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.