May Showers

Hello again, eager readers. In this post you can look forward to more than just an update on the mundane topics of weather and food: prepare yourselves for a deep look into my last two and a half weeks of personal exploration and self discovery.

Or we could just go with the food and weather and maybe that could be a cute metaphor for personal discovery? Yeah, that does sounds better to me. If it worked for college essays, it damn well better work for a blog!

I'm thinking about food because I've just finished making and devouring a meal of salmon, broccoli, brown rice, and white wine. If that isn't adult food then I don't know what is. Maybe I should have incorporated brussels sprouts or kale or blueberries to get all the super foods in? Whatever I don't care. In fact, I was so proud of myself that I rewarded myself with one or two (or four) Oreos. At least the junk food here is cheap too.

Back to good food. Santiago has a network of enormous grocery stores, smaller stores with seven or eight aisles of food, corner shops with a scattering of offerings, and fantastic markets where you can get enormous quantities of produce at incredible prices. It's late mid-fall in the Southern Hemisphere, so I've been enjoying kiwis, pears, and apples (apples are usually a little less than $.50/lb), as well as Ecuadorian bananas. A friend of mine tipped me off to a fantastic market that takes up about three blocks on Fridays near my apartment, so walking over there and doing my produce shopping for the week is now part of my weekly routine. I've learned to bring my empty enormous trekking backpack and then fill it up as I go along from stall to stall. Most of the food is locally/domestically sourced, but there are some obvious foreign exceptions: bananas come from Ecuador, some of the oranges are definitely not Chilean (though I'm not exactly sure where they come from), and I'm assuming that the almonds, walnuts, and pecans for sale are American. Last week I managed to fill the entire bag with apples, bananas, oranges, lettuce, spinach, eggplant, bell peppers, onions, and some fish on ice. Yup, this market is anchored by three different booths of fishmongers who, I found, can be accounted on to help an American figure out what he can easily cook up for himself.

This is one of the fishmonger stalls

I could honestly go on for far too long about how fun it is shopping at these markets. I love listening to the salespeople hawking their products; I particularly love when I hear them say "¿Qué quieres, mi reina?" (what would you like, my queen) to the little old ladies doing their shopping. A couple of weeks ago one guy called me flaquito (little skinny dude) as he sold me a bunch of onions. It's a cool environment to do your shopping, to say the least.

Another fun recent development was a trip I took to Mendoza, Argentina, last weekend. I went with a bunch of other foreign exchange students on the trip, which was great as it gave me a chance to meet some of my fellow exchange students while we explored a part of Argentina. Mendoza is the closest major Argentinean city to Santiago, sitting about seven hours away in a bus. The distance is probably a lot less than that indicates, though, because the bus crossing involves a somewhat harrowing ride over the Andes, with the border crossing at the highest point between the two countries.

The customs process takes a long time so we had a chance to walk around before getting our passports stamped--definitely better than standing in line at an airport

A definite highlight to Mendoza was learning about Argentinean wine (which mostly comes from the Mendoza region) while touring a vineyard. 

 The view from the vineyard's second floor. It's fall here, so the leaves are changing color and falling. The trees are olive trees.

Greek wine makers realized a long (long, long) time ago that placing a rose bush at the end of the row of grapes will distract bugs and diseases into attacking the rose first. This trick has survived into modernity, though apparently it's now more of an aesthetic move, as many modern bugs aren't distracted by the roses, no matter how beautiful they are.

At the risk of waxing poetic, I was struck by a sense of past grandeur in Mendoza. The railroads, plazas, old buildings, and cafes seemed like another era's idea of modernity. Argentina's going through some pretty tough economic times right now, making it a quite affordable country for people with access to dollars, but that doesn't make it much easier to see a country with such a pessimistic outlook on its future. I'm really looking forward to going to Buenos Aires in a couple of months, especially to learn a little more about this great country. Don't worry, dear reader, you'll get those iPhone photos in due time.

As always, thank you for reading. I hope your summers (almost there, UChicago!) are getting off to a great start. I'm thinking of you northern hemisphere dwellers as the leaves fall down here and I start thinking about skiing this winter. Clearly I'm finding ways to survive. If not, well, at least I know where I can get some decent food to eat.

Return to blogging

Dearest readers,

I know how much you have missed my blog. You set your routines around my normal biweekly posts on life in the southern hemisphere, you anxiously awaited my missives on language acquisition, and wrote down particularly astute observations from my blog for later use in regular conversation. And then, horror of all horrors, nothing; you survived nearly a month of no posts. Friend, confidant, voyeur: I'm here to tell you that the wait is over. I'm back on the blogging train and ready to share the minute details of my excellently interesting life. I was kept away from blogging by my seriously busy life down here (re-watching Mean Girls on Netflix to celebrate the 10th anniversary of that film, catching up on the NYTimes, eating in general), but I look forward to including my followers in my life once again.

But in real life...

Thanks for indulging my imagination of myself as a thought-leader. Maybe one day I'll have a column on the Huffington Post, but that is not this day.

I wrote in my last post about getting set for a trip to San Pedro de Atacama, and that trip turned out to be a wonderful experience. I traveled with Ailsa, an exchange student friend from the US; we quickly made friends with another foreigner (Constance, from France) at the bus station in Calama, Chile. Calama is the closest town with an airport to San Pedro de Atacama, so we flew there from Santiago and, hoping to save on the (to us) expensive $25 transfer in a van from the airport to the town we opted to catch a bus from the town of Calama. As you can of course anticipate, this was ultimately a bit of a fiasco: the four bus companies in Calama are located in the four corners of the town, each operating a different bus schedule. We trudged around the city for about an hour and a half trying to figure out which company would leave first until we resigned ourselves to waiting about two more hours for the next bus. The only redeeming factor to this misadventure was meeting Constance, who, like Ailsa and me, had hoped to save some money taking the bus. At the end of the day we made it to San Pedro de Atacama, but we'd learned our lesson: the $10 we'd saved by taking the bus didn't really make up for the three hours we'd spent hanging around in a nasty bus office.

But this grim start was quickly redeemed by our quirky hostel and crazy town of San Pedro de Atacama. It seems obvious when I write it here, but I wasn't prepared for the kind of dessert I was traveling to. As we drove around I was blown away: as opposed to desert in Texas or other parts of the US Southwest, the Atacama Desert is dirt with some cool rock formations. No cacti, no scraggly trees, no bushes--the distinguishing features were tiny shrubs growing close to the red ground. It wasn't a sand desert a la Sahara, but it was still crazy dry. There are parts of the Atacama Desert that haven't seen rain in the more than one hundred years of weather keeping there.

All of that combines to make a totally crazy environment. Ailsa, Constance, and I signed up for various tours in SPdA, taking us to see some of the most popular sites. We visited a valley where each of the rock layers was exposed, creating a half rainbow of rock colors from red to green, hiked around salt flats and swam in salt water lagoons, as well as visiting a series of hot springs and geysers about an hour from SPdA. Not your typical desert fare, right? The explanation for this diversity, at least as I understood it in Spanish, is that the desert lies between two mountain ranges, one that used to be heavily volcanic, and while the other is called the Salt Range (Cordillera de la Sal). Glaciers carried the salt through the area, melting away but leaving all the salt.

Two of the biggest highlights of the trip were renting mountain bikes to explore the surrounding area and, on our last night, taking an astronomy tour. My biggest regret going into the tour was not having a better idea of what the night sky looks like in the northern hemisphere, because there were some definite changes. As you might expect, my iPhone camera was completely useless in the total darkness of the desert sky; you'll have to take my word that it was amazing. Using strong laser pointers and telescopes our guides pointed out Sirius, the planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (we could see the rings of Saturn through the telescope!!), and explained some of the differences between indigenous American and Greek astronomy. Apparently the Aztecs, for example, imagined constellations in the dark spaces of the sky instead of completing links between the bright stars. At least that's what I understood--the tour was in Spanish, and the English translation was definitely lacking.

Following that weekend away we got back to Santiago, with Ailsa and I both remarking at how weird and cool it is that returning home now means coming back to Santiago. I got back to a small mountain of school work and have been digging myself out in the past week and a half. Next week I'm taking a trip with the campus exchange student activities group to Mendoza, Argentina (about 7 hrs in bus from Santiago). Meanwhile I've been perfecting my recipe for borracho beans (500 mL of chicken broth, one beer, two pork sausages and several mini chorizo sausages, one chili, and seven garlic cloves later, I can assure you I had some flavorful beans), rowing more at Laguna Aculeo, and exploring the cool street market options in Santiago. Somehow between apple sauce and lunch apples I've consumed around 5 lbs of apples this week, so I'll be back for more tomorrow. Some things don't change, though: I've run out of peanut butter again, so I think I'll have to stop by Líder to pick up another jumbo jar.

Here's some shots from the past month. Thanks for reading!

 Thanks again to my buds at home for getting my the Camelbak water pack! It came in really handy on a camping trip in early April and while bike riding in the desert.

 The interior of the church in San Pedro de Atacama. The plaque outside the church says the first mass was said here in the 1500s.

 Valle del Arcoiris (rainbow). Erosion has weathered away each of the different rock layers, creating the cool color effect.

 The rocks tasted like salt, so I had to give them a try.

 The stunning Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon). 

 Tough times on the bike path

 The view was worth it, though!

Here's a shot of me in the salt flats. The spot here had about six inches of spring fed water covering it. Everything that's white on the ground is salt though. I walked around tasting everything like the five year old I truly am.

Taking a plunge in the lagoon.