Todos Arriba, Vina

After Valparaiso, we went to the coastal resort town of Vina del Mar, one of the premier vacation destinations in all of South America. High-rise condos line the main beach where bathing beauties from all over Latin America sun themselves and work on their tans.

We were there in the height of the summer tourist season to see the Vina del Mar music festival, a weeklong affair that attracts the greatest artists in Latin music and from around the world; everyone from Julio Iglesias to Pearl Jam has played there at one point. To say that the festival is a big deal would be an understatement—it’s the ONLY thing on television for the entire week. This year there was particular interest in the selection of the Reina (Queen) del Festival. The crown ended up going to a blonde Argentine bombshell who had undergone… uh… extensive silicon injections to certain parts of her anatomy. When she won, she coyly removed her bikini top for the small army photographers present. The next day, she was on the cover of every tabloid holding her a left breast that was (literally) the size of her head. She was later spotted with Nicolas Massu, the Chilean tennis player and national hero who won 2 gold medals at Athens. The press made much of the fact that they went home together awfully early (about 3:30AM). Suspiciously early, in fact. Rumors continue to swirl.

The night we attended the festival was Chilean night. The main acts included Alberto Plaza, an aging but still handsome singer of romantic ballads; Congreso, an intellectual band fronted by a Sigmund Freud look-alike that blends rock, jazz, and indigenous, music; Los Hermanos Bustos, a group of older men in cowboy hats who play Mexican-style ranchera music, and Lucybell, a decent but unspectacular rock group with a rabid local fan base. There were also several other acts from all over the world that played everything from modern pop to traditional folcloricos. There were two acts that were the highlights in my mind. The first were Los Hermanos Bustos, who completely rocked out. It may seem strange that music based so heavily around the accordion can rock so hard, but trust me, it can. Everyone (yes, me included) was dancing in the aisles, and when the masters of ceremonies finally made Los Hermanos leave the stage, the audience roared and swore with disapproval.

The other highlight was a Spaniard who appeared in the international competition. He only sang one song, and I don’t even remember his name. His act, though, was priceless. He was obviously a good-looking guy, but by the way he moved it was clear that he thought he was god’s gift to sexy. He thrust his suit jacket over his shoulders, then whipped it off and twirled it through the air, revealing a tight white tank-top underneath. Before the song was over, he literally ripped off the tank top in a blaze of passion. Women in the audience squealed, and as I looked around I could see that lots of people were trying hard just to keep themselves from laughing. But I couldn’t help but cheer him on. At the very least, he dances better than I do.

Valparaiso, mi amor

The coastal port city Valparaiso is Chile’s second largest city and, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The closest comparison I have for Valparaiso would be San Francisco, but the San Francisco of 50 years ago or more. Like San Francisco, the city hugs the hills at the edge of the sea, with weather-beaten buildings slung at absurd angles on the slopes. But the city is more than just beautiful. It has a depth, a magic, and a mystery of the kind that San Francisco used to have but is gradually losing to glass condominiums and boutique coffee shops. In Valparaiso, chips of green, red, and blue paint flake off of the aging walls, stray dogs roam the thoroughfares, and everywhere there are cobblestone side streets and shadowy alleys. The city seems to breathe sweet and briny from both its proud civic buildings and its ancient brothels built for generation after generation of Chilean lonely sailors on shore leave.

Our main stop was a curious house named “La Sebastiana” in the scattered hillside neighborhood of Cerro Bellavista: one of the three surviving houses of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda was an outspoken socialist, an ambassador to France, a presidential candidate, a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. He also has a reputation as a hopeless romantic, so I have a little extra sympathy for him. On my birthday my Chilean family gave me “Versos del Capitan”, a collection of love poems that Neruda wrote to his mistress while living in Italy. I read part of one of them to my host mother. She squealed and exclaimed, “Oh, that’s BEAUTIFUL! I have to go tell Katya.” She then grabbed the book out of my hands and ran to the next room to call her best friend.

“I wish a man would say that to ME!” Katya told her.

“I know, me too!” replied Marcela. “I had to hear it from DAVID!”

Neruda’s house is decorated with the memorabilia of a lifetime of travels around the world, and reflects the poet’s own unique, and sometimes bizarre, sensibility. He built the floors intentionally squeaky to remind him of the sea. He mixed and matched tiles and paint colors in every room. His favorite chair, which he called La Nube (The Cloud) has been carefully preserved. Looming over his bedroom is a life-sized, black and white photo of Walt Whitman, his favorite English-language poet. “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman…” I whispered to myself. A favorite line from an Allen Ginsberg poem.

After seeing the house we walked down the hill to eat lunch, taking a winding path through an informal outdoor museum of murals painted on walls and the sides of buildings, el Museo al Aire. The museum route was only recently restored. Many of the streets of Valparaiso are so steep that there is no trash pick-up service, and it has only been in the last couple of years that the city has finally made an effort to clean up the route along the murals. “Valparaiso is a city where one walks with their eyes both in the heavens and in the earth,” a local told me. It was a romantic way of telling me to watch out for dog poop. Small packs of stray dogs roamed lazily about the city, sniffing for the tourists who may be willing to share some bread or an extra scrap of carne.

We ate in a rotating restaurant at the top of one of the city’s high-rise hotels. As with our trip to Concepcion, the Bings paid our tab—fortunate because this place looked pricey. From the top we could see for miles around—the sea, the hills, the rubble-strewn parking lot next door that had been a market until the last big earthquake, and the rusting hulks of shipwrecks along the breakwater dissolving into the salt and spray.

“Y el tiempo se escurrio y sus ojos se le llenaron de amaneceres. Y del mar se enamoro y su cuerpo se enrraizo en el muelle.”
- Fher Gonzales

A Discourse on Gringos

It has come to my attention that not everyone reading this will be familiar with a term that I have used several times already in the course of writing these entries: “gringo”. The word “gringo” is ubiquitous in Latin America. Its meaning is somewhat flexible, though it is usually translated as “North American”, “European”, “white-skinned English speaker”, “foreigner” or sometimes just “American”. Canadians can be gringos, as can Brits, Irishmen, Aussies, and New Zealanders. Sometimes even a German or a Swede can qualify. But Americans are the quintessential gringos. I read somewhere that the term dates back to the Mexican-American War, when Mexicans angry at the US occupying army used to chant, “Green go home!” in reference to the American soldiers’ green uniforms. I suspect, however, that this explanation may be just a myth, mostly because I think that American soldiers during the Mexican-American War wore blue uniforms, not green.

If you look the word up in a Spanish-English dictionary, you will likely be told that, though not vulgar, “gringo” is usually used disparagingly. Indeed, there is some truth to this definition. If a Latin American is speaking formally about people from the USA, they will use the word “americano” (“American”) or more often “estadounidense” (roughly “United-States-ian”). A disparaging comment, like an anti-Bush slogan for instance, is much more likely to include the word “yanqui” (“yankee”) or “gringo”.

This connotation, however, only tells half the story. Simply put, disparaging remarks are treated differently here. My friends and I are called gringos all the time; my host mother will introduce me to her friends as her “gringo son”, and my host brothers ask if I’m working on finding a “polola gringa” (a gringa girlfriend). But it goes farther than that. A good friend of mine, who, I should mention, is in excellent physical shape, has acquired the nickname “chancha” from her host family. Chancha, by they way, means “pig”, with all of the negative implications that that term has in English. They even bought her a placemat with a cute little drawing of a pig on it. When my host family is not calling me gringo, they’re calling me “flaco”, which means “scrawny” or “too skinny”, as opposed to “delgado”, which means skinny, but in a good way.

A lot of you probably already know the wonders of “gringo”, so I apologize for such a dry entry. I just want to clear up any confusion; I don’t want any of my friends or family thinking that I pass every day here being bombarded by insults and racial slurs. Speaking of insults, there’s another word that Chileans will sometimes use 2 or 3 times in the same sentence. The word is “huevon”, the great Chilean contribution to the vast pantheon of Spanish vulgarity. I could never do “huevon” justice in a format like this. Ask me about it when I get back.

Cajon del Maipo

I stood up, cinched up the straps on my backpack and walked to the door of the subway train. “Bellavista de Florida,” said the voice on the intercom. “End of the line.”

The green line of the Santiago metro runs north south across the most of the city. I took the train from the center of Santiago going south, covering a social distance far greater than the actual distance in kilometers. Immediately south of the city center the streets fan out at angles into block after block of industrial factories and rusting warehouses, some of the oldest showing their crumbling, earthquake-shattered brick frames to the yellowing sun.

By the end of the line, the neighborhood changes again. Bellavista de Florida, more commonly just “La Florida” is the heart of Santiago’s new suburban sprawl, with modest, colorfully painted houses both new and old ringed by tree-lined streets, construction sites, and dusty vacant lots where the children play soccer. As is true in all but the very best neighborhoods in Santiago, graffiti occupies almost every inch of available wall-space.
Although some street gangs in the dirt-poor poblaciones (slums) in the southwest of the city have recognizable graffiti tags, as a general rule Chilean graffiti is not as tied to gang activity as it is in the US. Much of it is political; a common slogan is painted in large letters and taking up entire walls is “Bachelet para todos”. Michelle Bachelet, the Minister of Defense for the current Socialist government, has nearly secured the nomination for the presidency of the center-left Concertacion coalition, and very likely will be Chile’s first female president. But the most popular political slogans by far are anti-Bush slogans. “No a APEC [the Asian Pacific Economic Conference, held in Chile, which Bush attended in December], No a Bush,” they say. Other popular ones include “Bush asesino” (Bush is a murderer) and “No a la Guerra” (No more war). Another is “Chile no se vende.” Chile is not for sale.

From La Florida I rode a bus to the little town of San Jose del Maipo. This little Andian pueblo is only a little more than hour away, and winter travelers know it as a stop along the road to some of Chile’s best ski slopes. I was traveling with my friend Matt, another Stanford student who studied in Chile during the fall and then spent the last couple of months hitchhiking his way around Patagonia, traveling from the Argentine city of Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, back to Santiago, a distance of about 4000 kilometers. Our plans were nowhere near as ambitious; we were going to spend a night in the Andes and to meet a friend Matt came to know on a previous trip through the Cajon del Maipo.

The Chilean we were going to meet was a 62-year-old artist named Lalo. Matt stumbled across his cabin in the middle of the wilderness on a previous trip to the Cajon del Maipo and struck up a conversation with him. It soon became apparent that the man who tends the rural stretches of the village water canal was no ordinary campesino. One obvious sign was the fact that Lalo speaks at least four languages. An eminently nice guy, Lalo is most easily described as a uniquely Chilean type of hippie. After graduating from university in Chile, he lived in various cities throughout Europe. After the military coup in 1973, he expected that he would never go back to his native land, and for a long time he set up shop for himself in Barcelona. He eventually had to come back, however, when his father became terminally ill. After his father died, Lalo found himself unable to bear the stress and bustle of Santiago, and almost by chance took up an opportunity to manage some land in the Cajon del Maipo. He’s been living there ever since.

Words, of course, don’t do justice to the beauty of Cajon del Maipo. The branch of the canyon we hiked was sunny and scorching hot. Families taking a weekend break from Santiago played in the cool of the river, a tributary of the Maipo River that eventually runs south of Santiago and to the sea. Alamo and sycamore trees grew close to the water, thorny bushes and cacti clung to the steep hillsides of the canyon, and wild raspberries ripened in the thickets along the trail. Along the riverbank the rocks looked like row upon row of lazily stacked dice, cubes and corners jutting out at all angles. The sides of the canyon towered above the valley, showing the long scars of ancient waterfalls now dry in the summer heat. As night fell Matt, Lalo and I sat under the trees sipping hot tea and quietly looking at the stars. In the west the smog and skyglow of Santiago spilled over the ridges and clouded a corner of the sky like a bag of flour spilled on the kitchen floor. In the east, the great clouds of southern stars drifted coolly from horizon to horizon.

The next day as I was walking back to the bus stop in San Jose del Maipo, I began to think about how much I’m going to miss this place when I’m gone. I passed an artisan’s fair in the town’s small plaza de armas, with vendors selling silver jewelry, wool blankets, and ice-cold Coca-Cola. I’ll miss the people trying to sell me something everywhere, the ability to buy ice cream off the street. I’ll miss the cracked sidewalks, the crumbling plaster, and the garishly colorful houses painted green, sunflower yellow, and fading, powdery red. I’ll miss the ancient churches, quiet and serene.

“Is that our bus?” I asked Matt, pointing a block down the street.

“Yup.”

“Should we run after and try to catch it?”

“Probably a good idea.”

Off we went.

It Takes Two to Tango

Today I added another class to my schedule. It was after the Stanford add deadline, but I’m sure the university won’t care. I am now officially enrolled in tango classes.

Tango, as you may know, is not actually Chilean, but Argentine. It originally started as a lower-class phenomenon that only later achieved acceptance in the Argentine upper class after it came into fashion in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The Argentines, never to be caught without the latest fashions, quickly reappraised their view of the dance.

Incidentally, the Chilean national dance is the cueca, a very traditional dance where the partners bow, draw close, and twist away. In the cueca each partner dances with a handkerchief in their hands, accentuating their movements and in general adding an air of humble elegance to the movements. Nowadays the cueca is danced mainly at festivals and ceremonial occasions and in the more rural areas. In other words, if you walk into a Santiago discotheque and whip out your handkerchief you’re going to draw some strange looks. In these establishments you are much more likely to hear American pop, European techno, or South American salsa. My host mother, by the way, has solemnly sworn that she will teach me how to dance salsa,

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a place to learn la cueca, so tango it is. The classes are held at El Cachafaz, a small but festively decorated bar with colorful Argentine memorabilia on the walls and a modest dance floor. The proprietor of the establishment is short, pudgy old Argentine named Jorge who wears his shirt unbuttoned to just above his bellybutton, proudly displaying his graying chest-hairs. I’ve taken to calling him “Don Jorge” out of respect, for the man can still tango with the best of them. “You did great today,” he told us. “Really, you’re picking it up very fast. I’m not just saying that. I really mean it.” I’m not so sure. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

My partner Colleen and I spent the first class learning the pase basica, the basic footwork for the tango. The beginning class lasts about an hour, and we needed at least that long to master it. There are certain things in life that are easier than they look, like riding a bike. Sadly, tango is not one of these. And of course, when you have no rhythm to begin with it, that doesn’t help at all.

We stuck around to practice while the intermediate class did their thing. At about 10PM the instructor for the advanced class arrived and we suck around to watch some of it. It was like a scene out of a movie. The instructor himself spoke in a melodious Argentine accent. He was breathtakingly handsome in his tight maroon shirt and green pants, and he knew it.

“Okay, today we will work on a new set of steps,” he declared confidently. “Start with the pase basica.”

“Then move one, two, BAP!” he said with emphasis, thrusting his hips out to the side.

“One, two, BAP!”

“One, two… then look away, cross legs. Look away… cross! Look away… cross! NOW,” he paused breathlessly. Then speaking slowly, secretly…

“Your eyes meet.”

He cast a sultry gaze into the eyes of his partner and held it for a second.

“Okay!” he barked. “Good. Let’s try it.”

I rubbed my ankle, still sore from the rhythmless strain of learning the pase basica and leaned over towards Colleen. “All I want to do right now,” I said jealously, “is kick him in the shins.” We exchanged a knowing glance.