Homecoming

‘Welcome to Walmart!’

a little voice inside my head… ‘Welcome to the United States of America’

Maybe I had romanticized home a little bit too much.

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Maybe. Reading my past blogs would certainly give that impression. And basically, it was true. But, my change of heart in South America, sometime in April when I broke out a calendar and a calculator, was mostly owed to my complete impatience and contempt for my specific university. It wasn’t that Chile isn’t the US, it’s that UAI isn’t U of M.

That drove me a lot further up a wall than it probably should have. I hope I didn’t romanticize UM too much. I guess we’ll find out in September.

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What exactly is study abroad good for in the first place? I spent the vast majority of this blog trying in one way or another to answer that. It was a frustrating question. I even went so far as to propose an alternate study abroad plan; the assumption there is that I knew what it was good for and that my plan was better at providing it.

I had always planned on studying abroad; before I was even looking at colleges I knew that the right place had to have a good international program. If you had asked me why I was so bent on doing this, I probably would have been confused and said ‘just because’. Seriously.

After thinking and writing about it (and living it) for the past six months, I’m not sure that’s a bad reason at all.

It might actually be the only legitimate reason.

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Buddhism teaches that when we take action because we have expect that a certain result will be fulfilled, or that we should obtain some benefit from acting, we set ourselves up for unhappiness and profound dissatisfaction. The only way to truly experience life to take action simply for it’s own sake. In doing so, we actually get much more benefit than if we had expected to benefit in the first place. Because even if all our expectations and desires are fulfilled, we are still left with the unanswerable question ‘was it worth it?’ We are then forced to try to quantify an experience on an internal scale, set an arbitrary goal for what level of ‘goodness’ is ‘worth it’, and clearly the problems spiral out of control from there.

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People ask a lot of questions when you get back from a long trip. I understand. It’s almost impossible not to. But the questions themselves are equally impossible to answer. You can’t reduce an experience to a few words, or try to frame it with generalizations like ‘yes it was fun’ or ‘I learned a lot’ or any other standard-issue answers. You can’t do any better with a paragraph or a page or a hundred.

Although Mom hates it, I think my standard answer of ‘meh hmm wrrr ghhh’ to any question summarizes it better than anything else. I even answer my own questions like that. Just look at my blog.

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Here’s a common question: What was the best part? Counting the entire trip, hands down it was the plane descending into Buenos Aires on the first day. I wrote about it in late January in a post titled Arrival: Expectations and a New Perspective. It’s still my favorite post in the whole blog. Notice I used the word ‘expectations’ in the title. I concluded accurately in that post that for Argentina, I had no expectations at all. For one moment as the plane was landing, I felt free.

It’s hard to explain that when people ask.

The reason I suffered later on in Chile was the gradual relinquishing of that freedom. I wanted UAI to be more like UM. I wanted to be less gringo and more Chilean. I felt like I should be accomplishing more. I thought I was wasting my time.

I expected to gain more out of Chile than this.

What exactly did I want to gain? I couldn’t tell you for sure. But the trip did teach me that lesson pretty clearly. I now know why.

Just because.

I Hate Titling My Posts

Clearly, Friday wasn’t a good day for me. So like any self respecting young male, Saturday I went out and got into a couple good fights. Nothing like wheeling around and throwing your flipper in somebody’s face to get over a bad mood right? Three points for me.

Karate has been good to me here in Chile. It keeps me sane, focused, and is my main resource for meeting actual Chileans. I capped off a good stint here with a second place finish in Saturday’s competition (with just a 1-1 record in the newby division… shhh, don’t mention it). The test for my yellow belt is next week, and with any luck I’ll keep practicing back in Ann Arbor in a few months.

Speaking of which, I have to decide once again whether or not to keep writing this blog after I leave in a little over a week. I’m not going to lie, it still feels really weird every time I sit down to write an entry. I’m still surprised every time I hear that people actually read this. I just keep yakking about my life or the stuff that runs through my mind, and 90% of it to me doesn’t seem all that interesting. Plus, going back and living in Houghton for a bit will probably make it even less so. I’ll decide soon enough.

However, I do have to say that I’ve gotten a lot out of this. I like writing, even when my writing sucks, and this has given me a lot of practice and confidence in doing it. Actually, I’ve got a micro-announcement to make: I’m starting a website. I’m putting this on paper (or screen) here just for the sake of putting pressure on myself to actually follow through and do the dang thing. I’ll be creating the best travel writing pieces I can create to document my experiences in South America and encourage people to travel here, provide trip ideas, inspiration, etc. The end goal will be to sign on a couple of non-obnoxious affiliates and create a set-and-forget micro-income stream that way. I’m trying to convince one of my friends who has also travelled a lot here to help out. It’s basically zero investment (=low pressure) except the time to set it up, and even if nobody shows up it will still be a worthwhile experience. For now the goal is to have most of the content created by the end of summer and a working website up by Christmas. We’ll see how it goes.

Finally, a congratulations to my cousin Laura on her marriage this weekend; hope everything went well over the weekend, best wishes all around!

on control

Ademas, la ley fomenta el uso irresponsable y desinformado de… breathe, dude. stop talking so fast. o sea, los resultos de los cuales, eee... ok, ok, calm, eeeeh… dude, move your feet. your knees are shaking. back up and start that sentence again. mmmm… oy! quit shaking! …your whole body is shaking! stop! i can’t focus when you’re doing this! neither can I remember what comes next. great. the whole page is a blur of words in my mind. quit @#$#%# shaking!!!

congratulations.

how to fail a final in 15 torturous seconds. i thought you were good at this? i thought you had this down? i didn’t know you were actually physically capable of sucking that badly. congratulations. i wish i could shake your hand.

this would happen today. after missing morning class. after losing my karate suit. after…

seriously. it’s 8:30 already. maybe if people would have followed the flippin directions and kept their speech to two minutes we’d have been out of here at 7 like scheduled. now i can’t get to karate, when all i want to do is go kick something really hard. great. that also means you missed the bus. which further means that you aren’t going make it to that asado at redyn’s to say goodbye to everybody who leaves tomorrow. woo.

i wish i could leave tomorrow. lucky pricks.

there’s a fly in my room now. isn’t it something that he’s a fly and you’re not? sucky fly. it’s a good thing flies can’t squash me. lucky prick.

seriously though, are we really so powerful? are we really in control?

Notes on a Sunday Morning

I woke up with a bit of a start and glanced out my window, greeted by a pair of glowing ruby red eyes that stood out against the darkness of night like something supernatural. The stars were also out in force tonight, bright enough it seemed to light up the night even without the help of the moon. It could also have just been my imagination filling in the blanks I suppose, picturing trees and lakes in the distance to match my immediate surroundings. I looked back, and as always I wondered whether maybe those eyes were maybe stars in the past, now fizzled out into red dwarves and stuck into the soul of this wolf. This thing was about to try to kill me, but I wasn’t worried. I’d been here before, many times over. The first couple of times didn’t end well, but I kept making progress, finding hiding spots in this miserable shack in the woods and figuring out how to get away. By now it was ruitine, the terror was gone, just replaced by adrenaline. I knew how this would end. I was homefree. Sometimes endings are predictable; sometimes nightmares aren’t so scary.

I woke up in the real world to some racket coming from the back porch. I thought it might have been another earthquake, but realized it was just the cats going at it yet again. They fight up on the rooftop almost every night and it always ends with a crash onto the stairs below. I checked my clock, 5:30 am. I got up anyways, made a cup of tea and set my cactus up on my windowsill to catch the sunrise. I picked him up a few months ago in this miserable tourist town called Pomaire on an organized trip and named him Felix. Its hard to explain how a pokey cactus can be so calming and friendly. I gave him a few spoonfulls of tea.

On the way back from that trip I had stopped at Color Café with Holly, one of my best friends here, who also picked up a cactus. Along with Sushi Sun Mondays, Color Café Sundays had become a highlight of pretty much every week. It’s a hole in the wall joint in old-town Valpo, where houses are made of shipping containers and people pay to have professional graffiti artists paint the walls. The café is one of those places that feels kind of timeless inside, like you could spend a week there without blinking. The walls are decorated by the customers with drawings on napkins and souvenirs. The menu is six pages of teas and two pages of (real) coffees. Unlike Sushi Mondays, it’s usually just myself, Holly and sometimes Haylie on Sundays. It’s usually the best day of the week.

Holly took off this morning, gone in the first wave of the gringo exodus from Chile. She gets to spend three incredible weeks in Bolivia before going home, including a bike ride down the Death Road followed by a weeklong boat/hike/camp trip in the Beni River basin. I’m really excited for her, and not the least bit jealous. But I’m also sad, because today’s Sunday, and we’re not going to Color Café.

What do you do when endings are predictable? At least half the excitement of life is simply not knowing what the future holds. Do you pretend like there’s no deadline? Or do you just stop yourself from getting attached in the first place? Within a couple of weeks, every single one of us here will go back to our separate worlds, regardless, as if this whole thing had never happened. It’s almost like a six month long dream, where everybody knows the ending, separated down here from the real world, and everybody knows we’re about to wake up. This, like a lot of other life situations, will be all be a memory and a few blips here and there on Facebook. Things change, paths turn, the world moves on. It’s everywhere, yet it also begs the question - does goodbye always actually mean the end, or does everything, in some way, live on?

Chile in pain

‘Dude, I got effing tear gassed!’

That’ll pretty much put a wrap on any day. It’s also pretty good excuse to not go to class. That’s all Ryan was trying to do today.* Tough day all in all, but at least he dodged the irritant-laced water cannon, dogs, and projectiles.

Nobody else was going to class today either, or anytime in the past three weeks as a general strike by all of Chile’s public university students wears on and turns progressively more confrontational. The issue at hand is nothing revolutionary; students complain of rising tuitions and apparent misuse of funds, officials obviously deny the claims and accuse the students of wanting a free ride. It’s an issue heavily divided by generational and class lines, just as it is in the United States or England recently. Yet in Chile, issues like this are never quite as simple as a complaint or disagreement to be settled by lawsuit or edict. It’s a straight-up fight, and it’s personal.

The ongoing war over education, framed by the students in terms of social rights and responsibilities, is hardly an isolated incident. Just in the past four and a half months since I arrived, there have been three separate large scale waves of protest. HidroAysen. The May 21^st demonstrations. Now education. From the outside, this would sound like a good sign for the country; a vibrancy in the air, where people aren’t afraid to point out problems and challenge authority, demand change to improve society. Many international commentators cheered when the people came out in force to protest the government’s plans to dam up Patagonia, and undoubtedly the current situation with public education has it’s share of outside support as well. But from the inside, things look a lot different. Every one of these protests started with positive intentions and subsequently devolved into all-out riots that threaten public safety and repeatedly blur ethical lines.

The sad thing is that all of these rioters are rallying around good causes, and in doing so, they kill any possibility of change. It’s a case of having too much of a good thing. Students are right to be upset with rapidly increasing costs and poor spending, but they take that several steps too far when they work themselves into a rage and attack police cars with rocks and baseball bats. During the HidroAysen protests, one policeman was ripped from his car and beaten to death. That helps nothing. That guy had no influence over the issue at hand. Simply being tied to the State was enough, and it became personal. Further hundreds were injured, arrested, and the damages were heavy and widespread.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There’s a stark difference between civil disobedience and direct confrontation, and Chile has yet to learn where to draw that line. Ironically, Chile’s neighbors to the north in Bolivia, much poorer people with arguably bigger problems, provide a contrasting example to Chile’s behavior. Bolivians frequently strike by camping out in the streets, shutting down the country’s transportation, and quietly but emphatically forcing the business or government’s hand. By resorting to riots in Chile, the people force the government to squash it using tear gas and water cannons mounted on police tanks. The riot is dispersed, people are locked up or hospitalized, and the issue continues to exist. It also makes it extraordinarily easy for leadership to simply dismiss protesters as hooligans, rather than citizens in good conscience demanding change.

If Chile is to assert itself as South America’s flagship nation for economic and social prosperity, its youth need to grow up, fast. Being critical doesn’t imply being confrontational. Nor are the police your enemy. The Chilean police force is considered a model for all Latin countries, and it’s a good thing because they are stuck dealing with the most rebellious population. There are plenty of honest, peaceful demonstrators as well of course, but until they stand up to the legions of instigators, the resentful, and their wounded sense of pride, nothing here will change for the better. To reject violence, rioting and barbarism – now that’s something worth protesting about.

*to clarify, ISA still holds separate class for those at La Catolica. UAI is a private school and not participating in the strike.

Weekend Fun and Philosophy

As part of the ongoing effort to make life more exciting here, a group of us decided to make a weekend trip down to the tiny town of Pichilemu to watch the South American Surf Championships and see a little more of Chile. I’m not normally interested in surfing much, but it was a lot more fun than expected. The best waves in South America happen off the tip of a very rocky cliff, and the modest crowd camped out by the edge on a turf of blankets and tarp. Quality reggae was played throughout (another thing I’m not normally interested in but turned out great) and the surfers took the time to meet people and take a pics. Best of all, not only were free pancakes and fruit accompanied by free coffee, but it was real ground coffee made with a full espresso machine! In Chile of all places! It was too much for me to handle after suffering nescafe for five months. After my third double espresso with cinnamon in two hours, I was getting worried about twitching myself off the cliff edge and called it quits.

One of the things that struck me yet again was the sheer quantity of energy in every wave. These things were 7 or 8 meters high, at least as thick, and many miles wide. Think of how heavy a bucket of water is, then imagine a million of them moving as fast as you can run. That happens every ten seconds, continuously. Recreating that with machines would require incredible amounts of energy. In a given 1-kilometer stretch of coast at Pichilemu, approximating an average wave of 5 by 5 meters moving at 4 meters per second (8 mph) and a wave every ten seconds, the power output figures to 20 megawatts on velocity alone – enough to run 4 freight trains at peak output!

The next weekend was a day trip to La Campana National Park, featuring a very difficult hike up 2000 meters to the rocky summit of a mountain by the same name. Here are the picture highlights:

Additionally, Aunt Pat sent me this comment on my posts about time to start a discussion. Please join in!

‘I've been pretty interested in what you have written about time, as it's something I also like to think about. There are some radically different ways of thinking about time, which can completely change one's way of going about living. For instance, the early pagan cultures--Sumerian, Roman, Greek--all saw time as being cyclical. Whatever is happening has happened again and will happen again. Nothing is new, so why build anything? Those cultures also did not have the concept of the individual, rather one was always part of the clan/tribe/people/etc. So there was no such thing as individual history, and no such thing as linear time to go along with that.

Along came Abraham and all that changes. (I just finished a really interesting book called "The Gifts of the Jews" about this.) Abraham gets called by a God who is not just another family member, rather glorified (literally), but a God who created all and is above all. God called Abraham out of Sumer, and you have the first individual history starting to be written. The first writings that are about "I". The future is now really dependent on what I do in the present. History becomes the movement of time. Each moment is unique and unrepeatable. And so hope is born--hope of doing something worthwhile with my life, of making a difference.

Then there are the Asian folk, at least I'm told the Japanese, who do not "spend" time, but rather "collect" it. So when you get to the end of a long life, you have a treasury collected, not an emptiness spent--with the question was it all worth it?

Then there are interesting ideas about time when God gets included. For instance, as creator He stands above time, and sees all time at the same time all the way to the end of time (which study is called teleology, the study of the end of time). So He already knows everything I'm writing and your response. That calls forth a very different relationship!

In church we have something called 'liturgical time' (in the Orthodox Church, I don't think other Christians have developed this in the same way). So when we go to church, like I do at least twice a day every day, we consider that we are encountering eternity--the membrane between time and eternity is very thin, so we can actually experience the Kingdom of Heaven now. We can experience the reality of God now, even if in very small part. Which helps interrupt the constant demand of time--the urgency and resulting anxiety that you wrote about. It enables us to begin (it's a life-long process) to live more fully in the present, which is really touching eternity. Each moment becomes a gift both from God and that can be used for Him and given back to Him. One of our most well loved theologians said, "Become at every moment a fresh paradise to those around you." That's a goal worth living for!’ –

Well, let me start off by mentioning that this is now my fifth draft. I can’t make up my mind.

Philosophy is something I dodged for a long time, mostly because I found it depressing. I always ended up coming back to a kind of cynical, fatalist view of the world, as in ‘in the grand scheme of things, nothing matters’. If I could sit on Pluto and speed up time and just watch the Earth turn for a few billion years, it would certainly seem that way. Whether you were the one to build a fantastic empire, or the one to bomb it to the ground, well, who cares? I’m on Pluto, and it’s now a billion years later. In the long run, you and all your actions really didn’t matter, however spectacular they may have been. Pass me the popcorn and we’ll watch the sun die out and consume the inner solar system.

Depressing, and that philosophy would lead us all to hedonism and suicide. It doesn’t pass the gut test. It also doesn’t answer the question of limits – if I can sit on Pluto and speed up time at my leisure, can I experience the end of time? Is there an end of time? Does it even matter?

Whether or not there is a beginning and end to the universe doesn’t change the fact that there’s a beginning and end to life. You mentioned a number of different culture’s views on time – I’ll add one more: animals. The vast majority of animals (humans, elephants, dolphins, and perhaps a few other very intelligent animals being exceptions) have no internal concept of their own death. Many have little perception of the future as well. Their actions are all reactions; based on external conditions, habits, instinct, feelings. There’s a branch of philosophy/psychology that says that majority of human actions and feelings are, under the surface, tied to our consciousness of our own impending death.

So where does this all lead? If living immediately in the present is the ultimate goal, are animals smarter and happier than we are?

I have more questions than answers.

How to Study Abroad

Here’s another thought I’ve been working on: I screwed up my choice of study abroad. Of course, this is a ‘hindsight is 20/20’ thing, but interesting. 3 clearly better alternatives:

1. I shouldn’t have ever touched ISA. Basically all study abroad programs are built for one type of person – the one who has never travelled, doesn’t know any language coming in and isn’t uncommonly independent. Out of the ISA group, I’d estimate that’s around 75%. The job of study abroad programs is to alleviate those three primary concerns. Think about what the programs advertise and you’ll get the idea.

Where we’ve gone wrong is assuming that all exchange students fit that mold. For the other 25%, the efforts of ISA will effectively sabotage the authenticity of your experience and diminish how much you learn and what you get out of it all. Between organizing tours, offering classes in English, holding required excursions with all the other gringos, setting you up to live with families and all other manner of holding your hand, the true experience (for those who want more than pictures and token cultural integration) gets hopelessly lost for the sake of minimizing pain and culture shock. It’s like boiling broccoli – it may make it more palatable to some but destroys the nutrients and reasons to eat broccoli in the first place.

My DIY study abroad plan for the 25% looks like this. Transfer to your new university (you may even get a scholarship). Get a student visa and pack your bags, leaving yourself plenty of time (at least a month) before term starts. When you arrive, travel around the area for a bit to get familiar with the culture and locale. Then, settle in to your city and stay at a cheap hostel, camp or couchsurf while looking for shared student housing opportunities (you’d be surprised how easy it is to jump in on these – a couple of ISAers did it with no problem). Try to meet one or maybe two other exchange students casually to give you an outlet and a travel partner (most local students won’t want to make weekend trips where they’ve already been). Go from there. You’ll also save about 8 grand.

2. I should have gone somewhere else. Like, a different part of the world, in a different language. I knew before this trip that I wanted to learn one more language (at least) after Spanish. What I didn’t define was how far I wanted to learn each. I’ve been hitting the law of exponentially diminishing returns pretty badly here in Chile – that learning a language to 95% is work but learning it to 98% is brutal. With Spanish, knowing just 2500 words will allow you to understand 95% of all speech and text. Getting to 98% comprehension requires learning an additional 25000 words.

In my case, I’m not yet solidly committed to Spanish as my dominant learned language. I have no idea what that will end up being, or even if there will be one. If, in the future, I get a promising opportunity that requires Spanish, I can get started on it with what I have now while I work further on those extra percentage points. But let’s say I take the time I would spend now to perfect Spanish and get 95% of a different language. My options now expand quite a bit. In my view, it’s probably better to have 90+% of a couple of languages than 99% of one, for the same amount of work.

3. I shouldn’t have studied at all. This, in hindsight, blows all other options out of the water. Since I don’t really need any of these credits, I could have avoided UAI/ISA and learned a whole heck of a lot more by taking that money and travelling/volunteering. Doing this offers a range and depth of experiences that is far greater than any study abroad program can touch. Call it minoring in life. A lot of content on this blog has already been dedicated to the topic, so we’ll leave it at that.

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It is what it is. Like I said, time’s not scarce. But… Weeze – I’m lookin at you son!

More Thoughts on Time

I’ve whined an aweful lot on this blog about time, probably as a result of suffering a year and a half of Michigan Engineering where every microsecond of every day counts (only slight exaggeration). I’ve stated before that I subscribe to the belief that time is your true wealth. The psychology of how we perceive time is interesting, and I had a breakthrough or two recently.

I was, ironically enough, sitting around playing Tetris on Monday night when I had this feeling of frustration wash over. I went out for a walk, which is my way of telling my subconscious: talk to me! It had some interesting things to say to me which changed how I view my time and my expectations. Four main points:

1. Time’s not scarce

2. You don’t have to do anything

3. When you remove all expectations, predictions and pressure, you multiply your capabilities

4. There’s nobody you need to justify yourself to

Let me explain.

First point. My world, like most Americans, is dominated by a sense of urgency. Stuff has to get done, in a certain order, as quick as possible. This is true in day to day routine as well as year to year. ‘Time’s not scarce’ refers to the big picture. The next couple of years for me look like this: Get through school, get internships and experience, pay down your debts, find a real job, get a life. The pressure I’m feeling to chew through all of this has been getting to me while I’m stuck here. But – here’s the interesting part. I know full well that there’s a lot of very worthwhile activities I could and should be doing with my time while I’m here. For the most part, I haven’t been doing them. I realized that my mind prioritizes blasting through schoolwork and the rest of the gig above pretty much all else. I haven’t gotten around to working on my projects because my internal checklist says ‘you still have to do school first, and you’re not’.

When I pretend that university life doesn’t exist; I’m coming home to nothing, no plan… I suddenly feel great about my time here. I immediately think of all the things that I could be doing, and actually want to do them rather than saying ‘I should.’ The anxiety just goes away.

The second point complements perfectly. I realized how much anxiety builds up in my mind about the things I SHOULD be doing with my time and my life. All the advice I’ve ever gotten from people and all the things I tell myself I should be doing build up into this great wall of anxiety. Take them all away, and I realize very clearly the things I WANT to be doing instead. Again, I’m not talking small picture like ‘I should be doing homework, but I want to go have fun’. Much bigger than that. We all say that we are in control of our lives, but most people still end up doing things with it they don’t really want to do. They do things that the ‘should’ do instead.

When I think about that, I realize that I want to do engineering. I’m studying engineering not because I should, but because I want to. I don’t think I’ve ever said it that outright and explicitly to myself before. It’s an empowering idea and it relieves a lot of anxiety. It’s not that I should be an engineer because I’m good at math and science and I like the challenges. It’s that I simply want to do it.

I also let myself say that I want to be an entrepreneur. I’ve been saying to myself that I should be an entrepreneur given the challenges and benefits and lifestyle and the fact that it gets me all kinds of excited. Instead of telling myself that, I just let myself gravitate towards it and realize that it’s something I want to do. Fortunately, I can work on that while I’m here. And when I temporarily de-prioritize engineering and school, I do it.

Moving on to the third point, which builds on the first two. I use a lot of shoulds when I prepare for a challenge. I build an expectation of results that, given my personality, tends to be really high. This is my old inhereted perfectionism illness. That, unfortunately, leads me to avoid things where I’m scared I won’t clear the bar. But more than that, it leads to significantly worse performance. It’s like playing goalie – if you expect perfection, you’re going to be a terrible goalie. I learned to deal with my perfectionism in sports, and I need to transfer that to other areas of interest as well, like speaking Spanish for example. I often won’t speak in class because I don’t want to sound like a gringo, and that’s detrimental. It’s probably no coincidence that my favorite class is the one where I’m forced to speak up anyways – Oral Expression. Practicing how to shut up perfectionism might be the most important thing I ever get out of playing sports.

The final point adds punch to the third. When I screw up and things turn south, I tend to rationalize like mad. That needs to stop. It needs to be replaced by ‘Yes, you screwed up (big time, perhaps), but you’re still plenty good enough’.

To summarize:

- Turning a blind eye to the future allow for making the best use of the present

- Justification for interests needs to be emotional rather than logical

- The best results happen when no results are forecasted

- Isolate internal worth from external results

Each of these reduces anxiety and gets the personal machine running much cleaner. I’ll be practicing these daily. With any luck, soon you won’t have to put up with any more complaints about wasting time. I’ll have to start looking for new things to whine about to keep interest up.

Saturday Stuff: Chile, Time, and the Internet

May 21 every year is literally designated Protest Everything You Hate About Chile day. I’m not kidding. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the biggest difference between Chile and say, Peru, is that attitude that pulses through the entire country. From my experience, Peruvians are awefully proud to be Peruvian. They will make sure you know that fact at every opportunity, and you’d better not contradict them. Especially in the poor areas in the south where I was, the country sometimes feels like it marches to the beat of it’s fists pounding it’s own chest. Chileans, in stark contrast, are quiet and dismissive and will take the opportunity to tell you why Chile sucks. They’re sarcastic, more cynical than is healthy, and generally much more my style. You can really taste the difference by spending any amount of time in both countries.

In any case, the police aren’t taking any crap today, so I’m stuck here for a bit. This post is a partial follow-up on the Wednesday Afternoon Rant, plus some other stuff going through my head and an excuse to catch up on picture posting.

Fact of the Day #1: In a recent informal but highly scientific poll, 8/9 other gringos in ISA agree with me in strongly wanting to go back to normal college life instead of continuing here, given the option.

My housemate Blake was the only exception, taking a very carefree stance. The most commonly cited reasons? 1. UAI is high school, and 2. I’m wasting a whole lot of time. The typical expat complaint list (miss your friends, your family, sick of spanish, etc.) consistently gets beat out by those two.

Conclusion #1: I’m not crazy.

Everything has been happening in reverse here in Chile with this group. From the outset, ISA tries to warn you about pity parties that gringos like to throw in the first few weeks where they just sit around and complain about the new culture and wish they were home rather than integrating as best as possible. For the first three months, almost none of that happened. Now all of the sudden, people are sick of the place. It’s not your typical definition of reverse culture shock, but it’s happening.

In response, we’re trying to be proactive about it. I started two new facebook groups – gringo eats! and Kick the Bucket (dammit). I should have done this a long time ago. gringo eats! is a place to organize restaurant trips and asados; Kick the Bucket (dammit) is an open ended bucket list of easy-but-very-worth-it things to do before leaving. I created a bucket list for myself before, but aimed a little too high (things like ‘go to cuba’ got stuck on there after a friend found the airline mistake fare of US$289 round trip santiago-havana. unfortunately, we never made it).

I also scored a gig along with a few other gringos as a general contributer to the English tourist site Eye on Vina. The founder moved on and left the site in control of a Colorado girl named Kayla, and she desperately needs help with it all. One of my friends does similar work with other, larger media outlets in print and online, and it looks like fun to me. I know I can write well enough to do it when I try. The website is flat broke (part of my job, along with Blake, is to run effective marketing on zero budget) so instead of getting paid, she promised a glowing recommendation. If I can use that to leg-up to a paying outlet later on, that would be beyond prime.

I wish this had all happened a little earlier, but so be it. I have a final note on wasting time that is going to wander a bit, but I need to write this down.

Fact of the Day #2: A recent informal but highly scientific study found that 91.61% of my time-killing activity takes place on my laptop. Of that, approximately 42.77% is spent playing FreeCell, Hearts or Tetris while listening to music; the remaining 57.23% is spent surfing news outlets (ESPN, various political sites, AlJazeera) or blogs (too many to list).

Fact of the Day #3: A recent informal but highly scientific study found that playing FreeCell, Hearts or Tetris for more than about 20 minutes a day is patently ridiculous, and spending more than 15 seconds per week on news outlets or blogs makes you angry and depressed.

Why? Because politics flat out sucks. Because industrialized food is poisoning you in more ways than you can count. Because misplaced corporate interests rule the world. Because dictators, disease and despair kill people. Because regardless of what you think about specific topics (global warming, nuclear energy, etc), there’s no doubt that our world craps on the planet on a daily basis in ways we all agree on (like dumping PCBs into rivers, burning rainforests or whatever else happens to be happening all the time). Because it just seems like the challenges are too big and too deep for us to solve.

But mostly, because there’s basically nothing I can do about it all.

I don’t like my solution, but it’s the only solution I’ve got right now.

Conclusion #2: Ignorance is bliss, or at very least, ignorance is better than prozac.

I’m turning it all off. Unplugging. Shutting down. For the sake of my happiness and sanity. For the sake of not letting ‘angry republican’ or ‘guilty liberal’ consume any more of my personality (I get both sometimes). I’m checking my email, my facebook, Matador Network and ESPN. When there’s more time to kill, I’ll start chugging through my Lord of the Rings books in Spanish and actually learn something. Or go for a run, or try to find a quiet spot in this house to meditate for a bit. If something important enough happens, I’ll find out about it somehow.

Comments? Do you have a better solution? How long do you think I'll last?

Finally, some (really old) picture zen for today, from my trip to the north back in March

A: Bizarre desert-worn quartz formations

B: the strikingly beautiful Valley of the Moon

C: I actually had a long layover in Japan on my way up

D: What's up dude? gotta love the Andes

E: Putre, one of my favorite towns in Chile. Good to be back on the altiplano

Campfire Stories!

Who doesn’t like a good campfire story? Back to travelling = back to storytelling. Pull up a stump and roast a marshmallow or two with me. This is a long one, but a good one.

High on the Chile Bucket List is ‘visit at least 3 more national parks’ for obvious reasons; this country is brimming with diverse and incredible landscapes (soon to be significantly less incredible if HidroAysen goes through, but that’s another story). So I picked a nearby spot, called a few people and organized a camping weekend.

We were leaving Friday morning. Thursday night at 10 pm, I get a call from my camping people – they had picked an entirely new spot and tripled the size of the group. So much for planning.

Regardless, I head to the bus stop bright and early at 8 am, like everybody agreed to, only to find zero out of the other six gringos. I had already bought my ticket, so I hopped on the bus and crossed my fingers that everybody would show up in Santiago. My phone had just ran out of minutes entirely, so I had no way to communicate with the others. Can you guess the theme of this trip yet?

Luckily, everybody met up eventually at the metro stop. We had to cross the entire city, right at morning rush hour, with a bunch of camping gear on the metro. The other Friday morning commuters weren’t the happiest looking Chileans I’d seen, but so be it.

On the flip side, we needed to stock up on food before heading out. Remembering the theme for the weekend, we broke up into three groups to buy food. Thus, we ended up with nearly three times what we needed, including… over 2.5 pounds of liquid caramel, nearly 5 pounds of sliced turkey, 4 pounds of rolled oats for oatmeal, plus many others (all to feed 7 people for 3 days… except after purchasing and leaving, one girl decided it was a good time to share the fact that she had already brought all the food she needed from home).

We leave Santiago by taking over a minibus headed for the hills. Most people are a little unhappy about the excess of food, so we shared two party bags of chips and a roll of cookies with the rest of the bus. We missed the next connection in podonk rural Chile, and would have had to wait over two hours for a shot at the next, so we paid off some locals to drive us up to our first site.

We posted up right next to a beautiful, deliciously cold glacial stream and went for a DIY hike up a nearby mountain. Later on, we set up camp. I brought a four person tent from home. We opened it, only to find that the tent had no poles. So four of us slept right outside on a tarp with no pads and no pillows. Hey, at least I had some sleep saved up from class last week.

The next day we intended to head a little further up the valley near a national park. We had no way of getting there, so we broke up into groups and tried to look friendly on the side of the road. Bret and I went first and hitched a ride in the back of a pickup. We got to the town, waited right alongside the road for a few hours and fished. On my first toss, I caught something huge that fought for nearly 15 minutes before snapping the line. After sitting around for another couple of hours, it was beginning to get dark and we were losing hope that the others would make it.

There was a small campsite in this town, so we pitched a tent. Nobody was at the office/shack. Later, somebody came and yelled at us for pitching a tent, and we had a little argument. Then, this guy changed his mind about us and invited us to take a walk. He showed us this little two bed A-frame hut that he owned and invited us to stay there. We couldn’t refuse.

We cooked some dinner and offered some to our host. He ate a little, and we made some small talk. He was an old dude, but a profilic mountaineer back in the day. He had every major peak in South America and Europe under his belt. He described how the bond between mountaineers was stronger than any other human relationship. Since his climbing days were over, nothing really matched up, so he lived alone with a crippled dog he called Pito (Spanish slang for marijuana).

Out of nowhere, he turned the conversation into a heavy spiritual discussion. He had once lived in the Vatican as a priest, then completely changed his views and now does the whole New Age spirituality thing head-on. We went to bed with our heads spinning in circles.

The next day, we tried to track down the others. There wasn’t much we could do unfortunately as the whole area had no cell coverage (as well as no internet or even electricity – just 60 miles outside of an enormous metropolis). Having no luck, we decided we might as well make something of the day and launched right into the national park.

It wasn’t a big park by any means, but it had all the essentials. A gorgeous valley with springs and rivers, wild horses and condors, capped off by an impressive mountain and glaciar system at the far end. The hike was about 10 miles round trip, rising about 2500 feet. The glaciars were accessible despite a very weak warning sign, so we headed up to check it out.

The front end of the glaciar was flat-out wild. The top of the ice was covered in rock and dirt, so it looked like ground except for the gaping entrance to an icy cave. It was everything you could want from an ice cave; crystalline icicles, layered wavy blue walls, a dripping stream and a ferocious echo. It actually went all the way through – it ended with an opening to the top of the glaciar. Constant falling rocks, slippery conditions and melting ice made it one of the most beautiful but naturally dangerous places I’d ever been.

We still hadn’t heard from or seen our friends by the next day, so we assumed they had turned back. We took the opportunity to outdo ourselves with an even more incredible hike. 17 miles through a different valley, vertical climb of about 4000 feet and featuring dinosaur bones, more towering Andes and a Hindu colorful-flag-mountain-shrine among other attractions. It was too long of a hike to complete before dark, but the moon was full and what was stunning by day was surreal by night.

The final day, we went fossil hunting. We both found a couple of old mollusks in the valley. I was working on a bit of a theory – the higher up the valley, the better the fossil hunting would go. I ended up giving up looking for fossils; eventually I just wanted to summit that dang mountainside and get a good look at the whole range. The climb was tough and getting tougher, but I was literally less than 100 feet from the summit… before finally giving in to that nagging little voice that says ‘hey you – don’t die!’ I gave up.

I stopped ascending, but quickly realized how big of trouble I had already gotten myself into. I was climbing a crowned ridge about 10 feet wide packed with crumbly, loose material everywhere and a brutal drop on either side. I panicked, talked some sense into myself, and slowly wriggled down like an inchworm. It took me a half hour to go about 50 feet, but I just kept going. Once finally off the ridge, I crabwalked it down the entire mountain face to try to avoid causing a rockslide. The two crazy dogs who followed me had just as much trouble. It was the most danger I’ve ever been in. Notice all the superlatives from this weekend? With the ice cave from the day before, that climb became yet another data point in the ‘in adventurous situations I am a serious danger to myself’ theory, which has by now more than enough data to be statistically significant. See also ‘spelunking in valley of the moon’ earlier this spring, among many others.

Its worth putting in a word about this town as well. Picture a classic Puritan settlement during fall in a temperate forest around the 1700s. That image should include farm animals, tall trees with piles of leaves blowing around, a small stone church on the top of a hill, plenty of cabins with smoke coming out of the chimney, stone walls here and there, etc. That place is our town – Banos Morales, Chile. Comically rustic and beautiful.

After finally getting off the mountain and meeting up with Bret, it was time to head out. We hitched a ride on a mining truck and slowly made it back to Valpo. With cell phone reception, it was time to place a few phone calls. Here’s what happened on the second day: Group number 2 hitched a ride with some clown who was convinced that Banos Morales was two hours north, not a half hour east. They ended up camping out around there before heading back. Group 3 actually made it to the real Banos Morales and incredibly slipped by us for two whole days, despite our search efforts and a local gringo alert we put out. We just missed them on the way in, in the national park, and then again on the way out. In such a tiny town, that was nearly impossible.

So that’s that. Going on the trip meant missing a little class including a quiz, but I think I had my priorities straight. I’ll still pass the class, and in exchange I got an bizarre and unbelievable weekend, a good story or two and some lessons on how not to plan a camping trip. With any luck, national parks numbers 2 and 3 to be crossed off will further the story…

Dude, your marshmallow is on fire.

First row: El Morado National Park, the end of the ice cave, Banos Morales and nearby mountain

Second row: Moon over a volcano, the only picture i managed to get on mount doom before descending

New Crap

Well I suppose its way past time I post something up here again, maybe I can scare the cockroaches away and get this blog back to life. I expected to take a little time off; I felt like LWT was getting old, and anyways I was running out of things to say. I never intended to take this long, but I would try to write something interesting and come up empty time and time again. But, happily, that's officially over. I wrote quite a bit on disparate topics, so I'll post it in pieces rather than one long bomb. So here goes part 1.

Life, and UAI's New Castle in the Sky

Well, well.

It’s another beautiful Sunday here in Vina, clear skies, mid-70s and a light breeze coming off the bay. Before the break, word got out around the house that I kept a blog (at one point, that is), so Blake and Cata (fluent in English after spending two high school years in kiwiland) read my Wednesday Afternoon Rant. The response, basically, is that I need to chillll out. Right on, people. So, in my view, I wimped out and life has become a little better. I lifted my expectations considerably. If waste way too much time, only end up getting to know a couple of Chileans, and get out with a functional level of Chilean Spanish, so be it. I made a couple of really good American friends, spent time on the Pacific, grilled steaks on rooftops, practiced karate, travelled to a number of chill destinations, wandered through otherworldly landscapes, and had plenty of experiences I could never have had at home. Really, what’s to complain about? I apologize for being obnoxious.

Also, as if in response to my complaints about UAI, the management decided over the weekend that they’d had enough of being stuck in residential Vina and moved campuses. It basically means I have to get up an hour earlier than normal, but at least the university is growing up (a little bit). The new gig is an absolute castle in the sky. It’s located on the very top of the tallest hill in Vina, which is quite a ways up, overlooking the whole city and bay area. The complex is shockingly futuristic in appearance, playing right into UAI’s image self-consciousness. There are four main buildings, made of minimalist white concrete, glass, and black steel. Each is connected by a small web of skyways and overhangs, surrounded by forest and a single gravel road entrance. Almost all of the parking is underground, built into the hillside. The inside of the building complex is even stranger. There’s absolutely no regularity in the floor plans; every little cluster of rooms is different than the ones above it and next to it. There’s also the numbering system; I was on the third floor, went up two sets of stairs, and was still on the third floor. What? To top it off, there’s exactly one normal staircase in the entire place. The rest? A series of eerily Hogwarts-like, criss-crossing, sloped walkways that go off in all directions and all angles. In all, it’s far and away the most bizarre campus I’ve ever seen. Later this week I’ll bring my camera so you can see for yourself.

At least it feels marginally more like an actual campus, being connected and separated from the rest of town. They extended library closing time from 8 until 10 pm (ooh! look at all the students pulling 1/4-nighters!) . We also get buses that run every 45 minutes or so. Depending on the time of day there are three different routes, which all end up within five blocks of each other. I think they were pretty proud of all the developments, which is why they rushed us into the new campus in the middle of the semester (some buildings aren’t even done yet). I’m proud of them too. I think UAI just passed third grade as a university. The curriculum going forward includes getting a computer lab, getting classroom labs, building a gymnasium, creating a mascot, writing a fight song and starting a sports team or two, organizing the online systems mess, offering extracurriculars like music, paving that gravel road, and most importantly creating a student housing community. I know, I’m picky. Progress is progress; I’ll take what I can get.

... more crap to come, after the break

Wednesday Afternoon Rant

*Note - this a rant. Please feel free to ignore it.

I do not like studying abroad.

In all seriousness, I really don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong – I love being abroad. But I hate studying here. University life is so much different here, and in my opinion not in a good way. And that’s exactly it – university life. Back home, university is a way of life. It’s an all-inclusive, distinct way of life from all other people, employees, secondary school students, retirees, stay at home parents, everybody. It’s a way of life that I really like. It’s working hard, playing hard, and living in a community with a bunch of other people in the same mode as you. I think I do more and get more out of every day during the normal school year than any other time, and that’s cool. Shift life up a few gears.

It’s not the same here. University is a place to go to class and basically nothing more. It’s exceedingly rare for people to move far from home to go to college. Almost everybody lives at home or just nearby, and there is no such thing as campus housing. There are no large university functions or events, no sports, no plays or art, or anything else that makes student life so worth it back home. People go to college with all their friends. University here really is just 13^th grade, minus the penguin uniforms.

It makes it all the more difficult for us fools to get engaged in the university. Nobody is new here, except us, and I can’t go to a hockey game or culture night or join student groups to get involved. Maybe I’m just frustrated and getting kind of cynical towards the whole thing. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood because my alarm didn’t go off and I missed class today, which only runs once per week (all classes are only held once per week, for two and a half hours). And since we don’t have textbooks or online material and since I don’t know anybody in the class, since it’s just lecture, I can’t catch up. Or, maybe I’m just stressed out because I have entirely way too much free time and nothing good to do with it. Yeah, that’s definitely it.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for a Chilean student to study abroad in the US. It would absolutely blow you away. First off, you’re not living anywhere near your family anymore. That just doesn’t happen here. People live with their moms and dads until their 30’s. 30-something years old! What were you doing when you were 30? When I told my host family that most American kids are dying to leave the house when they turn 18 (and don’t usually come home), they couldn’t believe it. And when people do finally get married and move out, they don’t ever move far. My neighborhood consists of my family. In some ways, that’s cool. We have family barbecues on the weekends, and people are always over visiting. Plus, when 16 year old girls have kids (I know several of them), the poor kids aren’t totally hosed over. But in some ways, that all really sucks. My February month Culture and Conversation teacher (Chilean to the bone) summed it up: ‘People really never leave here. They get married, their parents die, and then they inherit the house. That’s their life.’ Family goes even further than that though. Family are your friends, family are your colleagues, family are your partners. When you meet somebody and say ‘hi my name’s pat’, they ask, ‘well pat who?’ What do you care? Call me pat! They also like to ask what school you go to – public or private – and other crap to size up your status in society. Your family and your birth can be an anchor tied to your leg. Seriously, I never thought I could feel so flippin’ hardcore American.

I suppose this is why you study abroad in the first place, right? To get soaked in a different juice for a while. To get frustrated with the new culture, or with your own American-ness, or both at the same time. To feel excluded, like a true outsider, where the old rules don’t apply anymore. There’s a difference between travelling here and being here. If I’m travelling and I don’t like a place, I move on. I can be selective about what parts of the culture I choose to experience. No wonder it’s so much fun. You can skim the cream and eat that up all day long. Instead, I’m here, whole enchilada, and I have to find a way to deal with that.

Is this some kind of late-arrival culture shock? I don’t know. Maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. But when I wake up tomorrow, when I get up for class, I’ll still realize the same facts of life right now – I have one true Chilean friend (and it was a gimme – set up through the study abroad program), I know nobody in my classes, the people calling me to go hang out will call in English, and basically I’m doing a pretty miserable job of studying abroad and I don’t know how to fix that.

Yet it’s still fun more often than not. How often do you get to have nighttime rooftop grill-outs, looking over the ocean and having the best 3 dollar steak and 2 dollar wine you’ve ever tasted? How often do you get to go out on a Monday, because you have no class Tuesday and nothing to do regardless? How often do you have a grand total of 30 minutes of homework per week? Since when did the beach become a part of every single day? Really, this is all a glorified, 6 month extended spring break. And it’s fun. I just wonder whether there’s supposed to be more to it than that. What should my priorities be? Should I try to just relax and enjoy as much as possible, for 6 straight months? I’m not actually sure I’m capable of doing that. Or should I try as hard as possible to integrate, change myself, and learn? If I threw everything out the window, really put myself out there, tried to become as comfortable as possible with being extremely uncomfortable, would that work? What exactly would that look like? Would it be worth it?

I nailed the trip to Argentina on the head. I got about as much out of that trip as I possibly could have, without knowing beforehand what exactly that was supposed to be. Well, here’s Chile, and once again I don’t know what’s supposed to happen here. I just hope when it’s said and done, I can say the same thing once again.