El 18 de septiembre y mi familia

Hello,
Again, I am about a week behind in writing!
El 18 de Septiembre: the day that is celebrated and looked forward to the most of the year. There is about a week of celebration before and after the 18th. Here is my story of the week:

Thursday, September 14, 2006 was the first day of the great fiesta that they call Fiestas Patrias here in Chile. After classes on Thursday I went home and worked on some homework. That night I went to a Ramada, pretty much just a big party outside where they dance cueca and drink chicha. The Ramada was sponsored and planned by Educación Fisica (the students in Physical Education) at La Católica. It was a good time, except that we got there about 2 hours too early. For the first hour and half there was no one there except for us and the people who were working the Ramada! It was pretty boring at first, but we had a good time talking. After awhile people started to show up and we started to have a much better time, but we had plans to go out to Scratch, a discotèque in Viña, that night with a friend. When Lee and I told her that we wanted to stay at the Ramada she got frustrated with, which made it very difficult to stay. To avoid the repercussions of staying and making her mad, Lee and I left and went to Scratch. This has to this point been the thing that I have regretted doing the most of my time in Chile because for the first time, there were Chileans talking to me and I was having a really good time and there are only Ramadas once a year, during Fiestas Patrias and Scratch is there all the time. Oh well, I guess, you live and you learn. From this experience I learned that I have to stick up for myself more and do what I truly want to do rather than going along with one person wants to do to make them happy because if I don´t listen to my heart and do what I really want I am not going to be happy!

On Friday and Sunday nights I went to other Ramadas, one was in Valparaiso and the other in Viña. They were much bigger as it was something that the public could attend and not just for the University. They reminded me a lot of a state fair, but on a smaller scale, with carnival games and rides and booths that sell food. There were also places that you could pay to enter to dance, cueca and other types of dance.

For the 18th, the big day, I went to a party/Ramada at the house of a Chilean and another student from my program. This was a huge event with about 50 people, dancing, singing, drinking, eating, and in general just having a great time until the wee hours of the morning. I had a very good time, but was very ready for my bed when I got home at about 6am (eek!)

During the days I spent time with my family. On Saturday I went to Limache (a town between Santiago and Viña) and then to the mountains with Lelo and Fernanda. Fernanda´s brother lives in Limache, so we went to there house first because we were riding with them up to their son´s cabana in the mountains. Her brother has three houses on his property. He and his wife live in one and they rent the other two (he designed and built all of the houses himself!). The cabana was also designed by him and it was absolutely beautiful! We were up in the mountains all day. The day was beautiful and warm. We had an asado (barbeque) of steak, pork and blood sausage (I opted not to eat the blood sausage as I had consumed it while I was in Peru). After eating all of the food there, I was so full that I could not eat for the rest of the day!

On Monday Lelo and I walked down to the ocean and bought kites from a street vendor. Lelo tested all the kites for their flight factor with a strong wind (they had to have some slack in the paper so they didn´t rip in the wind). While he was testing his kites a couple of women walked up to buy kites and he started talking to them about the kites and what makes a good kite, totally selling them on a kite. After the women were convinced that he was the vendor, the real vendor walked up to make the exchange of kite for money and the women were shocked and did not believe her when she told them that Lelo was buying a kite! Needless to say I was laughing the entire time! After we had our kites and our string, we headed to El Estadio Español (a club for people with Spanish ancestory) in Recreo, a part of Viña. There was a competition for flying kites on Monday, but we were too old to participate, apparently you had to be a little kid flying your kite with a parent. Lelo was bummed because he wanted to win, but we flew our kites anyway. Lelo is a kite flying pro! He knows all about the knots to tie to make the kite fly differently, how to get the kite in the air, how to keep it in the air, pretty much everything! He taught me how to fly a kite in about five minutes and then I was flying the kite solo without any help. After our kite flying expedition we went to another asado in at Fernanda´s cousin´s (Amparo) daughter´s (Mari) house in Viña. Fernanda is the youngest of five children by ten years. Her oldest brother is about 20 years older than she is. Amparo is about 25 years older than she is so Mari is about the same age as Fernanda. Again I ate a lot of food, but this time there were more veggies and I ate chicken rather than steak or pork. After eating we sat around the dining room table talking. It reminded me of our family after big dinners: telling stories, laughing, and debating the origins of pisco and dulce de leche. It was very entertaining.

Lelo and I left a bit early to go home to rest before the big night. On our walk home I learned a lot about my extended family. I am living in a family with money. Fernanda´s dad had a lot of land when Fernanda was younger and up until about 10 years ago when he sold it to someone who built a low-income housing development on it. From the sale of the land he made a lot of money. Fernanda´s mom and siblings grew up in a house that is now the town hall of a town in between Viña and Limache. It is really big (I guess the town government kicked the family out of the house when Fernanda´s grandma died, but I am not totally clear on the story). Amparo, Fernanda´s cousin, is married to one of the richest men in Chile. When Amparo´s dad died, he left her a substantial amount of money. With this money Amparo´s husband invested in parts of some food enterprise. He sold out his shares of this enterprise to put the money into a company called Costo, a producer and distribuiter of cookies and crackers, where he has made millions. He and Amparo are separated, but not divorced and Amparo receives about 50% of the profits. Their children are in charge of the business in Argentina and the U.S.A. Lelo´s parents died many years ago. His mom died in 1979 of cancer; his dad, of a heart attack in 1983. He and Fernanda met when Fernanda was doing her student teaching in the school that Lelo was teaching at. They started dating and got married in 1984.

Once again, I have written another long post. I have to go and study now.

Love,
Kathy

Quizes, La Serena, and the start of Fiestas Patrias

Hola todos,

A lot of time has passed since I last wrote, so I have a lot to say...I may have to do it in two e-mails, but I have not decided yet. While it is getting colder in the U.S. here in Chile it is getting warmer by the day it seems. The days are very warm, but after the sun goes down, it still gets very cold here.

The week of September 4

I had three quizes this week, two of them were essays and one was a regular grammar quiz. One of the quizes was assigned on Monday and was not due til the next Monday (this is something that had changed a week before the quiz because originally the profesor had been planning on an in class essay but since she is leaving for Spain and will be gone for 3 weeks she wanted the time for a lecture instead of an essay). We were able to work on the quiz in groups of 2 or 3 people, so I worked with two other girls and we each did one section of the three part quiz. My other essay quiz I did on my own even though I could have worked with another person (in hindsight, I should have worked with another person because it would have been a ton less work!) The topic of this quiz was one of the Pueblos Originarios (the indigineous populations of Chile). I chose to write about the Rapanui, the inhabitants of Easter Island, and the reasons for their disappearance. In my research I discovered that the popular belief that they destroyed themselves through the abuse of their natural resources, i.e. trees, a population too big for the island to support, and a lack of other resources as a result of the large population, led to wars between the different family groups on the island and canabalism. This caused the population to fall from 20,000 people to around 2,000 and then when the explorers discovered the island the remaining population was wiped out by disease and the slave trade. I found many articles to this effect and this is what the professor that came in to speak to us also said. But I also found several articles that disproved this hypothesis for the downfall of the Rapanui. They had much more scientific basis and seemed much more credible. They looked at the island and the environment of the island with is much like the Hawaiian islands and other Polyinesian islands. It seems that when the Rapanui settled the island they brought rats with them, either as stow-aways or as a source of protein. The rats ate the seeds of the palm trees that the Rapanui used to construct their moais (the great stone statues of faces, that are really whole bodies as well, but the bodies are underground), build fires and their houses. The trees eventually went extinct, but this did not explain the extinction of the Rapanui. Archiological evidence is now suggesting that the Rapanui arrived on the island about 400 years after originally thought, they constructed their moais and used the trees. Their population never exceeded 3,000. Which means that the wars for resources and land did not happen and that the downfall and destruction of the population was almost solely the fault of the explorers with the introduction of disease, the rape of the women, and the abduction of thousands as slaves for Peru. When all was said and done, in either history, only 100 Rapanui remained living on the once prosperous island. Yep I wrote about this topic for about five pages. Five pages in Chile is much more difficult that in the U.S. for two reasons: one, I am writing in Spanish which unfortunately is slightly more difficult that writing in English, and two, they don´t double space here, they use one and a half spacing which requires a lot more words to form a five page paper. In Chile I am writing one average 2 essays per week. In the U.S. I would write on average 4 essays per semester! It is quite different. My grammar test consisted of categorizing words into their parts of speach, diagramming sentences, and determining whether a word was an adjective or an adverb. It was pretty easy. I didn´t take it the same day as my classmates because I had a trip to La Serena with my program, so I had to take it the following Monday during class.

La Serena

We left on Thursday, September 7, 2006 to travel about six hours north. In La Serena we were in the north, but not the extreme north. La Serena is a very touristy city, a city of resorts and vacations. However, it also has a very important history in Chile. It was the second city in Chile to be founded after Santiago. We arrived very late to our cabanas...yes, we were staying in cabanas on the beach (or across the street from the beach). It was very exciting. I stayed in a cabana with Claire, Bethany and Tyffanie, my group of girls here in Chile. When we first got there we knew that there was supposed to be food for onces, tea that is normally taken at 6 pm, but the amount of food that was there for us was enormous, so we just assumed that it was for our breakfast the next morning as well. We went to bed and then the next morning I woke up and made scrambled eggs, toast and palta (avacado). It was a great breakfast. We then went to the reception to meet with the other people in our large group to start the day. Turns out we had our timing wrong and that all of the food was for onces because we had breakfast in the reception...oops! After all of this we had a very long, but good day. We had a tour of La Serena, went to the University of La Serena to learn about Gabriela Mistral, one of Chile´s most important and well known authors, had lunch in the University´s cafeteria, and then had free time to wander around the city. After this we got back on the bus to go to Vicuna, a city 1.5 hours east of La Serena. In Vicuna we learned how Pisco was made in the Capel factory. Pisco is a very important alcoholic beverage in Chile and Peru. The Chileans and the Peruvians fight over whose invention pisco was originally. To make pisco you need sweet grapes (not the same kind as you use to make wine, they are much sweeter and produce a wine that can not be sold as wine because it exceeds the limit for percent alcohol). After the grapes have fermented for about 3 weeks or when the wine has reached the correct percent alcohol they distill it, bottle it, package it, and ship it to be sold in stores around the country and South America. I don´t think it is shipped around the world because I have never seen pisco in the U.S., but it is possible that there is pisco in the U.S. and I just never knew what it was and never really shopped for alcohol while I was in the U.S. After our tour of the pisco plant we got to taste the pisco. There were several types of pisco that we were able to try: mango pisco, papaya pisco, regular pisco, cola de mono, chica (more about chica later!), and pisco sour. After this we left to go back into Vicuna proper to tour the house and museum of Gabriela Mistral. The house was super tiny, it only had two rooms in it. Then we had some more free time to eat dinner or to just wander around. SInce we had been provided with a sandwich, an orange and some juice for dinner, I opted to keep my money and just eat the sandwich. The night was clear which was a super good thing, but the moon was full too, which was cool, but kind of sucked for the next thing we did. We went up to the Mammauca Observatory to look at the stars and to learn about the constellations in the southern sky. They are different than in the north. The southern cross was pretty neat. We got to view the moon through a telescope, which was really cool, but the light of the moon dimmed out a lot of the really cool stars that we would have seen without the full moon, but oh well. I got to see stars of different colors, red, blue and yellow. The colors signify the age of the star. And then we left the observatory after a jam session with the astronomers to go back to La Serena where we went to bed. The next day, Saturday, we had a free day. I had hoped for a nice day, but it started off pretty gross, cloudy and cold. For the first half of the day we went to Racoba, the market, to look at things and to purchase a few things as well. I bought some earrings, papaya syrup and a scarf. Tyffanie, Bethany, Claire and I bought a Chilean coin from 1933 that a man had cut very precisely and beautifully into four parts and now each of us has a part of the coin like a pendant. After lunch I went to the Cross in Coquimbo. The cross was commisioned or blessed by Pope John Paul II. It reminded me a lot of the St. Louis Arch. We went up in it and could see all of Coquimbo and La Serena...it was breathtaking. We walked down into Coquimbo to learn a little more about the city. We walked into a museum in the middle of the city. It was really random. A few years ago there was some construction happening on one of the plazas in the city. They had to halt construction because of torrential rains. After the rains they discovered skeletons of humans surrounded by the body of a llama. This is how the the indigenous people buried their dead in this part. If it weren´t for the rain they would not have made this discovery. It was pretty cool to see. After this we returned to La Serena, had dinner, and then played On Sunday we woke up, packed and returned to Viña del Mar.

The next week, September 11-September 13 was pretty uneventful in my world...class, homework, and class. However, September 11 is a very important day in Chilean history. On September 11, 1973 the Junta Militar took place. Pinochet and the militia took control of the country after bombing La Moneda (the "White House" of Chile). Salvador Allende committed suicide. And Chile was changed forever. Pinochet was a horrible man. During his rule in Chile many people disappeared and were executed for beliefs contrary to those of the government. The freedom to think freely was eliminated and forced underground in Chile for 16 years until 1989 when Pinochet was voted out of the dictatorship and Chile became a democracy again with a newly elected president. I was told to be very careful when I was going to class on Monday because there are usually riots on the 11th in the universities and in other parts of the city and that I did not want to be a part of any of it. I did not see anything, but apparently there were riots in Valparaiso that I saw on the news.

Also on Monday Claire´s micro (bus) got in an accident. There was a military transport vehicle stalled on the highway around a curve, so when her micro came around the curve her driver didn´t see the vehicle in time to stop or avoid it. There were only 5 people in the micro and none of them were badly injured...stitches in the mouth for the same thing as Claire, but the marines in the other vehicle were pretty beat up. Two of them died. I was in a later micro and I saw the crash, but had no idea that it was Claire´s micro. I saw a guy lying on the road (the only thing I saw was a hand and an arm, but it still had a really powerful impression on me, I almost started to cry, even though I didn´t know what had happened. Claire had been reading on the micro and when her micro crashed, she flew forward and hit the seat in front of her with her chin. She was brought to the emergency room where she received three stiches inside her mouth where her teeth had almost cut all the way through her lower lip. She also had butterfly stitches outside where she was cut from the seat, but not deeply. I spent my afternoon with her as she was in a rough state. I almost got on the same micro as her, but decided to wait for one that went a bit more directly to where I was going. Her accident almost ruined her plans to go south for our extended weekend. But it didn´t she still went south!

The 18th of September is like the 4th of July. It is Fiestas Patrias and it is very important in Chile. There are parties and celebrations starting the 14th. My stories of this will be coming in the next post as this one is already really long!

Love,

Kathy

Futbol

Hola familia y amigos,

Another week has come and gone, super fast. I can not believe that I have been here for a month and a half already. Last week went really quickly. I decided not to take one of my literature classes, which is a very good thing because I am, with just one literature class, falling behind on my reading. I will catch up, somehow. With just five classes and seventeen credits I am going to be much happier and will hopefully not be quite as stressed out.

Last Saturday (26 August 2006) I went to soccer practice for the first time for baby futbol, it is like intramural soccer, but with fewer players and different rules. I practiced on Monday with the women´s team from PUCV. And then again on Wednesday. There is a story with Wednesday`s practice. So it was in a spot that I had no idea how to get to. The girls on the team had told me which micro I had to take to get there, but beyond that I was lost. I asked Lelo and Fernanda the night before if they knew how to get there, but they had never heard of it. Lelo and I looked it up on the internet so I had some idea of what it looked like. On Wednesday, I had class til 11:45 and practice was at 12:15. I didn´t know if the micro I needed even passed through Valparaiso. I asked one of the guys that shouts numbers and tips out at the drivers about which micros are in front and behind him and how far. He told me that neither of the micros I needed passed through Valpo and that I needed to go to Viña to catch one. I managed to finally encounter the one I needed, get on, and tell the driver where I needed to go and that I did not know where I had to get off. He said okay. We drove into a part of Viña called Reñaca Alto (not the best part of town…really poor). I saw a field out of the window, but there was no sign on it and the driver didn´t say anything to me, so I assumed it was further up. Nope. When I asked the driver where it was, he was like, shoot I forgot to tell you where to get off. He stoped another micro for me that was going back down and told the driver where I needed to get off. He dropped me off and told me I had to walk up the road a bit and that the cancha would be on the right hand side. I found the cancha but none of the girls were there and it didn´t look like the picture, so I walked down the hill to where I saw the other fields, where the practice was. I was only a few minutes late, after all of my adventures.

On Friday we had a baby football game which we lost miserably.

I am not sure that I have ever been as sore as I was for the entire week last week. I could barely walk, my entire body hurt. Today I am feeling better and can walk without a problem, thank goodness, but there is practice again tonight, so we will see if I am once again turned into a cripple.

I have to study…I have 3 quizzes this week (two of which are essays).

Love,

Kathy