Tur de Grocery Stores

Word of the Day:
fiambre- cold cuts??
último/a- the absolute worst

For some reason, I ended up visiting 3 grocery stores in 2 days, which like everything else in Chile, provided very strong messages about class. I spent a lot of Hiper Lider and Jumbo to get food for our impending camping trip. Those stores essentially follow a Walmart sort of big box store model, but what I find fascinating and sort of creepy about them is the amount of English that you see in them. Half the packages, especially the toys, are listed in English. There’s usually American music playing. The non-place strikes again!

However, I also ended up accompanying my host Dad to Vegamercado, on the other side of Ñuñoa, past Estadio Central. Driving with Arturo is always entertaining, because he knows the history of every site and always has interesting tidbits to share, rendering even the smallest stream into a highly important agricultural canal. He also is able to give a sense of the transformations the city has gone through, which is very interesting.
Anyway, Vega mercado is an entirely different animal, sort of like a Costco if Costco was in a totally random warehouse and blasted cumbia music.
Sort of like this...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPByxdchIBo
(Speakers up to 11 for full effect) There was absolutely no English anywhere. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a grocery store that had more of a sense of place.

It also isn’t the sort of place you would necesarily expect to find people like my host parents, except for the fact that they are extremely good at finding a bargain, which is useful for living on a budget. All in all, an interesting sociological glimpse.

Quién merece que ser milionario?!?!

Word of the Day: lentejas- lentils
1. My host mom makes the most delicious lentils ever. I asked for the recipe and it was nothing special which makes this even more intriguing.
2. Lentils are apparently a good luck food to be consumed on New Years. Jumping on that bandwagon...

Thank you Tufts in Chile, I can't even watch TV anymore without analyzing class messages.

A couple days back, I watched Chile's version of "Who Wants to be A Millionaire” with my host dad. It was good because I learned a ton of trivia about Chile that I had never heard before but also, realized how little I actually know about Chile. There are so many things you take for granted growing up in a place, or in "Latino" culture.
What interested me most about the show though, was the way it was structured. Basically, famous contestants play on behalf of "worthy" Chileans who are in difficult economic situations, accompanied of course by dramatic or touching stories. In some ways this makes for better TV, because comedians/actresses can make answering questions entertaining, but its also sort of demeaning. There were several instances where the "average" person knew the answer and the person playing on their behalf did not...
Basically, it was fascinating to me because it unites two discourses about in Chile, the idea of solidarity but also the idea that it is the responsability of those with wealth or fame to "save" people from poverty.

August 2: Los Que Madruga, Dios Te Bendiga

Word(s) of the day
smallpox- viruela
cranberry-arándano

The title of this post roughly translates to "Those who get up early, God will bless." Today was the first day of classes for the majority of the facultades (schools) at the University of Chile and God blessed my early rising with a definitive sign that I should not take an 8:30am architecture class.
I left my house late, but managed by a miracle of public transportation to make it to Santiago Centro on time for "Urbanismo 1." I wasn't entirely sure what the class was about, other than that it was obviously about cities and sounded vaguely interesting. By another stroke of luck, I managed to find the class room for the course. I went in and a bunch of people were huddled around the back, so I assumed class hadn't started yet. I really needed to wash my hands since I had fallen up the stairs on the way out of the grungy metro so I ran quickly to find a bathroom. On my return, everyone was still gathered around the back. Then I realized, this WAS the class. It must have started the week before...I stayed for another minute before realizing that they had already created some sort of project, had obviously used software that I didn't have the faintest idea how to operate (nevermind in Spanish) and clearly all had some sort of background in city planning that I lacked. I decided it would be a good idea to leave as soon as physically possible. Luckily, not too many people saw me, I don't think. Secondarly, I feel like Chileans pretty much expect to the gringos to do stupid things like go into a class twice and then leave. Still think this might go on my top 10 most awkward moments.

So now, it was 8:30 in the morning and I had nothing to do. I decided to explore a bit- I went down Londres/Paris streets- beautiful old cobblestone areas with interesting architecture. Then, I climbed Cerro Santa Lucía again, the big hill park in the center of the city, where the Spanish first had a fort to keep an eye out for Indians. I was the 3rd person there, other than the extensive cleaning crew and it was gorgeous. So much green and flowers, textured stones and bricks, statues and rays of sunlight. Unfortunately, even though it rained yesterday, it was still so smoggy I could hardly see the mountains.

Around 12, I had my first real experience inside a Chilean university. I went to the Philosophy and Humanities campus for a history class about Chile's independence with Leonardo León, an awesome professor we had heard from during Orientation. I'm pretty sure the class wasn't entirely typical. At the very least, it was ridiculously informal. Half the students showed up late, talked to the professor like he was an equal and jokes were being made back and forth. Which meant that I understood about half of what went on during a 1.5 hour block...Once he started talking about the actually subject, I understood perfectly, but apart from this...Non content related parts of the class included stories about how he was one of the last people in Chile to have smallpox, something indecipherable about geishas and stories about Salvador Allende's lover. Content related parts made me seriously contemplate the meaning of history and the way we tend to always construct them from a top down institutional perspective, rather than from the perspective of those who actually live it. I'm seriously considering taking the class now- anyone who can make 17th and 18th histories of Latin American independence interesting and relevant while giving wise life advice probably is worth sticking around. But now I'm conflicted! There are far too many courses I want to take.

The afternoon was great fun. After class, I went to Bellavista, a "hip" area of town where most of the nightlife is concentrated, with fellow Tufts in Chile friend Molly and Ingrid, a Spanish house buddy from last year. Ingrid showed us all these great places to go and another delicious ice cream place, expanding my horizons beyond Emporio La Rosa. I got cranberry ice cream which was super interesting. Definitely worth another trip :) Then, she also introduced us to Sanhe-Nuss, a DELICIOUS chocolate with almonds. Thank god I climbed a hill in the morning.

I did a bit more exploring in the late afternoon, wandering around Universidad Cátolica, which has been described as the Harvard of Santiago- wicked expensive, beautiful but also prestigious. It was quite peaceful. I checked out the center of Ñuñoa, the communa where I live, for a bit and then walked home with the sun setting on the mountains, which were once again visible.

Today's take away image, however, was not the mountains, but a family I encountered on my walk home. A mother and her 2 children poorly dressed were rooting through the garbage of the wealthy residents of Ñuñoa, presumably for something to sell or eat. Even in the tranquility and relative luxury of upper class Santiago, the injustices of unequal distribution cannot be kept entirely invisible forever.

July 18: Social Tour of Santiago

Today was my low point on the trip so far. I was feeling really sick and tired, which was frustrating and then on top of that I felt really challenged ethically by the activities we undertook that day.
We went on a unique tour of the city, looking at the different social classes in the structures where they reside. We started out in Los Dominicos, at the end of the #1 subway line, all the way up near the mountains in Las Condes. It’s an old adobe village full of shops with beautiful woolen goods, metal/wood working, jewelry and for some reason, tons of birds. Although it was super touristy, we had a really fun time and a lovely lunch. For anyone who’s planning to visit, you can get most of the stuff they sell there at the Mercado Santa Lucía or other places for way less, although its not all necessarily as high quality.
We went up to Cerro San Cristobal, to see the best view of the city. It was a pretty clear day for Santiago, so we had a great view. We talked about the difference between the vertical and horizontal cities we saw below us: the vertical representing wealth and power in high rises and office buildings and the horizontal representing the poorer parts of the city, areas with huge inequalities in access to services, education, etc.
We drove on one of the roads that circumnavigate Santiago. Because it’s almost 200 km around the whole city now, there was obviously no way we could see every neighborhood, know here as comunas. Instead, we focused on seeing comunas that were representative of different social classes. We drove through Ñuñoa (where I’ll be living starting Saturday), Florida (the largest comuna in Santiago- middle class from the most part) and several other poorer neighborhoods. Unfortunately, at this point, I fell asleep since I was just feeling exhausted (and we didn’t even go out the night before).
When I awoke, we were in El Espejo, one of the poorest poblaciones (slums) in the city, which struggles with drug addiction among other problems. We visited Casa de Acogido, a drug rehabilitation center, started by an amazing pobladora(community member). While it was amazing to see the sophistication in technique and relative success rate of someone without any formal training, I felt like we were intruding. Of course, it’s kind of hard not to feel this way pretty much everywhere when you’re walking around in a giant gringo pack of 15 people...This feeling only got worse when we went down the street a little to Las Turbinas, one of the worse communities in Santiago, and one that has been that way for over 3 generations, pllagued by at least 60% unemployment, lack of running water, abysmal housing and desperation. While most shantytowns have progressed over time, bettering themselves mainly through large scale social movements, for some reason, this has not happened here.

While I appreciate that we needed to see the conditions of the poor communas, I felt really frustrated by the experience. I felt that if we were going to see the conditions of these places, we should be doing something to help their inhabitants or at the very least, talking directly with them about their struggles rather than about them, as if the inequalities they experience were nothing more than an academic problem. I think in many ways this has been one of my challenges throughout college: to accept that I need to understand the causes of things before I try to take action on them, even if it means I have to study things in a way that seems unnatural and denies a voice to individual suffering. Walk, crawl, run: I guess it’s how it has to work.