The Insatiable Pablo Neruda

Who wants to see some more pictures? These are about a week old, but they are the best we can do for you. Things are going well, as usual. We are in the process of winding down this Chilean trip, mainly getting processed out of work, which is occupying most of the day, and wandering around aimlessly with what time we have left over. Last week we taught our last classes and said our good byes to our students. Erin had some near tears from some of her students. None of that for me, though. My students prefer to express their grief with dinner invitations, so that's what we'll be doing tonight. The weekend was begun with a Comunicorp staff meeting, the first and last we will ever attend. Then we went to the first and last work happy hour we'll ever attend and had some good times meeting and talking to people who have for the most part been working with us the entire time we've been here...but now for pictures.

These were taken in Isla Negra, the tiny two-block town that houses the beach house of Pablo Neruda. Pablo is a pretty important guy in Chile, being a Nobel winner and the most famous poet they've ever produced. He was also a big commie, and he had lots of famous commie and non-commie friends. All in all, he's a pretty interesting guy. The house on Isla Negra (which is neither an actual island nor black) was supposedly his favorite house as well (he had another in Santiago and another in Valparaiso). It's very nice and has a lot of the sea and boat themes you would expect from a man who constantly wrote about the sea yet was terrified of the water. As much as writing poetry, he seemed to like collecting stuff, and a lot of his collections are located in the house. The place feels more like a museum than anything else. Very unliveable in my opinion, but apparently it was the same way when he was living in it. We weren't allowed to take any pictures of the insides, so you won't get to see his collection of mast heads or ships in bottles or erotic bottles or crucified Jesuses. Just believe me, they were there.

Here is the outside, complete with beached boat and mast and bells. This boat is more Pablo Neruda's speed. It doesn't toss or turn much and I like to picture him sitting in it with the sail up and wishing he was man enough to go on the real ocean. I suppose his fear of the ocean didn't prevent him from having three marriages, though, nor countless affairs, so I shouldn't make too much fun. He more than redeemed himself with his excessive promiscuity.


Here, my lady friend and I are under one of Mr. Neruda's archways. His houses are never normal like you think of modern ones. They invariably are laid out in strange inventive ways. In this case, the whole house was like one long hallway, stretching about a hundred feet. To get to the dining room you would have had to walk through the parlor, the horse stable, a bathroom, outside, back in, and through one more bathroom. We're standing in the outside section.


Isla Negra, aside from being the home of Pablo Neruda, was also home to pretty beaches and sunsets. These pictures prove it.




In this picture, Pablo Neruda proves that being dead is no barrier to his womanizing. He'll get all the women he wants, thank you very much.


Back at our rented cabin (we spent the weekend with Janine and Gonzalo), the rest of us drink our coffee and wonder just what happened between Erin and that Pablo Neruda statue.


Here we are later that night, still waiting for Erin to come home. Naturally, we didn't just sit around. The cabin we rented came completely equipped with a grill. We threw on some Choripan and then some two and a half pounds of steak. Naturally, it was all delicious.


Here is another picture of the beach at Isla Negra.


We managed to finally locate Erin the next day, wandering along the beach outside Pablo Neruda's house, completely disoriented and with no recollection of where she had been the last 24 hours. Here we are on Mr. Neruda's patio. It juts out over the beach in the shape of a boat front. It is even equipped with a mast.


This is a section of Pablo Neruda's house. We didn't go in the upstairs, but you can see the rest of it extending off in either direction. On the left side is the dining room, and on the right is his study.


This is more of the same section. The fish at the top is some kind of emblem for Pablo Neruda. We have seen it in his other house, as well. This one also shows the direction of the wind.


It is local custom for children to warn Pablo Neruda not to seduce their mothers and sisters. This is done by sitting on his head. If only I had known to begin with.

Pictures and an Update

I know I´ve been totally lazy about updating the blog, and I apologize for subjecting you to Nate´s crazy ramblings. Here are some pictures to satisfy the visual learners out there (and to prove that we do, in fact, have some friends). These pictures are from a birthday/St. Patrick´s Day party we had last month.

This is Janine (who works with us at Comunicorp) and Fiona (who lives above us). Janine is Canadian and Fiona is a Scot. I don´t know why that´s important, but everyone asks and knows about where everyone else is from, so it´s a habit I´ve also gotten into. Here is Nate being positively dwarfed by two Chileans. This almost never happens. These Chileans are abnormally huge. On the left is Gonzalo, Janine´s boyfriend, and on the right is Eric, who drives the metro. We were super fascinated by his driving of the metro (he´s That Voice... it´s like the Wizard of Oz), and he consequently made fun of us because he says all gringos are fascinated by the fact that he drives the metro.
Here is Fiona and her Chilean boyfriend German. It was her party and German made the birthday cake all by himself! His name is pronounced (hermán, by the way).

Nate expressing his feelings about socializing with people for more than two hours.
Janine and Louise, a Kiwi with a Chilean boyfriend as well. (I am the only gringa in the country not dating a Chilean, by the way).

More pictures to follow of our trip to the beach last weekend.

Short update on our lives: We are on our last week of work, and we leave for the States on April 28th. It´s weird to have the departure so close, because it makes you ration and plan certain aspects of your life in ways you normally wouldn´t. For example, we´ve tried to plan it so that we won´t have to do any more laundry before we go. This means there is no unnecessary changing of clothes or underwear if it means we´ll have to do another load of laundry. The last day here we´ll hopefully be wearing our last remaining pair of clean underwear and our last set of clothes. This is not an easy thing to do, but we´re trying to make it work. Laundry here is ridiculously expensive. We´ve also stopped buying things we may not use up in a weeks´ time, like spices, certain kinds of food, toilet paper, new bottles of anything, etc. It´s an amusing challenge to see if we can time everything just so. If everything goes as planned, we´ll be using the last bit of soap, the last square of toilet paper, the last grain of rice on the last day of our stay here.

We stop work on Friday, and then we have a week to mess around, visit any places nearby that we may have missed, buy any souvenirs we´ve put off buying, say goodbye to friends, and get our lives packed into 4 checked bags and 2 carry-ons. We arrive in the States on April 29th, and we´ll be up in the DC area on May4th. See everyone soon!

Poke Holes in My Daughter

Due to an expanded social calendar this week, we've had a variety of opportunities to experience the metro and bus systems first-hand. Once again, we've found them to be smelly vestiges of their former selves, and the people who ride them seem more down-trodden and dejected. Also, the number of babies on board seems to have increased. This might be because when we first arrived in Chile it seemed like every woman you saw on the street was pregnant. They aren't big fans of maternity clothing around here. On the contrary, pregnancy seems to be a good opportunity to let your giant belly sway freely across the sidewalks like some kind of trophy. Anyway, all those women must have given birth over the summer, because the baby population on the metro has sky-rocketed, which leads me to an interesting observation: the Chilenos love to pierce baby girls' ears. I get the impression it must be a service offered at the hospital, because we've seen babies that couldn't be more than a couple weeks fresh with little fake diamond studs. This is a terrible afront to Erin's feminism and sense of practicality all at the same time, and whenever we see a little pierced baby she rants mercilessly. She has adopted the habit of talking about people in English in front of them, which to be fair the Chileans do to us all the time. I'm a little shier about it, since I am of the opinion that people can always tell when you're talking about them. Anyhoo, her arguement is that it's machismo crap that makes people incapable of accepting the idea that anyone would mistake their seemingly androgenous baby girl for a boy, and on top of that who wants to have one more part of a baby to take care of? I suppose I can see her point.

We've been doing lots of stuff this week with our friend Janine and her boyfriend, Gonzalo Dos. They convinced us to spend our Thursday night learning to dance salsa. I should really say they convinced Erin. No such convincing was done for me, but I was dragged along anyway, along with James. We represented the entirety of the bad-dancing Gringo population in the bar, although Janine was excellent. There seemed to be a regular crowd at the bar where the lessons were held, because after they ended all the Chileans got up and did choreographed line dances, a la the electric slide, and a dance that was fun to watch involving a middle school-type dance circle and lots of stealing of each others' partners.

On Saturday we went to another asado, this time at Gonzalo's house. We drank lots of wine and of course ate the required amounts of choripan and steak. Also lots of mayonaise-based salads and ice cream. This also gave us a good opportunity to practice our spanish, because we were two of only three english-speakers there. By the time we left I was feeling fluent enough to politely turn down another trip to dance salsa, but only by promising to go at some later date. In the course of the evening, I also got to talk about my new favorite topic of conversation, the Chilean system of taking leave from work. Since Chile is much more socialistic than say the USA there are a lot of social programs here that we don't have. My favorite is stress leave. At any point during the year, a person can take off a minimum of three weeks paid leave from work for stress. This completely baffled me initially, but it's apparently very common here, and recently I've heard about a lot of people doing it. I went to give an English evaluation the other day, and after spending a couple minutes on the phone, the supervisor informed me that my evaluee would not be available for at least three weeks due to stress. And that's it. No one questions it. The government takes care of paying you while you're stressed out. It's against the law to fire you, and you get your job right back when you feel better. I find myself wondering if it is encouraged during stress leave to go out and have a good time. Maybe on the doctor's note (which is required), he prescribes having drinks with friends and taking yourself to a nice restaurant.

We're just out of Holy Week, which is a pretty big deal here. For some reason, on several days it was celebrated near our house by people dressed like Native Americans and playing inspirational music. There was also one guy acting out a death scene, probably at the hands of some Spanish conquistador, although it was mostly mimed. Erin and I celebrated by visiting church. It's pretty easy to follow, since the rites are exactly the same, and we even managed to pick up some religious spanish. Finally, we had our Easter brunch at a Chinese restaurant, one of the only restaurants besides Burger King that was still open. So, that much at least is the same.

A Lot of Words About Nothing

You may have noticed that the blog updates are becoming slightly less frequent. We may be losing steam on this whole writing thing. Nevertheless, I was called into work early this morning for absolutely no reason, so I've got a couple hours to kill before my first class. Enjoy.

What have we been doing? Time is kind of all mushing together into a blob, and our weeks all kind of blend together. Generally speaking, we've fallen into a routine of going to parties and movies and whatnot with work people on the weekends and then spending most of our week working and planning for the future. Occasionally, we get out for a beer or something. On Friday we'd been hearing good things about the hamburgers at this Irish pub a couple blocks from our house, so I managed to convince Erin to go give them a try with me. Clearly the only people going to an Irish pub to eat hamburgers in Santiago are gringos, so we fit right in. The most frustrating thing about going to a gringo bar is that the Chilenos feel the need to jack up the prices to a ridiculous degree. That means, instead of paying the 3 dollars for a big plate of sandwich and french fries, like we've gotten used to, we end up paying the exorbidant price of 6 dollars. Completely unfair. Still, the hamburgers were good and loaded with unusual toppings like avocado. We also indulged ourselves in some good Irish beer.

Speaking of the Irish, they all left this weekend, and we were there to witness it. Every Irish person that works in our company has decided to leave, and they threw themselves a collective going away bash. It was supposed to start at 10:00, and Erin and I made the mistake of showing up at 10:30. We were the first ones there by a solid half hour and Erin felt awkward (enough so that she felt the need to put a sizable dent in the bottle of vodka we'd brought), while I made small talk to Niall, the Irish dude. It was also on the 24th floor of the building, with some great big windows, so we took the opportunity to see how long it would take balloons and other things to reach the ground. The answer is pretty long. When everyone showed up, Erin felt less out of place, and I started receiving complementary spanish lessons from our Chilean coworkers. While eating some Pringles, I was informed that the name is funny because in Chilean (not spanish in general) the word pringado refers to someone aflicted by sexually transmitted diseases. Kind of makes eating them seem less appetizing.

Other than that, it's been more of the same. Fall is in full swing, but it's kind of a depressing season here. Pretty colors are completely overshadowed by the fact that the weather turns ice-cold overnight and the smog starts to settle in heavy again. Still, there's something pleasantly sureal about walking down the street and passing ten different guys sweeping the leaves off their lawns using regular house brooms. Do rakes exist here? I haven't seen any.