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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ! ! !

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.

so birthdays are kind of funny. especially in other hemispheres. but the weather has been perfect, about 80 degrees and sunny and fantastic. I slept with all the windows wide open so it was almost like sleeping outside and almost like it was August here and not winter. I was feeling weird last night and at 2 in the morning I cleaned my whole room and got out my oil paints and painted some cereal boxes because that was all I had. It felt so good. And even better to wake up at 10am with a room full of fresh sunny air and see a big card slipped under my door that everybody in the house signed happy birthday. But nobody was around during the day so I just sat in my room in the sun and made a calendar and read all morning. Then I had to carry 5 kilos of dirt and half of a wooden door that I found in the street to ceramics class and I almost fainted on the bus because it was so hot (I'm getting a little worried for summer). And the profe wasn't even there but I made a dinosaur companion for Ruby my dinosaur who you will never get to see pictures of since every time I try to upload pictures to this blog safari finds it necessary to quit. But anyway, then after a failed attempt at using skype to talk to the family Jenna, Rafa, Erin, Nate, Diego, Felipe, y yo all went out to Indian food down the street. I had some vegetable korma like I've never had it but it was really good and really exciting to have Indian food. Diego and Rafa had never had Indian food before and I don't know how much they liked it but I thought it was really good. Then we all came back and sat out on the enclosed patio and Diego played guitar and we all sang and he made fun of how badly we sang. It was fun but there is always the problem that we don't really know the songs in Spanish and no one else knows any songs that we know. Except sometimes twist and shout works as a mixture with la bamba but everybody gets tired of that pretty quickly. Which kind of sucked because just as I was getting ready to do something more exciting at around 11:30 everybody left or went to bed. I said goodnight and came back and found Rafa singing to himself and playing guitar and he obliged me and played for me for a little while. I think it was the prettiest music anyone has ever sang to me and kind of made me wish I was in Mexico but then he got cold and went to sleep too. It's kind of funny for it to only be midnight on my birthday and have everyone have gone to bed already. But I guess I am having the party on Friday. I can't wait! I have a really amazing 80's outfit and everyone in the house is super into it (well, except for the boys). Marisol, la dueña, even came out and told us that she had a costume ready and that she wasn't going to let anyone in if they weren't in "disfraz." And I went into the computer room and found Francesca looking up 80's clothes on the internet. It's gonna be great!