Dieceocho de Septiembre, Chile's independence holiday. In Pichilemu, a crawling five-hour bus ride from Santiago, my classmates and I got away from the bustle of the city for three days and relaxed on the coast.
Sunset at the beach.
Thursday night was spent at the fonda, the traditional Chilean independence day celebration, but regrettably, only fragments of the experience remain with me. What I certainly won't forget are the effects of boxed red wine on my memory. The 23 out-of-focus pictures I found on my camera the next morning were of little help.
What I do remember:
- Employing the skills learned in dance class, particularly the spins, among throngs of Chileans under a gigantic patchwork tent.
- Walking down a very crowded sidewalk.
- Buying something from a food stall (second-hand reports indicate that this was "a small hotdog").
- Lecturing safety at length to pair of USAC girls when they announced they were splitting off from the group to hang out with unknown Chilean men (reports the following morning informed me that this was not looked upon kindly by the Chilean men).
Thankfully, there was no news of me causing damage to anyone or anything, nor severely embarrassing myself, and over the course of the next day I found every item of value safely stowed in my bag. It seems that, in spite of my condition, I exercised a good deal of prudence; I drank enough water to defeat a hangover, and even took my keys out of my pocket before going to bed. It was agreed among the USAC girls, though, that my dance moves at the fonda were dreadfully lacking in precision. Perhaps the strangest recollection I got from my compañeros was that I spent a moment devotedly photographing a pile of grass clippings on the side of the road. No pictures were found to support this.
The fonda tent.
Friday and Saturday were considerably lower-key, the daylight hours spent on the beach and wandering through town, evenings in the campsite taking care to moderate myself. One foray into the Pacific marked my first official "swim" in our planet's largest ocean, though I'd call it that only as a technicality- the frigid surf was more than I could bear, and after marching out up to my waist while hollering obscenities, I scampered back to dry land without even putting my head under. Needless to say, my first surfing experience will have to wait until deeper into the Chilean summer.
Our two campsites at Camping Pequeño Bosque (little forest).
All things considered, the vacation was a success. Out from under the blanket of Santiago smog I saw my first stars of the southern hemisphere, and saw them good. Having lived in Montana, I can honestly say that an open Pichilemu field gives Big Sky Country a run for it's money. After the initial shock and astonishment at the entirely foreign heavenly bodies, though, I became somewhat unsettled. I never imagined that the night sky would be something I took for granted, but sharp pangs of displacement rippled through me as I considered the fact that the constellations which I'm used to are only "the half of it," as Jeremy Irons might say. Considering that, I was comforted (and surprised) to find Orion had crept down from the north when I left the tent for a 5:00 a.m. bathroom run.
Sharing a tent with around ten of my companions proved an incubator for some kind of esophageal-affliction ("resfriado," says Gabriela, tilting her head back and rubbing her throat), aided in no small part by the cool coastal nights, so I now enter my second bout of bronchial infirmity in Chile. The first, acquired during the arrival-weekend, was hastily quelled by Gabriela's onslaught of miel con limon and Tapsin, a local OTC dissolved in water, so I'm not too worried.
I've got a nice, slow week ahead of me, at the end of which I will finally make the trek down to Casablanca to visit Orlando, an old friend of my father's from his Los Angeles days. By that time, I will have passed the one-month mark, with a quarter of my semester abroad behind me.
So far, so good.
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