanish. Ours is like the Frog Prince, but with a dog instead of a frog, because we’re using the cultural fact that there are lots of dogs in streets. So we found a friendly dog and taped some interactions with him that we’re going to edit into a coherent movie, hopefully. We got some weird looks from Chileans when we were taping each other talking to a stray dog!
6) In my poetry class with Chileans, our readings so far have included Ezra Pound, Italo Calvino, Charles Baudelaire, and T.S. Eliot, all in Spanish. It’s difficult and kind of strange, but probably my favorite class—especially because the professor gets REALLY excited about what he’s saying.
7) When my host parents explain something to me, they like to use whatever may be on the table as props, like tonight they were telling me how when they were little they would buy watermelons at fruit stands in the countryside, and the people selling them would cut a triangle out of it and let you taste it to see if it was good before you bought it. My host mom used a tub of margarine to stand in for the watermelon and then my host dad explained it to me again using a roll of paper towels—they do a good job making sure I understand what they’re talking about :)
8) Often, when I tell a Chilean that my name is Hannah, they’ll look confused for a second and then say, “Ah, Hannah Montana.” This happens more frequently with the 10 to 13-year-olds at my school placement, but not infrequently with people my age and older!
9) In my TV journalism class, there are three exchange students: me, a girls from France and a girl from Germany. One week we had to make a short video with a plot, and the three of us were in a group with four Chileans. Our storyline was that these three foreign students are wandering around looking for the journalism school. We ask three Chilean students in French, German and English, “Where’s the journalism university?” Two of them look confused, but one guy understands the word “University” which is similar in all 4 languages, and he leads there (and gets the gringas). It was ridiculous and fun. The plaza is called Miraflores, which literally means Lookflowers, so we called it “Lost in Miraflowers.”
10) The only thing I can think of for a 10th is that on Saturday I went with American friends to a tapas restaurant for our friend’s birthday, and one thing we got was called Chorrillana: a huge plate of french fries topped with slices of beef and scrambled quail eggs. I don’t know if this is Chilean but it is certainly delicious.

The picture is of a fountain in Viña by the ocean.

Machu Picchu

So, Machu Picchu: It was incredibly beautiful and hard to get to. First the getting there part: We took an overnight bus from San Pedro to Arica, the northernmost city in Chile. Our arrival time was supposed to be 7am, but there was an accident so we were sitting on the bus from about 6:30-9:00am. We were on the side of a mountain in the desert, and all we could see to our left was clouds. When we finally got to pass the accident, we saw that it was a truck carrying fish that had crashed, and there were fish all over the road and right up to the edge of the cliff. Very bizarre.

We crossed the border in a taxi and got to meet a Peruvian couple who were both doctors coming back from a conference in Argentina. The really stressful part began when we arrived at the bus station in Tacna, the first city in Peru. All our sources had informed us previously that it was only going to take 10 hours to get from Tacna to Cusco: in fact, it takes 16 with a stop. The bus left at 12:30 (luckily there’s a time difference of an hour between Chile and Peru, because we arrived in Tacna at 12:30 Chile Time), and was to arrive in Cusco at 6:00am. Our train, which we had already paid for and is the only way to get to Machu Picchu, left at 6:30. So, if the bus were late at all, we weren’t going to Machu Picchu! It was terrible and also meant spending a second night in a row on the bus, but in the end it all worked out, because we got there on time and everyone we met was really helpful.

Then we were finally in Machu Picchu! We stayed one night in a hostel in the town of Aguascalientes, which is not much but is where you have to stay when you’re there. The next morning we took the bus up the mountain; it’s a narrow dirt road that has switchbacks all the way up, and if there’s a bus coming down when you’re going up, somebody has to pull over to the side—a little scary! It was raining in the morning, but we wanted to get in there and climb Waynupicchu, which is the mountain behind the citadel, which doesn’t look so tall in the pictures, but it is! It was an hour of climbing on stone steps (exhausting!) and we were in a cloud the whole time. When I first caught a glimpse of Machu Picchu through the clouds, it was breathtaking.

When we were coming down it started to clear up and we could get an idea of how high up we were: very high! Besides the fact that the Incas made almost no engineering mistakes in the architecture of Machu Picchu, its being perched on top of a huge mountain is also incredible. We were allowed to walk all over the city; there are some suggested routes, but you can explore by yourself, too. A tour guide, Ernesto, was nice enough to invite us to join his group, some Americans from a financial company in Mississippi (really), so we followed them around for a while. We also met two women from Belgium who had been helping to build a school in Peru. The weather turned out to be perfect, too. Near the end of our day we went up to the other side of the city and sat for a while where we could see the postcard view, and hung out with some llamas. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I’m really thankful I got to go. It was worth all the challenges to get there and back!

When we got back to Arica, we had a morning to see the city before our flight back to Santiago (good decision not to take another 35 hour bus ride). Arica is getting famous for its surfing; we stayed in a hotel called Arica Surf House and got meet some of the surfers, two women from England and New Zealand. There’s a huge rock formation by the beach called the morro, which was impressive. And, it was 19 September, which in Chile means Fiestas Patrias! We missed the 18, which is independence day, but Chileans party all weekend. All over the country they set up ramadas, which are stands with games and typical food. Emily and I had asado de pollo (grilled chicken, very tasty) in a ramada called “Ramada Las Chicas Superpoderosas” (Powerpuff Girls Ramada). I don’t know why they all have cheesy names, but it was pretty funny. On our flight back, we had the most Chilean airline meal ever: empanadas de pino, bread, a salad with just tomatoes and onions, and a dulce de leche cake. Also we made two stops—we had three takeoffs and three landings within four hours.

Since then I’ve been studying and enjoying the fact that the weather is getting warmer. Next Saturday we have a tour of Santiago that highlights the political history of Chile. On Wednesday I had my first day as a volunteer at a girls’ school in Valparaíso helping to teach English. It was not easy because the girls behave so badly that the teacher can hardly do a lesson at all. But I got to talk with some of them who really wanted to learn, and I think working with them will be fun and worth it.

San Pedro de Atacama

I’ve had quite the week traveling in the north of Chile and in Perú. I feel like, after doing this, I can pretty much travel anywhere and survive. The total time traveling by bus was at least 84 hours, plus taxi time to cross the border twice, 8 hours total in a train, and a flight back with a total time of about 4.5 hours (we had two stops, so it was a 35 min flight, a 45 min flight, and a 1 hour 45 min flight—very strange). Out of 7 nights, Emily and I spent 4 in buses. The only time we weren’t traveling in a desert was when we finally got to Machu Picchu. And yet…it was completely worth it!

We arrived at San Pedro de Atacama on Friday night and found our hostel, Hostal Florida, which turned out to be not up to our standards but we toughed it out for two days and two nights. In San Pedro there were 7 of us gringos, plus various other gringos from Valpo and other places—it’s a very touristy place, even though it’s so isolated. The Atacama Desert is supposedly the driest place in the world: it never rains ever. There are no living things at all for miles around, only in the small oasises—San Pedro is one. I started to really like being in the desert because it seems like a different culture. The weather was absolutely beautiful, warm sun and cool breeze.

My favorite thing in San Pedro was going horseback riding; I did it in Olmué for the first time, but here I got a bigger horse, we went faster, we went down big sand dunes (scary!) and the surroundings were incredible. I really felt like I was in a Western. Especially because I got to wear a hat. Our guide took us past the Cordillera de la Sal, hills made up mostly of salt, and we stopped at the oasis of Quitor, where there were pre-Hispanic ruins from the time of the Atacameña indigenous people. As it’s a desert, the buildings were preserved amazingly well.

Our two organized tours were to Valle de la Luna and the Tatio Geysers. Valle de la Luna is called Valley of the Moon because it has an unearthly surface that looks as if it’s covered with craters, and strange rock formations, at least one of which was over a million years old. The thing to do here is climb up a ridge and wait for the sunset, when the desert turns different colors because of the minerals in the dirt. Plus there was an almost-full moon, so it was just extremely strange and beautiful. There was also the hugest, smoothest sand dune I had ever seen.

The next morning we woke up at 3:30am to go on a tour of the geysers. I had heard it was going to be cold, but I was so not prepared for how freezing it was up on top of the mountain. I think it was at least -20°F, and I only had two sweatshirts on. That combined with the thin air, and I was walking pretty slowly. The picture is of Emily and me warming our frozen hands in the steam from the geysers. After having been to Yellowstone, I was surprised that we were allowed to walk around freely in the geyser area—not the safest thing in the world—but in Chile things are different I guess. As the sun was coming up, they gave us hot chocolate, and it started warming up quickly after that. So much so that just 15 minutes later we were all in our bathing suits swimming in a hot spring—it was still cold, don’t get me wrong, but it had to be done. Being a tourist in another country can be very weird, because you’ll be doing something ridiculous like swimming in a hot spring at 7am on top of a mountain in the middle of the desert, and there will be people speaking several different languages all around you doing the same thing.

Anyway, after that we got back in the bus and on the way down saw some wildlife including desert rabbits, flamingos (apparently this is their habitat??), 1000-year-old cacti, and llamas!! Bizarrely, after getting out to take pictures of the llamas, our next stop was an extremely tiny village with a population of about 50, where we had the opportunity to buy llama kebabs as we sat and watched them grazing on the hills. I couldn’t do it, but some of my friends did: “I’m never going to be able to look at a llama again without salivating.”

The second half of my voyage—Machu Picchu—I’ll save until next time.

Chocolate and celery?

Yesterday we had a program tour which involved eating chocolate! We went to a small chocolate factory in Curacaví, which is a little town in the foothills, and we met the founder of the chocolate workshop, Félix Brunatto. He explained to us about how he uses unconventional—and very fresh—ingredients to make the chocolates, which are then shipped throughout the world in beautiful boxes, also handmade. We had chocolates with celery, cloves, oregano, lemon, grapes, cheese, hot pepper, and more. All of them were delicious! I actually think I liked the oregano one the best. They use ingrediants that the Aztecs, Mayans, and Tolmecs used, and also traditional Chilean recepies, and they grow all the herbs they use right there (there they are in front of me on the porch). Also they have a store in Manhattan so I'm totally going...

Then we went to Isla Negra, another one of Pablo Neruda’s houses. It’s not actaully an island, but it has a beautiful view of the ocean. He designed it himself and filled it with all his collected things, like figureheads from the front of the prows of ships, insects under glass, photographs of poets, ships in bottles, paintings, shells, books, and a giant wooden horse. There was also a steam engine out front. He really liked things—just things in general. I think it’s ridiculous that he three houses absolutely full of random stuff, but I love him for it, too.

I’m going to read his poem “Alturas de Machu Picchu” this week, because next week I’m going to Machu Picchu!! I’m really exicted and a little nervous; I’m going with just one friend and we’re taking the bus all the way up there. First we’re going to San Pedro de Atacama (leaving on the bus Thursday evening, arriving Friday evening…ugh), which is a desert in the north of Chile and one of the best places on Earth to see the stars. Also there are gysers and salt flats and the Valle de la Luna. It’s turned out to be a lot of work planning trips like this by ourselves, but it’s also fun and going to be worth it!

Tomorrow I have my Television Journalism class, which is going to be a huge challenge, I’ve found, because the idea is to learn not only how to use the cameras and write news stories but also how to—eek—announce the news, which I often can’t even understand. But hopefully it will be a good kind of challenge. The other thing I got myself into is English Opens Doors, so once a week I’ll be assisting in an English class with students at a school in Valparaíso. I don’t know what age yet or how it’s going to work exactly, but I think it will be difficult but fun.