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