stretching

Today in futbol was the flexibility part of the fitness test. I guarantee it's the same as the one the dinosaurs did, back when the female dinosaurs had to wear dresses to gym class, which meant drill team/ cheer on the male dinosaurs. Yeah well I'm proud to say that I at last out did everyone (someone) in that class by breaking the record of 18 cm with 23 cm. Claim to fame, no? Profe's reasoning was, He's from a developed country (and something about how he hadn't realized that was part of a country's development program but apparently it is...). It was funny. Laughter.

But this sort of comment frames a lot of my interactions with people here, especially people older than myself. Our interaction is set in a framework of nationalities (I'm obviously gringo to chileans, though german to most others. Chileans also assume that all european-looking people speak english.) - US-Chile - which, in general, is interpreted economically. That the US is rich, "developed", powerful, further along some road that Chile is trying to follow, the model for Chile to follow... Anyway, it's a sort of exoticism (which does not preclude the elements of truth that it may contain), although gringos are not in the least exotic. Hi my name is Wiley, I come from Gringolandia, and I am an agent of the dream of economic "development" symbolized by my country.

On another note, my mind has made the switch for good. I am currently translating from Spanish to English. And finally, when I have conversations etc in English, my mind reverts to Spanish afterwords instead of the opposite.

Some photos of walls for enjoyment. Found a beautiful old neighborhood in Santiago. Built for the elite after the war of the pacific, when Chile annexed a ton of land from Bolivia and Peru, land which contains all the mines that generate an enormous percentage of chile's wealth.

A beautiful day

was Sunday, light angling toward night, ping pong paddle in hand, trusty doubles companion at side, and the metronomic bounce of the ball chanting the game's name beneath a shade tree in Parque Bustamante. Felix and I took on the world - a highly-trained 10-year-old and his bloodthirsty assassin-serving 8-year-old brother directed by their sage coach (they called him "papá", but I've been told that's actually a name one earns after years of training and sweat-soaked t-shirts). We let them take the first two games, not wanting to completely shatter the established playground order. But after letting them bounce in prepubescent glee for half an hour, we turned on them. We crushed them, plastered them, squashed, flattened, destroyed, obliterated, eliminated, exterminated, annihilated, annihilated-exterminated, extirpated them, finished them, sunk them, trashed, them, blocked the light from their eyes and sucked the hope from their lives, induced premature aging and both and pre- and post-traumatic stress disorder, fits, vertigo, severe insecurity and eating complications, grey hair and wrinkling, arthritis, tendinitis, appendicitis, chronic-blepharitis-induced chalazeans, and sadness. After losing the next three games in a row they didn't cry, but it sure felt as good as if they had been.

Nothing like a feel-good Sunday.

Fantastical plant adelina solis

hey AS. Isn't that flower awesome?! They are all over the hillside. The look like those giant asparagus flowers that shoot up from agave or century plants once in a lifetime. If you look in the third picture, you can see a silhouette of one of them. I didn't realize just how cool they are until I took a photo of one because I hadn't noticed all the button blue flowers sprouting between the arms. Blue flowers don't come around all too often.

Banana update!

thank heavens. We have a banana refill. Although 2 remain from the old batch, we have 24 fresh'ns waiting to be stripped, severed, and masticated.

Trekking: Cerro Manquehue

Woke up, which is always a good way to start the day, to meet a Santiago group of trekkers at 8.30 to climb Cerro Manquehue. It's a baby compared to Provincia, which looks even more like a mountain from Manquehue, which barely lifts its nose above the SMOG, which, in photos, tries to pass as clouds. It's impressive, really, the city's wool blanket. 4 hours hiking, a group, sun, no scaling, blister enjoying in the shade beneath my big toe, and a friend "out of shape" on whom I could blame my pace: nice morning.

On a side note, I just want to give an example of the impressive rate of food disappearance in this house. Last night, at exactly 8:22 PM, my host mom brought home loads of groceries - including 4 full bushels of bananas, or between 28 and 32. Well, right now it is 5:11 in the afternoon of the following day, and 8 bananas remain. Guaranteed they'll be gone by nightfall.

Successfully failed camping: Vilches

Adventurers: Cerro Provincia

Spines and sunburn: success

To make up for, I don't want to call it a "failure", but somewhere in the range of not upwardly successful camping trip on Friday, Felix, Thomas, and I climbed a big rock on Monday. They call it a "hill", Hill Provincia, but they also call this more-than-5000-meter thing a hill too, so I'm just gonna call it a mountain. And what a mountain! (If it's not a fish story, it's not worth telling.) The last couple hours'll strain your calves nicely, but the first few should be fairly tranquil. That is if you aren't an adventurer. Adventurers don't need the path, they don't want it, and they don't realize when they aren't on it. Adventurers add 3 hours to the hike by scaling - actually rock climbing - the face and tightroping the bald ridges. They remove spines from cacti with their palms because if they don't do it, someone else will have to. They don't wear sunblock because the muscular burn of the climb isn't enough. They don't take pictures because even the batteries they carry can't keep up with their pace. They watch the condor straddle the wind because hunger drives them to hope it will land within Leatherman distance. They crunch through the snow at the top and resist the urge to melt it in their water bottles even after they run dry. Adventurers are the last ones to reach the summit, where they eat gomi bershen (not gummy bears), and even the night beats them to the bottom. Adventurers imagine what it would be like to be a colonial explorer, horsebacking it over the Andes, descending the hill-mountains, seeing at a distance this vast flat valley, gilded by the setting sun not obstructed by radio towers, enhanced by smog, or mirrored in myriad city lights, and thinking: This looks a strategic place for conquest, to bare a plaque with my name, to report to the King. Explorers are paid with cold heavy metals; adventurers pay themselves with the stories they tell long after the sunburn has peeled and the splinters dissolve in the inner layers of epidermis. Adventurers smile when someone asks them if it was failure or success.

Adventurers, those from Austria, actually do take photos and they post them at:
camping 1: http://picasaweb.google.at/Tom.Leitner/RegenwanderungReservaLircay?feat=email#

hiking: http://picasaweb.google.at/Tom.Leitner/12102009CerroProvincia?feat=email#

Camping: attempt 1

Hello, from my warmer artificially lit musically accompanied roofed desk. That sounded so good from the inside of a soggy sleeping bag draped over rocks and sucking the moisture from the wall of our 3-person tent sad overhead with rain about 2AM Saturday. Great plans and maps and instant soups Thursday ended successfully in failure on Saturday. Thomas and Felix at least slept nearly 12 hours. I passed one of those nights in which you at least believe you didn't sleep until you got so frustrated that you fell asleep.

We left on Friday from the bus station in Santiago. As is necessary, I didn't arrive at the station until the bus was pulling out. It's not interesting otherwise. After 3 hours, we arrived in Talca, a smallish town with a train station and a bridge, one of those towns that always feels sort of wet and mildewy. To kill time while waiting for our next bus to the Reserve in Vilches, we bought some bread and horse jerky, which the vendor nearly forced into my bag. It's better with bread. The bus to Vilches is one of those in which your stop is always, ahhh, just another 10 minutes, ahhh just another ten minutes, until you realize that you are the only person on the bus. Actually we were three, so there were three of us bumping along in the darkness, a black that city kids don't know very well. The bus stopped. Here you go: just fall the road up that way a few kilometers, passed the first guard house - closed - through some gates, and there should be another one - open - where you can inscribe yourselves and pay. Just up this road? And we'll see the house from the road? That's right. And the bus trundled off. Actually, that's when it got dark. Armpit of a cave dark, cloudy, no stars, and the increasing flashes of lighting on the horizon.

Luckily, both Felix and Thomas are intelligent. Felix served in the German military and Thomas in the Austrian. They had headlamps, which enabled us to see the rocks we were about to walk over. The thunder welcomed us and the rain followed. And you know how in Texas we're proud of our big rain drops? You Seattleites know nothing about rain! Well chilean drops put them to shame. They're thick or something, like skydiving tadpoles. After about ten uphill minutes, we noticed some large flashing white bodies about 50 feet ahead. There are pumas in the reserve ya know. They looked to be dancing sort of jerkily, like they had taken classes from some enterprising gringo. And these pumas made this really strange plaintive reeeuuaaaaahhhhh honk sound. And they were 3, bolting from side to side. OK they were cows. But it scared us pretty good. And we scared them too, which scared us even more. They stayed ahead of us for the entire 2-3 kilometers until the final gate, where they were cornered. And a cornered car-sized animal is no friend of mine. They bolted blindly, crashing from one side of the path's barbed wire to the other. One really went crazy and went crashing from side to side all the way past us down the path. But the pumas were gone and we had reached the guard house supposedly open.

No one inside of course. And the path was turning into a river so we decided to pitch the tent. Fortunately Thomas decided to come with us. Because if he hadn't, we would have settled for my friend's two person tent, which is permeable and not long enough for male gringos. But instead we had to hunt this one down, an expensive orange one from Italy that was mostly impermeable. Unfortunately (the whole trip was one of those "fortunately... Unfortunately... Fortunately... Unfortunately..." games), my backpack isn't impermeable so everything inside was soaked. Wet socks and a soggy sleeping bag kept me company all night. Miraculously I didn't get really sick.

It rained all night and into the next day. We woke up and ate our bread. Felix was courageous enough to leave the dry triangle of the tend and explore the guard house next door. A clueless man sat at a desk smoking marijuana. I don' think he really worked there, but he had a truck so someone had asked him to fill in. He explained that the usual guard had died yesterday in some sort of "accident" which he never clarified and that the back up guard was out of the country. He said it was impossible for us to continue with our plans to hike up the mountain and through the reserve because it was snowing a little further up and the path was a river. At about 1 in the afternoon, he drove us down to a little house with a hut and fire for drying things. We had tea and thawed a bit. After talking with the 3 people who seemed to work/live there, Felix figured out that one of the women was the aunt of this girl at the Chilean embassy in Berlin he had a crush on. They exchanged emails. It's hard to tell how many of these encounters are true, since we've taken to creating false identities, gently lying about our lives. It's much more interesting than repeating the usual banal, I'm from the US, studying literature at the Catolica, here until July, living with a family... bla blah 21 years blah. But he's actually from Berlin so it could be. I had a nice conversation about my impending difficulties with finding work as a journalist in Finland. Everyone agreed.

We returned on the bus an hour or so later. The luggage compartment was a pond. The man apologized, saying this is a rural bus. It's a little humbling. The sun came out to make fun of us and shined bright the rest of the ride. We were too dampened to try to return and complete our 3 day planned hike. But what a beautiful countryside! from the shelter of the bus that is. It makes you realize that you are a city kid.

Comments

For everyone that leaves comments, keep doing so. I read and enjoy them, even though I can't respond to them on this site. Only I don't know who writes them because only a profile name shows up. Thanks everyone!

Still confused

After almost 3 months here I'm glad that I still completely confuse situations.

Yesterday, I went on a bike ride with two friends to the Ecological Community in Peñalolen. My friend Felix and I had decided that we hadn't explored the city enough and we wanted to see other communities at street level. Peñalolen is interesting, very mixed with wealthy and shanty towns. The streets are very small and it is quiet, which was nice. The community climbs the feet of the Andes, so the entire ride there is painful. The ride back makes it worth while.

So we went. On the patio of my house there are always between 4 and 7 bicycles, 2 of which no one has ever seen before, but which work better than the usual suspects. So I grabbed the shiniest one. No one knew who it belonged to, so I assumed it belonged to me. That's how food works at this house, so I extrapolated. So we rode for an hour or so, my Chilean friend Pasa directing to prevent the German and the Gringo from having to stop every 6 blocks and whip out the guide book, a decreasingly intelligent idea as the neighborhoods become increasingly graffitied. Felix realized that he recognized where we were, and that his "Aunt" (the mother of a girl he shared an apartment with in Berlin) lived there. He had met her once before, so we stopped in to say high. And stayed for 4 hours. That's how long it takes to say hi, which means lunch, which means life stories, which means.

During lunch I received a call. Hey, where are you? My friend is here and needs his bike. Pucha! The friend then told me that, as punishment, I had to come looking for him today. OK.

When I arrived home later that evening, I was greeted with a Walala! and a map of how to get to the guy's house. I'll do it tomorrow.

SO today (yesterday's tomorrow), I woke up planning to ride the bike over. But I didn't know the name of the person and didn't want to return it to "someone". So I did my other bike chore: Last night, I went out again on bike, but on a different one as to protect the "friend's". But I left that one, #2, at a friend's house because.... So this morning I went to retrieve it. But on the way, I received a call from Nicole's friend telling me that the situation had been confused, that it was the wrong bike and that therefore I shouldn't return it. That the bike was actually already at his house. Great!

When I returned home, I told my host mom this, that again no one knows who the blue bike belongs to. She was confused.

At lunch, Nicole asked me if I had returned the bike yet. No no no, it's not necessary. Your friend called me and told me that it was mistaken, that it was the wrong bike and that the right one was already at the house. Ummm.. she says, no he didn't call you. I called you.

-no you didn't.
-yes, I swear, I called you.
-No way! I swear that your friend called me.
-No, he doesn't even have your number. What did you do with the bike?
-I'm not returning it because it's not his.
-Yes it is.

Total confusion. I had no idea that the person I had been talking to on the phone was Nicole, not her friend. I didn't even think about the fact that her friend's name is Julio, and therefore probably didn't sound like Nicole. But I can't understand anything she says anyway, seeing as she doesn't move her lips. So I ended up returning the bike to Julio's dad this afternoon, Julio wasn't there.

What happened is that my other sister Vivi told my sister Nicole, owner of the friend, owner of the bike, that I had gone to return his bike, which I hadn't. I had gone to retrieve bike 2. When Nicole looked outside, she saw Julio's blue bike there, still, even though I had supposedly gone to return it. So she called me, telling me that I had made a mistake, that it was the wrong bike and therefore I shouldn't return it. I of course thought I was talking to "Julio". What was mistaken was what I was doing, she thought I didn't understand, though I did, until she tried to fix the situation.

So it was all Vivi's fault in the end.

And I learned a new saying because of it: "En lo ajeno, reina la desgracia." Which means that you always get into trouble playing with toys that aren't yours.

No pictures. Often I don't carry my camera because I don't want to have anything worth more than $10.