Are You Flaite or Cuico? The Answer May Surprise You.

I think we’re finally back into the rhythm of things here in Santiago. We’re in the last stage of our trip here, with only about one month left to go, so in addition to the regular schedule of work and play, we’re beginning to focus on our trip back, getting caught up on all the Lost: Season Two episodes we never watched, and planning forays out to Colorado. This week has been incredibly busy. Erin especially is working a lot, and I’m not too far behind. Still, we’ve had plenty of time for amusing ourselves. I went out for some beers with the single dude friend I’ve made here. We tried hard to muster the appropriate amount of scratching and grunting, but it’s difficult to achieve the desired affect with only two people. Erin countered by going on a girl’s night in which I imagine she watched The Holiday and got slightly tipsy on wine before chatting endlessly about boys and relationships over a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.

We also got ourselves invited to a couple dinners. One was tomato soup. The other was a typical Chileno asado. Both were delicious, and we managed to meet every single Canadian living in Chile between the two of them. At the barbeque, Erin found a little girl (maybe 2.5 years old) to occupy her attention, so I didn’t see her for the majority of the evening. To her credit, it was an exceptionally cute little girl. Bilingual, too, so she’d already achieved greater linguistic prowess in her short life than I could ever possibly hope to in all of mine. I’m getting better, though, I swear.

On Friday, I saw a huge news crew right outside where we work, filming for the hundredth-or-so news piece to air on Transantiago. Over the past couple of months, we’ve been witnessing the effects of a government-instituted plan called Transantiago. It was the brainchild of some poor sucker at the Ministry of Transportation, one of those ideas that looks great on paper but, once carried out (badly), doesn’t actually work. Basically, it was trying to open up public transportation to as many people as possible, especially those who live on the outskirts of the city/in the poorer sections. One of the benefits was supposed to be that you could transfer from a metro to a bus or a bus to another bus without paying twice if you do it in under a certain amount of time. Some of you may remember me babbling early on about the bus system. Well, Transantiago is an attempt to organize and improve the operation of the busses. They built stops, so instead of just flagging down a bus any old place, the people could go to specific spots to catch one. They organized routes. Before there weren’t actually any defined routes, and busses could pretty much pick where they wanted to go, a decision they would publicize using big cardboard signs in the windows. Now, they all run on a plan, dictated by bus number. There are also special busses only lanes now to speed up their movement around the city.
All of this, no doubt, sounds good. It doesn’t work, though, and it’s been a huge disaster. The major reason it doesn’t is because of the Chilean mafia, which owns something like 40% of the busses in Santiago, has refused to send its busses out under the new plan. All transportation is government organized, but the government issues contracts to private companies. Thus, while it can dictate where busses run, it can’t make them actually leave the garage. So, there aren’t enough busses for everyone. As a result, there are often lines of people 50 deep waiting at bus stops (this is actually a good thing—at the beginning of the Transantiago nightmare they used to fight and riot to get a spot on the micros), and you regularly see the people who did manage to catch a bus hanging out the opened doors because it’s so damn overcrowded. All the extra people have no choice but to cram themselves onto the metro, which in turn is now overcrowded, hot, and eternally reeks of BO. Workers have begun lining up outside metro stations at 5am, and when the doors finally open, there is a crowd of 200+ people waiting to surge in. Those who drive now have half the lanes to use, so private transportation is also ruined, with huge traffic jams in the morning and afternoon. It’s been a train wreck. It’s been front page news since its implementation in mid-February, and it’s always the first thing they talk about on the news every night. They always manage to interview some old abuelita saying how she doesn’t like to leave the house anymore. It even ruined the advertising career of the famous Chileno Soccer player who originally advertised for it. He’s apparently lost his credibility. Coincidentally, Paz is the only person we’ve met who is happy. Her commute to school was shortened by half an hour. The real results of all the changes are that there are never enough busses at peak hours and everyone spends about an extra hour commuting, especially the people in poorer areas on the outskirts of the city. While walking around one day, Erin and I encountered a graffiti sign that said (in Spanish), “Wake up earlier to serve the rich? No to Transantiago.” We are blessedly unaffected by all of this, because we walk almost everywhere. Still, it’s interesting to have been here for the death of both the former dictator and the transportation system.
One other thing we’ve noticed is that Chile is a relatively classist society. Wealthier people don’t like to mingle with poorer people and vice versa. This is true even between relatively close income brackets. This is something that everyone is aware of and most Chilenos we’ve talked to freely admit. The thing I’ve found most interesting about this is the vocabulary. From when we first arrived, we heard the words flaite and cuico thrown around pretty liberally, and it took a while to really understand what all this meant. From an entirely literal point of view, someone who is flaite is lower class, but it has the connotation of sketchy, and someone who is cuico is higher class, with the connotation of snobby and stuck up. Essentially, everyone who is not exactly as wealthy as you falls into one of the two categories. When Erin had her picture taken with the Colo Colo soccer team, she was surprised afterwards, given their insane level of fame, to find that, rather than being impressed, most of her students were a little surprised. We’ve since learned that Colo Colo, despite its popularity, is perceived as a bunch of lower class dudes by the typical businessman of Chile. They’re too flaite, in other words, to bother taking a picture with. There is a good bit of downward discrimination among the social classes. Businesses, for instance, in some cases feel that it is okay to pay an employee of a lower economic class less than an equally qualified employee from a higher class. The perception is that poorer people don’t need as much money, thus, it’s good business practice to higher them at lower salaries. In social situations, Chileans seem to avoid hanging out with people they consider flaite, and we have known Chileans to warn US girls that the boy they are talking to by the bar is flaite. The ironic thing is that a richer person might consider these same people to be flaite as well, so it’s all relative. While a lot of the discrimination goes one direction, the negative attitude goes both ways, with people considering those of higher class to be cuico and avoiding them. Occasionally, we’ll here a place referred to as a cuico bar, meaning it’s snobby and no fun, but also that it has a richer clientele. Likewise, when Erin first arrived in Chile with an accent similar to one from Spain, she often got made fun of for being cuica.

Another thing we’ve observed in our months here is the widespread use of credit in purchasing everything. There are credit cards in Chile, of course, but the most common form of credit is the cuotas system. This is private credit issued by the stores themselves. They just divide the purchase into cuotas and charge you once a month, adding a percentage. Cuotas are offered on literally everything. We were once offered the option of buying a pair of scissors (rough value: $1.50) in three easy installments. The thing I can never figure out is who it is among the Chilenos that is actually exercising this alternative, and if they’re buried under a mountain of cuota-induced debt.

Scrabble in the Park

Captain Heartbreak´s Guide to Chile

Just discovered: the Santiago Times, which is the English newspaper here in Santiago, runs a comic strip (or rather, ran, as the cartoonist seems to have left Chile) about an ex-pat called Captain Heartbreak. I´ve scanned a few of the cartoons, and they are excellent. They echo Nate and my sentiments almost exactly, and you´ll recognize several references on Chilean culture from our blog in these comics. Things that aren´t mentioned in our blog yet but that appear in the comic strip are undoubtedly phenomena we´ve noticed as well. If you can´t tell, I think this guy and his cartoons and observations are amazing. I can´t copy any of the cartoons on here, but definitely check him out:

www.chipsites.com/Comic/captain.html

So Now We're Back

After two and a half weeks of traveling through Patagonia, we were looking forward to getting back to Santiago. You reach that point in a vacation where a night in your own bed and a meal you cook yourself start to seem like the most appealing things around. Our first days back were spent being as lazy as humanly possible and washing the clothes we'd been wearing for the entire trip, each of which smelled worse than death. We, thankfully, had reached that stage of filthiness when you can no longer smell your own stink, but the Chileans around us had no such immunity, so I'm fairly certain we were the least popular people on the plane home. We also took the opportunity to meet up with Fiona and German to swap hiking stories and so Erin could take her pretty new ring out in public and start telling everyone she knows she's engaged. It was good practice for her.

When Monday rolled around, we both started work again. Thankfully, the February slump is over. All the Chileno business types have left the beach, put down the ice cream, and come back to Santiago for work. School has also started up again, so around about midafternoon all the school kids in their uniforms are milling around the streets and begging money off strangers near the metro. This is a practice that vaguely annoys me, so I try to come up with creative ways to say no. Tactic 1: Say I don't have any money and ask them if they could lend me some. Tactic 2: Give them exactly 2 chilean pesos. A peso is worth approximately one fifth of a US penny. A little less in reality and has the same buying power here as a fifth of a penny would in the US. That's to say no buying power at all. I have decided that rather than keeping single pesos, I get more value out of either throwing them at things or offering them to school-aged beggars. Tactic 3: Sorry, I need my money for beer. I haven't found that anything really deters them, but it keeps me vaguely amused and I get to practice my spanish. Work is pretty much standard, and it's a good enough way to fill up the day. It also conveniently ends by 2:30, which leaves the rest of the afternoon free for whatever activities we can think up.

Since we got back, we've been trying extra-hard to catch up on all the entertainment we've been behind on. Mostly, this means watching episodes of Futurama and the Simpsons in spanish, but my spanish has gotten decent enough that I can also now follow some of the original Chilean programming. Erin always seems a little disgusted with me when she catches me watching Casado con Hijos (the Married with Children rip off), but I don't care. We both finally got to see the Borat movie, which most of you probably saw months ago. It doesn't officially come out in Chile until this weekend, but, like most movies, bootleg copies have been available since the US release. We both thought it was funny, but it definitely got over-hyped. We also saw Pan's Labyrinth, which was incredible. Here, it's shown without English subtitles, obviously, and that made it a little difficult for me, but I did an okay job and Erin answered my questions after it was over. We've also been trying to get out and do things. We went rock climbing again in Cajon del Maipo. This time we took Nick, Fabiola, and Paz along with us. Nick was kind enough to drive us, and in exchange I promised him I wouldn't let Will or David make any more inappropriate comments about his under-age, pseudo-step-daughter. He was very appreciative, and both he and Paz were pretty good climbers. I was pleased to learn that I was still able to climb after a 3 month break, and I suspect the loss of some 20-30 pounds during these last seven months was helpful in that respect. At any rate, it was fun, and they invited us over for a BBQ afterwards. Nick regailed us with dirty stories of English boarding school and taught us what a "minger" is, and in exchange I spilled wine on their new tablecloth and ate so much steak I was sick that night. Erin was generally pleasant, so good for her. It doesn't make for much of a story.

Patagonia Vacation: Part II and Picture Extravaganza

Well, we said Patagonia was beautiful, and now we have pictures to back it up. Below are the major rock formations that make up the park. On the right are the Cuernos, and on the left is Mount Doom. I made the second name up, but I think it fits. We actually don't know the real one. Its summit, however, is perpetually shrowded in clouds...and mystery. This picture is from the first day of hiking and at the bottom is Lake Pehoe.

Here we have Erin and I on the shore of Lake Pehoe. Since this is also the first day, we still appear happy. Erin is yet to utter the words, "My feet hurt," and I'm yet to respond, "Maybe if you stopped talking about it, they'd feel better."

Here is our camp site from the first night. Having successfully transported our stove through Chilean airport security, we used it to make a delicious meal of rice and Cup of Soup.

Moving backwards in time, this is once again from the first day's hike. That's Erin in the picture, walking through the field of brown grass. Mount Doom looms ominously in the background.

Our second day was spent in the effort to reach Glacier Grey, which ends in a glacial lake. It's a pretty amazing site, and the whole lake was full of little iceburgs that would break off and float around until they finally melted.

Continuing on down the trail...we reached our campsite for the evening. We stopped to claim a site and set up our tent before we hiked on to the glacier lookout. This is me, chewing on my fork while contemplating just how good that Cup of Soup is going to taste tonight.

And Glacier Grey, or at least as close as we were able to get to it. To reach the view point took an hour of hiking up very steep trails, but I think it was worth it. Afterwards, we hiked back down to our campsite for dinner and sleep.

The view back down the valley from Glacier Grey.

It wouldn't really be a trip if we didn't have some camera problems. This time, we ran out of juice on our memory card. Apparently we managed to take 106 pictures in the first three days. After a day or two pictureless, I figured out how to delete pictures without the use of the LCD screen. The only downside is that we have no idea which ones we deleted. And we'll never know. Skipping ahead to the last day, therefore, we have the river valley that runs all the way to the Torres of Torres del Paine. The trail through this area was a lot steeper than it looks, and on the way down, Erin was nearly knocked off into the river below by a pack horse, which is used to carry supplies to the hostel. Strangely enough, this land is privately owned.

And finally, Las Torres. Erin chose to skip out on this section of the hike, so she missed out on the incredibly steep hike up the terminal moraine and the crazy-strong wind. Still, it's pretty nice I think.

This brings us to Argentina. After an evening in a hostel in Puerto Natales, Chile, we were back on a bus and crossing the border. Argentinian Patagonia, in our experience, was like the luxury Patagonia. I preferred Chilean Patagonia. The landscape seemed a little bigger, the area was more remote, the hikes were longer, the sites were more beautiful, etc. That being said, Argentina had its own upsides, the first and foremost being the food. It's cheap and mostly consists of giant, mouth-watering steaks and log-fire-cooked lamb. But I digress...

We started our trip through Argentina in El Calafate. As you drive in, the tourist office located a mile or two before anything else lets you know that El Calafate exists primarily to suck money from tourists. It's a small town with a disproportionate number of fancy restaurants, hotels, chocolate shops (which were awesome), and outdoor stores. We opted not to stay, although we did opt for a nice dinner. We caught the bus the next day to El Chalten, which is where the real activity is. Parque Nacional de los Glaciares is the Argentinian equivalent of Torres del Paine, and includes among other things, Mount Fitz Roy. While not as cool to look at as Mount Doom, it's pretty good. Unlike Torres del Paine, however, all the hikes are day hikes, and most people stay the nights in hostels in town. The hikes, themselves, we soon discovered were also substantially easier, over mostly flat ground. We were having none of that, though, and slogged off into the woods to stay at one of the three camp sites in the park. A sign on the way in warned us that if we saw a puma, we were lucky, but we should take care to throw rocks "aggressively." Check.

Our first morning in the park, we woke up to find a layer of sand covering everything in the tent. The wind had picked up to a ridiculous level overnight and had managed to carry huge amounts of sand up under our tent's fly, where they dropped down onto us below. We were perturbed to find out that the wind had no intention of letting up that day, and that, combined with frequent spots of rain kept us bravely confined to our tent, where I beat Erin repetitively in cards. Here she is looking cute in our tent.

By early evening, the wind and rain subsided, and we ventured up the valley to take pictures of the glacier. It was good. Here's Erin on one of the many moraines that cross the valley. Also, the bathroom.

After our day of bad weather, we woke up on day two to beautiful blue skies and perfect weather. We took the opportunity to hike back out of the park and catch our bus out of town.

Having had our fill of El Chalten, we returned to El Calafate for a night and then skipped town in a plane the next day. Our last stop on the trip was in the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia. Ushuaia was fun. Like everywhere else in Argentina, there was beef, which was enough to keep me happy. Erin and I were pretty worn out from the whole trip at this point, so we spent a lot of time lounging around our hostel, which was very nice, and taking trips to the chocolate shop to buy hot chocolate, which they make fresh using bars of chocolate and hot milk. Our one day of hiking was spent in Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. The land of fire, as you might expect, was interesting. It was very pretty, but we never got to see the southern lights for which I believe the area is named. It was always too cloudy. The park did not disappoint, though.

The majority of our time in Ushuaia, however, was spent in the futile attempt to ride a sail boat. We booked a trip for every single day but got weathered out every morning. It was disheartening, so we finally decided to take a ride on an old, steamboat-ish ship that takes a three hour tour (a la Gilligan's Island) around a series of islands populated by local wildlife. Here we are on our last attempt at a sailboat ride. We actually made it onto the boat and ate some breakfast before we were sent home on this try.

Here is the boat we finally managed to go on. The Barracuda. The name prompted Erin and I into singing on more than one occasion during the ride.

Cormoranes, sea lions, and seals! Can you tell the difference between a sea lion and a seal? Each of the male sea lions, which weighed like 800 pounds apiece, had at least six or seven females, who he used primarily as pillows as far as we could tell. Every once in a while they would start yelling at other males, making a noise very similar to a pig's oink. This is truly an advanced social system.

Me with the only penguin we saw on the whole trip (unfortunately)...and a beaver?

A view from the deck of the Barracuda.

And it's captain. Check out his manly beard. God, he just reeks of manliness.
The lighthouse. Pretty.
And finally...what's better than two and a half weeks in Patagonia? 4 a.m. flights home.

Filling In Some Gaps

Admittedly, we don't always have perfect memories and there are some things that might have slipped our minds while writing the last entry, so let me go back and include some interesting details.

First, the plane ride. Normally, plane rides are boring, especially in Chile, where they aren't kept in the greatest condition on the inside, but our plane ride down to Punta Arenas was event-packed. First of all, we had bought a camping stove a couple weeks prior to our trip so that we would be able to carry in, cook, and eat our own hot, delicious food while camping in the park. Naturally, you always need to test your stuff before taking it on a trip, so Erin and I made sure to do this with the stove. Unfortunately, we opted to test it with kerosene. The fuel itself works just fine, but unlike white gas (which is preferable, and harder to find where we were), it leaves a heavy residue on everything and stinks of gas long after all of the carbon has been burned out of it. We cleaned the stove as indicated in the instructions, but on arrival to the airport made the mistake of asking if it was okay (the thought being that it would be better not to have them think we were trying to sneak stuff on). Mistake. Smelling our stove, this guy tells us he can't let it go on. We protest that it's completely clean. I toss in the phrase, "couldn't light it on fire if I tried." None of this worked, so we begged permission to try and clean it before our flight left. After one failed attempt, Erin begged cleaning supplies off a janitor and we spent an hour in the bathroom, furiously cleaning. Two or three of the airport cleaning people hung around offering helpful advice and suggestions while we both did our best to coat all the equipment with a soap smell in the men´s bathroom. Arriving at the desk again literally minutes before our flight was supposed to leave, we found no one there to check the stove. Rather than repeat our original mistake of asking, we quickly checked the bag and ran to the gate arriving just as they were paging us over the intercom. So that you don't worry, I'll tell you in advance, all our baggage got to Punta Arenas okay. I'll also say that at security they very amiably allowed Erin to go through with a lighter, which not only smelled like fuel but visibly contained more fuel than the stove ever possibly could have and which I had earlier tampered with so that it could produce a flame easily three inches tall.

When we got on the plane, which had been very nicely waiting for us, we discovered that the entire Colo Colo soccer team was on board. This means nothing to you uneducated, unenlightened gringos, but it's the Chilean equivalent of sharing a plane with Peyton Manning and the Colts. Everyone on board was visibly excited. People with cameras were walking around taking pictures; parents were getting their kids to go ask for autographs; people were touching these guys just to do it. Erin joined right in, despite the fact that she didn't know a single one's name, couldn't pick them out of a crowd, and doesn't know the rules of soccer. What she did know: "They're so hot. Look at their tight little soccer bodies." When we arrived at the airport, we stepped off the plane and immediately heard the Colo Colo fans chanting and singing. There was a huge crowd of people waiting for them to arrive, none of whom could get inside the security area, so while we all waited for baggage we had unfettered access to their fame and "hot bodies." Erin even got photos with some of the most famous players, who were only identifiable to us because people screamed and swooned a little more than normal when they went anywhere. That was our brush with fame.

Here´s Erin with two of the Colo Colo dudes.

Erin with Suazo (who is supposedly super good, one of the best in Lat. Am.) and some other dude.Here is a real photo of Suazo in a real game, just so you know we´re not making all of this up.

In other news, we're engaged. If we were Chilean, this would be second in importance only to the fact that we rode on an airplane with the Colo Colo soccer team. Since we're not, I guess it's the best thing going for us right now. Erin likes telling this story more than she likes me, but I'm going to steal her thunder anyway. I asked her in Torres del Paine, in Valle del Frances. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole thing being eternally linked with France, but it is what it is and there's no denying it was pretty. This was not my initial plan. I was planning to ask her, but not until we reached Las Torres on the sixth day, so I didn't even bother to take the ring I'd bought over Christmas up with me. We hiked to the overlook, and as previously mentioned I also convinced Erin to hike a little farther to the ridge, which was a little too steep and windy, leading to her being angry with me by the time we got to the bottom. Undetered, I suggested we hang out at the overlook for a bit, which was amazingly pretty. It wasn't windy and the sun was out, but somehow it was still snowing little flurries. At any rate, deciding this was probably going to be one of the most peaceful, perfect moments of life, I asked her without really thinking about it. Erin likes to elaborate, embellish, and generally tell more details than could have possibly been squeezed into a couple seconds, but if you'd like to hear them, ask her. She said yes (or something along those lines; that was the jist of it, as I recall).

No more pictures today. You´ll have to wait for the rest.