This has been by far one of the best weekends I've had in Chile. All day Friday and Saturday I've sat on my ass and alternated between eating, napping, and watching movies online. Since I live on the outskirts of town whenever I go out for the evening on weekends, I end up crashing on somebody's couch or spare bed. The next day is always a late start, with people sleeping off hangovers and insisting I join them for lunch before I head back home. On the one hand, this kind of generosity and inviting attitude are super nice and not exactly how new coworkers you barely know would treat you back in the States. But on the other hand, four of five weekends straight of not sleeping in your own bed or traveling on buses does get tiring. So I've really enjoyed just chillin at home. I've caught up with The Office and watched all three Mariachi-trilogy Robert Rodriguez films. Since I'm using a Spanish-language site to view the movies, I've only had the option of turning on subtitles in Spanish. This means I've been watching all three movies without subtitles and thus practicing my Spanish for all the Spanish-only scenes (or in the case of El Mariachi, the entire movie). So I guess there's that to put in this week's productivity column. I also watched The Social Network, and I was very happy to see a Ben Mezrich book get a proper movie adaptation, after the very bad and pretty racist film version of 21. Anyway, I figured I'd use this blog post to talk a bit about Chile in general, since most folks back home still probably don't have much of a clue as to how I'm living down here.
The country is divided into 15 numbered regions, going from north to south (with a few regions numerically out of place because they broke off and formed new regions). In the north (the first 3 or 4 regions) you have the Atacama desert, the world's driest desert, with a whole lot of sun and heat. Way in the south (regions XI and XII) you have Patagonia, enormous glaciers, lots of snow, and you're as close to Antarctica as you can get in the world from any of the continents. In the middle of the country (around region V) you have the capital of Santiago and the big port city of Valparaiso. The weather in these parts is still very warm year-round, with mild winters that Chicagoans would consider to be summer weather. I'm living in Region X, Los Lagos (the Lakes region). About 12 hours by bus south of Santiago, we are far enough south that winters here get cold and rainy. However, we're still far enough north that we don't get snow, and the summer months are very hot from what I understand. The entire area is very green, with lots of lakes (obviously), huge forests, and even a couple volcanoes near the city of Puerto Montt.
However, for about three or four months straight the tenth region gets hit with non-stop rain. The climate here is similar to Seattle's, in that even in the summer months you'll get rainy days/weeks. And since central heating is entirely non-existent in southern Chile, people teach class in their jackets, sleep under five or six layers of blankets, and keep the wood-burning stoves on all day. As for the rain, they tell me last year a teacher moved from Santiago to Castro to work at my school, and suffered from depression due to the lack of sunshine over the winter. So basically, I'm bracing myself for lots of movie-watching and pisco-drinking for all of June and July. Still, folks tell me that the weather on other parts of the island of Chiloe, as well as in the Lagos region on mainland, seems to be worse, with stronger winds and more powerful storms.
This island itself is actually much larger than what anyone would think of when they hear the world "island." It's about 120 miles long and 40 miles wide, so it's not like I take a row boat from the mainland to some shanty town on a desolate island. To get to the island, cars and coach buses board a large ferry that takes about half and hour (in clear weather) to cross the river. From the northern tip of Chiloe, it takes about 20 minutes to get to the bus station in the center of Ancud--one of the three big cities on the island (even though this "big" city has no traffic lights). Then, its just under 2 hours to Castro. The entire island is covered with green forests and large rolling hills. The place is inexplicably odd: the large penguin colonies are in the north, the flamingos are in the south (yup, flamingos), and they say that the winds from the south (Antarctica) bring warmer weather.
People here have found a really cool balance between rural and urban living. Once you go beyond the houses immediately surrounding the town square (this entire area is pretty small), you start seeing people with horses or chickens on their property. Now, the properties are still pretty small -- about the same size lot a small house in Norridge has, or smaller -- and they're by no means farms or anything, its just that some people might build a small chicken coup in the yard, or a stable for a horse or bull if they have a slightly larger property. And these houses are just a few minutes drive away from city center, in what we'd either consider the immediate suburbs or still the city itself. As a result, you have an area with large paved roads, plenty of shops and big grocery stores, and people living in close proximity (rather than on the large multi-acre farms you see in the American Midwest), but the people live life at a slower pace, with plenty of fresh air and homemade goods (breads, jams, cheeses, and wool for knitting just about everything).
My house, for example, is just off the one major road that connects Castro to the rest of the island. About ten minutes outside of the city, you turn off the main street and follow a dirt road up hill to a small suburb (more like a village) with plenty of homes, a few tiny stores, and a church that has one mass per month. My host family has just the house on their property, with a small shed in back for storing firewood. But some of our neighbors have chickens, cats, and plenty of dogs roaming around outside their homes. It reminds me of the rural villages in Poland that I've seen, even though its only a few minutes away from the island's capital city. And since my host parents have plenty of friends who live on real rural farms, we get plenty of the homemade goods mentioned earlier, and of course they also make their own mayonnaise and jams and such here in the kitchen. I'll post more on Chilean culture, politics, etc over the next few months.
-Pablo
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