a trip

Last week the Fulbright people brought me and the other 4 Fulbright fellows in Chile together in Valpariaso, a bohemian city on the coast a little over an hour's bus ride away. We gathered on the campus of La Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, where we each gave a short presentation on our planned and ongoing activities here. After that we were treated to lunch and a visit to one of Pablo Neruda's houses (it is amazing that a poet could own so many houses), which was thoughtfully eccentric. While everyone else returned to Santiago that afternoon, we stayed for a couple of days.

Valparaiso has many parts that are grungy, with an air of a port city that has struggled to keep an economic base alive. The streetscapes are at least as colorful as anything I've seen, though from above they all share the same rusty corrugated metal look. The street art was ubiquitous, and of pretty decent quality most of the time. The ascensores, little train car things that haul you up and down the steep hillsides for 20 cents or so, a big tourist attraction, were impressively run down.

Sadly, after less than 36 hours there it became evident that a couple of us had consumed something that was not right. Our plans to return were delayed by a day while we just laid around the hotel room waiting for our bodies to recover to the point where we could handle the bus ride back to Santiago.

It was Fiestas Patrias weekend last weekend (18 Sept), so there were parades, rodeos, traditional dancing, and lots of meat eating. We didn't have the energy to do much related to it once we were back in Santiago (and we had done some of those activities the prior weekend). We did catch the TV report covering the terremoto (a mixture of white wine, pisco, sugar, and pineapple ice cream) drinking contest, with probably 15 minutes of footage of people raising pitchers of this foul mixture to their lips. In the paper that morning we saw a picture of a 79 year old woman, a legendary terremoto chugger apparently, who they reported 'drank like a 15 year old girl.' Now my translation could be off, but it is still disturbing on too many levels.

Anyway, life is busier now. I will be leading a two-day workshop for which I am not at all prepared, so there's some pressure building. My Spanish skills are not improving, which is disappointing, though I know what is needed is just more effort. It's just hard to muster that at the end of a long day's work. Tomorrow is Dia Mundial Sin Autos, which I'm looking forward to. More on that to come. Otherwise, everybody is happy.