September 17- 20: CHI-CHI-CHI-LE-LE-LE-VIVA CHILE!!!!

Word of the Day:
izamiento de bandera- flag raising
volantin- kite
borgoña- wine with fruit in it. Didn't actually try it yet, but sounds nice.
anticucho- kabobs
fonda- originally small temporary tent celebrations that are now gigantic outdoor parties, crowded with people
banda de tributo- cover band
asado- barbeque

Here is the story of how I celebrated 200 years of Chilean independence with a very diverse group of individuals.

Friday the 17

9 AM
We started off our celebration quite typically for Tufts in Chile: with an academic lecture. Professor Winn who led our orientation was back in town and brought a guest speaker, who talked about collective memory and how certain events are interpreted differently and how certain currents of memory are surpressed in order to make way for the official story. She shared some information about the Centenial to give us an idea of the comparative context. She urged us to pay attention to the story of Chile that was being constructed through the Bicentenario.

12PM
We headed down the Alameda to the raising of a giant flag made especially for the Bicentennial and a speech by Piñera. Pretty bland speech, although he did talk a lot about the importance of indigenous culture. The cynic in me thinks he's making a focus now that there's a lot more press on the Mapuche huelga de hambre, which makes Chile look bad in the international community.

2 PM
Ended up at La Piojera, a famous Chilean bar which was quite the fun location to start off the bicentennial. We made friends with a hilarious group of 30 year old Chileans and ended up buying cowboy hats.

10PM
Met up with some Tufts friends, a friend of a friend, her Chilean host brother, and his friends, in Providencia at a much classier bar. Friend's host brother, Diego, suggested we got to a show by a Nirvana cover band in Nuñoa, leading to the best bus ride ever. People were dancing cueca, singing and chanting. The show was also very entertaining as the band was excellent and the whole thing just felt like a throw back to high school.

3 AM
Went to hang out with Molly and some of the people we went to Algorobbo with. Very chill, so much so that we were falling asleep, and had to count the number of times the phrase "weon, po" was used in order to stay awake.

Saturday the 18 : Fiestas Patrias!

2PM- Went to Plaza de Armas for a spectacular in which paper strips were thrown from planes, creating a really cool effect. Ran into Professor Winn and got ice cream with him at Bravisimo, a very famous ice cream chain that he claims is the best (I beg to differ). He pointed out the historical context of the event: at one point during the 1973 coup, the Plaza de Armas was bombed by aircraft.

4 PM- Went to my first fonda, all the way up in La Reina nearly the mountains. It was slightly cuica (high class, with a snob connotation), especially the prices, but still a wonderful time. There were tents with sample food, cueca dancing, traditional dances, traditional horse back rodeo tricks, dances with horses, traditional pueblo originario dances, Rapa Nui dances, historically themed interpretitive dance, a carnival, and arcade games.
Tried some chicha and anticucho that were superb! and of course the requisite empanada.

11PM- Went to Espacio Arte Matta, for a fonda featuring several cumbia bands. It was sort of like a crowded frat party, except way more fun because the music was so unbelievably fun and danceable. They played literally until 6 am- also in complete contrast to Tufts where parties never make it past 2 without being busted by the cops.

Sunday the 19:

1 PM- Asado with the family! Tons of meat. But it tasted good. Really good. It's going to be hard to transition myself back to an non-animal diet. Watched the traditional military parade on TV. I had planned on going, but it was far away and I was in no mood to be jostled by gigantic crowds in Parque O' Higgins, the biggest fonda.

5PM- Went to Barrio Yungay for the Bicentenario Ciudadano y Popular, meeting up with Chilean friend Ingrid, her friends, and some other TinChilers. No cost and filled with young hip people which was super cool. An awesome band, Chico Trujillo, was playing as well as several other acts. There were really creative floats made by college students. Totally leftist, totally different than the other celebrations. I love the ways holidays are celebrated here: streets just shut down and then everything is relaxed, people just drink and be merry in the street and no one really cares. I spent the whole time with a large enough group of Chileans that we had to speak spanish the whole night, which was good. We ended up bumping into a friend from soccer as well and then his friends came along too. This led to sitting around singing with a guitar, my favorite!

12PM- After hanging out for a while in various public parks waiting for Ingrid and her friends to finish going out to eat, we went to a gay club. I found it sort of amusing that we managed to bring along 3 straight Chilean men while we couldn't get any of our American male friends to come. There were a fair number of straight people there though. It was SOOOOOOO fun, ridiculously fun. Great music- it switched between American dance music, to which all the men were busting out the moves from music videos and fast fast paced Chilean music for the bicentenario. It just made me happy to see so many people getting to be themselves. Other than that night, I'd only seen 2 openly gay male couples in public, although I've seen many more lesbian couples in public which I find sort of interesting.

Monday the 20:
7 PM- Light show at La Moneda. I know, light show sounds corny. But there were such good effects! Lasers, lights, fountains, fireworks and projections. Of course, the cost of it probably could have easily paid for tons of educational reforms. Good thing I'm not in charge of a country: I would totally fail at spending sufficiently on "bread and circuses".

Such an amazing week and a half!!! Like a year's worth of fun condensed. Now it's back to reality with 2 tests.

August 4: Gringo(?) Nite

Before heading out on my desert adventure, I hit up the phenomenon known as "Miercoles Po" with some friends. Essentially, it is a large gathering of international students at some club where we get in free and hang out. This week's was at a bar somewhere in Bellavista, the night life district of Santiago. Despite my reservations about hanging with an even more gigantic gringo pac than usual, it was a fun time. Especially since we ended up having to use Spanish as a lingua franca with international students from France, Germany and the Netherlands. So while it didn't help me actually hear better Spanish, I at least got to speak some.
Also, a random group of performers came out after an hour or two of techno to perform the cueca, Chile's traditional dance, which was rather unexpected. We also had an interesting discussion about the etymology of the word "gringo" (apparently for US/Canadians only?) with the cab driver on the way home as well as learning some Chilean slang. Good times...

"Si no buscas nada, nada va pasar" : Valpo Take 2

After an overnight trip to Valparaiso, my sense of time and space is entirely warped and overwhelmed, due to crazy angles and hills and staying up all night. "Valpo" is one of those places that if you are the kind of person who likes it, will get into your head and never quite let you go.

From my overly romantic worldview, Valpo proves that city planning takes all the fun out of things. Vibrantly colored houses are stacked up on incredibly steep hillsides overlooking the port, streets are practically vertical with tons of staircases and bridges, ancient ascensores(cable cars) ferry people up and down hillsides, and graffiti and art fill every corner, even more so than Santiago. Basically, Valpo could best be described as having a hip, working class artsy vibe.

After our quick 1 day trip last week, we felt like we had a lot of unfinished business with the city. So, since it's only $11 to go round trip (cheaper than 2 one way tickets), we figured we had to aprovecharlo.(take advantage of it)

We stayed at El YoYo, a really cool and quite cheap hostel, filled with art, circus silks and trapeze equipment. The staff was really laid back and cool, which took a bit of adjustment for our Tufts type-A selves, but made for a great time. They were so nice that they let us lock up our stuff, gave us the keys and let us go out to dinner before they even remembered to ask us to pay the $10(US) for the night.

We ended up going to a club close to the beach that night called La Sala, which was quite a steal ($4 entry, including a free drink) and an excellent time. It was divided in two parts, one side playing dance remixes of American pop and the other playing reggae/reggaeton and filled with Rasta type characters. Needless to say, a recipe for an interesting evening. One of my friends was dancing with a guy who coincidentally had ten other male friends and we ended up pairing off. Also, a total coincidence, I ended up pairing off with a really awesome guy with whom I had a ton in common. We ended up actually having a real conversation, as much as this was possible in 2 languages (he kept speaking to me in English) in a loud club. I don't know if it was just because I was so starved for a real conversation after 4 days of attempting to not bring up anything controversial around the host fam, but we were talking about social class in Chile. In a dance club. I could not have happier.

So, when things winded down around 3:30, they asked us if we wanted to go to their beach house nearby. Normally, I would never do anything like this. But, remembering advice I'd once received from a teacher in high school that you should do at least one thing a month in college that you would never do normally, I decided to lump up a couple of months worth of crazy doings into one night. After all, we were in a group, they were our age and we could always have called a taxi, had it been necessary.

Best "bad" decision I've ever made. Although we ended up staying up literally all night, we had a wonderful time. The whole group was musical, and just kept singing Chilean songs, both new and traditional, drumming along with various things. They even played La Bamba for us, figuring it was the only song we would know. They were pretty much right about that...It's so funny how other countries have a canon of popular songs that pretty much everyone knows. Not that the US doesn't, but there's so much more variation...

In one of the more brilliant episodes of the night, we learned the cueca, the national dance, from a former national cueca champion, using toilet paper instead of the usual handkerchiefs. (Lol)

It was so great to finally meet Chileans our age, something that has really been challenging for those of us without young host siblings. Corny as it sounds, it was so great to find so much in common with people across hemispheres, cultures and everything else. They were totally a bunch of hipsters, but they backed it up better than most.

And I have a new favorite song now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzgpJuUyFCY

After a short nap, we hit the city to explore the market and climb a few cerros, to get views of the city. An amateur photographers dream. We ended up climbing a cerro filled with art, including an open air mural museum called "Museo Cielo Abierto."

Then I came home and slept for 15 hours.