Lights Out

Sitting at the table with the last light of the afternoon keeping the room glowing, I didn't realize that the power on the cerro had gone out until I finally rose in the graying space and flicked the switch.

I walked down the hill to pick up the pizza I had ordered. Customers sat around candles of various sizes. For some reason, people speak more quietly in the dark, surrounded by candles. I collected my pizza and completed the transaction half under my breath. Parting from my friend at the street corner, I half ran up the steps that run along the side of the ruined stretch of Templeman, where the road has been replaced by rubble and stray bushes. The light was fading and I was thinking of my cavernous apartment and unlocatable flashlight.

I stumbled through the entry way and into the blank space of my apartment. In the dining room, the windows were still letting in a faint hint of light. I rummaged through drawers: tea lights, I know that I saw tea lights. I found them, on my knees in the invisible kitchen, and brought them back to the table. I dropped five of them into the rounded shot glasses that came with the apartment, and they made that satisfying sound: something soft and light cased in cheap metal hitting glass. The sound makes me think of my parents' dinner parties when I was a child, and of Christmas and Thanksgiving at their house.

The house was quiet and empty, my roommate sleeping in his room. My third roommate called to say that she would not come home from her boyfriend's. Lighting my candles and arranging my book, I thought back to another night without electricity. It was in a February, in Morocco, in a small apartment whose walls held no ceiling save in the small cubbies that were bedrooms. After brushing my teeth under stars of an unknown continent, I walked on bare feet across the cold kitchen floor into the tiny room with walls of stone. The bed was a shelf knocked into the wall. As I rubbed my feet under not enough blankets and spoke softly with good company, I remember the three stubs of candles that were stuck onto the deep rock sill of the tiny window at the foot of the bed. The wind picked up, but the crashing sound of waves was loudest outside the little wooden shutter behind the flames. I fell asleep that night, and the nights after, listening through these sounds for my breath and for the other breath beside me, the both of us breathing air so far away from anything previously known.

Tonight I arranged my candles in a semicircle around my chair and lone place setting. I poured some wine, took a bite of food, and opened my book. I've only just begun it, but I am far enough along to know that I am reading of a man whose past still grips him with its mysteries and pain. I know that I will read this book and feel an echo. There is something of this in the life of any person far from home without intentions of permanacy. Our lives here are a flicker; they began recently enough to be recalled in every detail; it is sure that they will end sometime soon in an airport, under flourescent light. The most intimate of friends made here can know only this short burst of time. When we mirror each other, we can see only the present tinted by the stories we tell over coffee, over tea, over wine and beer, staring out windows and tracing the rims of cups with our fingers. We tell each other that we lived before, will live later, but we exist only in the present and these other times are only stories.

I am thinking of these things in the dark, with the lights of the other, unaffected cerros of Valparaiso shining against the negative space surrounding my building. In the quiet, alone, I think of the company that is missed, and the history that cannot follow me here. In this unexpected, unadulterated space of the blackout, the shapes of that history fill the room and although it shakes me, I welcome them.

I call no one because I welcome them. Then the door to the side swings open and my sleepy roommate brings out flashlights from his camping supplies. I strap a light to my head just as my tea lights are reaching the end of their short lives. This is when I feel sad. The thin thread has snapped that had connected these temporary candles and this solitary darkness to those other misshappen candles casting dancing shadows against a stone wall, not so very long ago. But this is how we live, now, in this flare within my history. It won't be long before I sit with other candles and my heart pulls for the lonely nights in Valparaiso. So I laugh at myself, spill out my words, and return to my book and my work.

Flavor in Chile: Si, se puede!

Whoever named the chili pepper was definitely not making any reference to Chile, despite the fact that in certain languages the two words are spelled the same.

A week or two ago, I was cooking for friends, as I love to do. I was making a large stir fry that I knew would turn out spicy. Nearly everything that I cook turns out spicy--I spent three years cooking with a man who isn't happy unless he's sweating and turning colors. Ergo, my estimation of "quite spicy" is on par with most people's "inedible." My "spicy" is "on the edge of tolerance," to quote a friend.

One of my roommates, a chileno, hates spicy food. This is very much the norm: in fact, if you are living in this country, you may have read that sentence as redundant. Of course this is not the case with everyone, as I have at least two chileno friends who love spice, but otherwise it's pretty much the rule.

While cooking, I decided that I would make the sauce on the side in a special gesture in order to include my roommate. Just before the stirfry was finished, I took out vegetables for him and sent him a nice plate with rice via our third roommate. She told me later that when he received it, he made a face.

"What is it?" she asked.

"There's ginger in this. It's spicy," he said, wrinkling his nose.

Yes, my roommate is not the nicest of people. Moving on, though: ginger is spicy.

I won't blame you if you're wondering how on earth one can eat normally in a place where that sounds reasonable. It's been a struggle for me, as I've documented in this blog. While living with a family chilena, I felt as if I would die from carb and meat overload (hence my current vegetarian status). Nonetheless, I've found that it is completely possible to live a happy, healthy, flavorful life in Chile. To start, here is a nice dinner that you can easily make with ingredients from Lider (an average supermarket here):

Appetizer: Tomato Garlic Soup (gracias a C. Martinez)

Ingredients:
1 can tomates pelados (size depending on people invited)
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
2 bay leaves
small handfull of fresh basil
Aji sauce from the jar, to taste
Boiling water

Directions:
In a small saucepan, saute the tomatoes for a few minutes, and add about a cup of water. Stir in the garlic, the bay leaves, the basil, and the aji. Cook until with water boils off, and then add more. Repeat for approximately 45 minutes.

Side Dish: Potatoes and Carrots in Honey Garlic Sauce

Ingredients:
Potatoes and carrots, to fit size of group, sliced thin and diced into small pieces
a few tablespoons of oil
1 vegetable bouillon cube
1 1/2 cups boiling water
1/4 cup honey
a few tablespoons of soy sauce
2-ish tablespoons of white wine vinegar
1 of those mini limes, juiced
Cornstarch (if you can find it) or some other thickener (if you can find it)
2 small cloves garlic, minced
1 fresh aji, minced (optional)

Directions:
Boil the water with the bouillon cube. Once done, remove from heat. If you've got a thickener, add about a tablespoon and mix well. If not, don't worry about it. I put in a tablespoon of flour and it worked out fine, so no worries! Then, add the honey, soy sauce, vinegar, and lime. Use a whisk or a fork to mix well. In another pan, saute the garlic and aji in oil for about a minute on low heat--don't brown the garlic. Add this to the other ingredients and simmer. Meanwhile, heat a bit more oil and saute the potatoes and carrots until just about cooked. At the end, add the sauce and stir until it has thickened around the vegetables.

Main Dish: Indian Stew with Couscous
Group 1:
2 medium onions, diced
Group 2:
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 inch fresh ginger, minced
2 large green ajis, minced
tsp cumin
tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom (this takes a bit of searching (in Chile, of course)...try Jumbo, or Korean shops if you're lucky enough to live near them)
1 tbsp salt or soy sauce
large pinch of saffron (obviously optional given the price)
Group 3:
1/2 cup squeezed orange and grapefruit juice (I squeezed about 4 oranges and 1 pomelo)
4 eggplants, roasted for 1/2 hour, then cubed
Group 4:
2 green and 1 red bell pepper, diced
1 large slice zapallo, cubed
4 medium carrots, sliced thin and then diced
1 medium size can of tomates pelados
1/2 cup or so of water
Finals:
Couscous (or rice)
Fresh basil
Yoghurt natural

Instructions:
Stick the eggplants in the oven at about 350 degrees, halfed, while you're slicing the other veggies.

When you're prepared, saute the onions in oil until transparent. Then add Group Two and saute for about one minute. Transfer from the pan to a large sauce dish. Add Group 3, mixing well so that the spices coat everything. Simmer for about 8 minutes. Add Group 4, adjusting the level of water to allow enough to cook for a while without sticking but without drowning the thing. Simmer (covered) for about 20 minutes, or until the zapallo is soft. Stir every few minutes to move things from top to bottom. Prepare the couscous or rice meanwhile (read the box). About 5 minutes before the end, add a handful of torn basil, and mix in well. When all the veggies are well cooked, serve over the couscous with a 'dollop' (don't you love that word?) of yoghurt.

This may all sound very complicated. However, it's really not when you get to it. I find cooking quite relaxing. If you don't, be content in the fact that the Indian Stew will give you enough servings to eat for ages, if you don't invite 4-6 guests the first time round. You can also easily make as much as you like of the other two dishes, giving you a fridge full of delicious, flavorful, vegetarian food. When you think about how much you have to pay for such a luxury at a chilean restaurant, it works out quite well.

I also recommend that you indulge in our wonderful abilty in Chile to buy good wine at cheap prices, and enjoy a bottle with a friend while cooking.

If you enjoy these recipes, let me know, and I'll add more!

Help a blogger out, Part 2

** As previously mentioned, I am applying for a writing internship of sorts. Based on input from yourselves and my non-text-based friends, I've put together the following blend of two previous blog posts. Let me know what you think! Kill paragraph two? Vary your vocabulary in the intro? Come up with a better bridge? I want to know what I can do to make this piece polished. Thanks to anyone who'll leave me a little constructive criticism in the comments! **

When I am delayed by some street occurrence and find myself walking home around eight or nine at night, there is a flute playing over Cerro Alegre. The location of this lonely-voiced musician is indeterminable. It is clear that it comes to me from somewhere higher up on the hill, because the sound seems to be falling down from the sky. They are eerie and beautiful, these strange little unaccompanied melodies. The air at night, now that it is autumn, is crisp and clear and the notes of the flute echo these qualities. The flutist never falls fully into song, instead sending out smoke signals, little snatches of melody. Eight bars, sixteen bars, pause. Then follows another cadence, unrelated, it seems. The notes are random, a spread pattern like broken glass, and yet all are glinting. Never does a tone fall flat, never does the clear ringing sound break into a breathy split note. This sky of sound is the layer between Neruda’s sky, shattered with stars, and the chaotic but harmonic Bartok composition that is my city. My thoughts unclench and my mind falls into dreams and poetry. I begin to think that there should always be someone playing the flute on clear autumn nights when the stars are out, and Valparaiso's lights are falling into the ocean.

From the ethereal and chill notes of the night, I arrive into the warmth of my home and the privacy of my room. Here, there is an entirely different kind of music, far from the stars and the cold purity of autumn. There is a man, whom I have never seen, whose experience unfolds daily directly below the floorboards of my room. This building, built into the hill, opens into many spaces, and so while I enter from a pasaje that runs between buildings, this man most likely enters from one of the doors that run the grade of our slope of this hill. It is unlikely that I will ever know who it is whose life I can overhear as I fall asleep. I can guess that he is young because of his voice, the race-car video games whose soundtracks invade my space, and the fact that his most active periods fall between two and five am. Whoever he is, my downstairs neighbor loves to sing. Through the thin wood, he sings me endless gospels, ballads, sometimes pop music or the occasional musical score. He does not sing the way that most people sing when they are puttering around at home--halfway, one lyric here, another there, with half a voice. Nervous about the opening of a door or the angry banging on the wall from next door, we sing in showers, sing in the car, hoping not to offend, hoping to sneak under the radar. This neighbor of mine sings as if he had an audience of 50 people. Accordingly, he gives what deserve to be called concerts. An hour or more will pass, full of resonant sound, deep baritone from below pierced by seagull cries from above. I like to listen, and I like to think about the other listeners propped up on other beds or leaned over other tables. It is an anonymous community, the singer and his audience, hidden away in cubby holes, blind to one another.

Outside, on top of the hill, the flute is cold and beautiful and still. Inside, the lone ballad singer is the warm heart of the building. And down in the flat cusp of the city at the base of the hill, in Plaza Anibal Pinto, a man bangs on a homemade bass drum while a girl dances with a tambourine and six, seven, now eight people play on panflutes and mouth-harps, and the rest dance.


Morning breaks. The midnight singer is catching up on his rest, but I am quickly moving around between my brush and closet and bag. With a class to be taught at eight am, I am out the door at seven. This would never happen by my own design, but it is a surprising gift in my days.

Outside, it is blurry silence and the click of the bolt seems loud. Between two buildings, through a rusting iron railing, I look down onto the port. It is coated in mist and fog this early. Soon the sun will burn it clear, but for now it is all in haze. At the bottom of my stairway-street, the street cleaner who works my neighborhood is taking his cigarette break. The smell of the smoke mingles with the damp sea air. Twice a week, we see each other here, a reassuring clockwork. He is doubtless well into his shift; I am pulling on sweater ends and yanking wet hair around as I stumble into my day. All over the city, the street-cleaners are awake and working silently with their brooms and mops and trash cans. The streets never seem to get any cleaner, but it's not for lack of trying.

Valparaiso is soft and sleepy in the morning. I walk through pink half-light. Two old men in wool suits push and pull until they succeed in heaving open a store's metal security paneling. Uniformed children walk to school, chattering quietly like birds. Men wait to buy their newspapers and cigarettes at the kiosks that glow like the lanterns they resemble. The streetlights, determined to fulfill every moment of their service, glow on ever less strikingly against the lightening sky.

The rumbling beasts that constitute Valparaiso's fleet of micros are not yet quite awake. A scant few scream past and are absorbed again into the quiet, exhaust puffing from rusted pipes to join the sea fog. Seagulls are the only other jarring noise. Conversations seem muted. Suited businessmen and vendors pushing carts walk haphazardly through the empty streets.

It is a temporary, tenuous tranquility. The light hits the top of the hills first. It shines off of windows and brings the brightly colored houses back to life, and then it begins to creep down into the Plan.

This is not a sedate city. It is a humming city, a pushing-and-shoving city, a city of shouts and drums and motors. No one who finds themselves falling for this place would wish it to be any other way. But there is a beauty in the contrast that I find in the early morning. Even the murals seem to have their eyes closed, waiting for day to break.

Falling in love with a new city is like falling in love with a person. Walking through Valparaiso in the morning, I am lying propped up with one elbow on the pillow, hair tousled. As the light slowly wakes the cerros and creeps down towards the water, I am biting my lip, softly touching a still cheek or a slowly rising chest, thinking, He is so beautiful when he sleeps. Thinking, Wake up. Don't wake up. Wake up.

Que flaite.

Last night I met a young woman named Josefa.

Josefa is four years old. She arrived unexpectedly at a moment in which I was going to cause a lot of trouble for my friend, her brother, who had irritated me exceptionally. Luckily for everyone present, I can't wait to work in a preschool and the arrival of an outspoken four year old was about all I needed to let it go. Before you knew it, we had sequestered ourselves with a comic in Italian and were selling my H&M bracelets to each other (just DON'T forget the imaginary bag, that is bad customer service).

Unfortunately, while we were learning our numbers in Spanish and English and going blind unexpectedly ("Donde estas? Where are you? I can't see!") someone decided to break the window of her parents' car with a rock. They came in and told me what had happened, and then left again. Josefa thought for a minute.

"Is it true," she asked after a bit, "what my brother said, that the car is broken?" Yes, I told her (while teaching her terrible Spanish I fear), it's true, but the car is fine.

A few more minutes passed.

"Meredith," she said carefully, "como se dice 'flaite' en Ingles?"

After a bit of death by laughter I had to explain that I could not answer how to say "flaite" in English, because in the States we don't have a synonym. It is a special Chilean word, I told her.

This is quite true. I believe that it's different in England, where a similar sense of class relations exists. Tonight I was taught a few versions of 'flaite' by a British friend. Nonetheless, in USA English, there is no accurate translation. This is because there is no exact concept.

Flaite is a word that gets a lot of mileage in Chile. To itemize the various English almost equivalents, it is somewhat like low-class, ghetto, uncultured, rude, dive (as in bar), trashy, sketchy, and redneck. It is all of these things, and none of them. Flaite is a word that applies not just to a person's attitude, SES, or current position; it goes beyond fashion or cultural affiliation; it goes beyond how expensive the beer is and whether or not you're drinking it from a plastic cup.

Flaite is a noun, an adjective, and much more. Fleite is a way of life.

Chile's class system is an inherant part of the culture. This has become apparent to me in odd ways due to the fact that I happen to have blond hair. Here, paleness indicates European relations, which for years has meant power and influence. Hopefully this is changing, but the fact remains that when I walk on the street in any normal neighborhood, everyone has black hair, brown eyes, and medium colored skin. I turn on the TV to watch anything related to politics, and everyone interviewed looks as if they could be my uncle. It is one of the oddest and most disturbing factors of Chilean culture. People who are in the upper classes speak to me about their terrible household help, not realizing that my grandmother arrived in the US with no English and worked as a maid with only one half day off a month. Conversely, people in the middle class have reproached me with no end of various combative remarks, unable to accept that I make 300,000 pesos a month and will not be owning anything designer at any point that I can think of.

So to be flaite, as it is to be any other rank in the social system, is an all-defining thing. In the states, we'll go to dive bars. That doesn't, however, make us trashy. You can be incredibly educated and cultivate a ghetto style. You can live in the projects and be a bookworm. Here, these divisions don't seem to exist in the popular imagination. You ARE where you go, where you live, who you know, who your father is, who your father knows. It is indelible. You are a function of these things, and if those things are flaite, so are you.

As a gringa, this concept is difficult for me to grasp. I am never aware of what is flaite. Yes, I know what "low-class" is. However, I have been, at various times, told that the following things are flaite:

--Valparaiso
--Plastic outdoor tables at bars
--Drinks on the beach
--Picnics
--Bars frequented by the after-work (as in blue collar) crowd
--Bars frequented by people my age who, as far as I can tell, look just like me
--Micros
--Public transportation in general
--Street art
--Juggling
--Streets with inexpensive shops
--Arcades

And many, many more. I'll be walking with a friend, and suggest popping into a place for a sandwich or a beer, only to be met with an incredulous look and the response, "Pero que flaite esta lugar!" Thankfully, gringos seem to be excused for flubbing the social norms, because it's generally assumed that we have no idea what we're doing. This is a very good thing, because it seems like everything I like is incredibly flaite (ie, I ride micros for fun). Nevermind that flaite also includes mugging people, going to jail, beating your girlfriend, and other such wonders--you had a beer at that place with the plastic cutlery?!?!

Que flaite!!

Help a blogger out

I am in the process of applying for a writing internship affiliated with a major publication. In this process, I am asked to submit a writing sample. I'm going to take something that I've written about here and polish it into something presentable.
With that in mind, please help me choose the best Note from Behind the Language Barrier (of a Serious variety)!

The leading contestants at the moment are:

Wandering
Listening
Voyaging
Dreaming
Living

Please leave me a comment and vote for the one you think would make the best starting point for a piece of creative nonfiction (of the variety that one would find in a serious-style travel collection). Please! Of course, if you've been checking in for awhile now and have another suggestion, by all means let me know.

Your help is much appreciated!

Head in the clouds

On grey days in Valparaiso, the city disappears. From my windows, there is only a palm tree, and the jumbled roofs between my spot on the hill and the sea. The lights of the boats in the nearby port are diffused in fog; the coast stretching east and north is only a mental concept. A dim light in the distance could be the other towns which are normally sitting on the horizon above the bay, or they could be ships, but for my mind filling in the blanks like the missed words in a cell phone conversation.

The color closes around the city like a blanket, softly wiping away colors, blurring the eyes of the people walking in their zigzags, irresolutely. It makes my wet hair and my makeup-less face feel at home, born from the same lethargy and lack of edges. I view the polished-dull cerros and the bumbling smoke of traffic with sleepy eyes while waiting endlessly for the micro that doesn't come. We are the same in this moment, the city and I: attractiveness washed away by tiredness, lack of care, a tousled head and a crooked outfit. Perhaps in other moments we can pull off a sort of over-punctuated, hapless kind of beauty, but when the damper is on all that remains is the awkwardness of poor planning.

And so when I wake up in Valparaiso and look out my window to see gray sky, something in me softens, and I know that my city sister and I will have a day of calm. When Valparaiso decides once again to be bright, and laughing, to love the ones that love her and ignore those who don't, I will continue my far less successful efforts to be the same. For today, though, I know that she will not judge me in my last pair of clean socks, with my chapped lips sitting amongst scattered papers. She won't bedgrudge me the slow way I edit my latest project, or the time I spend wandering in the street staring around without conviction. She will allow me to choose the slowest micro I can so that I can listen to music and stare out at the storefronts for longer. She will look on with understanding as I put off til tomorrow what can be done today and instead take refuge under lamplight, out of the cold of the fog that sedates us.

A funny thing happened on the way to my blog post...

So, apologies from the bad blogger. My personal life has been a bit of a headache lately, and as such my reflections on Chile have been on hold while I try to get things sorted. As this is not a personal life blog, most of what I've been dwelling on of late has not been suitable material.

I'll be back on this week, so check back in today or tomorrow for a real, honest, post about Chile.

In the meantime, please take the time to check out this post on Kyle's blog. She has committed to paying a young man's tuition to DuocUC, a technical university. This is of particular relevance to me because I am, at the moment, a volunteer teacher at that same institution (in another location, of course). It is an extremely respected institution for the level of training it provides (something akin to a technical associate's degree in the US). It is also, however, expensive. This has been one of the major quandaries for me over the course of this year. My students are wonderful people who are given a great opportunity to better their circumstances--but for a price. It is difficult for me to resolve the contradiction inherent in being a volunteer at an institution which is only available to people who can afford the high tuition.

As such, I'm happy to pass on the information that Kyle, who is a photographer, is giving all proceeds from her print sales this month to her friend's tuition. You can read the details of this on her site. She is a skilled photographer. If any of you would like a nice picture of the country at the end of the world, now's your chance to buy one and simultaneously contribute to someone's well-being.