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