Rain and Questions

This is a rainy Halloween, with fat drops trickling down the windows of a big restored mansion. Nathaniel and I are still in Puerto Varas--we're watching over a bed and breakfast that is owned by my fifth grade teacher's high-school best friend. Right now "watching over" means reading Vonnegut in the common-space and waiting for guests. Also, thinking about questions.

Lately, you see, I've been faced with questions that are very difficult to answer. Here is a list:

(1) What did you study? ("Religion and Neuroscience" doesn't translate well into Spanish, and it also doesn't make very much sense.)
(2) What are you going to do with your education? (I either get quiet and awkward or say that I want to become a cat because felines in general seem to be enlightened.)
(3) What is your occupation? (This is often encountered when we have to check in places--Nathaniel and I share terrified eye-contact and freeze. Last time we wrote "itinerant vegetable worker.")
(4) What did you do to deserve this profound freedom? (I ask myself this one, and then struggle to remind myself that, in Tibetan, the word "guilt" doesn't exist.)
(5) Are we just walking non sequiturs? (Nathaniel just asked me that now, over his copy of The Grapes of Wrath. I kinda like it.)

This list is by no means comprehensive. In other news, Chile's only astronaut lives upstairs. Apparently he won some contest, so he got launched up above the stratosphere and gets to take part in the pilot project for a space-tourism agency. He may even go to the moon, and he's one of the happiest people I've ever met.

And I think that this Halloween is going to be pretty quiet. Although the holiday has certainly taken hold here in Chile, Nathaniel and I are going to stay at the guest house and protect it from marauding hooligans (read: we are lazy and might wear some silly hats). It's funny to compare this Halloween to my last, when I bade a confused Indian tailor to made me a sugar-glider suit:

Odes

I sit now in the home of a kind lawyer in Puerto Varas, Chile. Snow-frosted volcanoes loom surreal over an indigo lake, and I’m sipping tea, reflecting. As always there is too much to recount. We’ve worked for two weeks for a old man from Ohio, we visited my old friends in Temuco and danced until 5 a.m. through an earthquake, and now we’re here, in the picturesque tourist haven of Puerto Varas, discussing religion and politics with our wonderful Couchsurfing host.

I have mentioned, I believe, that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is the shit. In one particular anthology, Neruda writes every poem as an ode to something: “Ode to the Bicycle,” “Ode to the Artichoke,” “Ode to the Onion,” etc. In this spirit, I am going to try to allude to my experiences of the last couple of weeks in a brief series of odes. Enjoy.

Ode to Thistle
We are now intimate enemies, Cirisium arvense. Farmer Daniel calls you "Canadian Thistle," but I know that you're really called "Cursed." After spending untold hours chopping your invasive thorny hide into bits with a hoe in the cherry orchards, I'm confused. I think I've come to love you as much as I hate you. There's something almost proud about your spiny face under a gray spring sky. You know what "green" means. Your evil is pure.

Ode to Steinbeck
You genius, you. Of course it’s strange to be reading your North-American epic East of Eden, being on the wrong continent and all, but it’s so true and mythic. I can’t stop. You are my company during lazy afternoons on the Valdivia farm, where I read post thistle-murder with tea. I binge on your words, wonder where I come from, get lost in your universe. Pristine phrases float through my mind like clouds… “I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul.”

Ode to the Sea
You must be tired of odes by now, you infinite expanse of base-notes and lights. I can't help it, though—you're too beautiful outside of Validvia, framed as you are by the ramparts of old forts and yellow flowers. As pelicans muse like old men above your turquoise tufts, Nathaniel and I talk about the grandiose intangibles of life. God becomes a hypothetical mollusk, and we wonder what we can know.

Ode to Beer
European immigrants pander your strange golden rainbow, and we sample every variety in little plastic cups. I didn't think that you could come honey-flavored; thick and sweet like syrup. The "Gran Torobayo" is clearly the best, but I don't know where the name comes from and you're not nearly as good as your Oregonian cousins. I love your improbability, however, and I laugh to myself as I sip something so rich and brown and German.
  
Ode to Marcelo
“Temuco.” We wanted to go there, but the gleaming labeled bus wouldn’t stop for two grungy backpackers waving their arms on the side of the Pan-American Highway. You stopped, though, with your giant empty tea truck. We didn’t think that our shyly waving thumbs would yield any results, but you stopped and you saved us. You honked for us to come and then threw our backpacks where the tea used to be. For two hours you ferried us, laughed and chain-smoked, shared pictures of your son. You asked to friend us on Facebook and showed us how people are good.
  
Ode to Coffee
Grounding beautiful delicious dirt—I could write an anthology just for you (poor Nathaniel listens to excerpts daily). Everyone here drinks Nescafe, which isn’t coffee at all, and you’ve become a distant dream during the last few weeks. But then Vickie, a fascinating entrepreneur, serves you up steaming as we talk about chocolate and organic food and entertaining the prince of Monaco. Maybe we will work for Vickie arranging her porch and watching after her bed and breakfast. Maybe I will drink more of you, you beautiful bevarage. The possibilities are delectable.

Pictures!

 Dear Readership,

Nathaniel and I have collaborated to create a Picasa page documenting our experiences in South America. The first album, "Mint Binge," has just been uploaded, and it can be viewed at the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/N.C.southernexposure/MintBinge#

In other news, I am glad that the miners have been freed from the bowels of the earth. I ask myself whether any Chilean will be able to discuss any other topic for the next three months, or whether the local news will ever stop broadcasting the story of "LOS 33 MINEROS DE CHILE."

Life is good. Tomorrow I'm going to explore ancient forts and visit the Beer Museum.

Love, and thanks for reading,
Caitlin

Nostalgia is a strange loop.

Lumaco has changed a lot since I lived there five years ago. There’s a new municipal development across from my family’s tiny carnicería—before there were just tufted hills. There’s a new upstairs to my Chilean house, with rooms for boarders and a vaulted view of this rapidly growing rural village. There are fine lines around my host mother’s eyes, internet access in my host-home, and a supermarket.

Some things haven’t changed, though. Bread is still cooked in a wood-fire oven and served with avocado and cheap tea. The television is still incessant in its broadcast of tacky music videos, and roosters still crow outside of my window. Lumaco means “water of the trees” in the language of the native Mapuche people, and Lumaco’s brown river still bustles through on its determined course through the pine forests Southern Chile.  I don’t think it ever noticed my absence, or cared that I returned.

One evening I went running alone on the same gravel road where I always used to run, back when I was a lost seventeen-year-old feeling trapped in spiritual gridlock of small town life. Drunkards wavered to their countryside homes as the sun wavered on the horizon, and my lungs filled with the rich scent of wood-smoke. It was just like I remembered, except for this time everything was on my own terms.

Nathaniel and I went to Lumaco last weekend, and, over extended broadcasts of the Chilean Miner Rescue Mission, I tentatively reformed my connection with the dreary lost loving place that I once called home.  I had been afraid of returning to such a complicated nexus of memory, but Nathaniel played my host brother’s guitar and we drank tea and laughed and talked about the moon. I relaxed and flirted with some kind of atonement.

I was glad to get on the southward-bound bus, though, and watch Lumaco’s hills melt back into memory. I don’t want to live that life, and I never did. I prefer to carry it with me as I move, buried somewhere deep in my strange mosaic of self. Now I’m hoeing thistle and collecting alien-brain seed pods outside of Valdivia (see Nathaniel’s post for details), and the journey continues to evolve.

Tonight, I think, I will toast my tea evolution of journeys.  And to the color of Chile in the spring.

Tusks and Other Muses

"I came here to count the bells

that live upon the surface of the sea,

that sound over the sea,

within the sea.

So, here I live."

--Pablo Neruda

We are now in Valparaiso, a beautifully graffitied  port town built on impossible hills. During the past two days we have visited two of Pablo Neruda's three Chilean abodes. Neruda is one of my favorite poets, and it was like a fairytale to explore his eclectic decor and strange collections that included, but were not limited to, carousel horses, figureheads, and snail shells. He also had a fondness for colored glass and bells and green ink, but most of all he loved the ocean. Both of the houses we saw had panoramic vistas of the Pacific in all of its bone-chilling deep-blue grandeur. It was not hard at all to imagine a poet inspired.

But maybe his secret was the narwhal tusk. Neruda kept a 2.25 meter tooth of a narwhal whale, along with a historical painting of the fanciful beast. Strange man. He wrote beautiful things.

And now we're going even more austral. I spent a semester as an exchange student in Chile when I was seventeen, and we're going South to go visit my host family in their small small village of Lumaco. I'm kind of nervous to reunite with a universe that I left behind five years ago, but it should be interesting.

(I also wanted to mention that co-conqueror and travel friend Nathaniel is also keeping a blog. For a completely different perspective on our ramblings, visit nathanielgoessouth.blogspot.com.)

Santiago, Chile

I am here, staying with a wonderful French-Canadian professor. His apartment is on the sixteenth floor, and from the balcony you can see Santiago sprawling beneath snow-capped peaks that fade in and out of the smog. Boys perform improbable juggling feats at stoplights, impressive colonial architecture stands alongside ugly urban development, and there's a bite in the early-spring air. The biggest flag ever billows over the Chilean treasury--it is at least the size of 16 queen-sized beds, I'd say, although Nathaniel puts it in the twenties.

After spending the day meandering through downtown Santiago, we returned to our kind host's lofty apartment. As I made myself a cup of espresso, I thought about the fact that I'm going to be on this continent for eight months. I didn't have a paper to write, I wasn't late for anything, and I was pressing finely ground coffee into an espresso maker with the back of a spoon. The mountains watched through big glass windows, and everything was beautiful.

GOING SOUTH ...almost.

I got up at 3:30 this morning, and showed up at PDX ready to board a flight to Santiago, Chile. When I scanned my passport, however, my travel information didn't pop up. The lady at the front desk looked confused. She scurried to consult her supervisor, and after much hushed conversation around a computer, the solemn supervisor approached me.

"I hate to tell you this," she said, "but your flight doesn't exist."

I didn't know this was allowed. Hell, I didn't even know this was possible. Flights aren't like fairies--they don't go away if people stop believing in them... do they?

After sitting dejectedly by the baggage drop-off station listening to terrible terrible tinny classical music for four eons, and after almost crying to the nice Southern man who was the spokesperson for Avianca airlines, I was put on a different flight that supposedly does exist. It leaves tomorrow. Ostensibly.

And then I will be in Chile. I'm meeting my college-friend Nathaniel there, and then together we will conquer the entire continent of South America. And by "conquer" I mean "meander through," "get lost in," and "harvest the vegetables of." Our plans now are almost laughably vague (see the map I've included with this post). We're planning of traversing Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia, but I think that this is the sort of journey that evolves.

So check back soon! I know that my posting has been meager lately, but now I'm having a proclaimed adventure and will strive to be a reliable bloggist.

On that note, onward and southward I fly!!!! Hopefully.