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.

The Leroy Weekend Times - March 19

Afternoon Wake-Up Call

I was sitting down for lunch today, chatting and watching The Physics of Spiderman on the History channel and wondering what to write about for LWT this week. I figured I was running out of ideas on my usual topics of big-picture culture, economics and the like, and also wondering if that was getting a bit old for our readers. But as I was finishing an empanada, I heard a fighter jet in the air. The noise got louder and louder and I poked my head out the front door to take a look. All of the sudden this jet makes a terrific streak directly overhead, no more than 150 meters up, at full blast. The whole neighborhood shook with the unbelievable sheer force of the noise. I dropped to my knees reactively and jammed my fingers further into my ears than they’ve ever been before. Car alarms blared, animals went nuts, and some glass broke. I’ve seen military flyovers at Michigan football games before, but nothing ever compared to that.

For a split second, I panicked. This is a country instinctively distrustful of their government, who within the past couple decades saw their air force annihilate the capital building and install a long sitting, sometimes brutal dictator in Pinochet. Search ‘ultimas palabras de Salvador Allende’ on Youtube for a chilling sense of the golpe militar on September 11, 1973. The socialist president made one last radio broadcast from the basement of La Moneda (Chilean White House) while fighters bombed the government overhead, before taking his own life immediately following the recording. The country would suffer through single party rule, torture and citizens disappearing in the middle of the night until the late 1980s when Pinochet miraculously stepped down and the democratic constitution was adopted. The decision to relinquish power was heavily influenced by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ultimate failure of communism in the USSR amongst other regional factors.

In the US, a military takeover would be unconscionable. We’ve had a stable democracy for over two hundred years running, a firmly citizen controlled military, and very little political violence throughout. American citizens may doubt, distrust or discredit the government, but not in the same way as people do here. Chile is working on barely 20 years of continued democracy and is no exception on a continent sometimes known for political instability. Students my age sitting right next to me in class were born under a dictator! My parents at home might remember Nixon’s resignation, but my parents here remember listening to Allende’s last words and 15 years of Pinochet’s reign. Chew on that for a second.

In the end, the jet circled around and flew off without further incident. Nobody was sure why they decided to put on such a flyover; it was no holiday or celebration, tradition or the like. Maybe it was an ill-conceived attempt at entertainment, or maybe just a show of force. The armada floating outside the city is plenty enough in that case, thank you very much. Regardless, it succeeded in bringing history to life for me, if only for a moment. Next time though, can we find a way that doesn’t leave me bleeding from the ears?

In Brief

Like they always say, when in Chile… practice Japanese martial arts. I joined karate classes for the heck of it, and it turns out I’m the only one! I’m getting private lessons four hours a week from two guys who really know what they’re doing, for the price of a class that normally has 25 students (like in their other dojo, off in Valpo). The style that they teach is the oldest in the books and very welcoming, in the sense that they consider the entire network to be a family. While some karate sensei are more rigid than I-beams and beat the snot out of their students, these guys encourage questions, fun, and invited me to sushi. Being tall, fairly athletic and having practiced reactionary sports all my life (goalie, keeper, catcher), this is something I could get pretty good at, especially if this 2 teachers to 1 student private lesson deal keeps up.

Speaking of Japan…

Yikes. Just yikes. Down here we’re still getting daily aftershocks, and the whole of Vina/Valpo coast area was evacuated for a period last week due to tsunami threats.

Speak Chilean – Words of the Week

Cachai (k-etch-eye): [unkown?], Chilean for ‘get it?’ or ‘understand?’. Always put at the end of a sentence. Blah blah blah... cachai? Kind of like the British ending their sentences with ‘… yea?’

Cueca (quake-a): [noun], the traditional dance of Chile. Kinda goofy looking dance involving moving lines of dancers in traditional country dress doing a move like fake horse-riding a la Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The Leroy... Tuesday Times - March 15

The editors apologize for the spotty presence of this column recently as a result of travel. We had no Internet access in Pucon over the weekend.

Causes of Prosperity

I enrolled in a class called Introduction to Business Workshop as one of six options that I could choose between after trying them out for a week. The first day of that class was something else. This old fat professor with suspenders and thick glasses and a handlebar mustache waddles in after we had all sat down, drones in a monotone voice “This is Introduction to Business Workshop. If you are not in this class, please step out now.” He waits a minute (nobody leaves) and then proceeds to take an impressive leap on top of his desk and starts yelling and waving his hands “Welcome to business at UAI, fools! Time to throw out all your private prep-school bullcrap, and all your parent’s money, cause none of you are ready for this class! You have homework. You must go to Puerto Baron, tomorrow. Do you actually have to go to Puerto Baron?” class; “yes.” “DO YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO GO TO PUERTO BARON??” class; “Yes!” “You! In the back! MUST YOU GO TO PUERTO BARON?!” dude; “YES PROFESSOR!” prof; “WHAT?!” And so it went.

Finally we moved on to the lecture. The opening slide had a quote; “The underlying moral causes of prosperity have long been known”. The prof started pointing out students and asking what exactly that meant. One kid finally nailed it – prosperity in society comes not from resources or technology or power and might but in the morals of its citizens. I’ve never heard that before, but it began to make sense. If all people were honest, there would be no need for police and security. If all people were generous, there would be almost no need for government. If people could control anger, there would be no need for military. All of that money could be spent on other things, like lifting the poor out of poverty. Although all of that is extremely idealistic, it holds true that the more moral societies in the world simply do better. The US became what it is because the government gave power and trust to the people, and in turn the people worked harder than anyone else in the world, together, to build the country. Iraq became what it is because the government can just sit back and pump oil, and it didn’t matter if it abused its citizens or created an intolerant society.

Today, the prof pointed out that the Chinese and Indians work harder and save more than anyone else. In contrast, he continued, Chile and most of South America is full of crime and dishonesty and the US is becoming a lazy nation that is better at complaining, blaming and spending rather than working and saving. China is vulnerable to censorship, paranoia, and corruption, but for now its work ethic is pulling through. India, he said, is a better investment until China fixes those things. It has the potential to be a kind of Soviet-like ‘seeds of its own demise’ situation, if reform isn’t eased in over the next few decades.

This was all echoed in The World is Flat, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Look briefly at three cases presented in the book. First, Taiwan, a tiny island with virtually no resources, yet manages to be a financial and industrial horse because of its people and superior governance. Compare that with most European nations, blessed with beautiful land and resources, who struggle because their extraordinary work laws promote laziness and do not reward innovation. Germany, for example, was rated one of the worst countries in the entire world to do business in because it is nearly impossible to fire a worker and even harder to start a new business. The Germans complained and contested when the study was published. Finally, look at any number of dictatorships and you’ll generally see that they are propped up by hogging resources. Hosni Mubarak is estimated to be one of the wealthiest men alive; Ben Ali and colonel Gaddafi aren’t far behind. Yet when the resources run out, the society has a chance to open up to become prosperous and moral (kind of ironic really).

The professor’s point was that good business is moral business. Point well taken. Suppose I should scoot over to Puerto Baron now, eh?

Classes – Final Listing

Finance 1

Industrial Organization

Business Leadership

Marketing and Trends in Latin America (English)

Intro to Business Workshop didn’t make the cut – it might have been interesting, but also intimidating as heck for a clueless and wimpy gringo. The other cut was Intro Accounting. Oddly enough, the intro classes I should be taking ended up being far and away the hardest, as in, probably would have failed both. The language of Industrial Organization and Finance 1 isn’t Spanish but mathematics – that, I understand. Never seen partial differential functions or Lagrange multipliers applied to markets and consumers, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. I’ll also have outside help in both.

Donde la Pili

I have to take a minute here to sing some praises about my host mom whom everybody calls Pili (her real name is Liliana). She has a remarkable ability to deal with a lot of work and a lot of people all at once with basically no breaks, no vacations. Here is her average weekday:

5:30 – Wake up, prepare and set breakfast for 12

6:15 – Start the laundry, equivalent to a full hamper every day

6:45 – Wake Tomas up and get him ready for school

7:15 – Start cooking for the bakery/cafe she runs. This means a whole platter of empanadas, a daily lunch special, cupcakes, pancakes, alfajores, desserts and sometimes catering orders as well

10:30 – Open the bakery, continue cooking

12:00 – Husband Hernan takes over at the bakery. Pili prepares lunch for 10 of us

2:30 – Finish laundry, yell at me for washing my dishes, begin washing everybody’s dishes from the day

3:30 – Cleaning time

5:00 – Prepare dinner and onces for the house

6:30 – Family and friends living nearby invite themselves in for onces and tea

8:00 – Clean up kitchen and table. Begin cleaning bakery

9:00 – Bakery closes

9:30 – Grocery shopping and planning for tomorrow

Rinse and repeat, weekends too. Everybody feels a bit lazy and antisocial compared to Pili, master of her domain.

Speak Chilean - Words of the Week

Completo (comb-play-toe): noun, the national dish of Chile. A footlong hot dog topped with avocado, melted cheese, tomatoes, and a heavy dose of mayonnaise.

Po (poe): [unknown part of speech], the word has little or no meaning whatsoever, yet is put into almost every spoken sentence. Shortened version of the word pues, which means 'well' when used as a temporizer, except po is clearly not a temporizer as it is often put at the end of a sentence. Most frequently used in responses to a question.

Traveler's Map

I've been meaning to do this for a while now - during Argentina I compiled a list of where everyone I would meet was originally from. Here, finally, is the map.

The Leroy Weekend Times - March 6 Double Edition

On the Road Again

The most exciting time of the year to be in Vina del Mar is the last weekend in February when the city holds an enormous music festival at the beautiful Quinta Vergara gardens and estate, bringing the biggest names in Latin music. It’s actually a big weekend competition with a gold trophy for the winner, but for the losers, fans can (and do) boo performers off stage. It also marks the grand finale to tourist season in Vina as the town fills up for the last time. Perfect timing then for ISA to schedule a mandatory weekend trip to Santiago, where exactly nothing exciting is happening. To top it off, next weekend Shakira will be in Santiago, but we have our only other mandatory trip, to Pucon this time. Seriously. At least they can’t stop us from going to the massive, world famous Lollapalooza in Santiago next month. Chileans are nuts about their live music.

So we were carted off to the capital regardless. They put us up in these Vegas-style 220 US dollar per night lofts, which was a little ridiculous considering they then made us pay for our bus trip and all the food and extras. In exchange, we got our kicks in by having way too much fun for their liking and generally making life difficult. Hey, what’s being 20-ish on foreign vacation good for anyways? We met up with the new gringos fresh off their flights from home, and pretty much everybody got along from the start. How am I supposed to meet Chileans with this group of really cool people hanging around all the time that I don’t have to strain my brain to talk to? Despite ISA’s best efforts, it ended up being a great weekend anyways. It was also a bit of a guilty pleasure to be one of the Wise Oracles who Know about Chile amongst the flood of new gringos.

Santiago, for its part, was kind of a lousy city from what we saw. It has bad air pollution which ruins the (occasional) view of the mountains surrounding the city, a fair bit of crowding (8 million people’s worth), and really none of the charm of Buenos Aires. I realized that, for whatever reason, it drives me nuts when a city has no reference point or meaningful center. In Vina/Valpo, you always know exactly where you are at because of the sea. Buenos Aires is cut up into districts with their own centers and you always know where the ocean is. It’s like a calming effect from organization and being able to internalize distances and directions. Santiago has some small mountains in the city, but you usually can’t see them, and there isn’t a solid city center. The New York Times named Santiago the best tourist destination for 2011. When that was announced, both of my language class teachers separately laughed at it and basically said ‘thats news to us Chileans, because everybody just wants to heck out of Santiago whenever we can’. Thus the popularity of Vina/Valpo as an internal tourist destination as well, being only an hour and a half away.

The weekend ended as we rolled back to the coast on Sunday. Unfortunately for the new students, it was the dreariest, greyest day Vina has had all month, and their first impression of the city was a dirty looking fog. It cleared up the next day, but I didn’t have time to sit around as my date with Arica was upcoming.

High and Dry

The first thing I wrote about on this blog way back in January (two months already!) was about the airline industry and all the jokes and complaints that get made. Well, nobody’s complaining in Chile. When I asked the security guard if I had to take my shoes off for the scanner, he laughed. I didn’t have to take my bag apart either (laptop, electronics, liquids in plastic bags, etc.), just push it through and get on with it. On Sky Airlines, all you have to do is press the button and you’ll get brought some more wine and hot rolls with butter, anytime you want, and in economy class. My only complaint was the legroom because, well, Chileans are short.

Unfortunately the fun didn’t extend to the city of Arica, which is a good spot for surfers but not much else. It’s basically a big concrete wasteland surrounding a tourist-surf district. The hostel cluster was in the sketchiest location I could imagine, and I had to have my bags go through customs upon entering and again when leaving. Wake up fool, of course a city with close proximity to both the Bolivian and Peruvian borders is going to be a bit paranoid. So I got out as quick as possible. I scheduled a day trip to Lauca National Park and a bus outta town the same night. Both were good calls.

Lauca has, in one spot, all the features that make the Altiplano region so irresistible. You’ve got snowy mountains and volcanoes, tinted lakes, unique wildlife, sunny-with-a-cool-breeze climate, and friendly people. Arica is paranoid but Putre, a city on the way to Lauca literally miles from the Chile-Peru-Bolivia border convergence, is relaxed and welcoming. Maybe it’s the shadow of a volcano that gives Mount Fuji a run for its money, or maybe it’s the high mountain air that just makes your body feel different, lighter. I’ve now been to the altiplano in every country with land there, and only in a couple places in Peru have I felt unsafe. There are dicey locations to go around in South America, but for the most part all you’ll ever get on the altiplano is the occasional stare. I appreciate the Aymara culture’s relaxed sense community and tradition more and more every time I go up there, in comparison to the more modern and well-connected mainland in its barrios and reggaeton and broken sense of cultural community. The suburban barrios and favelas are oftentimes mirror images of the kind of violent, xenophobic, anti-progressive culture that crops up in places like inner-city Detroit. The Aymaras, working to keep their old culture alive, seem miles ahead of the modern flaites.

I’m not trying to sound like an elitist bashing the marginalized poor. Most of the people just never had a chance to make it out, and that’s sad. At some point though, somebody has to stop the cycle. It’s a social problem that I don’t have the answer to, so I take it for what it is and just avoid those spots for my own sake. Instead, I’ll go have some more earth-baked potatoes with mud sauce (actually delicious) and hang around above the clouds.

In Brief: UAI

Some schools are diploma factories. Some schools have character. Once in a while, you find both. Michigan is one of those schools, and so is UAI. College works a little differently here than it does in the states; for example, almost all students continue to live at home. In fact, it’s not uncommon for people to live at home with their parents until age 30 or 35. Crazy, but that’s for another article. Anyways, campuses tend to be spread out across a city, so for class, many students take the discounted rate at the metro system. But the students at UAI aren’t having any of that crap. The first question they ask themselves each day is ‘hmmm… should I take the Lexus or the Benz today?’

UAI holds a lot of clout amongst the rich who still want their kids to stay in South America for school. If you’re a successful Chilean businessman and you plan on having your kid take over your enterprise someday, you send them to UAI. Our foreign-student orientation leader told us we’d be the only ones walking to class, the only ones without designer clothes, and the only ones without a sports car. UAI gives steroids to the stereotypes of Michigan students. Maybe that’s not all bad; if I can make good friends with some people and meet their parents…

Power to the People

Sometimes it seems like US laws are made to protect criminals. I remember back in high school government class going through Supreme Court cases that continually limited police power. If something isn’t an immediate threat to a policeman, essentially, they’re not allowed to ask about it. There’s a whole series of decisions concerning traffic stops that prevent police from investigating anything not in plain sight or immediately accessible. Doesn’t that just make smuggling stuff brutally easy? Why would they have those laws?

They say you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone. South American countries have no such laws, and it’s true; you wouldn’t believe how much those laws benefit the average person until you experience it. On a given bus trip, we’ll be stopped and searched over several times, I’ll have to produce my passport and other information, and it’ll eat up a half hour. One time in Argentina I had to answer to the same cop twice during one trip (once on the way in to a city bus stop and again as we pulled out 20 minutes later). I thought about taping my passport and information to my forehead so they wouldn’t have to wake me up every time. Another time in Peru, I had to sit in the back of a cop car for several hours because my Police Sergeant of Puno – stamped and certified passport copy just wasn’t good enough for this clown. A couple of 100 sol notes would’ve sufficed, but I wasn’t about to give him that satisfaction.

So next time you think American cops are dirty or powerful, remember that in reality they’re just about the least-enabled police force in the world, and you have the power of the court on your side. While there are plenty of honest and respectable carabineros here as well, unfortunately the phrases ‘probable cause’, ‘search warrant’, and ‘reasonable doubt’ just don’t translate very well.

Speak Chilean - Words of the Week

Pololo/polola (English pronunciation): boyfriend/girlfriend. Don’t listen to your Spanish teacher and say novio or novia here unless you actually are engaged

Carretear (car-ret-tay-ar): to go out and party. Comes from the word carretera, which means road; carretear literally means to hit the road