18: Go Chile

So, the 18th has come and gone. The 18th is really not just the 18th, it is as many days as possible surrounding the 18th, the 19th, and anything in between that and the weekend. It commemorates various aspects of Chile's independence and general identity. We got relatively gipped this year as the 18th fell on a Thursday, so the party didn't start until Wednesday at noon. This may be a blessing in disguise, however, because if Fiestas Patrias had lasted any longer it may very well have killed me.

In some respects, I had a failed visitor's Fiestas Patrias: I didn't hang out with anyone's grandparents. I didn't see the rodeos in Olmue (despite best laid plans). I didn't even go to the ramadas, aka fondas, aka fairs that are the traditional celebration spot.

On the other hand, I had a pretty Chilean-style Fiestas Patrias: I hung around with people I liked, and I ate and drank a lot, and there were often Chilean flags around, and good times were had by all. All in all, rather satisfying. Along with camping (see below), I also participated in and watched some cueca dancing:





The cueca is Chile's national dance and it is meant to represent the courting dance between a hen and a rooster. It kind of intimidates me, as such. I'm not a great hen. The rooster is meant to stare you down, waving his scarf (or plastic bag, as the case may be), while you hide behind your scarf-or-bag and dance coyly back and forth. Truth be told, I don't like being stared down, so instead of doing flirtacious half-circles I pretty much just duck back and forth to get out of the line of fire. Anyway I did give it a shot several times, but the photo evidence lies in the cameras of others.

I attended multiple asados, where many people were shocked and astonished that I am not eating meat. At one point someone said that they had thought that I would at least have a chorripan (sausage in bread), as it's really not large at all. The lovely Kacy and Yasha provided me with fish at their asado, but otherwise I was just careful to eat before or after.

In general, I had a nice weekend, with a lot of relaxing mixed in with a lot of dissipation, plus a bit of wilderness wandering, and tried my best to represent (as did everyone else). Go Chile.

The Accidental Camping Trip

About half an hour by micro from Valparaiso is the community of Laguna Verde. Over the last few wildly irresponsible days--in honor of Chile's Fiestas Patrias, on which there will be more in another post--someone floated the idea of heading there en masse to go camping on the beach. As one should never count on plans made under the influence or past 3am, I thought nothing of this, until my hazy hungover head heard my phone beeping yesterday around 2pm. Text message: vamos, 3pm. Alright then.

I spoke to a couple of people and two of us came up with the plan to go, hang out for awhile, and head back that evening in order to be in town for a few birthday drinks with another friend. The weather was warm and sunny so when I met him we were both wearing sandals and sleeveless shirts, carrying daypacks. We hit the supermarket for a mountain of fruit, a bit of bread, and cheese.

On a side note, we also bought a product which is called Lemon Stones. It can be found in the beer aisle. It is sort of like O'Douls at home, in that it only contains 2.5% alcohol (O'Douls for the heavy non-drinker, I suppose). It is not like O'Douls, however, in that it tastes like lemon and not like beer. And so it was that I found myself going to Laguna Verde, where there is no lagoon and the water isn't green, toting a cerveza that neither tastes like cerveza nor contains alcohol. Appropriate.

The group as a whole numbered about 15. You can imagine 15 people at a supermarket: I believe the expression is "herding cats." So four of us decided to go ahead and meet up with the others on the beach.

We arrived at the end of the line, as instructed. Although we were barely outside Valparaiso, we had come to another world. Small houses appeared intermittently on a dirt road which ran through a dark green forest. The people wore cowboy hats, drove pick-ups, and looked at us as if we were aliens (I think that may have been my fault, as usual, due to my combined deficiency in melanin and espanol). We asked a little boy, about 8 years old, how to get to the beach. He told us that he lived by the beach and that his 'commute' to the micro every day was about an hour each way. The type of kid who sees no difference between himself and anyone else in the world, he sidled up to one of the chilenos and the two of them were tossing around "waeon" and "poh" in no time. He offered me water and then laughed at himself and said, "Of course! She doesn't understand!" I asserted that yes, I did in fact understand, but he looked very unconvinced.

Eventually the boy's father drove by heading the opposite direction, and so we lost our mini-guide. And so we kept walking. And walking. And walking.

This was the point when I realized that all was not as it should be. I was now nearly an hour on foot into the countryside, without much confidence in my ability to return on my own, and the sun was sinking at an accelerated rate. I began to bother my co-day-tripper about heading back, but he was of the opinion that we absolutely could not walk for an hour only to return without seeing the beach. I was unconvinced, but at this point my curiousity kicked in and I decided to follow along, although I was relatively certain that I would be passing a very cold night in my bare feet.

We had been walking for nearly another hour when a car drove by and we decided to ask for a second opinion. Absolutely not, they said. Turn around, this road doesn't go the beach. We had begun to do just that when a trio of ATV riders passed us for the third time and we flagged them down. No, the road doesn't go to the beach, but you can't turn back. The light was already taking on tones of soft fading yellow as it sped towards what we could only hope was the nearby sea. A path was pointed out to the chilenos as I wrung my hands, vowing that never again in an English-speaking country would I fail to appreciate my ability to ask anyone anything at any time, and understand their response.

The troupe was rather down at this point, and we headed off into a set of fields, ducking barbed wire fences and climbing thin embankments, cursing and moaning in our own languages. The setting was a large, green gorge, dotted with wildflowers and cacti. The wildflowers, though, were closing their buds for the night and as we walked along the steep sides of the ravine the sense of urgency was rather pronounced. Finally, the beach opened up in front of us.






We made it down to the beach just as the rest of our crew, who had left significantly later than we had, arrived from a path on the other side of the gorge. As I ate my cheese sandwich while lying prostrate on the sand, I attempted to maintain optimism. Perhaps the other group had come via a clear and easy to follow road, and we could head back in an hour or two as planned.


We straggled over to the group, who had gathered around a quickly assembled fire, and I asked for news of the road.


"You can't go back in the dark," my friend said. "Sit down and stop thinking about it right now because there's no way."


And what can you do? I did.

At this point I was already freezing, but somehow I managed to inspire charity amongst those better prepared than myself. While my formerly fellow-day-tripper, now co-strandee, made all the noise about our plight, I was being carefully wrapped up in other people's sweaters and sleeping bags without doing much more than staring dolefully at the fire. A picture is worth a thousand words, I suppose. In any event I huddled up with friends under a mountain of sleeping bags around the fire.

The provisions that the large group had chosen were interesting, to say the least. They came equipped with: one jug of fresh water, 6 or 7 packets of pasta, a two packets of tomato sauce, a tin of Nescafe, aji, salt, pepper (all three in full size jars), and 3 bottles of rum, 5 bottles of Coke for mixing, two boxes of wine, and two liters of beer.

This amount of alcohol is not as crazy as it might sound, given the size of the group; however, given the particular prioritizing scheme of the shopping trip there had been very little room left amongst the backpacks for items such as, oh, water. One fallout of this was that someone suggested cooking the pasta in sea water. And the pasta sauce as well. It was, in a word, inedible, but now we've learned our lesson about salt water pasta. I declined my plate and lay in the sand looking at the Milky Way in a perfectly clear line from one side of our valley to the other.

Meanwhile, a group of the guys had discovered a cave where we could be out of the wind and thus a bit warmer. So all throughout the pasta debacle they were harnessing their inner caveman, literally, dragging tremendous logs across the sand behind me. The light of flame began to grow from between the rocks and I watched a friend do a strange celebratory dance. I was simultaneously reminded of pagan ritual and little boys building a fort. Thanks to their work, we abandoned the wind and gathered in the cave.

The cave opened above us, letting out smoke and showing the stars.

The guitar-players took turns playing and we sang along as we could. It was an interesting activity. Our group was mixed: several chilenos, a couple from Argentina, several French Canadian foreign exchange students, an Italian, and myself and a few other gringas. As such, as the guitar went around, different voices came out to go along. I was able to sing along to just about every English speaking Canadian song by a woman, not surprisingly, but the Spanish songs that had the group clapping left me in the dark. It was warm though, sharing a fire and drinks and music. It was an excellent campfire, in short, as they're meant to be, with everyone feeling warm towards the world and each other. We grouped under blankets, heads on shoulders and bodies huddled in for warmth.

Slowly people began to fall asleep, myself included. I woke up to my feet being moved from their spot which was dangerously close to the fire, and the entire circle speaking to me in Spanish. Befuddled, sleepy, I grabbed my borrowed sleeping bag and went off to spend a terribly intermittent and cold night of sleep next to Elisa in a tiny tent.

I woke up before anyone else had emerged, around 6am, too cold to continue lying in the tent. I went outside and sat in the sand and watched as the sun came into the valley by the same route that I had taken the night before.

Some dogs had gotten into our food in the night, so I spent some time gathering up bits and pieces of what was left (it should be noted that my bread and cheese fell victim to these dogs). Later, when the others woke up, we fed the dogs what was left of the salty pasta and I got myself soaked washing the pots out in the water. Later some of the group decided to take a swim but I decided one dunking was enough. I lay on the sand, enjoying the warm sun, feeling my toes come back to life, and listening to the conversation that I could only sometimes follow.

Around midday three of us decided to head out. Being from the ill-fated party of the night before, we didn't know the correct road. Perhaps out of remorse for having deprived us of breakfast, the dogs decided to show us the way. They took us through several crossroads and path changes, barking whenever we went the wrong direction, looking back at us periodically over their shoulders, until they delivered us safely to the micro.

All in all, sometimes accidents turn out better than plans, despite cold toes.

En Memoriam

David Foster Wallace died this week (on the 12th) by his own hand, at the age of 46. He is the author of the Infinite Jest, a book which I have still yet to read--a book of massive length that can be called perhaps a semi-comic dystopia. It's on my list. I am going to order it now, as I'm sure a thousand other people will. How sad, this endless phenomenon that artists gain even more prestige through death (if they had any to begin with, which thankfully D.F.W. did).

In any event, you don't have to wade through 1079 pages to understand that this man gave American--and English language in general--fiction a gift. This short story is best read aloud, to oneself, I have found. The movement and power within the simplicity is amazing. As well as the fact that there are no sentence breaks. It makes your heart catch, to blend a metaphor.

An excellent tribute review appeared in the NY Times...read to the end of the third paragraph at least to understand the uniqueness of this writer.

RI more P than you had in this life, and dream more dreams.

RIP.

Up (the hill) and Away

My excessive laziness in relation to blogposts can be explained by the fact that I have been preoccupied by a move to a new apartment. I am now installed in the dining-living room of said apartment, diligently ignoring the unpacking disaster directly behind my back.


That's not me. That's my roommate, who energetically unpacked yesterday, along with cooking dinner, organizing the kitchen, and setting the table with placemats. In between teaching classes today she rearranged the furniture and cleaned up a bit. As I understand it, at the moment she is baking pies at a friend's house.

Meanwhile, I've folded my clothing, stuck some photos to the wall, eaten cereal and leftovers, and broken my reading light that clips to the book (argh!).

It's difficult to stay focused though. I've fallen in love with a city; now I've finally found a place within it that I can feel is mine. I have also had several hours of uninterrupted alone time--something that has not happened since I arrived in this country seven months ago. I am finding myself walking around in circles, touching surfaces, rearranging my things slightly, then messing them up again, and staring staring staring out the window.

The apartment is a section of what once would have been a grand mansion for some shipping family. Now the building is seperated into different living spaces, but the house that it was and is still shows through. The front bedroom sports an intricately patterned paraquet floor; the ceilings througout the apartment are over 10 feet high. The window that I cannot stop staring out of is in fact a wall of windows, itself a good 8 feet in height. From where I sit at my table I can simply raise my eyes and look down the bay to Vina del Mar, Renaca, Concon and on. If I stand up and walk over to the edge of the room, I will see the hill edging down to the water. If I walk into the front bedroom and look out the bay window, I will also be able to see the hills stretching northeast away from me, hugging the bay.

In this city, changing one's position slightly can reveal a whole new image. It is impossible, here, to ever see an entire building from one part of the city. The houses crush up against each other, and the hillsides thrust them out at strange angles, obstructing but also shaping your vision. From here, I cannot see the bottom of what was once a bakery, so I cannot focus on the windows that I often look at. I can only see the domed roof, and so that is what draws me in. There are new buildings, too, although I have only moved farther up on the same hill that I have always lived on. All of a sudden an unyieldingly large rusted roof has given way to let through a burst of purple, the crow's nest of some jagged building. Church spires break out of hills behind the hills that have been my city.

From here I can see that just as the hills I know are falling over themselves to reach down into the water, there are others pulling from the other direction to run away and into the mountains.

And in the morning, in the fog, all I can see is that beyond the neighbor's garden the world disappears.

The house is a microcosm of the city itself. The stunning parquet floor is darker in spots where long-destroyed or sold furniture stood. The large and richly colored planks of the floors in the rest of the house have subtle depressions and rises. Strange windows are punched into the wall; I was not joking about the nearness of my mess, because if I turn my head I will be staring into the back bedroom and my gutted suitcases littering the rope rug. From the kitchen, I could serve you a plate of food without leaving the room. In the precipitious ceilings on the west end of the apartment, tiny, irregularly square skylights open at the end of small tunnels to the roof. And so the light from the wall of windows filters into the house in a makeshift but endearingly odd way. It falls short only of the murky fishbowl of the foyer and the unneccesarily wide hall (officially named the Pasaje, as of yesterday). To compensate, every room has a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling by its cord.

Out of all of these windows, only two open in the same manner as one another; we have windows that slide sideways, shedding paint chips; we have small dollhouse windows that are pulled in with a small handle; we have three-paned windows that slide up; and we have large, heavy windows that push upwards in a mammoth's impression of my childhood colonial-style windows.

None of this deters my attachment to this space, much as jackhammered sidewalks and rusting edifices have only made me feel closer to Valparaiso. An apartment, like a city, is an exterior space that folds over and becomes your internal space. Everything else in my life may be merely different renditions of what I would and will do elsewhere: work, worry, drink, eat, laugh, miss the bus and cry in the bathroom over nothing. It's all richer though for finding a space which echoes and expands through repetition the parts of my mind that draw me in and make me enjoy my thoughts. Beautiful, rusty, honest and unique, is my house, is my city.

Las Chilenas

**This is the second in a series of posts in which various bloggers around Chile write on the same topic. The previous topic was Chilean men; the current one is Chilean women. Check out "Just Married Chilean Style" for links to the other blog posts.**

This topic was set for Friday. I've been dragging my feet about it because, frankly, there's a lot of animosity amongst gringas towards chilenas and I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to participate in this topic. After thinking a bit, though, I do think I'd like to throw in my two cents on precisely that aspect of things.

Gringas in Chile tend to paint the following image of chilenas: catty, cloistered, competitive, fashion-challenged, and unfriendly. I don't agree, but I do understand where this perspective comes from, and why it's so universally held. I have had a few run-ins with the type of behavior that inspires this stereotype, and it can be excessive. In the incident that first comes to mind, I was at a bar with a chileno friend, two of his male friends, and their two girlfriends. We were all sitting around the table talking, and although the girls weren't being super friendly towards me, they were behaving pretty normally. Then the guys got up to get another round of drinks. Immediately, I became invisible. The girls pointedly stopped talking to me, to the point where they didn't respond when I tried to speak to them. When the guys reappeared, they went back to normal. It was the most outrageous thing that has happened to me in a social setting since puberty (and its accompanying insanity) passed. I bawled my eyes out about it when I got home that night. It was petty, it was mean, and it made me feel like I would never make friends in this country.

Incidents like this are the fuel for the anti-chilena machine. Are they ridiculous? Yes. Do they happen to me here more than at home? Yes. Are they the province of chilenas alone? No.

The thing is, chilenas are just like women everywhere in the sense that at their best, they are warm, caring, and nurturing. At their worst they are territorial and barbed towards other women. The problem is that as extranjeras, we gringas are more likely to encounter the latter behavior.

Why? Because women everywhere can be suspicious of other women. There are various situations and instances which make this more likely to happen, and the gringa-chilena relationship often stumbles onto a few of them.

The first factor, shall we call it, is that both men and women are often less open when they are with their closest friends. If I'm hanging around with my favorite people, you just don't seem as cool. Nor do I feel particularly obliged to hang out with you, because I'm already having a fine time. In Chile, this situation is far more likely to happen than in the United States, because people here are almost always in the company of their nearest and dearest. The itinerant, transitory north american lifestyle is just not the norm here. People do not move away from home for university; they are less likely to move to a new city for a job; they are more emotionally tied to their families and so tend to stay close; and they just plain don't have as many places to go. In the US, when we hit maturity there is the expectation that we will go out into the world and find our own unique place. This is facilitated by the fact that we can move to any one of dozens and dozens of cities, across an astonishingly large territory, without so much as getting a new form of identification. Here, the economy is very much centralized based on sector. Fishing? Head south. Mining? Head north. Office work? Santiago. All of these things combine to create a society where people grow up with the same friends throughout their lives. So when you meet a chilena, the people she is with most likely remember how she wore her hair as an eight year old. That's a lot of history to compete with; I hope you've got a good opening joke. Santaguinos (both men and women) who have moved to the coast have told me that they have the same problem breaking into friend circles.

The second factor is that both men and women are more threatened by people who are different from them. Period. Sad but true, worldwide. Ask any immigrant, anywhere. Add to this that Chile is known for its racism, isolationism, and distrust, and you have a culture that is going to be even less receptive towards outsiders. This is a cultural trait, but it is not restricted to the women.

The third is that foreigners take more work to hang out with. Cross-cultural friendships involve incorporating different perspectives on major issues, behaviors that may strike you as odd, different attitudes towards friendships, and a host of other complications. This is worth it a) if you are interested in international perspectives or b) if you are particularly interested in the person, or both. However, for a lot of people, I could see why it might just be easier to stick to people who think like you do, laugh at the same things, and have experienced similar things. It's not my style, but I understand it.

Finally, a lot of gringas in Chile are dating chilenos. Some came here for their chileno; some came alone and ended up involved in a relationship. This is normal, fun, and wonderful for those who have found love. However, this is factor number four. You will notice that the story I told about my own bad experience happened when I was in the company of a chileno. The thing is that women, in any culture, are far more likely to be awful to one another when there are men in the picture. This is something that I find incredibly sad about my gender, but it's not unique to Chile. We women are territorial about our male friends, about our boyfriends, about our brothers. When a new woman enters a mixed-gender group of friends, she is going to have a much harder time winning over the girls than the guys. They are going to want to know what her intentions are. They are going to make snap judgements about whether she is "worth" their friend's time. If they are single, they might see her as a threat or an interloper.

This is something that makes me incredibly sad every time that I see it. For instance, consider the classic example: a woman's boyfriend cheats on her. What does she do? She finds the other girl, calls her a slut, denounces her to everyone within earshot, cries a lot, forces her boyfriend to denounce the other girl as well, and then slowly rebuilds her relationship with him. The boyfriend is the one who broke a promise and a confidence, but he is absolved because the two women take it out on one another.

It's depressing, and it's a trait that we need to abandon as a gender if we ever want to fully rise to equality.

But is it something that chilenas have a monopoly on? No.

I'm not saying that it's easy to make friends with chilenas. This is a very closed society. However, it's not easy to make friends with chilenos, either. In six months I have been approached by far more chilenos than chilenas, sure. But they're not interested in being my friend, they want something from me. Specifically, either to become attached to my hip, or to take me home for the night. That hardly qualifies as friendly in my book. Meanwhile, the few chilenas who have made an effort towards me do so out of honest friendliness. With my Spanish, anyone who's willing to beast their way through a conversation with me with no specific benefit in mind has got to be a genuinely nice person.

Basically, this reminds me of something a professor told me when I lived in France. France, also, is a closed society, and my language classmates and I were complaining about not being able to make friends with the other students.

"I lived in the United States for one year," she said, roughly, "and at first I thought everyone was so nice. Everyone invited me out, took me places, talked to me...it was great. Except that was it. They weren't really my friends. It was all superficial. At the end of the year, after all of that, I had two real friends, people I could really count on. Here, no one will initiate a friendship with you like in the US. But when they do, it's because they mean it. So, at the end of the year, you'll probably have two friends, and they'll be real friends. It's a different style, but in the end, people are people, and you'll make connections with the same amount of people no matter where you live."

An Ode to Chilean Salads

..yes, really, no sarcasm.

So, as mentioned in the last post, I am going vegetarian. 6 months of hearty meat and potatoes food has left me feeling like every blood cell in my body is running around with a backpack full of unneccesary building material, and I want out. This food is similar to what my German grandmother prefers, and in both her case and in Chile this diet derives from a farming lifestyle. As in, wake up before dawn, eat as much protein and carbs as possible, hit the fields and work non-stop until mid-afternoon, repeat meal, repeat labor, drop into bed and do it all over again.

When I was working as an apple-picker in New Zealand I had a similar lifestyle, which involved filling 4 or more 1000lb bins a day:



Not to mentiontion placing and climbing up a 12 foot ladder with an awkward load of 25lbs of apples.



Now, I couldn't afford a mountain of meat and potatoes at that point, but I did eat just about as much tuna fish and ramen noodles as I could get my hands on....so I understand the protein and carb heavy diet.

These days, though, the most energy I expend at work is writing on a whiteboard and gesturing like a maniac. While tiring, this hardly constitutes manual labor.

As for the rest of the time, I do a lot of walking, sure, but I don't need a farmer's diet. Yesterday, I mentioned this to the host fam. Or rather, they thrust some chicken nuggets at me and I recoiled with my hand over my face squeaking, "No! No! No puedo! No mas!"

Today I came home with slow feet, heavy hearted, not looking forward to my plate of difficult digestion. When I walked in, host-dad was pointing at a covered plate with a sense of urgency. I sat down, lifted the plate and found....a gigantic, fresh salad.

Pure joy. I broke my fast and introduced nutrition back into my life.

The thing is, in the US a salad means a whole heap of lettuce with a couple of other veggies mixed in, then doused in some heavy dressing. I really don't like them that much, I must confess.

Now I realize that lettuce alone may have been keeping me off vegetarianism for years. What a worthless vegetable--no taste, hard to eat, fills up space. And yet I've gone along thinking it was the basis of any salad apart from the fabulous cucumber-and-tomato mediterranean salad. How wrong I was.

In Chile, a salad is a collection of sliced vegetables laid out in a nice spread on a plate. True, if you go to a restaurant that may be sliced vegetable, singular, such as only celery. However, in someone's home, you are likely to get a nice plate. This evening I was treated to half an avocado, a sliced beet, diced potato with oregano, half of a sliced tomato, some steamed broccoli, and a hard-boiled egg. For dressing, you squeeze a lemon over the top and add, as you wish, olive oil, vinegar, and salt. I generally go for just lemon and a bit of salt.

They may not like them as much as I do, or understand why I want to eat them so frequently, but when Chileans do salads they do them right.

Breaking Point 1

So, when living in a foreign culture, your environment is, clearly, foreign. Your life is suddenly inundated by a mass of traditions, customs, behaviors, and lifestyles that you must evaluate carefully as you become aware of them. If you don't go through this evaluation process, one consequence is that you will have very little understanding of the experience you are living. The other is that you will never be able to hybridize your foreign self with your new foreign land so that both can lose the "foreign" tag and just become pleasantly different.

Part of this process is picking out the traits in both yourself and your new culture (and the interaction between the two) that you love and want to heighten and encourage. For myself, the first thing to come to mind is the affectionate aspect of the culture here. No, I don't ever see myself calling up a friend and telling her, "te quieeeeeeeero si muuuuucho! beeesooos!!" But I'm all about the kiss hello, the freer use of compliments, and just plain old letting people know that you care about them. I recognize that there's a very reserved aspect of my character that I am slowly abandoning. We gringos tend to be more open with new people than chilenos, but ironically we keep our close friends at more of a distance. Well, chau to that. I'm going sudamericana on this one if I can help it.

Another aspect of this evaluation process is figuring out the "agree-to-disagree" issues. One such example is the piropos as discussed in yesterday's post. Ok, piropos, if no one here minds you you can go about your business....I'm not going to try to convince people that this is a disaster if they don't see it that way. But when I become involved, I reserve my right to respond as I see fit, because it still violates my ideas of moral and respectful behaviour.

The third side of this evaluation, is picking out the things that you simply cannot introduce into your life. Essentially, you need to make rejections. It is all well and good to say that as an immigrant I should go out of my way to accomodate my new culture, and I would say that I and most other internationals worldwide do just that. But there are things that just cannot jive, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as the rejection is made in a respectful way. I have reached the point where I need to make the first of mine. I am stepping down from the chileno diet.

I have been living with a family (as mentioned below) for 6 months, and as part of my rent they feed me three meals a day (although I'm a 2-a-day ticket in general). The food is delicious, absolutely wonderful; the mother is a very talented cook. But this relationship, chilean food and I, well, it's just not working out.

I haven't fully experienced this before in my other foreign travels because no matter how long I lived away, I was still cooking my own food. I'd eat the local cuisine at restaurants and friends' houses, but the majority of my diet was an altered version of what I would eat at home. In my case, this means loads of vegetables and very little red meat or poultry. Plus, of course, the side benefits--I believe in a well-stocked spice cabinet. As a result, I would develop an opinion of the local diet, but never really had to make a decision about it.

Now that I have been totally immersed in a foreign diet, I feel a much greater understanding for my grandmother, who immigrated to the US from the North Sea. She never gave up cooking German food, which she still eats to this day. I thought this was stubborn. Now I see that there are some changes that are just too much to handle, and your internal environment is probably the first area where one might find these.

Consider one example of a meal in my Chilean life (not pictured: soup and bread on the side):



Meanwhile, I live in a country with plentiful, fresh, cheap produce:



For the first few months, going out and supplementing picture number one with picture number two managed to keep me pretty happy. Recently though, I've come to feel so unhealthy that I'm conscious of it pretty much all day long. It's not a cardiovascular thing--the hills here are enough to keep anyone in good shape. It's the extreme overload of calories, particularly given that those calories come in the form of a lot of meat and a lot of carbs. There are two main reactions I've noticed. At times, this diet makes me feel famished all of the time, because even with my vitamins I'm clearly lacking nutrients that I am used to. The second is that sometimes I never feel hungry, and every meal feels like it's following directly on the one I ate previously.

Last week my parents were visiting, and so I ate a lot of restaurant food and drank a lot of wine. I have found that this, on top of 6 months of not-my-kind-of-food, was the breaking point. For years I've played around with vegetarianism but never gone all the way with it. Well, I'm done. Good-bye carne and mountain of potatoes. At the moment I am fasting (family: don't freak out, I do this on occasion and it isn't dangerous) to allow my body to recuperate a bit from the inundation of calories. When I finish my fast at the end of this week, I'm going to cut red meat and poultry out of my diet. For the moment I'm going to hold on to fish, but we'll see.

So Chile and I have had our first real fight, but I'm confident that our new compromise will pull us through.

Piropos, in depth

So I was reading another blog, and there was a post about piropos. These are the antics of men in the street who get their kicks by bothering women in any number of ways, ranging from benign comments about prettiness, to obscene gestures and lewd remarks, to hissing and high decibal kissy noises. Read all about it from my first rant on the subject. Anyhow, this blog post that I was reading is specifically related to a very layered question: should you respond to these men? --in a negative fashion, claro, if you want to take them up on their offers that's your business.

I found the post very interesting but even more so the comments. I started to write one of my own but soon found it was turning into a post in its own right, so here I am.

In my own life, I tend not to respond to the running commentary. As I mentioned in my previous post on the topic, it's pretty constant. I'm hoping it will ebb some in the summer when the tourists come, but at least this winter being a blond has made me an exceptionally easy target. I just look strange, and that grabs attention. I don't have it with me but at some point in her memoir "My Imagined Country," Isabel Allende makes the comment that men in Chile will go crazy over a blond woman "even if she has the face of an iguana." Add to that, "if she is wearing sweats," "if she hasn't showered in three days," "if she looks like she hates the world," and "if she is in the company of her father," and you get the idea. I am very jealous of a certain short brunette friend who can "pass," as they used to say in a very different context. She frequently notes how much more annoying it is when I'm around. Of course, that statement holds true for a lot of things, but in this instance it's not my fault. In any event, if I were to respond to all of these jerks, I would spend as much of my time engaged in this sport as they do, and I truly would not wish that on anyone.

I agreed with one strategy that was mentioned, which is essentially to give them a look that reads, "oh how pathetic." Luckily I do this pretty naturally so it doesn't take too much effort. I do worry occasionally about some undiscovered link between excessive eye-rolling and future cataracts. Otherwise though, a pretty efficient approach. I will say, though, that I have a sort of knee-jerk reaction sometimes (generally after a hiss or a kissy noise--oh how I hate the kissy noise). This reaction generally involves me stiffening my arms, extending my fingers in some sort of cat-arching-its-back imitation, and letting out a ridiculously aggrieved noise which generally startles whomever I'm walking with. Ocasionally there are obscenities involved. I suppose there must just be a slow build-up that gets let out every once in a while.

While I was reading other people's perspectives, I began to realize what a multi-faceted issue this is. First, there was one comment that mentioned that gringas on vacation who go for the "latin lover" stereotype create much of this problem, at least for other gringas. I disagree with this very intensely. I understand that we are seen as "loose," as it was put, on much of this continent. Girls from the US are seen that way in a lot of Europe, as well. Honestly, this doesn't bother me--in fact, I think that plenty of us are more liberal in our sexual lives than many women here are. There is definitely a different attitude towards sex in the US and here, and I think that's just fine. Yay for difference, and acceptance of difference. Anyhow, what some gringas do or do not do in their personal lives has absolutely nothing to do with what some creep can say to me on the street. That to me is just an extension of the notorious "she was asking for it" logic. The thing is, when was the last time a guy yelled at a woman with the idea that she might sleep with him? These men know they're doing nothing but harassing us. I have a much higher tolerance for sleazy guys who hit on me in bars than I do for the street guys--at least the former have some aim involved other than impressing their friends and making my life unpleasant.

However, there's also another side to this, I realized. It was also suggested that gringas talk to Chilenas and tell them to fight back. The problem with this is, I don't think that's our place. In fact, I don't think it's warranted. I've had enough Chilenas (and French women, who live in a similar environment catcall-wise) tell me that they like the comments that I'm pretty convinced that this is a cultural issue, beyond being a gender issue. Yes, it is a very sexual thing. However, this is also a very sexual culture, compared to my own. And going back to what I said above, that's just fine. Gringas might be more inclined to have casual sex for pleasure--that does not make them sluts, or loose, or any other such obnoxious label. Chilenas may be more inclined to enjoy a sexualized relationship between the genders as a whole--that does not make them degraded, unless they fel that way, which I have not found that they do. Those who don't love the comments tend to find them harmless or at worse slightly annoying.

So, where does this leave us? In my opinion, to each her own. I hate the comments; when I walk towards a group of ogling guys that I can't avoid my stomach hits the pavement. So I will continue to roll my eyes until they fall out of my head and occasionally yell out nonsensical frustrations. And more power to the all-out combatants; I sympathize completely. I don't think that this is a societal problem to be solved--I think this a culture clash that every irritated woman must put up with in her own way. As for equalization of rights, well, maybe around the same time that women in the US start having the ability to express themselves equally, women in Chile will be out there in the streets hissing away with the best of 'em. Gender progress takes many forms--to quote Paul Simon, who am I to blow against the wind?