! ! ! !

2007-12-14T15:47:00.000-03:00

2007-12-09T22:27:00.000-03:00

i'm coming home in less than two weeks! so i'll give real updates and even hugs when i see everybody! things are amazing here, i'm excited to come home but really sad to leave and contemplating coming back in the summer because i am going to miss everyone so much. lately: uruguay, the beach, made my own bikini, living in friends houses, lots of concerts, free music, feria de libros independientes y alternativos, dancing, frustrations with school, etc. see you soooooon!

2007-11-04T15:30:00.001-03:00

i love summer.
i love buenos aires.
things couldnt be better right now.

porque?

spending every day outside in the sun
lunches in the park
food not bombs and talking to lots of new poeple
a bikini making cooperative and invitations to visit them in monetvideo
flowers and fruit trees
the trainride into the city and looking out the window
living with CAt and lou and ally and esteban
tons of friends offering me places to stay and opening up their homes to me
a stranger who offers me a tangerine for dessert in the park and then sits and talks playing ukelele for an hour
an out of the blue invitation to el loco mas loco del mundo's beach house
permaculture workshops every saturday
meeting a sociologist doing cool research right now
not telling anyone i was coming back and still ending up surrounded by people and plans
etc.

2007-10-28T23:34:00.000-03:00

today was the election, which cristina kirchner won so things will most likely continue the same in argentina. thank god it is over. if i have to hear another van with a speaker yelling the names of candidates or hear more of the same empty promises and things like 'in democracy we all win' i might have to go to Las Heras (argentina's suicide capital an hour from here). i guess i'll be coming back to the us just when we're in the thick of it there too. basically the only good thing to come out of all of this politics is that since its obligatory to vote, the government hired buses to drive students home because there are no absentee ballots. so fede's brother came home on one of those but is staying in pico truncado with his girlfriend a week extra so it looks like i can take his spot on the way back to buenos aires (25 more hours!) and get a free trip back to the city. which is really great! but man, politics. i am so sick of propaganda and lies and doublethink and people who know that nothing changes but suddenly when october or november comes around we act like taking two minutes to cast a vote for soemone we don't even like or trust is really going to make a difference and not make us obligated to change anything in our own lives. but i won't get into that.

here are a few pictures of pico truncado. tomorrow is my last day here if everything works out with the bus then i will go back to bs as and live with ally and the cat for a little while and study i guess. hmmm other things, i cant remember...

soy!

merle africa

2007-10-19T11:50:00.000-03:00

i made my own soy milk! and soy dulce de leche. and seitan. and three batches of cookies and bread and potato soy mayonaise and lunch and dinner pretty much every day. being a housewife is sort of fun when you also have someone else's mom to do all the cleaning and grocery shopping and don't have to be married.

and fede has a radio show called siempre libre every night for one hour that i've been going to with him and talking on and on wednesday we did a hiphop special and i brought music and his friend Akiles (who's 19 years old or something but really really really serious about hiphop and fighting for what it stands for and giving it a bigger place in patagonia and argentina and constructed his own studio in his bedroom and produces cds and music videos and documentaries about breakdancing and all sorts of projects...)came and talked and freestyled and played some music from his group Templo Under and even though i was really nervous speaking in spanish on the radio it was great!

what else? last weekend was nice and sunny so we went to the beach on saturday and camped there for a night. it was really beautiful with great tide pools and sleeping next to the water is always nice.

this weekend is mother's day (father's day is the same date as in the us but mother's day is inversed, so essentially the same day seasonally just not by month....) so that means that they are having a big asado with all the family at his grandmother's house on sunday, so maybe i'll see if i can stay for that since it sounds fun and then next week get up the energy to leave and go to mendoza. oh yeah and i started going to the gym with his mom and its at the chilean immigrants center with 20 other women doing funny dances and pelvic thrusts and weight lifting to music. its pretty fun!

these are some of the recipes if you're interested

SOY MILK is soo easy!
i soaked 1/2 kilo (i guess 1 lb) of soy beans over night.
Then i blended 1 cup beans with 2.5 c water and repeated until i had blended all the beans. I put it all in a big pot and cooked it for about half hour. (i think you could cook first and then blend too, maybe easier). Then with a cloth napkin as a filter over a jar i poured the mix, letting the milk go through and the bean pulp stayed in the napkin and then i squeezed it to make sure all the milk got out. it tastes a little funky plain but heated up with vanilla and suger was delicious and also with melted chocolate. and the bean pulp is good if you blend it with garlic and olive oil to make soy mayo or formed into patties for burgers

and with the milk you can make DULCE DE LECHE!!!!
this made one jam jar
1 liter soy milk
1/4 kilo (1 3/4 cups) brown sugar
1/4 tsp baking soda
5 drops vanilla extract
cook the milk in a big pot until it boils. when boiling add the baking soda and sugar. bring it to a boil again, and then cover but so that some steam can escape, stirring to make sure that its not burning. then basically wait about 1.5 hours until it gets to a spreadable jamlike consistency. turn off the heat, add vanilla, put in jars immediately when hot. yum!

CAROB COOKIES!
so i figured out the secret to vegan cookies made with oil. you have to use some sort of blended fruit to get the right consistency. i've used (about 1/2 cup) banana, pear, apple (sauce), zucchini! or avocado and they all work really well especially zucchini and banana.

1/2 c oil
3/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c blended fruit
1.5 c flour (or oatmeal)
1.5 c carob in powder like flour (called algarroba in spanish)
1.5 tsp baking powder
chocolate chips
chopped nuts
raisins etc!

most important is to blend oild sugar and fruit first then slowly add flour and everything else. spoon into circles on a greased baking sheet and cook 10 minutes.

ok i think thats enough.

2007-10-07T20:25:00.000-03:00

so i'm here, in pico truncado, a really funny destination, but i'm happy even though its cold and windy. i think this is the fartherst away from home i've ever been, its really far! and you can see in all directions forever because its so flat and empty. and the stars! it's good....

2007-10-04T19:56:00.000-03:00

today was the last food not bombs for me and seeing everyone in the world before i leave. a few pictures:::

mapsss

a quick update before i leave

2007-10-02T20:14:00.000-03:00

i'm finally leaving buenos aires on friday! this is the plan:
27 bus ride to Pico Truncado, which is waaaay in the south, at the the top of patagonia, here are some maps.

there i will stay with Federico and his family.
then i will travel around and make my way northwest to Mendoza, by the end of october where i'll spend a month at El Peregrino, which is an organic vegetarian farm, mostly for apples but now it's cherry season and time for planting vegetables and doing construction.

On saturday I took the cat on the train to Lomas de Zamora to her new home with Ally and Esteban and a kitty playmate, Lou who is 4 months old. For the first two days she hissed in the corner and bit everyone but now they are playing and she's ok. but i miss her!!!

Tomorrow I give my computer to Facundo for 2 months, Juan gets my bike, i'll bring all my old clothes and art supplies to La Sala community center, then there's Food not Bombs thursday morning, Rocio's play opens thursday night, i have a check-up at the doctors friday morning before leaving, ally and some friends come over for tea and fruit on friday afternoon and then I'm GONE!

so what's new, smellyman?

2007-09-19T22:52:00.000-03:00

what's new? i moved out of my room because i am leaving the city really soon. I am living in the living room right now for free which is fine. except i have a fever from getting stuck in the rain but i am feeling better now. i cant think of what's going on. i finally finished an english/spanish recipe book of all the recipes i invented this year and pictures of appetizing monsters alongside that i will photocopy and give to people. on october third i am leaving for mendoza, everything is confirmed with the farm to arrive the 9th so that gives me a few days to hang out in the city of Mendoza with Niki and Erny. the weather almost got good and i spent everyday reading in the sun on the terrace and eating dinner outside enjoying warm nights but then it rained for 10 days and is cold again. hopefully it will be spring soon. i have gotten pretty bored of the nightlife and second hand smoke gives me caughing attacks lately so i've been a homebody reading moslty. although there was poesia promiscua in kasa las estrellas en la boca, a murga in villa 31 (lots of kids dancing in carnaval costumes in one of the "shantytown"ish neighborhoods, on the other side of the train tracks of Recoleta the poshest neighborhood, the contrasts in this city are mindblowing), and a friend named Natalia came to visit this past week and we went to a raggaeton party at the youth communist headquarters. so still some parties. andre my german roommate leaves on friday so most of the people i know have left the city. i give the cat away to my chilean friend Ally, who lives in Lomas de Zamora, a 20 min trainride out of the city. she has a 4 month old kitten so Lea will have someone to play with when i abandon her. that will be hard but there's no other option. and i can't remember what else, i'm going to get some sleep and write again when i'm feeling better....

tuwuntee won

2007-08-28T18:06:00.000-03:00

climbing trees, good food, hidden restaurants, my first glass of wine, bardeando, a nice birthday....

hermanito

2007-08-13T20:12:00.000-03:00

patrick came last tuesday, now he's gone but we did tons of stuff: homemade soyburgers with sean at his friends' apartment; silkscreening at the Sala (community center in caballito); painting a house at the huerta (the community garden); a night of dancing that my friend gregg djd with really good brazilian beats; a visit to my campus, english class; more silkscreening; a ride on the exilirating A-line rollercoaster metro in the first car; patrick's first mate, puerto madero; ecological reserve; choripan; steak (for him) at Club Eros restaurant/soccer club; Recoleta artesania fair; recoleta cemetary (down in the crypts even, dad you would have liked it); bellas artes muesum; playing with the cat; empanadas; birthday party for Rocio, whose friends are all dancers and danced tango, samba, and rock n roll for us; San telmo street fair; and a night of cooking (disgusting looking) hummus and corn pizzas with the vegan kids. all in all a really nice mix of getting in some tourist attractions and getting to see what my normal life is like and meet friends.

by carlos uria:

2007-08-05T16:56:00.000-03:00

rambles from a sick kid

2007-08-05T16:42:00.000-03:00

I have been really sick lately with a bad cold and neverending cough, possibly on the mend so hopefully i'll be healthy for patrick (tuesday!!). But yesterday staying in gave me the excuse to draw aaaall day. I drew funny hairstyles and some pictures of people with really good hair which I can never do and some cartoons and made 9 new pages in this kind of zine I am making that is not really a zine but kind of a homemade design experiment. And I decided I am going to paint a mural on the stairs going up to my room because my landlord is a pelotudo and is in Spain plus it will be nice so I think he will be happy. I think something like a bird flying off with heartstrings trailing behind followed by a school of flying colorful fish that chase the sun. And I also found all these friends of friends art websites and got suuuper inspired which is a great feeling. I got ideas for plans for two other drawings which will be 1. Half An upclose detail of my inner ear and half a cross section of the surrounding vicinity meaning Av. Juan de Garay as heard from my window. And the other will be a really up close of my toenail and a cross section of everything there like bacteria and sock lint and dogpoop etc.

I also tried to learn how to play the kalimba but I really don't know anything about instruments so I don't even know how to tune it or what the notes are. Which is sort of more fun but I also need someone to explain some things to me so I can get further. I recorded some musical doodles on my cassette recorder for fun and it is nice to listen to something and think hey! I made that! And I found these two books I brought from the usa on Latin American art and performance art that I hadn't looked at in months and now I realized I know a lot about the artists and the articles are so much more interesting now. Man, today was an art day! Those are my favorites. And his morning i went to this argentine artists house, his name is Carlos Uría (I think he's pretty famous, I don't know. He uses really bright colors and makes fun playful paintings) but he is dying and really sick with lung cancer (and still smoking). but it was really great to get to see his studio and talk to him and listen to stories and see paintings.

I've been obsessing about monsters again (as always?) Probably they are my favorite things to imagine and draw. So I am thinking of drawing a monster book, well I've been thinking of doing it for a while but now maybe I will really do it. like lots of chest hair and many eyes and maybe cilia for legs and fangs and tails and scales and large hairy toes. Probably if there was nothing serious to think about in the world I would most like to sit under trees and eat vegan food with friends drawing monsters together singing along to music and having sleepovers and bike rides and sitting in flowers. Maybe that is what I do mostly anyway. Right now. What would you do if there was nothing to fight for? Is that a silly question? Is aiming to make a difference actually the most interesting part? Would it be boring if there was nothing to do but sit and watch baseball all day without thinking and analyzing? too many details into my stream of conscience? this is what sitting inside in bed for 4 days does.

i really wish i could have been at the 80th birthday weekend. I miss all of you more than you probably think. and grandmom too. a lot!

unas fotos

2007-08-01T18:11:00.000-03:00

camping in the living room, sean, niki

2007-07-27T14:38:00.000-03:00

i have no internet in the house so i haven´t been able to write. things here are beautiful: cooking lunch to eat in the park, costume parties, conversations, bicycling, concerts at the huerta, planning the trip to mendoza, the sun, cookies, banana ginger nut smoothies, living in friend´s houses, chinatown, hunts through the city for vegan icecream etc.

recently

2007-07-15T01:27:00.000-03:00

dude i've been gone for a year! the past weeks have been really nice, here's what's happening a little.
back in june it was aneta's bday and me and this old man named mario made 20 pizza doughs and then only about 20 people came to her party and spoke esperanto all night playing with balloons so we have had pizzas coming out of our ears.

i made these ones for sean's birthday last tuesday. which was a really funny party that we had here too and all these people from a hiphop collective here in the city came and freestyled for us all night.

and it snowed! man it was so fun! we ventured out into the cold that night and had a snowball fight with some neighborhood kids and ran around for a couple of hours and i am now really sick but igual it was really special for it to have happened. except for all the homeless people who died and the fact that it's snowing here means climate change is pretty real. everything feels pretty real lately.

and i redid my room and have a place to hang things and an art corner and some more space.

and the huerta! it really sucks and the government has been trying to turn it into a park and bulldoze it. turning a functioning growing community garden into a fenced in "green space" seems pretty ridiculous but I guess its always like that. so we've been having some demonstrations in front of the Jefaturia but mostly just still going and having all sorts of music and food and workshops. sometimes i feel really uncomfortable there not really being part of the scene but also i'm meeting them and still i think its my favorite part of bs as. this was today:

my friend Fede singing made up songs

composting.

Facu and Erny with my bike in the elevator

.and they were the best. the one on the left is who taught me silkscreening.

really good saxophone

no place is safe from an impromptu moshpit when vegan argentines are around.

and my plans right now are looking like this: hang out here for the rest of july, finish this class on the marques de sade, start going to some free classes that the university of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo offer and try not to freeze. patrick comes the second week of august. i can't wait. and then niki and sean and jess all leave. but i've been hanging out with this new boy named Orlando from Bogota and today i met this girl who studies art and wants to hang out and i'm getting to know the huerta kids more so i won't be totally alone. then in september i take all my final exams and finish up with school here. then erny and me are gonna go to Mendoza and visit Niki and the go to this farm there where i'm planning on staying at least a month. then i guess come back and enjoy spring and summer here and then december 22nd i come home!

2007-07-09T17:07:00.000-03:00

its snowing! for the first time in 89 years

2007-07-02T17:36:00.000-03:00

this is the Twelve Tribes wedding that went to a while ago. I wish i had written about it then because now i forget.

2007-06-23T02:47:00.000-03:00

also Boca Juniors won the Copa Libertadores on wednesday (which is a pretty big deal if you don't know) everybody went to the obelisco at 2am to celebrate with fireworks and sleeping babies and lots of smiles. it closed down all 312 lanes of avenida 9 de julio with masses of blue and yellow. i don't think i've ever seen that many happy men in my life...drama drama drama in the house. i'm sick of it, you don't even want to know. i need to try to go to sleep before 6am one of these nights. okay, starting now:

2007-06-23T02:41:00.000-03:00

"Para todos los sistemas de machos y fachos la mujer es una puta; mueran los sistemas, vivan las putas"
- Mujeres Creando de Bolivia

2007-06-10T20:32:00.000-03:00

she's really healthy now! and almost big.

2007-06-01T21:56:00.000-03:00

look who i brought home today!!!

she's really really tiny! only 800 grams. can that be possible!

she finally fell asleep under the heater listening to nick drake. i think i might join her. there are a lot of other things happening too, here's a really brif update: 1. i gave myself a really bad haircut with bangs. 2. i think i got a job working during the day on weekends more or less as a hostess in a restaurant in san telmo. 3. free silkscreening workshop starts tuesday. 4. i went to a crazy twelve tribes wedding at their community/farm just outside of the city. i'll tell you stories if you ask, there are a lot...

2007-05-24T14:20:00.000-03:00

here are some more pictures of the new house: and i finally got heat in my room!

we have about a hundred balconies:

where lots of pies happen:

living:

soon to be my new kitchen:

routines i sometimes forget are important:

the seed fair:

the view from my little window:

and the huerta:

what i like about living here is that it's a real neighborhood. Before i moved i had never even heard of San Cristobal and none of the foreign kids know where it is but lately every porteño i meet actually lives here too. i don't know it's just really little things that sound silly but make me happy to be here. for example yesterday the wheel came off my bike when i was carrying it downstairs so i was standing on the sidewalk trying to put it back on but i didn't have a wrench and an old man sitting in a donkey drawn cart yelled for his friend to come put the wheel on for me and they came over and fixed it and told me i needed air. and a woman was walking by and i wasn't wearing a coat and she yelled at me to put some clothes on and then saw me twenty minutes later and yelled at me again. and the people who work at the fruit stand below our house know who i am and there's an organic food store down the street with grain and granola and dried fruit and spices but it's just run by this ni
ce old couple who sells everything for really cheap because they want everybody to be able to eat healthy. and i found a free silkscreening workshop that meets for classes every tuesday night but i can go use it any night of the week too and they have hundreds of screens with really good images. and they have a bike co-op. and i made friends with this funny vegan boy from mendoza

2007-05-20T15:26:00.000-03:00

yesterday i met up with alyssa, this girl i farmed with in ecaudor who's in bA for a month, and we went to a seed fair in the provincia about an hour away. It was in this giant giant park and i was thinking it'd be cool to be able to talk to people about roof gardening and maybe get some seeds but it turned out it was more of a seed exchange so they weren't really selling stuff. but i started talking to some people from huertas in the province and they were just like, here take what you need and gave me for free a giant bag of seeds that are good to sow in winter/fall. so now i have onions, mint, scallions, beets, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, spinace, acelga, calendula, beans, peas, peanuts, parsley, radishes and a whole bunch of other stuff. and we got a free lunch when we arrived and this lady gave us a big block of cheese that she made yesterday and we got invited to a wedding next saturday! and today there are a whole bunch of workshops like silkscreening, bike fixing, and planting along with art shows and films and music and potluck dinner at this place called la sala. so i am baking an apple carrot cake for that now...

2007-05-15T17:42:00.000-03:00

this is my new place: General Urquiza 1590, Capital Federal, 1243, Argentina. It's in San Cristobal/Boedo.

here are a few pictures. my roommates are a little odd but they live downstairs so I don't have to constantly see them.

finally moving

2007-05-12T17:14:00.000-03:00

i finally found a new place to live so i think i'm moving in there tomorrow. I'll take pictures when I am moved in and tell more about it then. Its with a couple of argentines, a peruvian, and a french girl or something similar to that combination. And I will live on the roof in a room that they just built with a kitchen and a whole giant roof terrace right outside my door. I think it will be nice and it will be nice to be in a new barrio. In case you've been wondering, here is a map of the neighborhoods of BsAs. Right now I live in Recoleta, a really wealthy commercial busy area. I'm moving to San Cristobal. My classes are in Caballito, which is right in the middle. Most nightlife goes down along the east side in Palermo and San Telmo but pretty much everywhere has something happening until 6am. tonight is Sara's last night here and Anne has already moved so its sort of completely like starting over right now when i move. which is sort of nice.

2007-05-06T21:36:00.000-03:00

hmm i haven't really felt like blogging at all lately but that doesnt mean that everything isnt really nice and inspiring still. being home was really great but i think i saw everyone who reads this so you already know all about it. highlights: spring in the garden at home, eating alfajors with anna, biking with patrick, seeing grandmom, a night with robin and surprisingly maya and julia and even sam levine. a really nice dinner with dah, margot, mark, and thea. and i saw lawrie and duncan and my parents and caroline in brooklyn. and even bard didn't fulfil any of my nightmares. daffodils were out, people were out having fun, i got to see photo shows and the ccs and even a sneak peek at sara katz's senior show. and andy and sarah and you know. i think it will be ok to go back there. but not for 8 months. some things i've been thinking about and doing lately are these: well to start i have been living in my living room for 2 weeks because i rented out my room. first to a german boy stdying here but while i was in the us he moved in for 5 days but my gay canadian roommate was hitting on him so severely and nonstop that he couldn't handle it and moved out. what's extra funny is that he himself was the same with anne and sara and even called sarah a maneater. its all pretty l'auberge espanol, which i guess you have to have a little of when you're a foreign student. anyway now there's a british rugby player corporate lawyer living in anne's room and anne now lives with a 65 year old woman on the 15th floor near campus and a german shopaholic lives in my room. and only to continue the soap opera of azcuenaga 1064 apartment 8a, the german girl and the british guy wake up in the same bed every morning. but the living room is fine. obviously i'm looking for another place but for now i can handle this. plus i am not paying rent. i've been biking a bunch and got my brakes fixed. i kind of helped cook food with the huerta orgazmika to sell at this place called FLA where there was this big concert/party put on by poesia urbana which was totally great and i gave myself blisters from dancing so much. but i'm excited to go back in the day because they have the largest anarchist archives of latin america or something and you can be a member of their library for only one peso a month. plus i found a whole load of talleres and classes like silkscreening and textile and cooking all over the city at community centers that sound neat. lately i've been thinking i would like to make my own soy milk, making kambucha would be fun too, and a zine or some cookbooks. i've been reading this book called "sidewalk" about people who live/sell things on the sidewalk in greenwich village. i've been listening to rapper's delight club and the evens on repeat for a few months. i realized that my tape recorder is not broken and i'm just a moron and the batteries were bad. i want to learn how to crochet. and maybe an instrument, there are tons of free classes here on instruments. and i saw the science of sleep which made me inspired to use my hands more in the creation of where i live. also something neat at the ccs museum was this map project mapping the geography of incarceration, which you should download and read: archleague.org under exhibitions, "architecture and justice." i've been enjoying seeing a lot of argentine art on my own and for class. its hard to take things in in class but i went back to the museo nacional today on my own and walked through and could recognize all the paintings and what decade they were made in. so i guess i'm taking some things in at least. mostly what i do here is have late morning coffees with sara, bike around and talk and listen to music with sean, fail at making good small talk in spanish, daydream in class but still manage to learn a few things, draw with oil pastels on my balcony, and wish i was more involved in life here but then remember that i have 8 more months so it will happen.

2007-04-21T00:53:00.000-03:00

look what i bought yesterday!

Tucuman

2007-04-11T20:30:00.000-03:00

so I'm coming home in an hour and a half! but i have a little time now and i wanted to write about tucuman, where i went for Easter week. because it was crazy. this is what i wrote when I got back from it: this weekend was a pretty big adventure. like adventure adventure. it makes everything i've done so far not even seem remotely adventurous. it began on wednesday night when after not sleeping for a week i threw a pair of pants, 2 shirts, and my sleeping bag in my backpack and took the 18 hour night bus to Tucuman to see Gonzalo but i didn't sleep then either because i was talking to a woman from Buenos Aires who lives in my neighborhood. so its been literally a week without hardly sleeping and i'm imagining a weekend relaxing with his family or whatever for easter but i get there and he tells me he's organized for us to go camping with some friends for a few days. which i think sounds great until we get to his friends house to plan when we're leaving and what we need and they start talking about where we'll go. and gonzalo asks if we can go to siambon. and his friend says, yeah but it will be about an extra 8 hour hike! an extra 8 hours! that means we're already planning on doing at least 8 hours! and i don't have any shoes or anything. but whatever! so we go. and meet his friends on the bus and they are old! like could have been my dads! and we got off the bus and the first thing we did was cross a river up to our waists! and i only had one pair of paints! and then we crossed the river 28 more times! but holy shit it was fun. so it was me and four boys, or i guess they were pretty legitamately men. fording rivers, camping in mountains, having mate with mountain people, talking about neitsche. etc. man it was beautiful and so great to be out of the city and in nature. i was super weird and withdrawn and just in myself and the landscape but it was really relaxing and pretty much the craziest thing i've ever done in terms of outdoors excursions. and the mountain people who's fields we camped in were really interesting and totally matriarchal and had lived remote in the mountains for generations and generations. i was generally too tired by the end of the day to ever talk to them but it was sick to show up at someone's house in the middle of the mountains after walking without seeing anyone for 8 hours and go into a hut and sit with a bunch of women cooking over a fire and drink mate with them. we spent a bunch of freeeezing nights shaking with cold and not sleeping at all so never sleeping until the sun came up and wasting half the day afterwards trying to wake up. but that is never a problem for me. and we swam in the river and just drank water right from it (and i don't have parasites!) and man i don't even know what to say. it was probably the most bizarre weekend of my life talking about che and philosophy and religion and sufjan stevens and having lucid dreams and life discussions and being the only girl and only non argentine, non spanish speaker, the weakest, the youngest, the only one not from tucuman, the only one not super into outdoors activities and hiking. i don't even know, but they took care of me and i felt sort of like the daughter/princess but it was good and they were impressed that i made it and we had fun. then the last night we set out too late so we had to cross the river up to our waists at night 8 times. and a rock fell on my foot and i was wearing gonzalo's mom's shoes which were way too big and there were lots of rocks in them and they hurt a lot but i ignored it until we finally got back and found a campsite and i turned on the lights and what i thought was mud all over my feet was actually blood. eeeew. gross! i don't even know. walking in the clouds and i found a giant snake! and on the last day i found out that gonzalo's friends really were old. one was 38 and one was 21 in 1992 when for six years he rode on bike all through south america and the usa and canada. one was 22 and gonzalo is 28 so it wasn't like everyone was super old, but when would i have ever thought i would be camping with dudes who were 18 years older than me. that's weird. but that is just what happens when you are out of the us i guess. so that's tucuman in breif. i didn't take too many pictures but here are a few.

2007-04-04T01:26:00.000-03:00

tucuman tucuman tucuman! i'm excited. and look, even though i quit so it doesn't really matter, one of the websites that i reviewed was really happy with my review:
March 26, 2007.
"Killer Startups posts a review of Kumquat; without having spoken to us, they seem to have nailed the concept pretty much dead-on (we begin to think we may actually be communicating)"

2007-04-03T01:50:00.000-03:00

oh yeah, and i quit that lame internet job. what was i thinking? i need a job where i am out in the city and speaking spanish not spending my days on the internet writing in english. (but if you want to read funny reviews of websites that i wrote you can go to killerstartups.com!) so i have 10 resumes in spanish and next week when i get back i am going to go pass them out and find something to do.

2007-04-03T01:36:00.000-03:00

I'm going to Tucuman in the north on wednesday to visit my friend Gonzalo for a week! I met him in ecuador and we travelled in colombia and he makes documentaries and is coming to live in buenos aires soon but right now i get to visit him and his family in Tucuman for easter and go camping in the mountains! Also I am most likely coming home to maryland for a week. what! holy shit, no way! i know. probably the 21st of april to the 30th. so you have to come see me. because also most likely i am not coming home again until christmas. as in staying here for another semester and graduating one semester late from bard. yeah, kind of a big decision. but really not so big. haven't i known i was going to decide that forever? being here for only four months just makes no sense among a million other reasons that i can tell you if you ask me. so those are the big pieces of news. also exciting: i found 10 gold beautiful picture frames in the trash last night that i am excited to make art in. today i went to a giant design/fashion expo at the convention center kind of by accident but it was entertaining. and i had indian food for the first time in months and i randomly met a bard graduate who lives here in buenos aires!

2007-04-01T04:07:00.000-03:00

i love buenos aires so much right now. where else could you have a horrible headache and be overwhelmingly tired but still happily stay up until 4 in the morning without even realizing it was happening? one of my other colombian friends had some people over tonight so i said i was exhausted but would make an appearance since he lives on my same street 8 blocks away. so i got there and what were they making? arepas! which i ate every morning on the beach in colombia with ola and have been missing. and the people here are just soo nice. i didn't know anyone there except juan but they all sat and talked with me as if i was their main friend and the reason they were having a party. and every slang word they used they stopped and explained exactly what it meant and why they say it. so we sat speaking mangled spanish all night sucking on wads of coca leaves brewing in our cheeks to keep us awake. and then i left and walked home and ran into a group of wasted kids who gave me fernet branker and walked me to my apartment and endearingly called me a mother fucking asshole so they could show off thier mastery of english curse words and invite me to their birthday parties. buenos aires, en serio, te encanta.

2007-03-31T23:24:00.000-03:00

i played soccer today! with this women's league in san telmo. and i was so bad but it was soo good. it was on turf outside but underneath a 10 lane highway (they use the spaces under highways really innovatively here. even for fancy restaurants!). i only had a coffee and a piece of bread before going though and so now i feel a little sick and exhausted but! they play every tuesday and saturday and were totally down with us coming and playing with them every week. so this is what my hopefully coming together life looks like right now: 2 long days of stimulating classes a week, soccer twice a week, teaching english classes twice a week, going to concerts every friday, working for killer startups internet review thing 3 days a week, hopefully doing something with this organic garden (called la huerta orgazmica) a few times a week, making stencils and collages with friends on the side, baking and cooking once a week with roommates, seeing free movies at the art museums and hopefully figuring something out with this printshop. shit, that sounds pretty good.

address

2007-03-31T16:40:00.000-03:00

this is my address:
KellyAnne Mifflin.
Azcuénaga 1064, 8A.
CP: 1115, Capital Federal de Buenos Aires.
Argentina

2007-03-31T16:18:00.000-03:00

last night after a long long day of classes i told all three people i know to come over and i baked a peach apple pie and chocolate banana cake. but at ten thirty no one i had invited had showed up and it was just one of those awkward nights where you sit around talking in english to lots of international students about boring things like why they are in argentina so i decided to leave and go to a concert even though it was technically my party. so i left and went to this really funny really fun surfpunk show with some argentine bands and also this guy called daddy-o of los straightjackets (i know you guys know all about surfpunk and know who he is of course). he wears a mexican wrestling mask and speaks really really fast made up spanish that no one can understand while brazilian surf videos and movies from the 50's play in the background. so it was totally worth it but 10 minutes after i left to go to the concert i got a million texts saying that all of these people kept showing up saying they were my friends and i wasn't there. but 3 hours later i came home and they had all just decided to stay and eat dessert even though i wasn't there so we got to have a party anyway. and then totally coincidentally my friend sean had been invited to a party in the basement of an apartment building on azcuenaga 1064. my building! so at 3:30 am we ventured downstairs and found a door with ricky martin blasting out of it and after ringing the bell for a half hour finally got inside and it turns out it was a bachelor party! not with strippers or anything but i did see the groom making out with some girl in the kitchen. so that part was not so great but then i forgot about it and we just danced all night to bad/great latin music with porteños who didn't even care that some weird kids had just knocked on the door and come joined their party. then at 4:30am some old people came in and said hi to everyone and then went into another room and it turns out that this guy who's house it was lives with his parents. who were in the other room sleeping but no one turned the music off or anything and we all kept dancing until 5:30. so a very argentine night. and i met some vecinos. also i found out about this organic garden in the city that is open to anyone to come work and hang out at! they have concerts and movies and stuff too but mostly it would just be soo great to get to be around plants and people into organic gardens and eating fresh food! i can't wait to go. except it's really a shitty situation and they've been there for 6 years or something but don't actually own the land and now the government wants it for a parking lot or road or something so they have to camp out in tents every night and fight a lot to not have it taken away. but it's still really exciting that it exists. now i'm gonna go do some reading and have dinner with some friends at a vegetarian restaurant in san telmo. i'm really really happy being in buenos aires right now.

2007-03-29T12:31:00.000-03:00

i hope you are not offended. its just so we have an excuse to bake a lot and wear thrift shop dresses and because we all miss and love our abuelas so much!

2007-03-25T17:36:00.000-03:00

oh and i have another roommate named rocky from canada but i'm not really excited about it so i'm not going to write about him. but here are a few pictures of my other roommates. anne (blonde), sarah, and Jeppe. we made tapas all night and got dressed up and ate them at midnight.

2007-03-25T16:25:00.000-03:00

ok so there are about a million things to write about. 1. i got a job! not so sure how i feel about it but i'm gonna try it for a little while. my friend rosie is basically my boss and its for this company called killer startups that writes reviews of startup internet companies so i have to look at lots of webpages and write whether they seem like they're going to bomb or would be a good idea to invest in. the good part is that they're all kind of interesting websites so it hopefully will be a little fun. and i do it from my computer whenever. and i get $8 an hour which is mad dough for buenos aires. and maybe i will start doing graphic design work for them instead. obviously i am totally unqualified for all of this but apparently that is irrevelant. so we'll see. 2. i went to the class i was super excited about, sociology of art, and it totally totally sucked. so i'm gonna drop that but the religion one surprised me and is really interesting and taught by these two young really excited professors. they walked in wearing a beastie boys t shirt and dirty sneakers and i can't understand a word they say cause they speak so casually and like they have food in their mouths. but judging from the enunciation and hand gestures i think its gonna be really interesting and if i get through it my spanish will be soo good. also already the professors are on strike so classes are cancelled on wednesday. 3. i met this amazing person named sean who is sarah robinson's friend and we went and saw The Evens (you know, ian mackaye's new band) and it was so good. probably the best concert i've been to in latin america. cause it's so rare that big underground bands can come here since it's so far and expensive but it was so fun and good and thought out and it was exciting to see Argentines into a dc band. and afterwards we went out and met these argentine girls who dance tango in the street for tourists in la boca on caminito (remember mom) and its cool to be able to look at those tourist areas from a different perspective. 4. and then yesterday was the 31st anniversary of the military golpe del estado in '76 so there was a really big demonstration at plaza congreso and plaza de mayo which was phenomenal. really different than any protest i've bee to before and really interesting to see especially compared to santiago. for one there were no police! no police interaction at all with the demonstrators. i didn't realize how used to tear gas and riot gear and molotov coctails i had gotten but it was really nice being here. the left is super divided in buenos aires so there were millions of millions of different organizations present and everyone there was part of some group or other, which was sort of intimidating at first but then we talked to a bunch of interesting people and joined up with some students and it was ok. i don't know, it's always really intense to think about the desaparecidos and actually be in the spaces where extreme acts of violence happened and see pictures of people my age who went to class one day and then were gone. but inspiring to see so many people still out and remembering and speaking out against it.

2007-03-21T19:19:00.000-03:00

i just got done with my first day of classes which was surprisingly really really good. really long but i´m hopeful too. the ethnicity one in the morning is going to be good (although two thirds of the class are extranjeras from germany) and the argentine art history one, although almost unbearably long is exicting because we get to spend the next three classes in the bellas artes museum instead of the classroom. its a little ridiculous that i´m taking an upper level art history seminar in spanish when i´ve only ever taken one art history class ever and don´t know what any of the terms mean but i guess that´s what makes it fun. and tomorrow i have a job interview!

2007-03-20T13:39:00.000-03:00

2007-03-19T18:27:00.000-03:00

apartment!...

so i'm all moved in. i stayed up all night on friday and painted my room blue and i love it. you can see the before and after pictures. we're still looking for a 4th roommate. the colombians were back with plans to all there live in the tiny back room but the other girls thought that would be too much so now we're back to looking for someone else. i am a little disappointed because this means i won't be living with spanish speakers and also the apartment is so huge it feels really empty with only 4 people living in it. but maybe it will be less chaotic. ...

Classes start wednesday for me. 9am to 9pm. it's a lot. i'm taking 4 which are: sociology and anthropology of art, argentine art history, theory and practice in anthropology of religion in latin america, and anthropology, politics and economics of ethnicity. probably i'll drop one since each class is either 4 or 6 hours all at once and that is a lot of lecture in spanish. The filosophy and letters "campus" where I am is pretty special. It's a converted tobacco factory and is probably the most disorganized place ever with millions of conversed stringy haired kids running around all day handing out flyers for communist concerts, protests at the us embassy, miming workshops and a lot of other things that make me laugh at how stereotypically it is the facultad de filosofia y letras. by which i mean its fun being there but also impossible to ever know what's going on and today i was trying to check my e-mail in the computer lab and realized that i was actually in the middle of a class and had to get up and run out. and i got lost for 2 hours on the bus trying to get to campus so i have no idea how i will get there on time on wednesday. but i guess that's what being in a new city means. I surprisingly know a whole lot of people here and am finding lots of stuff to do. i went out for a drink with this guy i met at a bookstore and his good friend owns a printmaking workshop and he's going to introduce me and see if i can get a job or just help/hang out there. which would be phenomenal. and its still warm enough to eat breakfast on my balcony every morning and wear dresses and eat icecream. actually i'm here in Freddo's, my favorite icecream place, which is only 2 blocks from my apartment and has free wireless internet even if you don't buy an icecream (which obviously never happens)....ok, its been 2 hours and clearly these pictures are not loading. someday, sorrry.

2007-03-15T23:53:00.000-03:00

here are some basic pictures of the apartment. i bought paint today so i'm going to paint my room light blue and i made a desk out of a door for it too and now there's only one bed and obviously it will be different with my stuff in it. but so you have an idea. about a million people responded to our add but none of them are native spanish speakers so we're holding off before making a decision. plus today during dinner the colombians called us to say that they had gotten the money and so now wanted to move back in with us, but we've all changed rooms now so the only one open is this tiny one at the back of the apartment and they want to fit 3 people in it. they say the will sleep on the floor. so that's a little insane and the other girls are worried and think it will be too much to live with 3 boys. but speaking spanish is better than speaking english so i don't know. we have to decide saturday morning.

2007-03-14T18:10:00.000-03:00

sike. no colombians. but we decided to keep the apartment anyway, right now its just the danish girl, Anne, and an American girl for 2 months named Sarah and we have to look for roommates. but it's still exciting and a relief. there is a giant living room with a long balcony and a small grill, fairly decent rooms, 3 bathrooms, a big kitchen, horrible mattresses, plants, a bike, really well located, on the 8th floor, and i don't know what else to say about it. But i'm not going to put up pictures until i move in and make it pretty, so maybe next week. signing leases and contracts in spanish is pretty fun. it took four hours to finally get everything worked out but now it's ours. !

2007-03-13T22:19:00.000-03:00

I got an apartment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with 3 colombian boys and a danish girl (and el misterioso novio) pictures to come, i'm allowed to paint it! and it comes with a bike! (to share between 6) hooray! por fin.

Noticias from Debbie

2007-03-13T10:31:00.000-03:00

We’re in our little apartment on Cerrito & Posadas, possibly one of the ritziest neighborhoods in BA, waiting for 2 Columbians and 1 Dane to show up so KA can start looking for an apartment with them together. Should be another exciting day in this bustling metropolis of 12 million. Since Fred has left, we’ve gotten down to tackling the practical daily hurdles like learning how to flush the toilet, avoiding new bathroom floods, lighting the pilot so as not to have to take cold showers and figuring out how to get the bus to stop if we don’t want to go another mile from where we intended to get off!

We love the buses though because they zip through the city (since they don’t bother to stop unless someone is halfway in the middle of the road waving them down) and we get to see everything that we are not going to visit like the huge Puerto Madera.

If you come to BA, all of the streets have names either of another country, so you see a tango show on Estados Unidos, drink coffee on Florida (I guess they think this is a separate country) or Mexico, and have a wonderful Italian meal on Arabe Seria. Otherwise you are on a street named after some famous male whose mausoleum you can visit at Cementario Recoleta. Every single name I had encountered over the past week I discovered again at the cemetery.

Here are a few pictures from our outings – tango show, street fair in San Telmo & La Boca (literally the ‘mouth’) & the “beautiful” Facultad de Filosofia & Letras – another clear indication of the sorry state of the funding for the humanities. Today we visit a colleague I met in Graz in a suburb of BA. We are thinking of you all in el Norte (basically, the rest of the world) and sending besos & abrazos.

BUENOS AIRES--BY FRED

2007-03-06T17:32:00.000-03:00

Hello again from Fred, filling in for the real blogger queen. BA is huge. I forced Kellyanne to go to the top of the 23 story Intercontinenatal Hotel with me last night to see the city from above where we were immediately stopped as we tryed to casually walk by and pretend we were guests there. They let us go anyway--so much for security. I hope the pictures convey the scope of how big the city is. The road you see lit up is eighteen lanes wide! Which leeds me to cabdrivers and driving in general.

Lanes do not exist here. even though they are all nicely laid out for you to stay in your proper place, every driver and particularly the cabbies are constantly creating two lanes in one. The eighteen lanes mentioned above are really about 53 lanes. I really don't know how they survive-but they do. Also, there is no such thing as a pedestrian (or pedestrian right of way). Kellyanne tells me if you get hit---you pay for the damage to the car (in colombia) . Walker beware. Bikerider be even more aware. Not to many laws regarding mufflers either--it can be very loud. There seem to be alot of Ford Falcons and Ford/chevy pickup trucks, more of a vintage cariety. The subway system is good here and costs about 25 cents to go anywhere and any distance. They have beautiful tile work and murals in the tunnels.

more mundane stuff while I am on the subject: They haven't gotten anywhere near as far as we have regarding ADA laws for the disabled. the last bano (bathroom) I was in was barely big enough for me to get into--let alone a wheelchair. There is alot of beautiful ornamental ironwork on the buildings, particularly the balconies, lots of huge, 12' wooden doors with "big knockers" (brass). Beautiful tile work and murals in the subways:

Prices: (I spent an hour in a supermarket comparing prices while Kellyanne tried to register for classes)
a dozen eggs is about 60cents, a six pack of Bud is $3, a roast chiken $4, ground meat $1.5/pound, bananas 30 cents/lb, wine ranged from $1/bottle to $10 for the good stuff. we ate at a fancy restaurant today called La Brigade, which was recommended to me by travellers from Wyoming. A steak, a big salad, two cokes and two sprites plus a breadbasket cost about $23. By the way, grilled steak is supposed to be Argentina's specialty, but I have had it twice now and i still like US barbecued ribs better. let it be known that if i said that on the street here I would be hung in the public square.

University: We travelled out to where Kellyanne will be going to school. Note: the univerity is in many places all over the city. It depends what you are studying as to where you will be located. Her school is about a forty minute ride from where we are staying (which for those of you who have forgotten, is the posh section of town just a gold coin toss away from the Four Seasons hotel). The building which houses her university is nothing to write home about---but it does have writing all over it. Students are very political here and one method of communicating their message is with graffitti. Anyway, Kellyanne is working out the details, one of which is that university education here, even for foreigners is FREE. So I told her she can spend an extra $25/month on her apartment.

Recoleta Cemetary: they say there is something very similar in Paris. the pictures speak for themselves. The most famous person buried here is of course, Evita Duarte Peron. She is buried in the Duarte family site. throngs of people gather around her grave and she is the only one with fresh flowers every day. The closest thing I have seen to this is the famous cemetary in New Orleans--which is above ground due to the water table (that's if the cemetary still exists there). Anyway--this was an entire city of grave sites honoring the wealthy, the influential, and/or the famous with lavish structures, statues, and yes...streets.

We saw a commotion the first night i got here and went to check it out. the police were there and we thought it was a student protest. Then we realized that it was mostly girls and they all seemed to be in their teens and all were emmitting that high pitched shrill that only adolescent females can muster when they are infatuated with a rock star. Guess who it was? Ricky Martin! Kellyanne and I happenned to be in position to acually seem him (as opposed to the shrieking throngs) ...you can imagine how excited we were :)

I've learned not to refer to Kellyanne as "mi hermosa" (my sister)--that got a little embarrassing back in Costa Rica. She is now correctly labeled "mi hiha". She should be called "mi hiha La Traductora"...my daughter the translator. In conversations with our Doorman, ( who quite generously talks about soccer with me not fulling recognizing that I only understand one tenth of what he is saying) I successfully told him that the Boca Juniors loss the other night 3-0 was not "embarazado" but "verguenza", The first word would have implied his team's loss was pregnant, the second means the loss was embarrassing. So, my spanish has been elevated from that of an infant to possibly pre-school.

To end--let me say that Kellyanne and I got a free ride on the subway the other night. they waved us through. We asked why at the other end realizing that every station appeared to be free and the guard said "they had run out of change".

Note: Debbie got here safely, bright and early this morning. We visited the botanical gardens, the zoo--which was a riot but fodder for another blog, and a whole new section of town I had not been to.

fred's blog:

2007-03-04T22:19:00.000-03:00

Hi--this is fred filling in for kellyanne.

I sent an email with pictures to everyone but I don't think it made it---so more pictures included here. I met KellyAnne on wednesday in santiago. It was beautiful flying down the backbone of the Andes and then seeing Santiago tucked into the middle. The pictures above and below are from Pablo Neruda's house--which was quite beautiful. KellyAnne had been to all three of his houses and knew almost as much as the tour guide (he is chilean but had spent ten years in new york and was quite a character. Pablo Neruda had a penchant for women, drink (3 bars and two bedrooms in the house) and things nautical, even though he wouldn't get near the water. He built a boat and kept it in his front yard where he presided as captain over the libations.

The best part of santiago was, of course, seeing KellyAnne and the family and friends she was staying with. The city was fine, generally clean, but I don't think you could really spend that much time there if you were't visiting someone. I think most people go to chile on vacation for the wine tours, to see Pategonia, to go mountain climbing, and for the beach.

The night before we left, Jorge and Marisol had a barbecue (asado) for the whole house, plus we invited Luke and Cory (friends of KellyAnne's from silver spring. The onwers prepared the barbeque and cooked up alot of vegetable shishkabobs for KellyAnne and others. The grilled meat was great...and should be even better in Argentina. KellyAnne (and Alaina--from Montana and pictured below, baked three peach/plumb cobblers. All were devoured. At one point I counted one Colombian, 4 Germans, 5 Chileans, 2 French, and 6 Americans (4 of which were the Silver Spring contingent). The night ended, as evidently every asado evening, with a ping pong tournament. I didn't do too bad but the chileans who owned the table were far superior. The last picture is KellyAnne with the owners on the day we left. They were very kind to KellyAnne and i think she left her mark on them as well. Our joke was that in ten years all Chileans will be having vegetarian asados due to her influence.

We took off on Friday morning heading to Mendoza, Argentina with only one thing in our way----the Andes. I only included one picture here because they seemed kind of repetitve. Most of the snow had melted by this time. It was a very long climb up on the chilean side but for some reason was much easier funnelling out on the argentine side. I have never seen anything as incomprehsibly ineffecient as going through customs directly in the middle of the andes. The whole bus ride was supposed to take six hours to Mendoza but it took 8 hours because we spent 3.5 hours sitting in this absurd setting: something like a giant bus terminal at about 13,000 feet. it was pretty, but pretty insufferable at the same time. KellyAnne slept and I manage to scorch my bald pate taking a nap out on one of the big boulders.

We finally got through and made it to what turned out to be a fun and festive mendoza--the wine capital of Argentina.

Mendoza was mobbed with mostly local people there for the festival. Luckily, KellAanne was able to secure us the last room in what turned out to be a great bed and breakfast with wonderful hosts. We got there at last, dropped our bags and had dinner and a bottle of wine. The pictures are from the festival. Lot's of regional beauty queens vying for top honors as queen of the entire festival. Our B&B host's daughter was one of the queens and is pictured below. Then we had to catch an all night bust to Buenos Aires that night (last night) so we never saw the winner. I was sick with coughing spells the whole 13 hour ride so it was pretty miserable for me----but buses here are very comfortable and entertaining (for instance, the ride began with everyone playing bingo!) They also showed movies and very poor music videos.

I sat next to a woman from South Africa who had just climbed Acacongua (sp) the highest peak outside the Himalaya chain and one of the mountains that people refer to when they talk about climbing the "seven summits". She is the only woman from South Africa to have ever climbed it!

We crossed miles and miles of pampas (the Argentine plains--plenty of beef out there) in the pouring rain. We made it to our rental agent's office and had to wait over an hour for them to get there (along with a guy from wisconsin who comes twice a year fro tango lessons). We are now firmly entrenched in a very nice apartment which we have for two weeks in one of the wealthiest districts in BA. Buenos Aires is many blogs unto itself. let me just say it is massive in scope and somewhat overwhelming right now.

For those interested (Brooklyn/Patrick and others), we could not get tickets to see Boca Juniors, who played today. We watched the game on tv and they got trounced 3-0, as did river plate. Poor showing for the BA futbol teams today.

Fred

2007-03-02T00:06:00.000-03:00

my dad is here! and we're leaving for Buenos Aires tomorrow morning. we had a last big asado bbq at the house with marisol and jorge and everyone who is living here now (coincidentally a girl from the farm is staying in the house too) and we baked peach plum nectarine crisp and grilled lots of vegetables and now are having a ping pong championship and its really fun for my dad to get to see everything.

2007-02-20T15:55:00.000-03:00

carnaval is basically over now and i didnt take any pictures cause i think it was pretty certain that my camera would be robbed if i took it out of the house. we spent most of it in barranquilla which is one of colombia´s biggest cities and really trashy and ugly but friendly and now we´re in Taganga, a fishing town on the coast where the people are even friendlier. so we spent a bunch of days in barranquilla with a colombian couple Ronnie y Ladeies and the sweetest baby i´ve ever seen Ronnie Jr. there were lots of parades with dancing and funny costumes but mostly it was just realy sponsored and there were also lots of trucks with dancing naked women advertising beer or headache medicine (colombia has the most breast implants of anywhere because plastic surgery is really cheap) and the official stuff didn´t really feel at all like a festival for the people, you had to pay to sit in a chair and watch the parade and you had to pay to go to any of the tent parties afterwards, actually the official slogan of the carnival is ¨quien lo vive es quien lo goza¨which means that you only can enjoy it if you spend a lot of money. but when you got away from that part the streets were full of people and every single house had 10 or 20 people sitting outside on the porches dancing or listening to music at the bars on the corner. so leideis and ronnie took us to the south where the used to live and we all danced and they all laughed at us for not being suave enough and we learned the stories of their lives (they are black market perfume makers among other things) and then they told us that we were their only friends and asked us to come back in june for the baptism and be Ronnie´s godparents and that was kind of weird and sad but mostly we just had fun together and spent all day yesterday at the beach with the baby trying caribbean sweets and eating fish. on our way to taganga we met some argentinian guys and split a cab there and then we got there and every hostel was full so we are staying in their place now which is on the top of a hill overlooking the town in this giant domed house made made of palm leaves in the indigenous style. some italian man built it for vacations but then he got sick and went back to italy so now it´s for us and we really lucked out and it´s only $2.50 each. i´m only writing all these things because i´ve been waiting hours for some pictures to load but it looks like it´s not going to happen. i go back to bogota on saturday and then even bigger things start to happen like school and parents and moving. that is really soon!

2007-02-17T15:27:00.000-03:00

it´s carnaval! everything is sparkles! and i got robbed! (for the first time!) but it was only the hotel key and i felt them do it so we ran home and everything was fine except that the stupid hotel didn´t have an extra copy of the key so we had to wait all night for the locksmith to come and drill open the lock and then we had to pay for it all. but it´s carnaval and there is glitter and tacky costumes everywhere and i am going to go enjoy it.

2007-02-15T21:24:00.000-03:00

p.s. have you read pilgrim at tinker creek by annie dillard? i´m finding it to be one of the lovliest most wonderful books. i want to read aloud every line and call you and share how alive it makes me feel.

2007-02-15T20:56:00.000-03:00

we went to playa blanca, a beach a few hours from cartagena, for a few days with linda and andreas (caroline´s friends from high school) who are funny. the beach was the carribean so turquoise and beautiful and we slept in hammocks under the stars(which is not as romantic as it sounds. mostly it´s just freezing and windy and your legs and arms go numb and you wake up at 7 am to toothless ladies screaming ¨ensalada de fruuuta¨ in your sleepy face and not leaving for 10 minutes even when you breathe bad breath on them and tell them you can´t eat fruit when you are asleep so why are they insisting.) but it was kind of really touristy there of course and the vendors were crazy and wouldn´t leave us alone and we ran out of money because everyone felt bad if they weren´t good tourists buying lots of things all the time. and i thought i couldn´t take it anymore but we couldn´t find any boats to take us back to cartagena so instead i went snorkling and saw the most beautiful fish i´ve ever seen in my life and almost got washed out to sea because i couldn´t take my face out of the water for hours they were so amazing. then i sat on the beach with watercolors and painted five year old pictures of fish and all of the people selling stuff stopped and watched me and told me the names of all the fish i drew and i painted fish tattoos on them and they told me one day they would marry me and my eyes.

2007-02-10T22:18:00.000-03:00

2007-02-10T21:28:00.001-03:00

i´m in cartagena and it is HOT. i mean HOTT. it´s also super touristy and there are lots of stereotypical americans saying stupid things like ¨look an iguana! i´m gonna go grab that fucker¨ or ¨dude, quick! four chicks are getting on that boat. hot!¨and i feel kind of uncomfortable and i don´t really know what to do about it. i bought some watercolors and that´s fun but basically all i can manage to do every day is stand up and take a cold shower and then pass out on the bed again from heat exhaustion. but maybe i´ll get some motivation soon and do fun stuff. the last nights in bogota were nice. we went out and met really nice colombians and had a good time talking to them even though they were crazy. but who´s not. in bogota they don´t stop at red lights which is not so surprising but when the light is green EVERYBODY stops and waits for the people with the red lights to go through. also if you need to make a phone call there are people on the corners with cell phones and you pay them 10 cents a minute and you can use it. also remember bill nye the science guy? well he is pretty smart and makes complicated things simpler and explained moons and tides really well here: http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Columns/?article=BNTides>1=9033 .moons were a pretty prominant part of farm life and are pretty fascinating. so if you think so too, you can read about it! it has a lot to do with when the best times to put seeds in the ground are and other things. did you know colombia´s the third largest recipient of US military aid? coming here our bus got stopped for like an hour in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere in total darkness. man i almost had a heart attack. but actually its pretty calm right now and i feel safe.

2007-02-04T19:46:00.000-03:00

i´m in bogota! i like it a lot. but it´s fall and cold and even though i´m on the equator i feel more like i´m at home than i have so far down here. driving from ecuador to bogota looked just like the drive to bard except for the extra big mountains and cumbia coming from the radio. it´s been so long since my last fall and this one is really unexpected. i didn´t realize how much i appreciate seasons. it makes me kind of miss it and i´m excited about settling into Buenos Aires and fall there. i can´t wait to get a job and wear sweaters and cook and go to shows again. we´ve been travelling for the past few days with 2 guys from argentina and one of them is moving to buenos aires in march too and he was funny and piolo and it will be nice to see him there. but colombia is exciting too! now we´re here and hopefully going to stay with caroline´s friends, but maybe ola and i have to stay in a hostal cause there are 5 of us (including a swedish pop star. ooh) i think we´re gonna stay here for 10 days then go to cartagena for a week and go along the coast for a little and then come back and fly home. i´m learning lots of swedish and speaking lots of spanish too. like this is hoe you sing happy birthdaÿ: ja ma han leva ja ma han leva ja ma han leva uti hundrade ar ja visst ska han leva ja visst ska han leva ja visst ska han leva uti hundrade ar! oh i have to go. i never write about what is really going on, lots of other things too. now we´re making earings out of beans and feathers and having crazy conversations with people from here who think bush is the best world leader and are mad at me that i don´t respect him. ...

2007-02-02T15:03:00.000-03:00

safely in colombia! i´ll write more soon

2007-01-30T22:36:00.000-03:00

I´m in Quito with the O and C. it´s great to be with them again and funny as always. quito is a crazy nice city. i´m really glad we decided to come. i had no idea it was going to be like this. it´s beautiful and clean and has a lot going on and the people are really nice and the architecture is really cool. i like it a lot. it feels kind of like a different country from being en el campo though. but equally interesting. this morning we found ourselves in the middle of a giant demonstration trying to get the constitution rewritten and inevitably got teargassed. i miss the farm but this is good too. i´m having trouble thinking of things that would be intersting to put on the blog. it´s ola´s birthday tomorrow (27!!), i bought a watch, i made lots of cool earings with the feathers of a dead mot mot bird that i found on the farm (gross, i know), i might meet up with this boy who went to the UBA last year and lives in Quito, we´re going to Bogota this sunday, eating lots of porridge and funny fruit, getting blisters, writing boring blog posts. basically. send me your addresses and i´ll write you postcards or draw you pictures!

p.s. lots of robberies happen in colombia. do you think i should get some sort of insurance for the month for my camera and ipod. i guess this is directed at the parents. i don´t really know where to look for that stuff.

2007-01-27T11:46:00.000-03:00

i left the farm this morning at 6am. off to a whole new part of the trip. i´m sad to go but it was also a good time. Tina found out that her leg is actually broken ans she´s in a cast for another few weeks and most people have left. also i´m really excited to see ola and carolina and spend time with them and see colombia. I just finished leaf storm by marquez which got me really excited for it. i kind of can´t believe i´m going there! i guess i don´t know what else to say right now or how to wrap up the farm. did you know that your body takes in the most vitamin d through the palms of your hands? or that marigolds are really really good in gardens to keep out bugs. and that petunias protect beans. and you should plant spinach and strawberries together. and dandelions actually help the aromatic quality of herbs....

2007-01-23T14:25:00.000-03:00

here are a few pictures, me and beth on the trail to the farm in the mountains, everyone getting ready to go to the creek for the afternoon swim, our room! like camp.

2007-01-22T17:35:00.000-03:00

beth packed up her stuff and we left the farm today. i can´t believe 3 weeks has gone by already. for the next couple of days i think we´re going to stay with this lady named martha who´s friends with tina and is a breaadmaker and supposedly super buena onda and has phenomenal gardens that are unreal. also tuesday is extra cookie night where you get to eat the leftovers and sometimes there is soccer being played and she has a tv so we can watch movies. so if one of those three things happened i´d be really happy and i think it will be nice. most people have left the farm now, it´s just been 6 or 8 of us. i´ll go back on thursday for a few more days until the swedes get here and then i´m gone too! it´s been a really rewarding time. right now i´m learning a lot about composting and making garden beds and double digging soil and weeding and a little about permaculture and biodynamic techniques. i wish it was more but there are only so many hours of daylight. yesterday was sort of a birthday party for me because we wanted to have a party and people got a little confused. so we made cinnamon buns and had a fire and got sleepy and went to bed at 11. i also bought this tiny instrument called a kalimba from this man Hans who lives on the farm and makes instruments and panella wine. it makes really pretty sounds. i play it every night before i go to sleep. maybe that´s all. oh no, the most important thing, i forgot! i found a cure to mosquito bites! every time i get one i draw a circle around it in ballpoint pen and within an hour it´s disappeared and doesn´´t ever itch again. i guess the pressure of drawing it cuts off the histamine reaction or something. so my legs are covered in circles and everyone laughs at me but it´s totally worth it, the mosquitos here mean business.

2007-01-17T10:52:00.000-03:00

so we´re back in vilcabamba for a few hours. things on the farm got a little crazy this past week but they´re good again. i found out i had parasites, i think from bolivia but maybe from the farm, but i took a bunch of medicine and they´re dead and i have so much more energy than i´ve had in a while. then last thursday tina (the lady who owns the farm) was coming home late at night alone and slipped in the creek and dislocated her kneecap really bad. then the next day since it was the weekend everybody else on the farm went to town for this healing ceremony and beth and i were left alone on the farm for the whole weekend to take care of tina without any medicine or anything. that was kind of weird and i thought about leaving but it´s ok now and everyone´s back and we´re doing lots of work again. yesterday i made a bunch of quiches and black capped raspberry pie. we eat like queens here. or more like we feast. my lostboy name is not "la quiche" cause they liked it so much. i´ve been doing lots of hard work digging out beds to put in new gardens which means serious baretta work but i´m getting strong. we bathe in the creek every day which probably couldn´t be more beautiful or refreshing. it´s kind of like one of those weird cliche utopias except that it´s not at all. i think we´re gonna go to this biological reserve this weekend and then i only have one more week! i don´t know what else. i discovered this totally new type of fruit called palmarosa which is literally the taste of biting into a rose. and there are surinam cherries that are like cherries mixed with tomatoes and passion fruit and papaya and pomegrantite and dates and zapote and oranges and grapefruits and a million other things. i´m reading really good books and drawing some pictures and waking up early. we wake up at 7 every day and hang out and eat breakfast until 8 or 9, then work in the gardens or collecting fruit or cooking until 12:30 then eat and go for a swim then work again until 5 or so, swim, cook and eat dinner by candlelight at dusk, practice salsa and go to bed at 9 or 10. i wish i could put up pictures. maybe i´ll upload some sometime soon. hasta pasta.

2007-01-09T16:38:00.000-03:00

hello. we came into town to get our poop tested for parasites and ameobas because there´s this really good clinic here and it only costs $1.50 to get it tested so we figured we might just do it and be safe. nothing to worry about. but the farm! i wish i could put up pictures, it´s the most beautiful place i´ve ever seen. it´s one of the greenest places in the world and the farm is in a valley full of fruit between beautiful mountains with a creek that we bathe in every day and fresh water from a spring up the mountain. the food is delicious, the work is fun, the people are smart and nice and great and we´re having so much fun. there is fruit everywhere. there are about 15 people working on the farm so it´s totally full and thére´s lots to do. not so much besides fruit trees are producing right now but we´re working on a lot of new gardens. beth is great, we have fun. we practice salsa dancing every night. using a compost toilet is surprisingly not bad and hardly even smells. we eat dinner by candlelight every night and go to bed around 9 and wake up at 7. the bugs aren´t terrible, there are these giant ones though called picasenor because supposedly they stung jesus and they are like 3 inches long with bright red wings. i take showers under a chirimoya tree and eat papaya and lime for breakfast and am reading good books and drinking lots of coffee and learning a little about biodynamics and planting gardens and how to make bread and there are funny dogs and cats and i´m learning spanish vocabulary for things like ¨to weed¨ and sawdust and other things i probably wouldn´t learn if i wasn´t here. i guess i don´t really know what to say to explain it here but those are some things and i think that´s good enough.

2007-01-04T11:55:00.000-03:00

i´m here and it´s amazing like i can´t even explain. i havent gotten to the farm yet but some people met us at the airport and we´ve been doing things all over ecuador and are about to hike out to the farm now. so i have no time to write things now but man the people are great and i´m going to learn so much and there are millions of fruit trees and i already feel like 3 weeks is not going to be long enough. so you don´t have to worry about anything! this is great.

2007-01-02T02:23:00.000-03:00

fuck i'm freaking out and i'm leaving in two hours and i miss chile so much already. it was awful saying goodbye to evelyn and melanie and pauline. and everybody else i just didn't even get to say goodbye to. it's pretty unreal that in a day i'm going to be in another country on a farm and all of the people i've made my life around here are not going to be a part of it anymore. but i guess i'm equally asexcited as sad. so. adios.

2007-01-01T20:15:00.000-03:00

new years!

2006-12-31T15:35:00.000-03:00

i´m in valparaiso with evelyn, ola, and carolina. it´s amazing, i love this city. it makes me love being in chile again. aside from being the most beautiful there are also probably 2 million young people here for new years and you don´t even have to go out to bars, everyone just sits in the streets on the cerros singing and smoking cigarrettes and selling soy burgers and six packs until morning. there are so many people that all of the stores are out of alcohol. it´s weird not to have new years at home with friends but i think this one is going to be exceptional anyway with an hour of fireworks over the harbor that we watch from the top of a hill with millions of other people. so, it´s good. and after this i go to the airport at 4am on tuesday and meet beth and begin lots of new things. i´m going to be pretty m.i.a. for the next two months, so sorry if i don´t answer e'mails or update this at all. in case you are curious the farm is in vilcabamba which is near lagos in the very south of ecuador almost on the border with peru. ok. that´s all.

2006-12-24T14:11:00.000-03:00

so in sweden today is christmas. so i have to celebrate it today. we made a compromise that we would open presents tonight at midnight since that´s what they do in chile so it will be funny. we´re making soy swedish meatballs and eggnogg and mango chickpeas and glug and potatoes and pasta salad and spinach and i bought tons of stuff to bake cookies with but then we got home and realized we don´t have an oven. so no cookies. but merry christmas. i miss everyone and wish i was with you. a lot. except it´s cold and cloudy here so it´s not that different from normal weather. we decorated the cabana last night with all the decorations from aunt debbie which was fun and now it looks great.

when travelling kicked my ass

2006-12-23T01:04:00.000-03:00

yesterday i was sitting in a park in Calama waiting the 2 hours for my bus reading in the sun. A gyspy came over and asked me for money and i gave her a cien because i was feeling lazy and she only had two teeth. she sat down next to me and took my hands. She told me she was old and pulled up her shirt to show me her wrinkley nipples as proof. i guess she was telling the truth. She told me that I would have a long vacation and then made me tell her about my love history. She told me that she wanted to help me and that she would do it but i had to put a bill of money in my hand, not for her of course, for me. And i said no. And she said, do it now. And I said no, i don't want to. And she said, ahora, ahora! And I said, no, why can't i use this apricot instead of money? and she started screaming, ahora! el dinero en tu mano AHORA! I'm trying to help you and you're making fun of me. Do you want me to have to put a maldición on you? And she grabbed my head and pulled out my hair and grasping it in her closed hands said if i didn't want her to curse me, i'd better get out some money and put it in my hand for her to be able to help me with. I took my hair out of her hands and told her i wasn't putting the money in my hands and she left in a huff and i thought i was safe BUT when i went back to the bus station the bus never arrived and i waited and waited and finally asked where it was and apparently i was supposed to be at the other terminal (even though I specifically asked if i had to switch bus stations of wait in the same one and they told me the same one) so that bus i was supposed to be on was long gone and all the other busses were booked until december 26th. fuck, i thought, i'm stranded in this shitty gypsy cursed city and can't even get back to santiago to celebrate christmas. Then I realized that there were other companies so I went to them. one was booked until december 30th but Pullman Bus had one spot on a bus at 5 o'clock. it was 4:20. i said ok, i'll take it and took out my wallet to pay only to find a giant gaping empty spot where my debit card usually lives. it was more than i could handle and i just sat down on the floor of the bus station and cried. etc. so not only was i stranded there without any buses but also i only had $7 and didn't know anyone. I went back to the other bus station to see if they had made any progress on refunding my old useless ticket so I would at least have some money but the verdict was that it could not be refunded by them because even though i bought it from them it was not their company's bus. i didn't know what to do so i just sat outside of the bosses office and cried and totally freaked out the boy who was working there who had no idea how to handle a girl his age crying and would run by between the bosses office and downstairs as fast as he could without looking at me. But finally they managed to find a bus I could take to Antofagasta and then get a bus to Santiago in Antofagasta later. but it left at 6 and it was now 5:40. twenty minutes. and they could only reserve the ticket if i gave them some money then. so i had to call the bank long distance and cancel my credit card and see if they could send me money somehow from my account. no. ok, western union, that should work. no, only for people with accounts. ok, parents. no, answering machine. fuck, what do i do? I finally got in touch with my dad but at that point i only had $2 and i was calling long distance so i didnt know how long i could talk and it was 10 until 6. he said he would figure it out and i went to leave when the woman working at the telephone office, who had been watching everything, asked me if i was ok and completely amazingly without even knowing me or anything told me she would give me the money i needed. She gave me some water and food to calm down down and then gave me 100 dollars! i can't really get over it. it makes me really happy about people and everything always working out in general. I didn't even ask for it. i'm basically stunned. Just at the same time my dad was trying to figure out how to Western union some money to me and someone told him not to worry, that the chileans were nice and would help me out. and they did. so, after all of that and 24 hours on busses i'm home safely and i had a really nice dinner with Luke Bostian's family and now I'm going to sleep and tomorrow at 4 i'm going to pichilemu for a week with the swedes for christmas. and you will never get to hear about bolivia because i'm tired. it was pretty.

2006-12-20T12:56:00.000-03:00

i just got back from bolivia. what, bolivia?! yes. i´ll tell you about it when i get back to santiago on friday.

2006-12-16T16:27:00.000-03:00

i´m in the desert now getting sunburnt waiting for a bus so i thought i would sit in an internet cafe for a half hour. the past 2 days have mostly just been travelling and not too exciting but i´m two hours away from san pedro de atacama now which should be exciting. it´s a little weird being alone but mostly i feel safe and not that lonely and i´ve just been reading a lot of pablo neruda and drawing and writing down the things i wish i was having conversations with people about. the desert is a little intimidating. i´ve never been to one before. all i could think about as the bus pulled into antofagasta was why did i come north? this is the scariest place i´ve ever been to. no wonder it was easy for the dictatorship to dissappear people. all there is are grayish tan mountains, gray cement factories, giant mines, and an occasional gray brown pine tree that you almost miss because it blends into the landscape so well. then out of nowhere, still in the middle of nowhere, houses begin to be etched into the mountainside. there are no trees though, not even a cactus. it´s far from an oasis but still it exists which is impressive. then suddenly and totally unexpectedly there are millions of houses and the ocean, all the bluer for the lack of any color surrounding it and still engulfed in mountains on all sides, which is striking enough to see that it makes me glad i came. antofagasta is weirdly like santiago in the way it looks, which means kind of ugly. some people drove me up to see part of the escondida mine which i think is the biggest copper mine in the world but it was actually 2 hours away so i didnt see it, just the processing plant where they turn the copper powder into sheets and load it onto ships. it´s interesting to see the part of chile that really fuels the country´s economy and that´s responsible for starting a lot of the major political movements of the past. chile of course has to buy copper at the world market price. but the people who work in the mines seem to have pretty good working conditions now from what i´ve been told.. i´m in calama now and the half hour is almost up so i guess that´s all. i´m looking forward to spending a bunch of days in san pedro although it is frusterating that it´s a totally tourist place and me going there just continues to fuel that and i hate being excited about seeing people with backpacks or light eyes or hearing english because really that´s not what i want. i could have not come to chile if i just was going to hang out with those people but in practice it´s a lot harder and really all i want to do is meet other backpackers and have something in common and hang out with them. etc...

2006-12-14T15:07:00.000-03:00

vicuna, nestled among the mountains, is tiny and delightful. the outside is made up of long walls and chipped paint that sometimes allow a rose bush to peek through giving a tiny glimpse into the wonders hidden beahind those walls: 20 ft tall hollyhocks, apricot trees, creeks, chilli peppers. piles upon piles of rosebushes, grapes, avocado trees, sunflowers, palms, plums, and an assortment of other fruit i can´t even name. and there, as you look past the garden are the neverending mountains. last night i saw red giants and blue giants and megellan´s clouds in clear view without a telescope and through a telescope i looked at future supernovas and other galexies and o´rion´s nebula and more stars than i´ve seen in my whole life. then today i went biciclying in the mountains and stumbled upon a forest of figs ripe and juicy and just waiting for me to eat them! i cooked dinner with a french man and now i am going to antofagasta 12 hours north. being alone is not so bad.

2006-12-12T15:25:00.000-03:00

ah! I'm off!

2006-12-11T00:59:00.000-03:00

being in chile is pretty crazy. it's oddly calm right now with just the sounds of helicopters circling and occasional horn honking. i didn't go out when the serious riots were happening mostly because i was alone in the house and it seemed like a bad idea to go out alone. but then we were watching the BBC world news and seeing pictures of what was happening 10 minutes from our house as if we were watching it from the states or something just like any other riot we see on the news. it felt ridiculous to be watching it all on tv so later after things had died down a lot, Evelyn and I walked around and ran into a bunch of things set on fire, lots of broken glass, a lot of people but no one being violent, and really scary pacos. here is a picture of a car on fire. what was the most interesting to me was that all of these fires were right outside of the fire station and about 15 firemen were standing outside watching it but not doing anything to put them out. only the extremely creepy carabinero metal plated war tanks were putting the fires out. I've never been more scared of the police than after being in chile. 20 at a time, they come out of these giant dark green trucks with chains on the front that clank ominously as they apporach and are in full riot gear with shields and clubs and olive green body suits. i know i've talked about them before but it's just so reminiscent of the dictatorship and one hundred percent citizens versus pacos with one side throwing rocks and screaming pacos culeados, asesinos, and other insults, and them retaliating with tear gas, potato guns, water sprays, and chases on horseback and motorcycle, I can't help distrusting them. After reaching the deserted wrecked plaza italia where a lot of stuff was happening during the day, we were about to go home when this guy came up to us and started speaking in a mixture of swedish an german inviting us to have a drink. i thought he knew evalyn since he was kind of speaking in swedish but really he was just a crazy asshole who made fun of us for being gringas and looking like idiots. he couldn't understand what we were doing out and why we weren't acting like all foreigners and running away. apparently he was hanging out with some police officers and they all started laughing at us for having blond hair and assumed that we had no idea that pinochet had died and were just idiot tourists out for a stroll or on drugs. after talking to him i found out that he is in the navy and he grew up in austria because his family had to leave the country for political reasons in 1972. ! how did i fucking end up having a drink with someone involved in the pinochet regime on the fucking day he died when there are millions of people in the streets with clearly similar ideologies as me celebrating his end? Then this guy told us about his grandfather who is retired military who if you give a beer or two will start telling you everything, who, what, when, where... talking about torture and disappearances as if it was a joke. I got really mad and yelled at him for insulting us and treating us like idiots but i don't even know what you say to someone who in his own country has to find foreigners to go to a bar with because he comes from a family who is and was involved in a military who murdered it's own citizens. so we left and now i'm home and it is really strange to be in a foreign country when something like this happens that I care a lot about but that is not my celebration or history and makes me remember how unchilean I am. it's exciting to see people who a lot of the time have been silent about what happened and try to forget that part of their history really rejoice and react to the fact that Pinochet is gone forever. It's frusterating that he was never tried or seriously held accountable for any of the deaths but i think a pretty big weight is lifted by the fact that he's not still living relatively peacefully just over the hill.

2006-12-10T15:52:00.000-03:00

Pinochet died! it will be interesting to see how the city deals with it since he never was brought to justice for anything he did. i can't believe i'm in chile on the day he died.

2006-12-06T22:04:00.000-03:00

did i not ever write about thanksgiving? this was it. we went to a really nice restaurant nearby with ola, evelyn, erin, nate, and jenna. Like the tablecloth and napkins? courtesy of grandmom and aunt debbie. (wait till you see what i have for christmas). the waiters thought we were crazy and i think we embarrassed the swedish but it was great. I also made an apple pie and pineapple stuffing that we had for dessert.

also this is some performance art i saw the other week in front of the museo de arte contemporaneo. he was from california. i ws going to talk about it but it took so long just to load the picture that now i'm too tired.

2006-12-06T21:57:00.000-03:00

that's not how you spell philosophy, is it? did i mention that the house is decked out with a christmas tree and decorations now? and it's 90 degrees and the sun sets at 9:30pm and everybody's wearing shorts. i can't handle it!

2006-12-06T20:21:00.000-03:00

today i got a yellow fever vaccination. the hospital was crazy like an old univerity campus and all the hallways and waiting rooms were outside! with trees and broken tiles that old ladies in walkers were tripping over and fresh air. it was the best hospital i've ever been in. but i don't know what they do in winter. this is a picture in front of the blood bank.

also i had my first and only written exam today. it was hard to write three essays in spanish in an hour after not having written anything in english let alone spanish since may. at least it's over.

And I got officially accepted into the Universidad de Buenos Aires filosophy and humanities department (which has anthropology and art) so as long as Bard is ok with it I'm gonna go there in march. ! ! ! !

2006-12-03T22:44:00.000-03:00

i went rock climbing in the mountains today!

man,i'm bad with updates.

2006-12-02T19:56:00.001-03:00

Aside from plannig trips and saying goodbye to friends, I haven't been doing anything too exciting lately so I'm just going to write about my plans for the next few months instead: Next Monday December 11th is Jenna's last day in the country and my last day in the house so we're going to throw a despedida party that night and then I move out the next morning! god that's soon. I'm going to take 10 days and travel alone to the north of Chile to La Serena, Vicuña, Atacama valley, and then to San Pedro de Atacama . La Serena has areas of really cold water in the ocean off the coast that are so cold that Antarctic penguins live there. vicuña is supposed to have the most beautiful sky in the world and is where Gabriela Mistral is from and in the Valle de Elqui there is a really nice observatory. There are really neat salt flats north of that before you get to the desert and then there is the desert! (Any grapes you guys in the US are eating right now probably come from around here). Apparently the world's highest volcano is also there, something i just read. The Atacama desert (about 24 hours north of chile) hasn't had recorded rainfall since the spanish conquest and is the dryest place on earth. I'll be there around the summer equinox which is when the Altiplanic Inversion happens causing huge rainstorms in the mountains that rush down the dry gorges and flood everywhere. yes! In the desert there are lots of mummies (well i guess they're not there anymore) but they are from a few thousand years even before the ancient Egyptian ones! There is also Antofagasta which is a big city in the desert with lots of beaches and rocks and San Pedro de Atacama has a dry salt lake and hot springs and lots of caves that you bike through the desert to get to and is near Valle de la Luna which is supposed to be really creepy like the moon and has geysers which burst out of the ground at sunrise every morning because of the drastic temperature change. I doubt I'll make it past there but above that is also Iquique and Arica and then bolivia! So there are a lot of options for places to go during those 10 days. Then I'll come back to Santiago the 22nd and leave with 8 Swedish people to spend 5 days in Pichilemu on the beach for christmas. Then I'll come back to Santiago on the 28th and go to Valparaiso for the 28-1 for New Years. Valparaiso is apparently the place to be for New Years and they have tons of festivals and free concerts and music and theatre going on the whole week before. Then on the 3rd or 4th I'm going to Ecuador with Beth to wwoof on an organic farm there. I haven't decided which farm yet so I can't say where in Ecuador or exactly what I'll be doing but most of them have vegetable and fruit gardens, do a lot of reforestation and seedsaving of medicinal plants used by the Quechua people in the area and have community projects too. more on that i guess when I decide where I'm going. I'll be there until around the 25th or around the last week of January and then 2 of my Swedish friends, Ola (yes, his name is hola) and Carolina, are going to meet me somewhere in Ecuador, where we'll spend some time travelling and then cross into Colombia and travel there until the end of February. So far I don't know what we're doing there yet except visiting the sister of a woman i live with who lives in Colombia on the border with Ecuador. Then the last week of February we'll take buses home for a week stopping in Peru and Bolivia a little bit to break it up. Then first week of march I move to Buenos Aires (or possibly stay in Santiago and get a new apartment), parents hopefully come visit the second week of march for a week or 2 and then school starts again the second and third week of march! man, i am going to be broke.

2006-11-15T12:46:00.000-03:00

Halloween!

This is where I live! They go on forever and ever (literally, the Rocky Mountains is a continuation of the same mountain range)
And a few from Easter Island:

some pictures, finally.

2006-11-13T21:57:00.000-03:00

I've been trying for weeks to put up more pictures but I can't so instead here is an update on me: I look pretty much the same. I wear lots of clothes that I've made here. I listen to Swedish music and little indie chilean bands and hiphop like it was 10th grade. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen in the middle of the night staining all of the kitchen pots solferino and turquesa with bright colored dye and that's probably what they'll remember me for when I leave here. I like to find sunny spots on the lawn of the art campus to read Pablo Neruda's memoirs and imagine that Chile really is like that. Sometimes I make funny pieces of artwork with things I've found in the street that illustrate parts of my dreams. Sometimes my dreams are so good I don't wake up until 2pm. But every time I have woken up early it's been cold and foggy until noon so I don't think I'm really missing anything. I like reading about performance art and the feminist movement in Latin America as well as articles professors post on reserveweb. As always, my room is full of lists and unrealized plans for projects and goals. it's also a mess. I haven't done laundry in a month and I'm running out of clothes. I had fleas 2 weeks ago that I got from the hostal in Buenos Aires but I got rid of them and only got 5 bites. I pick fresh fruit from trees in the street everywhere I go and mostly live on fruit and vegetables and desserts that I bake. Everyone laughs at me when we have barbeques because I fill the grill up with asparagus and zucchini and then for dessert have a bowl of cherries. I'm excited about working on a farm even though I know I'm romanticizing it. I miss home and fall and my family and everyone and sometimes more than anything I want to just come home but I also equally love doing this and am really happy about all of it.

2006-11-12T04:09:00.000-03:00

yes! i found concerts and amazing bars and live music and bands who love how i dance to their music and give me gigantic smiles from the stage. so santiago is great right now. I also love the swedish and I think I'm going to travel to Colombia with Carolina and Ola this February. and work on a farm in argentina with andy in january. I'm really excited about all of it, but especially knowing where to see concerts and liking silly santiago bands who i can see every week when they play.

2006-11-10T21:06:00.000-03:00

I found people to spend chrsitmas with!!! The swedish kids invited me to get a cabin at the beach in Pichilemu with them. It's not the most exciting since I've already been to Pichilemu and they don't really speak spanish but I like them and we all like the same music and spending christmas relaxing on the beach, although strange, sounds really nice. so mom and dad, you don't have to worry so much anymore. also, I only have one more month in chile! Did I mention already that so long as everything works out with getting into the Universidad de Buenos Aires I'm going to move there in March? So I have three months free to figure out before that and then I'll be in Buenos Aires until July. Also, even more importantly, I made nispero crisp today with nispero that we robbed in the middle of the night from the empty house across the street. It was insanely good and the oven didn't destroy it and I know this is not the type of news anyone wants to read about on the blog but it was so good and I'm really excited that I haven't lost my baking skills because I thought I had. And even better, I made it without a recipe! I wish that everyone could try nispero because they're kind of an integral part of my experience in Chile and I think I talk about them a lot. in Peru they call them mispero apparently. but i'll stop since no one has any idea what i'm talking about.

2006-11-02T02:45:00.000-03:00

sike. the nose ring just fell out when I was washing my face and I can't put it back in. now there's snot coming out of the hole. gross.

2006-11-02T00:10:00.000-03:00

buenos aires was amazing. i applied to some colleges there. i'm also thinking about rio and montevideo but i guess i'm definitely leaving santiago. even though after being in Buenos Aires I realized how much i love it. but it was really exciting being in Buenos Aires too. There's so much art happening and giant parks everywhere and it's full of people. Except they are all to skinny and fashionable. BA has the highest rate of eating disorders in the world. None of the stores made pants that were bigger than me. Only sizes 1, 2 and 3. Jenna and I were on the metro one day and it was really crowded and suddenly this man started yelling, Oh my god, get this woman a seat, she's pregnant! It was pretty ridiculous. But it was humid and hot like home and there were thunderstorms and parks full of passed out cats and homeless people selling art magazines on the street so i fell in love. But now I'm back and for the first time since being here am really stressed out. I have all these applications to do and I missed a week of school (excused, don't freak out, parents) so I have tons of projects due and I decided I'm leaving Santiago on December 11th but that's really soon so I have to decide where I can go. . . halloween was ok. there was a party at our house but it didn't get too exciting and then Melanie had a crazy alergic reaction and had to go to the hospital so we didn't end up going out or even eating candy. I was a pirate. I pierced my nose for three dollars too. It matched the costume. I kind of hate it though, it's too sparkley but mostly you can't even notice that it's there. today was the best day. The whole house woke up at 2 and we went downstairs and found a ping pong table on the patio and nate and I played ping pong all afternoon and then we got out the grill and made a giant bbq of asparagus and zuccini and onions. and did i mention that I had the genious idea of buying the house a hookah? yeah, its great. Except ping pong plus grill plus hookah means I am never going to leave the house again and it's already midnight and I haven't done any of those things that I needed to do today. yes.

could i be more excited at 2am on a wednesday night?

2006-10-19T02:14:00.000-03:00

I saw Noam Chomsky speak today! Kind of less exciting than it sounds and when I say see I mean I was one room over watching it on tv through a live feed with a spanish translator talking over him, but still. And I'm going to Argentina in 30 hours! And I got a 7 on my latest textile exam! (7=A++++). And I found an amazing "chinese" store (chinese means anything asian here) that sells lots of Japanese food and we bought sushi matts and rice and fixings and made tons of sushi that was kind of ugly but really good. And seperately I found a sushi delivery store that needs a bike deliverer and it's only a 20 minute walk from my house and i think biking, spending time outside, and exploring santiago plus free sushi sounds like the ideal job for the next two months so maybe they'll hire me. I'm sure there's more excitement than that but that's all for now.

2006-10-17T18:48:00.000-03:00

Maybe I'm crazy but I'm going to Argentina this weekend for a week. I'm thinking pretty seriously about moving there or to Brazil next semester so I want to at least see it before I decide. Does anyone know anyone there I can call either for a place to stay while I'm there or just to meet up with? That would be really really helpful.

2006-10-16T14:09:00.000-03:00

I have a million things to write about and tons of pictures to figure out how to put up but that would take a million hours so here's briefly what's been going on for the past few weeks:
1.) The furthest back I can remember is 2 Fridays ago when I died. I lay in a body bag in the street for 2 and a half hours as part of an amnesty international action on gun control to demonstrate that every minute someone dies by gun wound. It was pretty exciting to be the spectacle and not just be watching it. And I really was a spectacle, there were just 4 of us in orange plastic body bags and I think probably 6 thousand people saw it if on average there were 10 people watching at all times, spending an average of 10 seconds each, for 2 and a half hours. but probably I don't know how to do math and that's wrong. Regardless it was interesting to see such a small action that only took 6 people to orchestrate be so visible. Of course I have no idea if it made any impact.
2.) That whole weekend was Diversity Weekend in Santiago starting with a big Gay Pride March on Saturday. We even got to feel like we were really part of it because we spent all morning blowing up thousands of balloons for amnesty international and then got to carry them over to the march and give them out. Surprisingly a lot of people were there considering Santiago's general homophobia. Jenna even saw one of her micro drivers! Afterwards we met up with my French friend Melanie, who's interning at Amnesty and went back to a party with her co-workers. They were all really nice but it was weird since we're not part of the organization. They spent the whole night congratulating themselves on how well the march went and I felt like it was kind of excessive, i mean gay pride marches happen all the time. But actually it was a really big deal and they've only been successfully happening in Santiago for about 3 years. 5 or 10 years ago it apparently was just 20 or 30 transvestites getting booed in the street. So it was a big deal. (even though El Mercurio, the biggest newspaper, didn't even note that it happened)
3.) I don't know what sort of diversity they were celebrating the next day but there was a giant outdoor music festival a few blocks away from my house where they closed down one of the largest intersections in Santiago for the whole day. I was planning on checking it out for a half hour and we ended ups staying from 2pm to 11!. And it was all fun people roughly my age and they were even selling delicious soy burgers! Minus Coney Island and band whose names I recognized, it was kind of like a mini Siren Fest. And we made some friends but i lost my phone the next day so I lost their numbers and the numbers of everyone I've met here. oh well.
4.) We realized we had a 4 day weekend the next weekend the next weekend for Columbus Day so after a million other failed travel plans, Jenna and I bought tickets to go to Isla de Chiloe in the South. I didn't quite realize it was going to be a 14 hour drive but luckily the cheapest tickets Jenna could find were on a nice bus where you get served breakfast and the seats turn halfway into beds. So I got about 7 hours of sleep. We finally arrived in Puerto Montt at 10am Friday and took a ferry over to Chiloe. It was cold and rainy but the south is amazing and magical so it wasn't a big deal. The saying here is that "you leave Santiago and enter Chile" and aside from the continued use of huevon and po, it almost did feel like entering a new country. The ferry dropped us off in Ancud on the north of the island where we stayed in a funny hostel decorated in kitschy old lady style with billions of knickknacks and doilies. It was fantastic. We also discovered this special liquor called liquor de oro which was literally candy that they make homemade around the island. And I also finally had a caldo de congrio which was delicious. And we met this amazing lonely old man who was selling wool sweaters who talked to us for a long time about his whole life and showed us really old pictures of him and his friends when he was twenty that he was going to get blown up to hang in his house because he missed them. I'm always too embarrassed to take pictures of people like this though. But it gives me hope for being able to do interesting anthropology work when i get around to that....We failed at all the next three things we tried to do because it was too windy to see penguins, not the season for flamingos, and since it was the weekend, no buses were running to the place where you can go kayaking through a forest of dead trees. But in our search for those things we stumbled upon the Parque Mitologico which was made and run by another lonely old man. It was kind of for kids, kind of for tourists, but mostly just to entertain himself I think so it was really funny and silly but I think he also took it seriously. All of the monsters and dinosaurs were made with real human and animal teeth turned upside down for extra ferocity! It was maybe the most fun thing we did in Ancud... that night we took the bus further south to Castro and stayed in an even stranger hostel. The owner was also a lonely older woman who reminded us of a witch and was really no nonsense and sat around with us sometimes being nice and sometimes suddenly getting really upset and almost angry and then acting normal and quiet again 5 minutes later. It was kind of awkward and tense but I also liked her and the beds were really warm with thick raw wool blankets. We had the best food in Castro. They make this dish called curanto which is a giant pot of clams and mussels along with a sausage, a hunk of ham, a chicken breast, a piece of fish, a milcao, and more! Jenna got that and I had a chupe de jaiba which is kind of like crab fricassee over melted parmesan cheese. It took us three hours to eat it all. .. Our plan for the next day was to visit the market in rancague on the main island and then take a free ferry to a nearby island that's part of the archipelago and visit chonchi where supposedly they make the liquor de oro so we could bring some back. But chonchi was a dead town and nothing was open and there was nothing to do. At the market another funny old man jumped out of nowhere and started talking to us about linguistics. He gave us a mapuche language lesson and explained that words that sound the same but have different meanings are called synonyms and gave us the etymology of his Greek and Spanish name and with it a whole description of his ancestry and then just as suddenly left and talked to some other people. We almost bought homemade wool coats but resisted and hopped on the ferry instead. We thought it was going to take us to the town we wanted to visit but it didn't so we were kind of stranded and didn't know where to go when we heard the toot of a horn from a VW van and we got in and spent the whole day driving around with a family from Osorno. They were soo nice to us and let us hang out with them all day and it felt like we actually knew them. You know how when you're comfortable with people, sitting together in silence isn't awkward? It was like that. I miss them. And the island was beautifully scenic and we wouldn't have been able to see any of it without driving around with them. I guess the draw of chiloe in general is supposed to be their wooden churches that were made without nails or anything non-wooden so we saw a bunch of those with the family too...Then we took the late bus back to Puerto Montt, got really lost in the middle of the night trying to find the hostel and were really mad at the women for giving us bad directions but then we met them and they were of course really nice women and they had gotten up in the middle of the night and gone out searching for us in the street. Plus it was only $6 a night. the house reminded me of something you would find in New Jersey and it was nice to stay in it.... For some reason people just really like helping us out. Jenna had met a woman who offers tours in the bus station when we first arrived so we found her the next day to take one of the tours and she let us go for 5 mil instead of 10 mil and offered to let us leave all of our stuff with her all day and she went and found us cheap bus tickets and reserved them for us. We discovered later when we got on the bus and found someone with our same seat number that she even had convinced the bus company to love this woman to another bus so that we could ride together. Which was obviously unnecessary and i felt bad that this person got moved around just for us, but I don't understand why the woman felt like she had to do that for us. Anyway though, the tour was really beautiful. The lake region of Chile is totally phenomenal and magical. It was cold and there were a bunch of foggy misty lakes that felt like they should have warlocks canoeing through them and casting spells. Which actually could be possible, chiloe has its own witchcraft and brujos who are pretty serious and supposedly have to kill their best friends to show that they don't have sentimentality! Luckily we didn't run into any. Just beautiful scenery. I saw my first glacier! We went to Volcan Osorno, whose whole top is a glacier so it's perpetually white. Along with Mount Fuji, Osorno is one of two perfect cones in the world. Possibly a lie, but it was impressive. For lunch we crossed the beautiful Petrohue River and went to a homemade log house for a super gourmet meal of freshly caught trout. They had beautiful stunning views of the volcano from the window and I think the pictures in our guidebooks must have been taken from there. It was a funny mixture of German tourists who didn't speak Spanish and a bunch of couples from Santiago and they all treated us like the little kids since we were the only unmarried couple there. Then we had a boat tour around Lake Todos Los Santos but it was a little awkward since we had spent all of our money and didn't think we'd be needing money for the tour so the tour guide had to secretly pay for everything for us. We weren't expecting to have to pay for all of these extra things so finally when we got to the last one we just asked if there was something else we could go do for free for the next hour. But instead he went and talked to the guards and they let us in for free. It was kind of awkward and I felt bad until one of the guards started hitting hard core on Jenna and offered her a private tour of the area. of course rejected but I'm glad we did get to see this place. it was formations of volcanic rock waterfalls with beautiful turquoise water that was perfectly clear even 10 feet down. It was neat being there because it was actually in the cordillera of the mountains, which at this point in the country almost butt up to the sea (Chiloe used to be attached but broke off so the mountains go right up to the edge at that point). Something else interesting is that Chile's part of Antarctica is allowed to be theirs because its the continuation of the Andes, which are the same mountain range that goes all the way through the states as the Rocky Mountains. I guess that's all. I got back last Tuesday morning just in time for class on a much worse bus that was basically impossible to sleep on but that showed really good Chilean movies that had just been part of a film festival that i missed. I guess that wasn't that breif.

2006-09-29T02:37:00.000-03:00

a weird thing happened yesterday in my globalization lecture. out of the blue we were given a 20 minute sex education lesson. in french! in a university class! and then we went back to talking about decentralization of the latin american state. Chile, you never cease to amuse me.

2006-09-27T03:19:00.000-03:00

happy birthday, momma!!!

A brief update:
-i had my first day back at school yesterday in almost 20 days. But it didn't last long. Today class was cancelled because there was a paro nacional (a strike) but for once i was not a total bum and instead I downloaded hundreds of articles from reserveweb from the classes I wish I was taking at Bard and read a bunch of them on my own. It's great to read and learn just for myself and without it having to be assigned.
-I went to a club down the street from my house this weekend and it was great and funny and there was no reggeaton and boys could kiss boys and they just played pulp and blur and the strokes and no doubt and jay-z and i pretended that i was back in high school and sang along to every word with these three amazing chilean boys I met who danced just like me or dare i say it better and with no shame. and they promised they would take me out this friday and soon i'm pretty sure we'll all be best friends.
-the 18th was fun. It's their 4th of July / Veterans Day / Biggest Holiday of the Year and lasts for 4 or 5 days straight. The main focus is consuming insane amounts of meat on sticks called anticuchos and meat-packed empanadas while drinking a sweet homemade wine called chicha that you can buy in the street in recycled bottles for 1000 pesos or less and dancing the traditional dance of chile, La Cueca, a pretty silly dance where you kind of pretend you're a rooster and shake a handkercheif in the air at your partner. Jorge and Marisol threw a party for the house on Friday night before the 18th and the rest of the weekend we went to various fondas (the name for any party that includes chicha, queca, or 18th related activities) some of which were gigantic, i guess equivalent of state fairs in the states. I even found a vegetarian fonda but couldn't persuade anyone to check it out with me and didn't end up going. In general it was really fun and I was really glad I stayed in Chile for the weekend but for the 18th itself, the big day we'd all been waiting for since the moment our planes landed in the country, absolutely nothing happened. After a beautiful weekend, it rained all day and was really gloomy. Everything was closed obviously but that included most bars too and the streets were kind of dead and we all ended up just calling it quits at midnight and going to bed. Not exactly what I was expecting for the biggest holiday in Chile but I guess everyone just talks about the whole weekend in general as the 18th and not just the day itself.
-Snapfish doesn't work so I'm still having trouble getting any pictures up. maybe someday
-It is almost three, why am i awake writing this?

2006-09-22T16:25:00.000-03:00

in case you were worried that I'm not eating enough, i just got back from the market and i have more fruits and vegetables than i know what to do with. and i found ginger and curry and fennel. and fresh basil! with a full set of roots attached so I planted it and maybe it will grow.

and this is what my room looks like now. I don't think I've ever put up a picture of it.

2006-09-20T02:57:00.000-03:00

Also, maybe you have noticed how obsessed with food, especially fruit, I apparently am. Well I have to. All I think about are new recipes to make, how hungry i am, and how much I love food, and when I am not eating or cooking I study online how food affects our bodies and what we need and how we use it, and when I’m not thinking about that I’m thinking about how to sustainable grow food and about how wasteful so much of the way that we grow it now is. So realizing that, I’m thinking that maybe I’m going to work on an organic farm for a little while over my summer vacation. So if anybody has ideas for me about that / wants to do it with me over your January break from school, talk to me. And talk to me anyway, because I’m feeling really disconnected from life up there in the north and I miss everybody a lot.

2006-09-20T02:54:00.000-03:00

jesus christ, that was obscenely long. It is too difficult to put up pictures here so I'm going to upload them all to snapfish instead. If you want to see them, just e-mail me and I will e-mail you the link that will allow you to view them. maybe not for a few days though.

ok, RAPA NUI (Easter Island / Isla de Pascua) finally:

2006-09-20T02:52:00.000-03:00

I got back from the trip Thursday night but starting Friday was thrown into the dieciocho Independence Day celebrations back here in Santiago so I haven’t had time to write or post pictures in a while. So here is everything in one giant paragraph of bad grammar and lacking poetry: I stayed up all night Friday before leaving researching Rapa Nui since I didn’t know anything and found out lots of interesting things such as: 1.) It is the most isolated place on the planet in terms of distance from other populations of people. 2.) It has excellent fish and fruit but everything else is really expensive since there are only 3 shipments of supplies from the mainland a year. This is especially visible in the horses who are all dying and starving because there is not enough horsefeed sent to feed them so they eat non indigenous plants that ruin their livers. It was weird, everything was healthy and great except the horses were sickly sickly skinny. 3.) In old times Rapa Nuis considered the Island the Navel of the world or te pito te henua. 4.) It is plio-pleistocene volcanic and man the volcanic rock is fucking cool and everything from the beach to asphalt to tombstones is made of igneous rock. Sleeping on rocks that were formed from volcanos millions of years ago that still looked like volcanic rock was really exciting. (albeit hard) 5.) “delinquency does not exist” 6.) there are not really any animals on the island other than dogs, cats, rats, mice, and of course large webfooted rats, which we luckily didn’t run into but we heard some pretty loud dinosaur growls when we were inside the Rano Kao crater and then found a mutilated kitten which I think can only be attributed to the webfeet. 7.) In the 17th/18th century (maybe before too, I can’t remember) there was this practice called the birdman ritual that there are pyroglyphs of all over the island based on the migration of the only visitors the island ever received: the sooty tern birds. The practice was that each leader chose someone to jump off a cliff into the Pacific ocean and swim to a nearby island where the birds mated and find the first egg laid. Then he swam back through the ocean carrying the egg supposedly strapped to his forehead. And the prize for the leader whose swimmer brought back the egg was that he got to stay in his house for a whole year. And the houses (shaped like boats) were only 4 feet tall with no windows or light! Pretty crazy. Not to mention the Moai. But that will come later. I haven’t even gotten to the part where I arrive yet. After an impressively delicious meal on LAN we arrived in the early afternoon and although warned against it by everyone at the airport who wanted us to pay them to camp in their yards, Jenna and I started walking around looking for a place to camp for the night. After ten minutes of walking with no idea where we were going to go and backpacks full of water and food and a tent and sleeping bags we were about to pass out when a guy in a pickup truck pulled over and offered to drive us wherever we needed to go. So we told him we were going to try to camp and he drove us to the coast which was beautiful and showed us a nice cave to camp in but then offered to give us some water and fruit from his house so we went back there and ended up getting the keys to his cabana so that we could shower and use the bathroom and we just ended up staying there for free for most of the week hanging out and cooking dinner with him every night and eating fresh fruit from his fruit trees. [biography: Napohe. I have no idea how old he was, a lot older than us. He’s a designer and makes these really nice cloth prints related to Rapa Nui, which he gave us, and lived in a really cool house. Apparently when he was 22 he met a 44 year old woman traveling to Easter Island who worked for NASA and was very wealthy and I guess having a midlife crisis. He moved to California with her where they lived for 8 years and had a daughter. But he couldn’t handle living there and in such high class society, especially since he was so much younger than her and she wouldn’t let him work or do anything. He also traveled around Europe and the states but really just liked Rapa Nui life so he moved back and opened this design company. Etc. I don’t know if anyone else is interested in this, especially since you didn’t meet him, but I think people’s biographies are fascinating.] It was really fun and great to not have to stay in a hotel and only hang out with other tourists and I think we got a totally different understanding of Easter island than everyone else we met who was also visiting. (I’m sorry there are no paragraphs, the blog doesn’t let me do them for some reason). We did camp as well which was also fantastic. On Sunday we woke up and went to mass at the Catholic Church, which was really beautiful and full of singing in Rapa Nui and Spanish and it was pretty cool to understand an hour of mass in Spanish. (One of my new projects is to try to understand religion more, especially the religious phenomenon in Latin America, and visit all of the different churches in Santiago each Sunday. I think I’m going to go to Synagogue this weekend for Rosh Hashanah). After church we set out with our backpacks along the east coast feasting on wild guavas along the way and climbing over old lava. Since we were walking I felt like we were really discovering every foot of the island and we stopped at every site of fallen Moai and got a really good idea of their intensity and what it would have taken to carry them so far. Our final destination for the day was the crater (Rano Raraku) from which they were carved so we walked in reverse the path that they would have had to have walked to carry them and it was really neat to understand it that way. I was exhausted just from carrying a backpack; the idea of moving a 10-meter giant stone figure is pretty unbelievable. It was impossible not to feel excited about life and have amazing thoughts while we were walking. Something that Jenna said that I liked was that we are going to find what we’re looking for because we’re still looking. And I was thinking about how great everything was going and how easy things were working out for us, almost as if we had a guardian angel, but really it was just life. And we were just aprovecharing it. And something important I realized was that I’m not pessimistic. And that feels great. So we walked for about six hours and were about to pass out when six loud boys from new york and jersey on motorbikes pulled over and offered to give us a ride the rest of the way (which only turned out to be 10 minutes by bike). But it was awful. After a whole day of slowly and quietly noticing every step I took and everything that was around me and feeling at total peace with myself and the environment, being on the bike was unbearably loud and intrusive and conquering and completely missed everything. You couldn’t see anything because you had to look out for potholes and horses (the boy driving me was an inch away from hitting a mother and colt and almost crashing us) and there was constantly wind blowing in your eyes and you had to drive on the road so they missed all of the neat things that we saw by walking on the coast and actually being able to stop and look at everything. But they were mostly there to surf so I guess they didn’t care. I don’t know who goes to Easter Island to surf, but whatever. We wouldn’t have been able to make it without them, although finally getting to Tongariki (where 15 Moai are lined up together in front of the ocean) in such a way was kind of a let down. So Jenna and I decided to walk back down the road to where we couldn’t see them and walk back up and pretend that we were just getting there for the first time but along the way we ran into a family and some people having a fish barbeque in a cave and they invited us to have piscolas with them and hang out. (and it turned out that one was a park ranger in Rano Raraku who we saw the next day and another worked in the airport and we saw her again too in town and when we were leaving. It was fun to feel like I knew people). So we spent the night in the cave but we didn’t have sleeping pads and sleeping on rock is kind of difficult so I hardly slept at all even though we went to bed at 8 as soon as it got dark. Then we almost woke up at sunrise but not quite and went to Rano Raraku which is a giant crater of a volcano which is where the Moai were carved from. They were littered all over the outside of the crater and some of the rock sides of the cliff were full of parts that were half carved out and abandoned (possibly because they ran out of trees to carry them with?). Somehow embarrassingly we missed the giant moai that is 20 meters tall. I don’t understand how we missed something that was 20 meters tall but we could never find it even though it was supposedly right there in the exact place we were. Very mysterious. We also walked all around the inside of the crater and had a guava feast next to a few moai which was pretty funny. Then we walked halfway across the island to get to the beach Anakena and got picked up by some Chilean tourists for the rest of the way. Going in car still felt weird and missed a lot but it was a ton better than motorbike. That was really funny too because they were tourists so they were stopping to see all the sights along the way so we obviously stopped too and got out and visited the places with them as if we were part of their family. We got to Anakena and it was a perfect white (or actually pink from the coral) sand beach with crystal clear turquoise water and little blue and silver fish swimming everywhere along with palm trees and more moai. But it was kind of windy and drizzly and we were too exhausted to try to find another place to camp so we got a ride back from a really nice Rapa Nui couple who had been out fishing for the day and were so obviously in love with each other that we couldn’t help smiling for the whole ride. Then by chance we ran into Napo in the street who was shocked to see us since we were back a day early but he came home and we all cooked dinner together and he drove us around and picked us fresh fruit: pineapple, papaya, avocado, strawberries, lemons, the most delicious bananas, and nispero which really should just be called divine heaven fruit because they are so delicious, like a ripe juicy apricot multiplied by a million degrees of deliciousness. The fact that we could live for free on fruit, get around for free because everybody gave rides to everybody, camp for free or live with nice people who offered their houses for free, and spend only about $40 total instead of the $40 a day estimated by the guidebooks was almost the best part of being there. Well obviously not the best, but it made me feel competent. And after talking with Napo a lot I realized I didn’t even have to feel guilty about not putting money into the primarily tourist economy since Rapa Nuis don’t hoard money in the same way there and generally work as much as they need to be comfortable, fish and grow a lot of their own vegetables and fruits and make enough off of all the other tourists for it not to be a big deal. Hmmm….We did a lot of other things but I kind of forget what right now. We went to the Southern part of the island to Rano Kao and made friends with the park rangers who let us hike down to the bottom where there were supposed to be lots of fruit. We thought everybody was pulling our legs because they said there was a whole forest at the bottom with avocados and oranges and grapes and trees that were 20 meters tall but from above it looked like rock cliffs and maybe a few bushes. But sure enough we made it down and were engulfed in a humid forest. We couldn’t find the avocados, which was too bad since we had brought crackers and were hoping to be able to eat lunch there, but we found some nispero and coffee plants and more guava. Raw coffee fruit is actually pretty good, kind of like tangy milk. But then we got worried that they weren’t really coffee plants and they were poisonous and it started to get dark and we heard lots of noises and saw the dead kitten and started to freak out so we abandoned the avocado search and left. Then we were walking home and saw Napo driving with somebody else in his truck and got worried that maybe he had a woman back at the house and it would be awkward if we went back there to sleep in the cabana again but it was all in our heads and he invited us in and we all made rice pudding together. Bizarre. I guess we just hung out in Hanga Roa (the city) for the rest of the time. It was a really neat place. And there were nasturtiums everywhere to feast on. They are one of my favorite flavors in the world. Oh, and there was a super pregnant cat who wasn’t Napo’s but for some reason hung out only in his house (along with 5 roosters and chicks that also weren’t his) who he hated but we loved and every night after he went to bed we snuck into his refrigerator and gave her all of his leftovers. And then she gave birth to 5 kittens!!!!!! They were so little they weren’t even cute yet. It was amazing. And Jenna had a really crazy allergic reaction to something when we were hiking and the whole bottoms of her legs turned bright red like a rash or inflammation. We spent half of Wednesday at the hospital with this funny American kid named Robert who also was living at Napo’s and Jenna had to have a cortisone shot and has been taking benadryl twice a day since then but it’s still not gone. And I have a weird skin discoloration all over my arms too but not from Easter Island. Ok, enough. That took me about 3 hours to write. the end.

2006-09-08T18:01:00.000-03:00

I'm going to Isla de Pascua/Easter Island tomorrow!!!! Jenna and I spontaneously bought plane tickets at 1am on Wednesday night basically for half price since we're under 23 years old and it's off season. We're borrowing our friend's tent and backpacking gear and we're going to get bikes and bike around and camp and starve for a week. I'm completely overwhelmed by the excitement.

2006-09-07T00:16:00.000-03:00

I just wrote a really long post about everything that's been happening and of course somehow it got deleted and I really don't have time to write it again because I am sick and I have a big exam tomorrow in textile art and am also possibly going to Easter Island on Friday because we found really cheap flights but I just tried to buy them and it keeps saying I'm going to be charged 198,000 dollars instead of 198000 pesos so have a lot to figure out with that. So in super super brief: I went to Pichilemu on Friday a beach town 3 hours south with Jenna and her friend Fred from Colorado. the bus broke down 35 km away and we had to walk 15km and then hitchhike the rest of the way. Then we went to the house of someone Fred knows but we couldn't get in touch with the owner to see if we could stay there but when we looked around all of the windows were open so we just decided to break in and then it was fine and the guy called later that night and said it was fine for us to be there. So that was nice and the town was nice and it was especially great to be out of the city and hang out on the beach even though it was obviously too cold to go swimming. etc etc... pretty beaches and views, delicious empanadas with artichoke hearts and corn and cheese, really really good seafood (something called Machas which i've never seen before but which are my new favorite type of seafood). We also met some local surfers who were nice at first but then really aggressively tried to make moves on me and jenna even though we expressed disinterest a million times. but I think here girls just say no a lot but don't really mean it so guys don't listen to you when you say you're not feeling them. It's kind of frusterating and the girl-boy dynamics here are strange and confusing and I don't like how they work. But I bonded with lots of Swedish people over mutual love of The Knife and now we're friends and one of them makes me lots of cds of swedish music and a chilean girl in my class got really excited that I had seen all of her favorite bands in concert when i was in high school and she is going to take me out to shows here. and we found some uber hip bars that are kind of obnoxious but a welcome relief from reggeaton and Cristal and have art openings and free wine. . . In case you are also confused about what an exam in textile art looks like, I too am trying to figure it out. clearly not getting very far.

2006-08-31T01:30:00.000-03:00

Today was possibly my best day in santiago. i managed to wake up at 10 and met Jenna in the Plaza de Armas. It was cold and cloudy and felt like it was going to thunderstorm all day so everyone was walking around full of anticipation and general excitement. But it never did. We went to the museum of Santiago and followed around high school tours and it was pretty interesting to get a better understanding of how the city developed and why it's like it is now. Then I remembered about this performance art piece happening at the Museo Arte Contemporaneo so we went and it was amazing. The artist was this neat Brazilian guy and it was all in portuguese and all interactive, kind of like a game. I guess it was about communication and fluidity and thinking about our bodies and how we give and recieve. and I could understand it all! in portuguesel! I'm not going to explain it because i think it will be impossible to convey the experience but taking part in it was a more beautiful feeling than I've felt from ever looking at a piece of artwork. I can't stop being excited about it. It was neat, there were only about 15 of us and the museum was closed because it was between installations and it was fun to be there and feel like we all knew eachother even though we never even introduced ourselves and then we had to leave through the secret construction exit and it made me think a lot about how interested I am in curating, not to mention performance art obviously. Then I came to the not very profound realization that I'm only here for a short amount of time and need to just do everything that intersts me and not worry about needing to sleep. But even after deciding that I was still too hungry and tired to go see Raul Zurita (a really famous and interesting chilean poet who was also part of CADA, the groups that did art actions in the 70s against the dictatorship). Eating is important too though (I made pasta with tomatos and garlic and onion and apples and somehow it was delicious). But walking home we stumbled upon a really really cool independent movie theatre that also has a lot of live music and neat things happening there and we went back and saw "Dias de Santiago" about an x-soldier in Peru which was muy fuerte. And we were going to go back again and see a show at 12 but i decided it was probably a bad idea to walk a half hour alone to a kind of sketchy area at midnight, so we'll have to go back some other night. And my globablization class started getting interesting. I'm still confused, we have a different teacher every day , but this one was from social studies, not economics, and it was interesting. And Maria Angelica called me in the middle of the movie to tell me she had found me a job! But it was in the middle of the movie and then my phone died so I don't know what sort of job or anything. but still, bacán!

futbol, etc.

2006-08-29T02:32:00.000-03:00

A couple hours ago I was walking to the bus stop and found a huge pile of wood in the trash so now i have lots of wood to make paintings on! It's kind of frustrating because tomorrow i would like to stay in my room in the sun and paint but I have class. It is so silly to be taking art classes so that I can do art but then when I feel like doing art I can't because I have to go to class. This morning I woke up feeling really inspired and excited to make things but then I had to go to ceramics and I couldn't translate anything I was thinkng about into clay and I didn't make anything all day except for plans to go to La Serena this weekend. Which I'm excited about because it is the beach! It's only five hours north and we can take a midnight bus and sleep on the way and arrive at sunrise and have a full three days there. But I'm really bummed out because Jenna and I had plans to go to Buenos Aires for a week in September when we have off for independence related holidays but it turns out that the facultad de ciencias has off the week before the holidays and I have off the week after them so now we can't go together and I'm not sure who I could convince to go with me. alone is possibly a bad idea. oh! I also went to a soccer game on Sunday which was crazy. It was a "clasico" which is when 2 of the 3 good teams from Santiago play eachother, in this case the Universidad de Chile vs. the U Catolica (which does not mean college soccer. They are Chile's professional teams, they're just owned by the respective universities). So obviously I was rooting for la U Chile and everybody was giving me shit for it and saying that they were really bad and definitely going to lose so I bet one of the Rafa's that they would win and I don't know what they were talking about because la Chile dominated the whole game and won. so now he owes me a beer. But that is not what's crazy about soccer here. What is crazy is that the stadium is full of carabineros (police) dressed in full head to toe riot gear with shields and some even riding on horses. The way you pay for tickets is based on whether you have to stare into the sun all game and whether you are behind the goal or by the sidelines. The super cheap tickets are behind the goals so that area is packed and a lot rowdier and that's where people are really into it. So the police just line up in front of those two sections and wait for people to start getting too crazy and occasionally they'll march in formation around the field while the game is going on. For me it was really strange, I guess we have security too but it was just so reminiscent of something from a military dictatorship that it was hard to feel comfortable around them. And then we left the stadium and started walking towards the metro but apparently a riot had broken out and the carabineros were spraying down people with water and then charging in on horses and motorcycles to disperse everyone. They were really scary, much scarier than the people waving flags and running in the street and throwing rocks. So of course when you start getting hosed down with water sprayed out of an armored truck, everyone starts running in all directions and it's total chaos and kind of scary especially for me since I obviously had no idea how serious it was or where I should run or whether my friends were still behind me or not. It's stupid because the police response just made it more chaotic and made everyone panic and run and all the rioters were doing was throwing rocks at the armored truck and so if the police hadn't been there "to keep things in order", they wouldn't have even been doing anything. Maybe that's not true but that's how it feels and the police make me really uncomortable. Also they wear ridiculous all brown uniforms that make them look like an army from the 17th century. But the Chileans I talked to are not bothered by it and say that that is just how it is at soccer games and that the people who attend them are kind of dangerous and uneducated. But it is not just soccer games. There was a student protest at Macul (my campus) on tuesday and the police response was the same. Granted the protest was kind of immature and it was supposed to be about LOCE and education reform but mostly was just kids throwing pieces of concrete at the armored truck but again, they wouldn't have been throwing anything if the police in riot gear and armored trucks hadn't been there to put down the protest. And the police shot potato guns back at the students with real potatos! and then they tear gassed them all! I feel like it's just really extreme and it bothers me that the instant response to any sort of demonstration is to disperse it and act really scary so that everybody runs away. That does not make me feel protected. Also they close down the metro stations when there is a riot. But they don't only close down the station next to the stadium, they close down the next three stations on the line, including mine. So after reuniting after successfully avoiding the cops we had to walk an hour to get home. It makes me feel like if i had tried to do something like that alone or without chileans, it would have been basically impossible. I'm feeling vaguely down on Santiago right now but I'll stop talking only about the frustrating parts because lots of good exciting things have been happening too. Today Jenna met a boy in her biology class who is going to New York in a few weeks and wanted suggestions for what he should do there so she took him to meet me and we all went out to a pub with some other chilean girls and I pretended that I knew all about new york and started telling him things to do and realized that I actually did know some things about it and it made me feel good to finally feel useful or knowledgeable about something. Maybe that's what's most frustrating here. There is obviously a lot that I don't know but even the skills that I do have, i am not really getting to share with anyone. . . whew, that was a long and unproofread post and I am going to sleep. Tomorrow I am going to train myself to wake up without an alarm clock since they don't work for me anyway and go see either a Brazilian performance piece at Bellas Artes or go to a park and draw in the sun.

p.a.r.t.y. ! ! !

2006-08-27T04:12:00.000-03:00

the best birthday party!!!!!! It was great, I'm too tired to write more than that, but here are some pictures.

If you look closely, you will notice that everybody is wearing some piece of my clothing! (Marisol, fran(cesca), Carolina, mee, Erin, Evalyn, Jenna, Gaby)

(Erin and Nate)

I love Javi!

I got to blow out the candles twice because no one noticed that I had already been sung to and blown the candles out already so they all sang again in spanish and then in English.

The 2 Rafas. Mexicano Rafa's outfit was priceless.

And luke Bostian was there! That was a riot. We just kept looking at eachother and screaming holy crap i'm in Santiago and you're sitting here next to me!

Jorge and Marisol, the owners of the house. They wouldn't let anyone in unless they were dressed up and stayed up with us almost the whole night dancing and dressed up too!

In the back are Piter's brother Richie, Felipe, and Piter, who are incredibly nice and I've ended up spending a lot of time hanging out and playing charades and pictionary with.

The Oliva family! Javier (the 10 year old) stayed up until about 4am taking pictures of us and discreetly videotaping everything and the next morning we all woke up and he was waiting downstairs with all of the videos uploaded to the computer to make fun of how funny we (but mostly me) dance. It was pretty funny because everybody imitated how i danced because they thought that was how you were supposed to dance to 80's music buut really i was just dancing how i always dance.

Also something funny was that no one could understand the idea of dressing up like you were from the 80's and thought that they had to dress up as a specific person. Piter was a Ramone. He was pretty upset that I couldn't guess that. It was decided that I was a mixture of Molly Ringwald and Madonna. definitely.