Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Los Tres Concert

Last Wednesday night I went to a concert here in Chillán by the Chilean rock group Los Tres. They have been around since the 80's, but really hit their stride in the 90's after the Pinochet dictadura was peacefully overthrown. I just recently discovered their music and bought their latest CD. I was really surprised to see that they were playing in Chillán, since we are pretty far from the mainstream down here and good concerts are few and far between.

On the night of the concert I arrived at the Casa del Deporte a few minutes before the scheduled 9:00 pm starting time, ticket in hand. The line at the door stretched around the corner, so I wandered along its length to the end. As soon as I took my place at the end of the line, a young substitute teacher from school, Orlando, came up and motioned to me to come with him. He and another young teacher, Nelson, were farther up in the line. Although we hadn't really had time to get to know each other in the first few weeks of school, they recognized me and took me under their wing.

Once inside, I realized that I might be the oldest person in the building. There must have been 3-4000 university students seated in the wooden bleachers of the aging gym. As soon as the band started, everyone started singing. And I mean everyone, and every song. It was remarkable. I have mentioned before my impression of Chilean parties, where one person starts to play the guitar and everyone starts to sing along. This concert was no different, except that there were several thousand people at this party. The crowd swayed, there arms aloft in gentle waves, as the band played. Occasionally they would all hold up their cell phones, the lighted dials replacing the bic lighters of concerts of yester-year.

The crowd was incredible, and the band was awesome. Los Tres can really rock. They played for about an hour and a half, then left the stage. The crowd started clapping for an encore, and then started chanting in unison, one example being "no nos vamos sin miramos" (loosely translated: we are not leaving without seeing you). This encore solicitation went on for about 15 minutes, and the chants kept changing, but the volume remained constant, and eventually the band came back and played for another 45 minutes!

It was all quite splendid. Great music, great crowd, great energy.

Here is an MP3 of my favorite Los Tres song, Hagalo Usted Mismo (do it yourself), which tells the story of a conversation between God and a guy with woman problems.



Here is a link to a good Wikipedia article on Los Tres.

Friday, March 23, 2007

These shoes are made for walking

When I first arrived at my school last July I received two white board markers and an eraser. Oh wow, I thought….tech support is alive and well here in Chillán. It was months later when I discovered that the eraser was actually meant to polish my shoes. Meanwhile, I brought it home (since I discovered an eraser in each of my ten classrooms) to use on our own white board, purchased after a vast search in all the office supply stores in Chillan. White boards and the like are still a foreign concept here in Chile. Also noteworthy, Post-it Notes, a can’t-live-without staple at home, are nowhere to be found here.

So, back to the walking. We don’t own a car here. School is about a mile or more from our house and we get there by foot. I’ve only taken a taxi twice since last July due to blustery conditions. There are days when I walk to school, walk home for lunch, then back to school, then home again. All in all, probably equal to the miles I walk many a day in Portland to air out my thoughts and take in the lush ambiance.

Like any professional, I arrived last July with all the right clothes for teaching, including a pair of Italian leather J Crew boots I bought on sale 10 years ago and had yet to break in. True confessions—I had never worn them. Always the pragmatist, I guessed that Chile might be the perfect opportunity to get some mileage out of these boots. Many blisters later those boots are now well broken in.

Still, as spring progressed, my feet were aching for more freedom. Our school follows a fairly strict dress code, so I watched with an eagle eye for a change in footwear. I was a bit uptight since all the women at my school tend to wear high heels, far too fancy and dangerous for my needs. Caramba! I often marveled at how my colleagues could balance on pinpoint spikes while walking to the farthest point on campus—ours, the senior building. I, on the other hand, could barely navigate the crowds with flats. Anyway, well aware that some dress codes dictate no open-toed shoes, I didn’t want to be the first to break the rules so I consulted with the experts: my students. While they acknowledged that exposed toes are not the norm, they also encouraged me to disregard conformity because, in their words, I was exempt as a norteamericana. Eventually, I saw my first open-toed sandals on the feet of a colleague in November…and pulled out all the stops after that.

I must have been a victim of foot binding in a past life. Now that the school year has resumed, I suppose it’s time to dress professionally again, which means chucking the Reefs. They indeed look like they’ve been scraped and scrabbled by some vicious reefs. Nonetheless, they are deliciously comfortable. My solution for now is to leave my work shoes in my locker at school and wear my walking shoes, or flip flops, to and fro. Even this is an oddity and I feel like I have to change my shoes in the privacy of the bathroom to avoid gaping stares. Students make comments about my footwear when I’m in transit. Now I can put Rodrigo’s comments about my desire to ride a bike to school in context—scandalous he said. This is an insider’s view of “correct” teacher behavior in our school.

I never did put my Limpia Calzado (shoe cleaner) to its intended use, but it makes a perfect eraser for our white board at home. Rest assured, I do have a wide array of shoe polish and wax, and diligently keep my school shoes sparkling. So does Dan, however he has been wearing his Crocs to school these days and I sense a whole new scandal is about to erupt.

As for all the ground we’ve covered, we are making considerable inroads on the senderos (trails) of Chile. Now that we’re back in school we are limited to weekends when we continue to explore this gorgeous country. Fortunately, we live close to the Andes and have easy access to many sacred sites, always a treat for trekkers like us. Our shoes are well worn and have a permanent home here in Chile, not to return back to the USA, but rather to the earth on which they tread.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Vendimia Festival

Last Saturday we went to a vendimia festival to celebrate the fall grape harvest. The festival was in the tiny town of Rahuil, which is in the coastal mountains between Chillán and Concepción. We went with Pam, our friend and fellow Fulbrighter here in Chillán, and she in turn was the guest of Don Jorge, the principal of the K-8 school in Rahuil. Pam had donated some books to the school the week before, and Jorge had invited her to come back and be part of the vendimia.

We started off the morning by driving west on paved roads for about an hour, then turned on to a dirt road in the small town of Rafael. We were headed for the school in Rahuil, where we were supposed to find some people who could tell us the way to the actual festival. Pam had been as far as the school once before, but luckily we picked up a couple of young hitchhikers who helped us find the way among the many branches of the dirt roads. We got to the school alright, but there was no one there. Our cell phones couldn't pick up a signal out there, and the phone booth at the school didn't work either. So, we kept driving, stopping to ask directions from a couple of farmers in their field, and at one point waited for 10 minutes at a crossroads for a car to come by. The people in that car knew exactly where to go, and they told us to follow them. Sure enough, after 15 minutes and a couple of obscure turns onto increasingly narrow and rutted roads, we arrived at the Rahuil community soccer field where the festival was just getting going. (I admit at this point I was wondering how we were ever going to find our way out of there and back to the main road...but hey, this is Chile, so I figured it would all work out. Worse case, we sit at a confusing fork in the road until someone comes by and ask directions.)

A large tent had been set up, and maybe a hundred people were listening to a traditional music group and cueca dancers. We met Don Jorge and his wife Patricia and their kids, and felt warmly welcomed. Pam was asked to say a few words into the microphone and also do a brief interview for a television film crew that was there. Although we were clearly the outsiders in this small town fiesta, we felt welcomed and accepted.


Soon, most of the crowd, including us, headed out of the tent and up into the nearest vineyard, lugging wooden boxes to pick grapes. Along with us was a ox cart with a large wooden half-barrel. Everyone was picking grapes (and eating them too) and dumping their boxes into the cart. The vines in the vineyards around there were low to the ground and growing close together. The contrast with the laser-straight manicured vineyards of the large industrial wineries in much of Chile was striking. I felt like we were seeing the way grapes have traditionally been grown by small towns for centuries. This was, as they say in Chile, campo campo, the real countryside.

Within 30 minutes or so the cart was full and the crowd made its way back to the tent for lunch. Also at this time large green jugs of chicha, a mildly-fermented freshly-pressed grape juice similar to apple cider, was making the rounds. It was quite delicious, and I'm guessing that people have been drinking some form of chicha around the world as long as they have been harvesting grapes, going back thousands of years.

After lunch we rested for awhile in the shade of a nearby grove of pine trees (it was over 90 degrees in the sun by that time). After about an hour, the festivities started up again. Another large half-barrel had been set up under the tent, and across the top of the barrel were slats of bamboo. The idea was to crush the grapes with your feet so that the juice would drop through the slats into the barrel. Actually, there was a contest to see which team of two people could do the stomping with the most style. With dance music blaring through the speakers, the contestants held on to ropes overhead to steady themselves while dancing a merry jig on the grapes. The crowd applauded their efforts heartily. Below is a video of the winning team.




Note, if the embedded video doesn't work for you, try this link

Around 5:00 we decided to leave with Douglas and Marisol to catch a ride to Concepción where we could catch the bus back to Chillán. Before leaving I bought a 2 liter plastic bottle of chicha being sold from the back of a pickup truck in the parking lot. The woman selling it warned me to release the pressure inside periodically or the whole bottle might explode. On the ride back on the bus I found myself carefully untwisting the bottle top slightly to allow a hisssss of pressure to release. Back home in Chillán, sitting in our refrigerator, the chicha has continued to get a little stronger each day as the fermentation proceeds. Each sip takes me back to the festival and connects me to the ancient history of harvest festivals, and especially to the grape harvest festivals. I feel like we could have been in an ancient Greek valley in 400 BC and it wouldn't have been too different from what we experienced in Chile in 2007. It was a timeless combination of the grape harvest, small-town neighbors, good food and drink, music, and laughter. Gracias a la vida.

To see more photos of the day, click on this link

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Kayaking in Parque Pumalín

In the first week of February, we took a kayaking trip through the fjords of Parque Pumalín in southern Chile. We gathered a group of seven friends and enlisted the guiding services of Alsur Expeditions. The trip was fantastic, although it was not without its moments of discomfort and stress. Before we could get our boats in the water, we had to first take a 10 hour bus ride from Chillán to Puerto Varas in a bus with broken air conditioning on a day when the temperature must have been hovering around 90 degress. It was brutal. Every hour or so we would pull into the bus terminal in another town where we would have 5 minutes to rush to the bathroom and back before the bus took off again. Another fun part of the bus trip was that when we got close to Puerto Varas they dropped us off out on the freeway outside of town rather than taking us into the center of town to the bus station. Luckily there was another person who got off at the same spot who helped us flag down a local bus to take the 10 minute ride into town.

We stayed at a nice hostel in Puerto Varas and assembled our group: Dan and Catherine, plus Shay and Stephen, our friends from Portland who were here in Chile for vacation. Also, Pancho, Catherine's cousin from New York, and Douglas, the husband of another Fulbright teacher in Concepción this year. Finally, Annie, a Fulbright teacher living on Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile.

Monday morning, our guide Tomás and a driver picked us up and we drove south for about 3-4 hours, in the rain, to get to Hornopirén, where we would put the boats in the water. There we also met our support boat and crew, Rudi and Beto. For one reason or another, we didn't actually get the kayaks into the water until about 5:00 pm, and we had several hours of paddling before nightfall, including a rather dicey channel crossing in wind and rain, our group rather spread out and only one guide to keep track of us all. The conditions were rough, and Pancho had never kayaked before, and Annie's boat was leaking and sinking low in the stern, drastically slowing her down. (We later patched the leak with duct tape.) Luckily, our destination was a hot springs on the island of Llancahue where we got to soak in the hot pool and spend the night in real beds in the hostel rather than camping out in tents.

I awoke several times during the night, each time hearing the rain coming down hard, and each time I turned over and thought, "ah, it will stop by morning...". Well, the next morning as we set out the rain was still coming down. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as spirit-dampning as putting on cold, wet, paddling clothes. Hmmmm, maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.

As we paddled that morning, the rain eventually stopped, but it was still pretty cold and cloudy. The spirits of the group remained high. It was great to be out on the water, invigorating. We joked with each other quite a bit, and the humor was of a decidedly dark variety ("terrible. no, horrible, that's what this is"), but no one whined! As the clouds began to lift we were able to see more and more of the incredible fjords all around us. The discomfort ceased to be an issue, and we surrendered to the beauty and the challenge of the day. Midday, we met up with Ludwig, the head guide, who had been detained on another trip and couldn't make it for the first day of our trip. After lunch, we continued paddling, pausing briefly to get up close and personal with a group of sea lions.

Eventually we arrived at the hot springs at end of the Cahuelmo fjord and set up camp. What an amazing place, with the hot tubs chisled out of solid rock, with natural hot spring water flowing in through channels in the surface of the rock. It was glorious, and we spent several hours in the water, warming our bones and cheering our spirits. This was one of the most beautiful spots that I have ever visited, yet the caretakers there said that they actually get very few visitors during a summer. Perhaps the cold and rain and the complete absence of a road contribute to this. Beto, our support boat crewman, was born and raised on the shores of this fjord, but the family homestead is long gone, abandoned and absorbed back into the rain forest. One troubling aspect of this place is the pending possibility that a road will be built along the coast to connect northern and southern Chile. There is a major fight going on right now in Chile over the placement of that road. If the road is built, this area will be completely changed.

That night in our tents at Cahuelmo, we again listened to the rain, but by morning it was only cloudy. We meant to get an early start, but slept in a little too late and ended up having a tricky exit as the tide dropped further and further, threatening to strand us in the mud flats. We had another day of paddling, with an afternoon of brisk winds and tricky waves. By about 4:00 pm we were glad to climb out of our kayaks and get on board the support boat to make the final channel crossing to Porcelana Creek and its hot springs deep in the forest. We spent two nights camping here, and enjoyed the hot springs morning and night. It was here that my sleeping bag ripped open in the middle of the night and we woke up in the morning with a tent full of feathers. We also took a hike one day to visit and tour the beekeeping and honey producing farm that is part of Parque Pumalín.



I could go on and describe each subsequent day of paddling and the wonders that we saw. But in truth, the memories that are most happily recalled to my mind are of the people on the trip. Rain or shine, the people sparkled. The memories of mountains and the waters and the birds and fish fade away, but the people remain in my heart and mind. Here are a few impressions of the members of our group:

  • Our head guide Ludwig, who shared his long experience in the area and tested us frequently with politically incorrect humor. He also showed us the proper way to drink mate.
  • Our guide Tomás, to whom we taught the proper use of the phrase, "bummer", and in more extreme conditions, "BUMMER, dude".
  • Rudi, the captain of our support boat, a man of few words but impeccable judgment and knowledge of the sea. Also his son, Rudi Jr., who we could see taking over the controls of the boat occasionally with his father close by.
  • Beto, the crewman of the support boat, who was always cheerful and always seemed to anticipate what needed to be done. Love those white boots, Beto.
  • Carmen, who conjured three gourmet meals a day in the support boat's tiny galley and always went to the hot springs with us as well. The most memorable meal may have been the seafood stew made with mussels harvested that morning off the rocks, along with fresh caught salmon.
  • Pancho, the ultimate sun-worshipper, did he ever stop smiling, even when the rain was pouring? Also notable, his statement that he only has two speeds for paddling, "slow and frantic"
  • Douglas, seemed like the quiet type, until he started telling jokes. I will never forget the joke about the three construction workers and their lunches.
  • Annie, kept us all in stitches, and translated our jokes into Spanish
  • Shay, the energizer bunny of paddling, she just keeps on going.
  • Stephen, whose positive outlook and good common sense kept us on an even keel even when the waves of discontent threatened to swamp the boats
  • Catherine, who makes it easy to keep in sync while paddling together in the double kayak, and in life as well

In the end, as I look back on my travels through life, it is the people that I remember rather than the places.

To see more photos of the kayak trip, go to http://www.slowtrain.placo.com/photos/kayakpumalin/

To see a GoogleMaps map of some of the places from our trip, go to
Dan and Catherine's annotated map of Chile

Thursday, March 01, 2007

La leña seca

Some of you might remember a previous posting in this blog about wet firewood at the end of last winter. Not wanting to repeat that particular predicament, I stocked up on wood this summer when the price was low and when the wood would have plenty of time to be really dry before the cold weather arrives in the next couple of months. Live and learn. I hope I got enough.