Erin Taylor’s Weblog

Piropo means catcall in Chile.  The catcalling phenonmenon is funny here.  Most of the time people are too embarrassed to actually full out cat call you until you’ve already passed them, so that you don’t get to see their face.  Also, sometimes they don’t really sound into it.  It almost sounds obligatory, cursory, it’s strange.  You’d think if someone was going to go through the effort of calling out some superficial compliment about a woman’s beauty, he’d only do it if he, you know, actually thought she was pretty.  But sometimes I feel like the tone of voice these men use is the same one they’d use to say “no honey, those pants don’t make you look fat”.  That automatic, I have to say this but I’m not even thinking about it and there’s no feeling behind it voice.  Other times of course, there is passion, and sometimes people are downright creative.  A few weeks ago (when I thought about writing this post) I got two very creative ones two days in a row.  

The first one occurred very close to my house.  I was crossing the street towards a man with dreadlocks and he roared at me.  Then, in English, he said “you look like a lioness”.  Honestly, maybe I’m being a bit conceited calling this a catcall.  He might’ve been commenting on my huge curly hair.  But the roar was kind of throaty so I’m going to pretend it was a compliment?

The next day I was in almost the same spot but going the opposite direction.  A man who’d been kind of just chillin on the sidewalk stepped widely out of my way, motioned me into his wake in an “after you my lady” kind of way and said “buenas tardes reina” which means, good afternoon queen.  It was quite galliant, I must say. 

These of course are the highlights.  The average hombre just says “muy rica” or “bonita” or something to that effect.  I, however, prefer to dwell on the positive and laud the poets among the pirpo-ists.  Call it optimism if you like.

I meant to write this like right after it happened but then life caught up with me and I had other things to deal with.  It is, however, one of my better Chile stories I think.

So I’ve been going to services every Friday I can (and at least the last four in a row) at this amazing house that is also a synagogue. I won’t try to explain this synagogue itself on this blog because it is an absolutely amazing place and I could never do it justice here.  What you need to know though are a few basic important facts.  1) there’s a central group of families who started this synagogue within the past year, and my friends and I are connected to the community through one of them, so the people we know best are all part of that chavurah.  2) for the past three Fridays before the blessed week I’m about to speak of, we had been invited to stay at the house in which services are held, for Shabbat dinner afterwards.  3)the week in question, services were not being held at the synogoguehousething but rather at a hotel, to accomodate more people, because a daughter of the central chavurah was getting married, so we weren’t expecting dinner at all.  4) that week, we brought Jordan.  Jordan is African American, so he stands out in Chile.  He stands out even more in a Chilean synagogue.

So we went to services in the hotel and it was wonderful.  In the middle of services the rabbi got the whole family of the bride to get up and dance, and more and more people joined the circle.  There was dancing, singing, clapping, and stomping.  It was loud.  I wonder what the hotel people thought.  It was awesome.  We wondered where the groom was.

After services we were munching our challah with some Chilean boys and staring in awe at how many people were there (still kind of wondering where the groom was), when the mother of the bride came up to us.  She asked (in English, which is weird because we always speak Spanish there) what we were doing for dinner.  We said we had no plans.  She said we needed to come to her house because she was already expecting that we would come.  We were not about to turn down a nice Shabbat meal.  Plus we figured all our friends (aka the people who usually talk to us) would be there.  Que suerte! How lucky! We live such a charmed life.

Just like that, two young Jewish Chilean men appeared, ready to drive us in two pairs to the house.  Jordan and Joanna left a few minutes later, and Simona and I stayed to help clean up a little with Matias, who was driving us. 

Eventually we arrived at the house.  We had in mind a table with a few families around it, some Shabbat candles, some warm food.  You know, standard stuff.  We were wrong.  The first thing we saw when we walked in was the photographer, who flashed his flash at the three of us.  Suddenly I was making appearances in the wedding albums of people I’d never spoken to.  The next thing I saw was a woman carrying butlered hors d’vours, then another, then another.  As I stepped forward, recovering from the shock of the fanciness and light from the camera, and more of the house came into focus, I realized the backyard was covered in a huge white tent, and set with a whoooole lot of tables.  We found Joanna and Jordan and promptly joined them in the corner where we were served mini empanada thingies and pisco sours.  Delicious.

Obviously we were all thinking the same thing.  What are we doing here?  Somehow, inadvertantly, we had found ourselves at what looked like the equivalent of a rehearsal dinner, of a stranger.  Yeah we’d seen the bride’s parents at services, but we’d never talked to them, much less her, and we STILL didn’t know where the groom was, only that his name (like all other Jewish men in Chile) was Alan. 

Matias saved us from our awkward corner by motioning us over to a table.  Each place had three glasses, two or three forks, the other necessary utensils, and a mini challah.  A waiter offered us wine.  We looked for Alan.

Throughout the night, toasts were made, songs were sung, amazing dairy filled food was consumed, and we just let ourselves be carried along as part of the festivities.  Many references were made to how nice it was to be amongst so many close friends and family members.  We tried not to look too bemused about that.

Finally I asked someone where the groom was.  Everything got cleared up when it was explained to us that there exists (in Judaism apparently, who knew) a tradition of having the bride and groom be completely out of contact for the week before the wedding.  This serves two purposes.  It keeps them apart for that most stressful last stretch so they won’t fight over things like number of forks at the table and then change their minds about the whole marriage thing.  And, it gives them more ganas to be together once they’re finally reunited under the choopah…and after.  Even if you don’t speak Spanish you can probably guess what that sentence meant.  Anyway, mystery solved.  Alan was surrounded by his own family, friends, and perhaps one or four wedding crashers as well.  He should be so lucky.

We did birkat and everything.  The whole shebang.  Jordan got the complete Shabbat package for his first ever experience with Jewish prayer and ritual.  At the end, the bride came over and told us how glad she was that we’d come.  Really?  We thought.  Cool.  I don’t think we left until at least 2 or 2:30.  Luckily we were also offered rides home, as we had no idea where we were, and I’m guessing we weren’t close to much public transportation.  It was quite an enjoyable evening, and I ate well too. 

And that is how I accidentally crashed part of a wedding.  Perhaps you were expecting something a little bit more racy.  If so, many apologies.  I am not, it turns out, Vince Vaughn.  I am, however, in Chile, and in Chile you never really know where you’ll end up next.  

I had a list of things I was going to write about when I added my last ones and I never finished.  Here’s one, there are some more coming.

You might guess that, considering the time of year, the pumpkin cooking came as part of Thanksgiving.  What you wouldn’t guess is that the pumpkin was actually sweet potatoes. 

Let’s back up though, because if you haven’t been functioning on Chilean logic for the past three months, that probably makes very little sense.  The season of Thanksgiving was upon us, and by us I mean me, Jordan, Simona, and Joanna, and the United States, but not really the rest of Santiago at all.  The season of summer is upon us here in reality, but that’s a whole other story.  So yeah, Thanksgiving was upon us but we were in Santiago.  Nevertheless we decided to undertake the adventure that was cooking Thankgiving dinner in Chile (try explaining dinner at 4:30 to a Chilean.  They will say, you mean lunch right?).  Moreover, we decided to cook a kosher Thanksgiving (or, more or less kosher) because our poor friend Simona had eaten meat exactly one other time the whole semester, and what is Thanksgiving really without a bird?

We met up at Joanna’s house at 10am for our shopping expedition, list of ingredients in hand.  The plan was to make a kosher chicken (already purchased by Simona on her third try), cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes, string beans, brownies without milk in them, and mashed potatoes.  First of all, we went to a grocery store called Jumbo, which lives up to its name.  It’s more like Target than a grocery store as they also sell clothes and tupperware and like, toys…. and it’s the size of a Target.  So that was a bit overwhelming.

Then we started looking for ingredients.  Cranberries, don’t really exist in Chile.  So we settled for a mixture of oranges, raspberries, and cherries that ended up not only being delicious but somehow managing to taste like cranberry sauce in the end.  Baker’s chocolate (aka chocolate without milk) also doesn’t exist here.  I don’t really understand this phenomenon, but although there are delicious baked goods in bakeries all over the place, and some of the best cookies I’ve ever eaten, it’s impossible to find baking supplies here.  Do people only buy cookies and never make them?  Where do the bakeries get their ingredients?  So much escapes me in Chile.  Anyway, we tried to make brownies out of cocoa powder and oil instead of chocolate and butter (because all margarine in Chile has milk in it. This is an improvement over Argentina where they actually don’t have butter, only mantequa, which has animal fat in it).  We also lacked measuring equipment in the non-metric system…What we ended up with was something that looked like brownies and was chocolate.  It was delicious with the raspberry cherry orange sauce.  The texture was a bit off.

The other major difficulty was the sweet potatoes.  First of all, I don’t think it directly translates, so trying to explain to the grocery store man what I was looking for was not easy. Finally I apparently got my point across by saying I wanted something looks like a potato but is orange inside and sweet.  But he told me they’re not in season so they don’t have them.  He suggested squash that came in cubes.  I didn’t look impressed.  He suggested a whole squash (it looked like a medium sized green pumpkin).  I asked if it was orange, then if it was sweet.  I don’t know why having it look like sweet potatoes was more important to me in that moment than having it taste like them. 

Anyway, in my house it’s always my responsibility to make the sweet potatoes, and this squash thing  cost about a dollar, so I decided to give it a whirl.  I couldn’t imagine Thanksgiving without some kind of orange much with marshmallows in top.  I first took out the seeds (which we sauteed in garlic and it was delicious) and then chopped it up and cooked it.  I mashed it, added all my sweet potato ingredients, and at the last minute before putting it in the oven, it occurred to me to taste it to see if it actually tasted anything like what I was going for (it looked right).  Turns out, it tasted like squash.  What a surprise.  We brilliantly added brown sugar though, and somehow it actually did end up tasting like sweet potatoes– similar to the noncranberry sauce miracle.

In the end our dinner was quite delicious if I do say so myself, and didn’t take us all that long to cook.  We tag teamed very efficiently.  The most difficult part was probably the shopping.  We ended up also having matzah ball soup! And no dinner that starts with that can be bad.  Nothing was exactly as it would’ve been had we made it in the US, but everything was close, and it was somehow much more satisfying to eat it all knowing how much trouble we’d gone through to search out the ingredients.  As strange as it was to eat Thanksgiving dinner speaking Spanish the whole time and sitting outside in the nice spring weather, it really did feel like our Thanksgiving.  We worked for it, we cooked a pumpkin, and we even ate the leftovers for dinner a few days later.

Not this weekend because it’s ISP crunch time, but both of ISP’s other weekends, I have traveled.  The first weekend Joanna and I went to Viña del Mar and Valparaiso (two beach towns right next to each other).  We woke up on a Saturday morning and went to the bus station, bought tickets on the next bus, and arrived in Viña with no plans other than that I wanted to go to the pickup frisbee game at 4.  It was marvelous.  We sat on the beach eating strawberries, palta, and cheese, and reveling in how cool and Chilean we were being.  Joanna came and watched the frisbee game and then we went out for delicious cake with my frisbee aquigos (aquigo= acquaintance + amigo.  It’s a term we made up for people in Chile whom you call your friends because you know them and they’re cool and nice, but in any other circumstances you’d admit that they’re more of an acquaintance).

After cake we wandered around Viña looking for a hostel that wasn’t full and finally ended up staying in this cute but kind of strange place in which we were the only Americans and the only youth I think.  But we got our own room and it included breakfast.  We were incredibly excited to have figured everything out with time to spare before 10, because we really wanted to go to this falafel place that was closing.  When we got there they were still open and making food, but told us they weren’t making falafels anymore… okayyyy we ate empanadas instead.  This was our downfall.

Joanna got food poisoning.  The next morning she could not move but also didn’t want to take a bus at that moment.  We left later that afternoon.  Joanna missed out on Pablo Neruda’s other other house, which wasn’t much.  She made it almost all the way back to Santiago without throwing up.

Last weekend the entire Santiago crew (Joanna, Simona, Jordan and I) went north.  We arrived at the bus terminal after Shabbat services Friday night to find that there were no tickets left to La Serena, oops.  Andres (who has now taken both me and Simona on dates) and his mom, who had driven us there (they’re some of our Jewish friends, don’t even worry about it), wouldn’t leave until we had tickets.  We bought passage to Ovalle, a small town that is almost as north as La Serena, and where there is actually nothing to do.  We had to wait there, deliriously eating strawberries and drinking coffee, from 6 am until 8:30 when we could take a bus to La Serena, a beach town.  We visited La Serena and Vicuña, and stayed in a sweet hostel.  We all brought food from our houses and ended up buying only a quarter of a wheel of goat cheese, a pack of cookies, one avocado, and three ice creams between us the whole weekend.  Some highlights include:

-A tour of a pisco factory (pisco is Chilean liquor made of grapes, it was really cool)

-A night time trip to an observatory, as Vicuña is known for having the clearest skies in the world.  I saw constellations I’d always kind of thought were made up, like cancer.  Also Orien was upside down because we’re in the southern hemisphere.  When we bought our tickets they were like well you can go but it’ll be you guys plus a group of elderly Chileans who are part of a tour.  So yeah, that was funny.  When we peeled off from the group and just laid on the ground and actually stargazed, all the old people found us hilarious.

-Our hostel owner passing us in his car when we were wandering around the neighborhood portion of Vicuña to see what it was all about, and stopping to make sure we weren’t lost.

- A free ice cream sample received in the following manner:  We’re walking by an ice cream shop.  A young man appears in the doorway and says here, try this ice cream and hands me what appeared to be a mini cone full of ice cream.  Thanks I say, what flavor?  “don’t worry” he says, in English.  Simona, Joanna, and I somehow manage to get about 9 licks out of that mini cone and still can’t figure out what flavor it is.  Wow, one of them says to me, I can’t believe how non-chalantly you just accepted the end of that dude’s ice cream cone.  I mean, I was down once you said yes, but that was pretty ridiculous.  What? So apparently it just hadn’t occurred to me that 1) they don’t make cones that small 2) the top of the cone was broken and 3) he really just gave us the end of his ice cream cone that he’d been eating.  I just hadn’t thought about it.  Both of them thought it was glaringly obvious.  I found this all incredibly funny and still have a tendency to laugh in a debilitating kind of hysterics whenever someone brings it up.

So it turns out that trying to do a controlled study, have any information about what’s going on in your own day ahead of time, and trying to plan things in the long term over a month’s period doesn’t really work in Chile.  Here was the original planned timeline for my ISP.  Week one: read.  Weeks two and three: Interview one history class’s worth of tenth graders at a public school, and some history teachers there, and observe in the class. Do the same at a private school.  Week four: edit the film and write the paper.  Sounds simple enough.

What actually happened has involved trekking all over Santiago to interview various people, some of whom are in high school.  One man I interviewed at his house in the evening (that sounds way sketchier than it was.  His mom and daughter were home too), and he had me come to the grocery store with him first so he could buy the following items: one liter of iced tea, one roll of oreos, one liter of ginger ale (diet), two juice boxes of chocolate milk.  Okayyyyy

My schedule has been more like this:

First half of week one: find a place to live

Second half of week one: read

Week two part one: seemingly have no one to interview and instead have to ask Rene (as opposed to my advisor, who is his brother in law) to set me up with anyone, which was apparently very difficult because there was a national strike going on of most government employees.  But Rene put me in touch with Luis Vincencio who is a ridiculous man who wears a vest, is probably covertly running the entire communist party of Santiago (no joke), and who is constantly moving at a sprint because he is so busy.  Luis Vincencio is the advisor of Joanna and Simona.  Luis Vincencio is eccentric.  We’re not really sure if he’s really human.  Luis Vincencio is also a history teacher at a public school.  I called him and he said “come to Liceo Cervantes at 5pm (that’s the school)”.  Today?  Yes.  Okay.  I interviewed four students there and one teacher.

Week two part two: Interviewed the man who did his grocery shopping (he also had to buy colored pencils).  Interviewed three college students at the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias Educacionales (so a school that only has teaching majors).  Sounds perfect until you realize I was at the campus that is solely for gym teachers.  I actually walked around looking at all these incredibly athletic people and thought, you are allllll going to be gym teachers.  Good think I play a sport or I would’ve felt like a fraud.  The students (gym teachers to be) ended up having very useful things to say. Interviewed a masters student.  “observed” in a classroom where they were having their history “final” (aka a 10 question true or false test).

Week three: Interviewed six students and one teacher at a public high school and wrote most of the paper I need to have accompanying my video. Also started editing my video a lot.

Week four: Starts tomorrow.  I’m supposed to interview at a private school finally, but who knows what will happen. 

Just to give you an idea, here’s a typical kind of ISP day.  I go in for my weekly Monday meeting with Roberto (my advisor) after being away for the weekend and traveling back to Santiago on an overnight bus.  He is late, as always.  He comes in and says, we’re going to a school (this is a school I thought I’d be going to an entire week earlier).  I say, I don’t have my camera or anything.  He says, that’s fine, we’ll just go there and schedule a time for you to go interview.  Okay.  We go there, they are not expecting us even though Roberto has called me at 8am that morning telling me to email my interview questions to the principal.  The principal says yes you can do your interviews here but you can’t say the name Pinochet in the questions, you must say the government between 1973 and 1990 in Chile.  Great, so now these interviews are totally different from the week 2 ones.  We schedule a time for me to come.  Roberto and I leave and go to his house to change the questions.  He invites me to stay for lunch but I have to go grocery shopping. 

Example two.  I knew that I was supposed to go to this private school on Friday, but hadn’t heard from Roberto when I went to bed Thursday night and had no idea what time, where, or what the school was called.  Roberto calls at 9am Friday and says, I’m waiting for an email about when you can go to the school.  It should arrive at 11:00.  I start working on other things.  At 2:00 Roberto calls and says he has just forwarded me an email and that I can go to the school Monday and must arrive at 7:45 am.  It’s going to take me an hour to get there, and the teacher he had me email there hasn’t actually responded to confirm.  Great.

On the bright side, I’ve seen more and more of Santiago.  And I visited a gym teacher college.

Last night a little bird reminded me that I haven’t written on this in about three weeks.  I was kind of shocked but also very honored that anyone cares enough about what I have to say, that they would notice a lack of blogging.  Also a good deal of excitement and frustration have occurred in the past three weeks.  Entonces, Jan here’s a shoutout.  These next ones are for you!

The house hunt

I’ll try to do things chronologically and thus little by little cover the vast expanse of time that is the past three weeks.  It all started with a house hunt.  I returned to Santiago on Friday, November 7 quite resfriada (sick basically, I had a hacking cough after losing my voice on election night), exhausted from the experience that is Buenos Aires, and more exhausted because the cough was keeping me up at night.  Naturally I was incredibly excited to embark on a citywide search for a new place to live during my ISP (independent study project, aka the thing that’s taking over my life right now). 

I spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday souring Santiago with my friend Jordan.  We visited hostels as well as two apartments that a man named Fernando at this real estate agency called Home Chile connected us with.  Fernando talks about three kilometers a minute (that’s more than a mile) and has been sighted talking on as many as three phones at once.  He ends every conversation with “ciao ciao.  Ciao ciao.  Ja, un besito.  Ya ya”  butsaysthatreallyreallyfast.  He himself was an experience. 

Anyway on Monday night, exhausted and fed up with the search but knowing I really needed to move Tuesday so I could start my project, I found myself on the phone with a man named Gonzalo.  He claimed to be Chilean but sounded American.  He owned two hostels and had just bought a house next to one of them.  With plans to expand the hostel, he was temporarily using the house to rent rooms for longer periods of time, and it was already being inhabited by two girls from the US who were teaching English.  It was cheaper than anything I’d seen, and even though the girls were American and I’d wanted Chileans, something in his onda (his like, aura, energy, vibes—onda doesn’t translate well) just felt right.  So I took it. 

Moved in the next day (I still haven’t given him any money…).  The house has way more rooms than people inhabiting it and each room has three or four beds because, it’s going to be a hostel.  Gonzalo is incredibly nice if somewhat strange.  He always brings us whatever we need.  He also lives across the street.  My house mates are a hysterical set of best friends from Indiana (one of whom, incidentally, knows someone named Rob Thomas from Indiana but it’s not the Rob Thomas I know from Indiana nor is it the singer.  That was mostly for you Jan).  They just graduated college and are traveling together.  Each day we return from our separate adventures to regale each other with stories about how strange Chile is.  I’d almost forgotten.  Plus, I get to tell them all the stories I’ve already written here and told to all my SIT friends.  It’s great, and they humor me by laughing.

To add to the ridiculousness that is my house, one of them is now dating Gonzalo.  I will leave it at that for now.  At this moment all three of them are in Valpo and I have the house to myself.  If you’ll excuse me, I think guy delivering the keg just rang the doorbell.

Today, or tomorrow, let’s say tomorrow, marks the start of yet another epoca of the SIT program– the ISP.  ISP stands for independent study project. In addition to studying independently, I’m pretty much about to do everything else independently too.  I’m in the midst of trying to figure out where I’ll live.  Half of the people on my program stayed in Buenos Aires, three are going south, one to Valparaiso, which leaves three of us in Santiago spread around the city doing our own thing.  I theoretically have a school to do my research in, an advisor, and recommended books, but I hear about all that tomorrow.  So right now I have no idea what’s going on other than that by less than a month from now I should have a project done.  It’s a bit scary to say the least.

I’m going to research how the dictatorship here affected Chilean national identity, and how that plays itself out in the education system, and theoretically I’m supposedly doing this by means of a video.  I’m pretty stoked for the topic, but a bit overwhelmed about how to go about it as all I have now is Isabela Allende’s My Invented Country in spanish, and some theories.  I guess part of step one is get a video camera?

In case you’re interested though, I’ll present my theory going into it, which is based on months of living here plus two weeks of viewing Santiago from afar in Buenos Aires.  Before I say it though, I have to qualify this by saying that I dont’ claim to be any kind of expert. Everything I see is totally skewed by my own biases, and I’m not Chilean.  If you are, and you think I’m wrong, please don’t be insulted.  Just tell me.

Basically I see two parallel patterns, one with students and one with the country as a whole.  Kids here who don’t have lots of money have very little hope of going to college, and the reality is that they won’t get a much better job having graduated high school than having dropped out after two years.  Everyone around them is telling them that they have very little chance of success.  So, they lose hope, they get disallusioned and stop. They need money so they stop.  Even if they finish high school, the odds that their public schools have adequately prepared them for the PSU (think SAT but in Chile) are slim to none.  So then they have a national test system also tell them they’re inadequate.  They get jobs that don’t pay well, the same thing happens to their kids, the cycle continues. 

The exception I saw to this was the school I observed in, the Instituto Nacional.  Basically it’s the best magnet school in the country and it’s all boys (they have a girls one that’s equivalently good too).  Everyone knows it and everyone knows that these boys are smart and they go to college.  Ask any teacher there and they say the boys are the best there are.  Their matriculation rate is like 85% while most public schools send close to no one.  It has exactly the same resource allocation as any other public school, but those boys get told all day long that they’re the best, and they succeed.  The Instituto has produced something like 16 presidents.

On a national level Chile seems to have a self-image problem too, especially in Santiago.  Chileans will tell you that Argentina is better, that the US is better.  My Chilean friend at the university where I study said his professor paints an idealized perfect picture of US university students when his classmates miss an assignment or a class.  Chileans don’t seem to have a very positive self image of their country (except for maybe that the south is beautiful).  Now think about the image you as an American have of Chile.  It probably doesn’t exist.  You probably just haven’t ever learned about it or thought much about it before.  In contrast, Argentinians have great things to say about Argentina, and so does the NY Times travel section.  

The differences between Chile and Argentina are so vast that you basically can’t compare them.  The contexts before their dictatorships, the lengths of the dictatorships, the responses to the dictatorships, and the recovery processes, were all completely different.  I’m not setting out to compare them.  But being in Argentina for two weeks and seeing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, and all of the other human rights movements that have blossomed as a reponse to their dictatorship, seeing posters that say “nunca mas” (never again), did allow me to look at Chile from a different perspective.  I started to think about the direction Chile has gone since its dictatorship, and how much you can still see the remnants of it 18 years later, even in the government. 

I think I’ve really been curious about Chilean identity ever since I started trying to figure out what Chilean culture was and struggling with that question.  I’m pretty excited to have an excuse to sit people down in front of a camera and interview them about their thoughts on the topic.  However, the task of figuring out how to ask the question is quite daunting.  If you have any advice, please by all means share it with me.

You are in South America.  It’s a hot summer night in the humedest of cities.  There are streets full of clubs, and clubs full of people.  We’ll enter one, chosen not completely at random.  It is packed.  I mean hold onto your purse or someone will steal your wallet packed.  I mean just walking from the door to the line for beer almost feels like a sexual experience packed.  And it is sweaty in the way only a dark room on a humid summer night, crammed full of exuberant young people in their twenties can be.  Condensation forms on your forehead almost as soon as you cross the threshold of the doorway, and within ten minutes, drops of moisture slip down your back.

Something is different about this night though, than any other summer night at any other bar.  A palpable sense of comradery pricks the air.  The exuberance of the youthful crowd is more evident than usual and the excitement in the ambiance speaks of something deeper than the possibility of a good hookup on the dance floor.  Every eager face smiles at you as you wind your way through the crowd murmuring your “permisos” and your “perdons” and trying not to step on any toes. 

Moreover, everyone is facing in one general direction, away from the bar, and no music is playing.  It’s also Tuesday.  What a strange club this is.  That, or they’re all facing the wall onto which the 2008 US election results are being projected, live from CNN in English.  Yup, that would explain why this night is different from all other nights.  That would explain the way that everyone seems to be able to completely ignore how incredibly uncomfortable and sweaty it is, the mixture of eagerness excitement and nervousness on everyone’s faces, and the beautiful unspoken companionship emanating from every young person in the room.

As more and more results come streaming in and are broadcasted onto the wall, and as more and more of them carry good news, the electric energy in the room grows exponentially.  Everyone wants to know what state you are from and then to congratulate on having simply been born there.  Every time a new state is won, every time more progress is made, with every step, no matter how small, the entire mass erupts into cheers.  As each time zone in the US closes its polls, the crowd shouts a countdown worth of New Year’s even in Times Square.

And then there’s this moment when everyone knows that the battle is over and that we have won.  8pm Pacific time is ten seconds away, and you count down those seconds with all the air your lungs can pull in.  When you reach zero the room absolutely explodes with emotion and you feel like you could hug or kiss any stranger nearby and they would return the embrace.  People scream, cry, leap onto tables.  Your friends jump into your arms and everyone is hugging.  It is one of the most beautiful moments you have ever experienced, and you think you can maybe begin to understand what kind of emotion fuels the student political movements of the continent from which you are witnessing your own country’s revolution. 

In case you had forgotten that you were in a Spanish speaking country (which is quite likely considering you’ve spent hours surrounded by only your own compatriots) the disparate voices around you suddenly combine into choruses of “Obama presidente,” “Si Se Puede,” and “Olé olé olé olé”.  All of the activist cries of the global southwest.  And you actually feel like the kind of pride you feel in your own nation at this moment is worthy of these exclamations. 

In an unexpected act of coordination, the crowd quiets itself to listen to the concession speech, and then the acceptance speech.  Standing next to a guy named Dave you met five minutes ago, you decide that this speech is one that requires a firm hand holding, and you inform Dave of this decision.  Maybe he agrees, maybe he’s humoring you, maybe he’s drunk and mistakenly thinks that holding hands in unified support of your new president will lead him somewhere else.  Whatever his motives, Dave obliges.  You grip his hand hard as you watch history in the making on a huge screen, in a sweaty club in Latin America, surrounded by anonymous and hopeful peers who, if only for a moment, are unified in an overwhelming sense of pride in the moment and excitement for the future.  

Living With a Family Family

My host family in Chapod was for sure a family, but that experience was so incredibly different because of the farm, the poverty, their indigenous status, the fleas, and everything, that it’s really impossible to compare it to Santiago.  However, I’ve been in Buenos Aires for the past two weeks with yet another host family, and they actually feel like a family.  It’s wonderful.

My host mom is forty four, a lawyer, a mother of two, and divorced (or separated, divorce is complicated down here).  She is a mother.  She made me take a nap when I didn’t really sleep on election night, and she lets me know when she doesn’t think I ate enough dinner.  She argued with my host brother the other night because he hadn’t studied enough but he wanted to go to a party. Every evening she makes sure I know how to get to where I need to go the next morning. 

I have two host brothers, but only one lives here.  Ramiro, the older one, is seventeen and recently moved in with his dad.  He is the president of the student body at his school, and what his mom calls a “Trotskista” in his communist ideas.  He moved because his dad doesn’t mind when he stays out all night at protests, but his mom cared where he was (at least according to her).  He plays the flute.  I am fascinated by Ramiro but only really got to experience him once, on the first night I was here.  I say experience him and not talk to him because he did all the talking, and at a brakeneck pace.  Sitting at dinner with the family, I had to devote every ounce of my energy to comprehending his rant about the upcoming strikes at his school, and therefore could not actively participate in the conversation.  I wish I could’ve hung out with him more.  He’s really interested in politics and is actually the reason the family started having exchange students. I think we could’ve been friends.

Mariano is fifteen and does live here.  He’s a pianist and is much less inclined to talk than his brother.  He constantly has friends over and constantly plays Imperium, a computer game, with all of them gathered around, however he seldom speaks.  I’ve gotten a bit more out of him a few times one on one, but he seems to be fine with sitting back and letting someone else do the talking if someone else (generally his mom, or his friend Ramiro, a different Ramiro than the brother, something that confused me greatly the first day) is willing to do it. 

The first twenty four hours here were uncomfortable just as the first twenty four hours living in anyone else’s house for the first time tend to be.  I thought they’d be easy because I’ve done this twice, but I still had to figure out the way this family works, there were still things I didn’t understand, and I still felt awkward.  Beyond that though, I’ve sincerely enjoyed this family’s company. I’ve had great conversations with my host mom about Argentine politics, the education system, environmentalism, religion in Argentina, the dictatorship, traveling, Latin American literature, and much much more.  I’ve made various attempts to connect with Mariano and I think they’ve generally worked, but I’m not sure.  Two weeks isn’t really enough time to turn a fifteen year old boy who doesn’t like to talk into your best friend, but sometimes we smile in understanding at something his mom doesn’t get, and he started practicing piano when I’m in the house.

Another really cool thing about this family and about living here, is that both sons go to a music magnet school.  It’s a public school that does a normal secondary education in the morning, and all music in the afternoon.  You have to apply to get in but only your musical skills are tested, and you graduate after one extra year with a degree to teach music.  There are only 200 students!  Buenos Aires has similar schools for dance, ceramics, and art.  Not only did I get to ask my host family all kinds of questions about this school and get primary source real person responses, but the first week I was here the school was striking because of a lack of resources from the government (a large problem common to all public schools here including the free public universities), and Ramiro was organizing the student part of the demonstrations!  Every day I was going to class and learning about the Argentine education system, and then each evening I could discuss what’s actually going on in practice in the live of my host family members.  Talk about experiential learning.

I feel just as connected to Lina and Mariano as I do to Andrea and Juan (of Santiago) if not more, and I’ve only lived with them for two weeks.  I leave tomorrow, but I sincerely hope to keep in touch with them, and if the come to the U.S. one day (which is more probable than with any of my other host families thus far) all the better.  

Let me start out by saying that if you include cakes that were either fully or partially in honor of my birthday, but that did not actually get consumed on my birthday, I had at least six birthday cakes to celebrate the completion of my 21^st year of life.  Not bad considering that seven weeks before my birthday I didn’t know anyone in this country.

The actual day of my cumpleaños was breathtakingly beautiful in all senses of the word—physically, spiritually, weather wise.  It was my last day in Chapod and the sky over the campo was completely empty of clouds, plus I finally had a prescription antihistamine to bring some small bit of relief to my approximately 200 flea bites (I lost count).  One of the less exciting things I learned in the campo is that I’m allergic to fleas.  Angelica came in while Simona and I were packing to say that they’d been waiting for us for breakfast.  We went in and sat down, and a cake appeared out of nowhere.  Suddenly my week-old family was singing happy birthday and I was miming blowing out candles that weren’t there.  Entonces, breakfast was mil hojas cake, my absolute favorite kind of Chilean pastry, made all the more delicious because I knew how big of a deal it must have been for this family to purchase a cake.  And I got to serve it. 

Later that morning between packing and helping my host mom peel potatoes for the goodbye lunch, I got to sit with Ezequial in the fruit tree orchard near our house and interview him for a project.  Since he absolutely fascinates me and I knew it was my last day in Chapod, any time with him was valuable.  An excuse to ask him meaningful questions about his life and dreams was all the more amazing.  And his answers were as beautiful as I would have expected. 

 At 12:30 we took some final pictures in front of the house, and the whole family crowded into the car to drive to the school for a farewell barbeque with all of the host families.  Rene and Kelly immediately greeted me with a plastic tiara that didn’t actually fit on my head, and a phone to call my parents, or what turned out to be my mom, Matt, Katie Vogel, and Larry Bacow.  Not whom I had expected to talk to exactly but all pleasant surprises.  The mental disconnect between whom I was talking to and where I was standing (a field behind the school in which pigs were grazing—yes, it turns out pigs graze) was immense, but somehow appropriate.

I spent the whole afternoon outside at this barbeque.  Off in a corner, large animals were being cooked over coals.  Pato (my other favorite boy from Chapod after Ezequial, and someone worth asking me about) and his band played us beautiful music, and various members of our group also performed everything from Lean on Me to the Solja Boi Dance.  We tossed the frisbee until the food was ready, then everyone sat down in the school’s commedor for one of the biggest potluck events I’ve ever attended.  Liz and Joanna’s family had baked a cake, and in honor of my birthday I got the first piece (and yes I’m counting that as one of the six, shh).

At the end of the meal a real birthday cake appeared! It was chocolate, raspberry, delicious, and had trick candles.  My whole host family had to help me to get them blown out, half because I was laughing and half because they kept re-lighting themselves.  As we huffed and puffed together and I soaked up their love, my birthday wish was that I would keep in touch with them forever.  The worst part of my birthday came soon after, saying goodbye to them.

Leaving Chapod, ten of the 14 SIT-ers borded a van and drove to Pucón, a tourist city an hour south that acts as a gateway to some incredible national parks and hot springs.  We stopped at the grocery store before arriving at a huge house that we were renting for an unbelievable low price for the night.  Every one of us had a bed.  We made our picnic dinners and headed to a hot spring.  I spent the evening of my 21^st birthday sipping beer and a surprise bottle of champagne in a volcanic hot spring in southern Chile.  When we got back to the house there was, you guessed it, ANOTHER CAKE courtesy of my wonderful friends.  We drank tea, attacked the cake with 10 forks, and stayed up until 3am talking.  All day they’d been checking in constantly to make sure I felt special and that my birthday was going well.  It totally worked.  Two months ago I couldn’t even have made up this birthday, and I will never forget it.