Chile 2.0

I'm back.

And this is the view from my new bedroom window, atop Cerro Alegre:

Here's to Valparaíso, take two :)

A Mess of Thoughts

I'm beginning to feel that my life in Chile is something completely separate from my life at home.

I mean, obviously it is...I'm thousands of miles away and interacting only with people I'd never met before coming here and always in a completely different language. It makes sense that Chile Laura would be different than Jersey Laura and Middlebury Laura - even those last two Lauras are different, although there is a little bit more overlap of those two worlds. But at the same time, I'm still Laura, and I'm still in constant contact with my family and my friends from home. Still, it is entirely different life, in that there's only so much I can share with people who aren't here. I can post pictures and blog entries and send e-mails and talk on AIM and on Skype, but I can't walk with them through the plaza or laugh with them in Chilean Spanish or sing songs by Victor Jara alongside them. It sometimes gets to the point where English makes me tired. My comfort foods and songs and words have shifted, and I know I'm going to be craving avocado and manjar and Inti-Illimani the second I get off the plane. And at the same time, I still crave without end the warmth of the holiday season I'm missing right now.

It's something of an identity crisis. Whenever I hear folk music with zampoñas and quenas, half of me feels lost in something strange and left out of something beautiful, shuffling my feet awkwardly on the side and feeling like I'll never understand the music the way a real Chilean would. And the other half feels a pull, a connection, almost a nostalgia for the same music. I'm separate from it and a part of it all at once, and it frustrates me that no matter how much I listen to or sing or play these songs, I will never genuinely be a part of them.

But I'm different here, I know that much. Or at least, I haven't actually figured out who I am here yet. It sometimes frustrates me that the Chilean friends I've made don't know me the way my friends from home know me. But maybe part of that is because I haven't really figured out who I am yet, at least who I am here.

I'm so excited to come home two weeks from Thursday. I think I need some time to reconfigure and relax and remember. But I'm excited about next semester, too, because I'm excited to find out more about this new Laura I'm just meeting. I just hope that the two can blend together, if not neatly, then at least peacefully.

All right, I'm off to a folkloric dance concert and then to ice cream with Sarah and Maddie. Ha, if that's not a satisfying mix of the old and new Laura, I don't know what is :)

ya viene la fuerza...

Last night, I decided to escape from the end-of-semester mire (three finals this week, two the week after, two more after that plus a term paper…) to see an Inti-Illimani concert. I’d already seen them a few months back in a bar called La Piedra Feliz, but I figured I could use a study break (ignore the fact that my study break last weekend was to run away to Argentina…that’s another story). So I hopped on a micro and pulled into the Plaza Anibal Pinto, met up with Sarah and her friend Pablo, started hiking up Cerro Cárcel – named after the Ex-Cárcel (ex-jail, now a cultural center) near the top of the hill. During the military dictatorship in Chile under Pinochet from 1973 to 1991, the jail was used as one of several torture sites, where leftist artists and activists were contained, tortured (guitarists had their fingers cut off) and often brutally murdered. Turns out that this is exactly where we were headed.

We fell into the patchwork of bohemian-looking kids, decked out in all things bright and woven and beaded and pouring into the entrance of the Ex-Cárcel. The doorway itself looked menacing – even though the walls are now covered haphazardly with murals and poems of remembrance, there are still bars on the windows and a pervasive feeling that something awful happened here. We made our way into the open jail yard – cold walls splattered with beautiful graffiti, a series of kiosks with people handing out beers and communist pamphlets, giant banners with photos of the murdered prisoners flapping furiously in the wind. Dust kept blowing into our faces from the jail yard ground as we stared at the stage, framed by distant hills eerie with electric light.

In between each band, videos were projected against the jail walls – the one that really struck me was footage of La Católica students fighting with the carabiñeros (uniformed police) – rocks and teargas and all – right outside the Casa Central, where I hang out all the time. It looked like it could have been filmed yesterday. The reality of it made me shudder. When Inti-Illimani finally came on, I breathed in the sound of the violins and zampoñas (Andean panpipes), sang along to “Samba Lando” and “El Guarapo y la Melcocha” and even found myself chanting under my breath “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido” right along with the crowd of Chileans with their fists in the air, shadows flung against the cracked white walls.

I like that no one has painted over the ugly parts of the Ex-Cárcel. It represents a scar on Chile’s history, and they bear it out in the open, scribbled over with color and poetry and remembrance, to make certain that nothing like it ever happens again.

Overseas Briefing

Hi everyone :)

Sorry it's been forever and a day since I've updated this thing. I wrote an article this past week for the Middlebury Campus' "Overseas Briefing" section, and since the online version freaked out a little bit with the accents and threw in lots of squares and question marks and Chinese characters, I'm posting it here. Enjoy!

Overseas Briefing: Valparaíso, Chile
by Laura K. Budzyna

Three times a week, I hop off the micro bus, maneuver through the fruit sellers and street artists in the Plaza Anibal Pinto, and begin the steep and winding trudge up to Cerro Concepción. Before the street takes its first curve, I pass Bar Cinzano and Café Ritual on my right – two locales that will be brimming with young artist-types and the smoke from their cigarettes by nightfall. A rooms-for-rent sign and a clothesline dangle out of the window of a battered old building on my left. In front of the building, two television sets are stacked with a message scrawled across their screens in white paint: Apaga la tele – Vive tu vida: “Turn off the TV – live your life.”

The street twists to the right, and I run my hand along the brightly-colored mural on the wall. As the hill gets steeper, the sidewalk buckles into steps – some painted, some inlayed with stones, some splattered with graffiti of Che Guevara. A shopkeeper knits a funky green poncho in the open doorway of her shop, spilling color out into the street, and I count the pesos in my wallet to see if I have enough to snag the fringy scarf I’ve had my eye on. Next time, I tell myself, as I step aside to let a dreadlocked twenty-something carrying a canvas pass by. As I round the final curve of the hill, I spy the old man in his pastel-plaid cap, sitting on a bench and feeding the pigeons, as usual.

It’s always warmer on top of the hill, I decide, although I could just be flush from the ascent. I look at my watch. Ten minutes before my chorus class begins, and although I can hear voices and violins ribboning out the windows of the Instituto de Música, I tell myself that I have time. I amble by Color Café, a curious little place whose walls are collages of kites and keys and sheet music and shells and playing cards and dream catchers. As I pass, resisting the urge to go in and order a kiwi juice, the gruff man with the eye patch who once helped me blow up balloons for a birthday party gives me a nod. I plink by a row of pastel-colored houses lined up like piano keys – pink, orange, green, yellow, blue – until I reach the fence overlooking the port of Valparaíso and the Pacific Ocean.

I lean against the fence, brushing my hair out of my eyes to get a better look. To me, the city of Valparaíso looks like a giant puzzle – a mosaic of colorful houses elbowing each other on the hillsides and trying not to fall into the sea. And in all of its twists and corners, it hides secrets – painted steps and stray dogs and old women selling art and empanadas. And places like this, I think, watching the red funicular elevator rise up the hill from the street below.

I snap out of my thoughts for a moment, realizing that class started five minutes ago. I hurry back up to the music building, only to find all the kids in my class sitting in the doorway, three playing their guitars. The strumming melts into the cigarette smoke and Chilean slang, dotted with the “po”s and “¿cachai?”s that no Spanish class will teach you. I make the rounds, kissing each friend on the cheek before asking nervously whether we should go in for class. “Ahh, n’importa,” answers one, leaning back onto the steps and smiling. It doesn’t matter. So I sit down on the steps, content to hide a little longer in one of the colorful secrets of Valparaíso.

Caza de tesoro

You’ll all be very proud to know that my borderline obsessive birthday party planning antics reached new heights yesterday. After my friends finally got home from Chiloé yesterday, Maddie and I managed to pull off a Valparaíso-wide treasure hunt for Sarah’s 21st birthday. Oh yes. We spent the afternoon penning witty clues (in perfect poetic meter…in Spanish), dotting the city with bright pink and green index cards stuck to benches and ledges and signs with mounting tape, making friends with a host of ice cream parlor workers and street vendors and ascensor operators who were really excited to hand off clues, and blowing up balloons with the entire staff of the Color Café. Sarah being our resident gymnast, a handstand photo was required at every stop. Not to mention a “shot” of manjar-filled chocolate.

When we finally got to Color Café, a festive table was waiting for us. The two folk singers sang “Féliz Cumpleanos” in harmony, accompanied by the rhythm of an acoustic guitar. The gruff chef with the eye patch and the fisherman’s cap handed Sarah a hand-painted glass ashtray as a birthday present. The quirky waitress, Angélica, who lives with a friend in the apartment right above the café, sat down and chatted with us for most of the night. And as we sipped our kiwi-apple, chirimolla-orange, and banana-lemon SuperJugos, we looked around at the walls covered with kites and keys and postcards and maps and crepe paper and puppets and necklaces and records and candy wrappers and tea bags and playing cards.

That just might be my favorite place in Valparaíso. And it just might have been my favorite night here.

Trozos

So, when I first saw the Dunkin Donuts in the mall of Viña del Mar, I was pretty mad. I mean, come on, a city with a funky bohemian café on every corner does not need to be polluted by American fast food chains. But then I saw that they offered the flavor “Suspiro Limeño” (“Sigh of Lima”), which is a powdered doughnut filled with manjar. So I praised glocalization and bought one.

In other news, I am now friends with the nun in my dance class. She’s from Mexico, and she’s been in Chile for four years as part of a mission that helps orphans. And her name is Laura, "el nombre más hermoso del mundo." And if the nun said it, it must be right ;)

What else? Drawing is wonderful and addictive, Sebastian said his friends at the party thought I was cool, I’m getting a haircut tomorrow, I know too much about Chilean colonial economics, and my room has just been restocked with Calipso cookies and apricot juice. Awesome.

Song and dance, color and light :)

So I’ve got myself a routine, and so now maybe I can be a little less neglectful about this blog :)

My classes are finally all settled, and I really like them all. Choosing them, however, was one big whirlwind of panic. The international students luckily had a month-long grace period to test out classes, but I got a late start since the history classes started two weeks later than all the others. Scrambling to collect the required 12 credits, I kept ending up in really intimidating classrooms with distant, mumbly professors and *gulp* oral exams. But after a couple weeks of uncertainty, I ended up with six classes that I like: three history – Colonization of Chile, Formation of the Hispanoamerican Culture, and Urban History/History of Valparaíso – and three music – Choral Practical, Fundamentals of Ethnomusicology, and Traditional Dances of Chile. AND I’ve got my student ID card now, so trips in the micro buses only cost me 150 pesos (around 30 cents) instead of 400 (around 80 cents), not to mention my super sweet Chilean ID card, which allows me to legally walk the streets. Awesome.

So far, the workload hasn’t been terrible. I’ve read no less than three full books on the economics of colonial Chile…in Spanish…but the readings for the other history classes have been more manageable, and work outside of the classroom is rare for any of the music classes. The trickiest part is the technical stuff – things like finding out when classes are canceled so I don’t show up to an empty classroom and getting photocopies of all the readings when there’s only one copy of the book in the library – but asking lots of questions has allowed me to get closer to the professors and also to the Chilean students in the class (I actually ended up spending an afternoon with two kids named Nicolas and Sebastian after asking them for help with the photocopier). I’ve got a bunch of tests coming up this week and next, which I’m only angry about since all of the other universities have a week off for Fiesta de la Patria (and even more time off because of a slew of student strikes). Which means Sarah, Maddie and Hannah are off traveling in Patagonia and Chiloé while I’m studying in my room. Not cool. Also, sort of scary, since I’m used to having partner-in-crime in my Chilean adventures, and so this weekend I’m pulling off a solo gringa act at all the birthday parties and concerts I’m going to. Yikes!

But the classes, as much as I only intended them to be a small part of my adventure, have really shaped my experience here. A few weeks back, the music department of La Católica hosted an international music festival, and my chorus class participated in a week-long choral workshop directed by a visiting conductor from Poland. This was awesome, since the conductor spoke some English but no Spanish, so for once, I was the one who knew what was going on! We met for a series of rehearsals all week, and put on a concert that Saturday. And check it out: we made it onto the music institute's website! http://www.revistamusical.ucv.cl/fdv/fotos/019.act01.jpg and http://www.revistamusical.ucv.cl/noticias/ago13.31/info.html

But the best part of that workshop, really, was that I ended up spending a lot of time with some realty great kids – and all music dorks! The day after the concert, I went to school’s orchestra concert with Francisco (who, you’ll remember, is the guitarist from PANIKO ROCK FEST), Diego, Fabian, Sarah, Maddie, and Mary Ellen (another American in the chorus). We headed to Café Journal afterwards, and in the middle of one of the toasts, Diego broke out into “To Life!” from Fiddler on the Roof, following that up with some “Tradition” and “If I Were a Rich Man.” I sort of stared at him for a second, then hugged him, and declared him my best friend. That was a fantastic night (ignore the fact that my cell phone was stolen that night, which was a saga in itself), and a real turning point for me. The rest of the week, the group of us exchanged mp3s, went music-festival hopping, and sang both choral epitaphs to Don Quixote and 90s hits by Weezer. Tonight, in fact, Diego and I are hanging out in Viña and then going to see Francisco’s band play in Valparaíso. My theory holds: the best way to make friends is to sing with them. Which is why, um, I joined another student chorus, too :) And the Cuban cha cha chas and Peruvian folk pieces we sing are even more fun.

My dance class has also been a treat. Three professors, ten American students, fifty Chilean students and one nun (awesome, I know) all get together in the auditorium of a church to play Mapuche games and to do Aymara dances. Right now, we’re learning cueca, the national dance of Chile. (Sebastian: “What’s the national dance of the US?” me: “Uhh…I don’t think we have one…”) It’s a partner dance which is supposed to imitate the courtship of a rooster and a hen – the two dancers step evasively back and forth in semi-circles and S-shaped patterns until they finally end up arm in arm at the end. It also involves a lot of handkerchief and skirt twirling. All the American kids are still pretty lost, and there’s actually a quiz coming up, but fortunately so is Fiesta de la Patria. I hear the streets explode with flags, ramadas, empanadas, and cueca, so I should have plenty of opportunities to practice.

It probably seems like I’m busy all the time, but that’s not really true – most of my classes meet just once a week, and I don’t spend too much time with friends during the weekdays. Because of this, I end up having plenty of time to reflect, which has been invaluable. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who walks around with a notebook, and suddenly I am. I always carry a backpack full of journals and stationery, which I scribble in anytime I’m alone in plazas and cafés. I also bought myself a sketchbook and some colored pencils, which has been an adventure in itself since I know nothing about drawing, but has helped me put on paper some of the images and especially the colors that have stuck with me.

So, what did I forget? The weather is getting warmer and the Spanish is getting easier every day, Sarah and I discovered that the Chilean film Sexo con amor is way too much fun, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to come back to the States and not have a constant supply of avocadoes, kiwi and manjar (sort of like dulce de leche). I’m actually thinking about applying to be an RA at the Spanish House at Middlebury senior year, just so I can keep pretending I’m in Chile and organize onces and movie nights and cueca parties.

Thanks for reading, and double thanks to everyone who has written letters! I’m in the middle of a letter writing spree, so expect to hear back as soon as the Chilean post decides to deliver them! ¡Chao, que les vaya bien!