Teachers, Zombies, and Running in the Park

I’ve been slacking.  It’s been a while since my last post, even though so many things have happened and I wanted to write about them all.  I wanted to write about Dia del Professor, when the kids of 5B blindfolded me and Miss Cecelia, their head teacher, led us to the classroom and then threw confetti and popped balloons.  About how after we all ate cake, and they didn’t believe me when I told them that we don’t have teacher’s day in the US, or student’s day either, or no, not even Dia del Nino (which is essentially mother’s day for kids).

I wanted to write about how to the school celebrated Teacher’s Day with a lunch for all the teachers in the eleven-school network, about how we took a bus with plush seats an hour south of Santiago and the teachers danced in the aisles until one of the inspectors, the one who always makes announcements at breakfast, told them to sit down and be quiet.  The restaurant was beautiful, a low-sitting, ranch-style building that opened into a wide green lawn.  The meal began with pisco sours and salad, and their there was the main course while they called names for a raffle and then dessert, but the real fun began when the raffle was over and the wine opened and everyone who wasn’t outside smoking was dancing, the old teachers and the younger ones, the media teachers and the ones who teach basico, Chemistry and literature and computer sciences and, of course, English.  We danced until one of the other inspectors, the woman with the dark curly hair who all the students are afraid of, tripped on the stage and fell.  Her glasses bounced from her face and swung, tethered to her body by the beaded safety chain.  Someone helped her up and she put her glasses back on her nose and continued dancing, and everyone else went back to dancing too, and we danced until the band left, heading for their own bus, and for a moment I thought we were going to keep dancing, bouncing between the empty speakers.  We didn’t, of course.  We went to Bellavista for beer.

I wanted to write about last Sunday, when I took Gala, my roommate’s golden retriever, out for a walk.  It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the fountain in the plaza in front of my apartment building sparkled.  I hadn’t even made it out of the plaza when I saw them, the crowd coming down Arturo Prat.  It was a perfect day for a walk, but now there would be carabineros and tear gas and smoke bombs, and I looked more gringa than ever walking a blond dog.  I was about to head back inside when I noticed that the crowd wasn’t normal, that they weren’t banging pots with heavy spoons but that instead they were staggering, walking down the street with wild, uneven gaits. 

            I paused, stepping back towards the fountain so that I could watch them pass and still be close enough into run to my building if I needed to.  I waited, peering at the slow moving figures down the street, and it wasn’t until they were only a few yards from me that I realized what they were.  Hundreds of people dressed as zombies.  Wearing ripped clothes, covered in fake blood, staggering like zombies.  While I stood by the fountain, a few of them tried to climb the gates in front of the huge church that sits across from my plaza.  Gala, as well trained as ever, sat down and sniffed at the air, looking bored.  The zombies groaned and banged on the metal and probably got fake blood on the stairs, but they didn’t ever really get close to scaling the fences.  I don’t really think they were trying. 

            Apparently a “zombie walk” is a fairly normal thing—at least, it’s something that happens in cities all over the world.  I didn’t know this, and so spent at least ten minutes watching the zombies stagger by my plaza, trying to figure out how this could relate to the student protests.  There had to be some connection between the undead and those denied education, between life and university, right?  Later, I read in the newspaper that although 2,500 people had participated in the zombie walk, it didn’t have an organized political message. 

            After about fifteen minutes Gala and I left, walking away from the zombies and then turning north.  Of course, when we got to Alameda, no more than ten minutes into our walk, the street was closed.  This time, I stood behind the carabineros who were redirecting traffic and watched the humongous crowd wave flags that exclaimed La Alegría de Ser Catolico!—The Joy of Being Catholic!  The same newspaper said that almost 40,000 Catholics participated in this event, and it could easily be true; all I know is that wide Alameda was swollen from sidewalk to sidewalk, and that when I watched carefully I could see a few lost zombies, staggering and stumbling through the crowd. 

But since this a blog, I feel like I should be talking about things that happened recently—today! Yesterday! Or, at least, this week.  So I’m going to tell you about the run I went for on Sunday, sticking to the shady side of Santa Isabel until I hit Vicunna Mackenna, turning left to run through Parque Bustamante.

            It was a perfect day.  Warm, but not hot.  The sunlight sparkled, the shade was dappled.   The breeze, light and warm, kissed my cheeks as it slid by, carrying tiny white flower petals with it, just-bloomed springtime petals that had jumped into the wind and now floated, dancing their way down through the air.  There was a ferria at the south end of the park, the vendors spreading their secondhand clothes and hand-made jewelry across colorful cloths, and their wares seemed to sparkle, the same cheap rings they sell in every part of the city now shining brilliantly.  I ran past, glad I hadn’t brought any money with me.  

            In the center of the park is a library/café, a building with tall windows and a wide, open terrace looking out onto a long pool.  I don’t think you’re supposed to swim in the pool—it’s long and shallow, more of a fountain really—but it was full of kids, splashing and jumping and yelling to each other.  There were a few dogs in the pool too, probably strays, panting happily in the shaded corner. 

            The city should build more of these pools for the dogs, because as I kept running I noticed that the strays that are everywhere, sleeping in the parks and on the sidewalks and chasing cars on the side of the road, looked cleaner than normal, and happier too.  And usually I hate pigeons, but on a bench at the north end of the park a homeless man sat cradling one in his hands, cooing to it softly, and as the bird sat quietly and let him it was almost cute. 

I reached the end of the park and turned around, running back south, when the man with the bicycle cart fell in beside me, slowly pedaling the heavy weight of the piles of snack bars and cookies, chips and soft drinks.  I stopped to let him pass, and that was when I realized that it was a day when everything was beautiful.  Not just the trees and the sky and the long shallow pool, but everything.  The bags of lays potato chips hanging from the bicycle cart swung slowly back in forth, moving to the beat of the man’s pedal strokes.  They glimmered, those plastic bags of papas fritas swaying in the sun, as if they were something special.

The plaza pre-Zombie invasion

One week later, the church still looks exactly the same

Lacrimogenas

I was walking up Arturo Prat towards Alameda, making my way towards the Universidad de Chile metro station, minding my own business.  The walk from my apartment to the metro takes me somewhere between seven and ten minutes, depending on how far I stretch my steps, but since it was a holiday and I wasn’t in a rush I ambled, slowing down to enjoy the stretch of sun between the perpetually closed Mall Chino! and Muebles Mundo, the furniture store that collides with the sidewalk as end tables and TV cabinets and long wooden benches spill out its doors. 

I was listening to my ipod and I was happy, and I didn’t pay much to the small fire burning in the middle of the street a block or two south of Alameda.  After all, there’s always a fire burning in the middle of the street somewhere nearby—I’ve gotten so used to it that the smell, that peculiar mix of smoking cardboard and singed asphalt, no longer gives me reason to pause.

I was half a block away from Alameda, less than a minute from the metro, when the carabineros’ van flew past me, racing towards Alameda with its siren whining.  Really? I thought.  After all, it was Columbus Day, a national feriado—no one had work or school, and here it isn’t a holiday controversial enough to protest.  It would have been a good day for an asado.

 

When they’re managing riots, the “vans” the carabineros drive are more of a mix between tour buses and tanks, dark green and splattered with paint, heavy grates over the headlights.  You can’t see in through the windshields, and missile-shaped devices for spraying tear gas and chemical-laden water over the crowds swivel on the roofs. 

The van-bus-tank flew around the corner, and moments later they came running from the opposite direction, twenty or so students with their scarves tied over their mouths.  They paused halfway down the street, right in front of me, turning to confront the van-bus-tank that had followed them and sending glass coke light and Cristal bottles smashing into the grated windows.  I ran past them to the cluster of non-students behind the newsstand that was steps from the corner.  There were six of us non-students: me, the man who owned the newsstand, two younger men eating completos, avocado and mayonnaise laden hotdogs, a dark haired woman who clutched her daughter’s hand tightly, and a middle aged woman arguing with the newsstand owner over a chocolate bar.  “No,” she said, pushing the candy back into his hands, “no Super Ocho normal—Super Ocho con mani.”

We all jumped at the pop of a smoke bomb exploding.  Then, for almost a minute, it was quiet.  The van-bus-tank took off down Alameda and left the students lingering in the middle of Arturo Prat, looking almost disappointed. 

“El metro esta abierto?” I asked the woman with the chocolate bar—the kind with peanuts—if the subway was open.

“Por supuesta,” she said.  Of course.

It was only steps away, just across tiny Arturo Prat, but as soon as I reached the steps that descend underground I saw the gates that had been pulled across them, closing off the entrance, and in that same moment that whine of the carabineros’ siren sounded again, and the van-bus-tank came barreling down the middle of Alameda, and the students rushed towards it, which also happened to be towards me, and they threw their bottles and burning juice boxes and I didn’t want to be mistaken for a student but I was already running when the carabineros began to spray the chemical water, and looking up I could see it arching right over me, gleaming in the sun. 

I ran all the way to the next metro station.  It’s only three blocks away, and I could hear the water hitting the sidewalk as I hurried underground, feel my heart beating in my legs.  My eyes burned just a little, stung by an edge of tear gas.

Later that night, when he walked me home from the metro I told him about my brush with riots, using my arms to trace the arc of the water that had danced above my head.  He could tell that I was just as excited as I was scared and so he laughed, pointing at the piles of burnt juice boxes and charred soda cans and asking me why I hadn’t expected something. 

“Because there’s always a fire or two in the middle of the street,” I said, and he laughed again as if it wasn’t true.  As if by now I should know better than to leave my apartment without a scarf to tie around my mouth, just in case.  As if I should always keep a lemon in my purse, pre-sliced and sealed in a ziplock bag.  Maybe I should.

"Democracy smells like tear gas"

Found this in Valparaiso, and I'm starting to think it's true.

Valparaiso

Here, the city buses are called micros.  We had ridden one almost twenty minutes past our stop, past the port and up into next cluster of hills, until the driver realized we were lost and flagged a micro going in the other direction.  Now we were backtracking, flying down the narrow winding roads while the new bus driver talked and talked, turning back to look at us and wave his hands so that we understood that his daughter really did live in New York City, and his niece and nephew too, and he laughed at the story he was telling while we barreled around another blind curve at a speed that could not have been legal (but seemed to be the standard for micros in Valparaiso, in the same way that the micros in Santiago can’t help but tailgate each other), somehow sliding past the car speeding up in the other direction without hitting it.  Since the bus driver didn’t seem to be doing it, I kept my eyes on the road, trying to ignore his gesturing hands and the bouncing Chilean flags attached my springs to the dashboard. 

Up in the hills, we didn’t see a single bus stop; just people waiting on the side of the dusty roads, holding out an arm as if they were hailing a cab.  At the sight of their hands the bus driver would pull to a sudden stop, nearly throwing us from our seats.  The doors would pop open and the potential passengers would tell him where they were going, and he would yell yes or no, he didn’t go there, and the ones who had found the right micro would step on as the bus started moving again, and half the time the doors would still be open while we bounced around the next curve at full speed, the new additions to our bus standing at the front counting their monedas while I held onto the seat in front of me and tried to stop myself from sliding out into the aisle.  

When I wasn’t falling out of my seat or wishing I could warn the driver that another sharper, steeper curve was coming, the hills were beautiful.  The roads were dusty but the hills themselves covered in green and bursting with yellow flowers, mixing with the brightly colored houses that were everywhere, pink and blue and orange, pale and bright, on the top of the hills and down in the narrow valleys, colorful houses with colorful laundry hanging from the windows, jeans and t-shirts blowing in the breeze.  When we rolled over the crest of a hill or barreled past a wide viewpoint I could see the ocean, dark blue and sparkling in the sunlight. 

After we finally found our stop and checked into our hostel, we spent the first day wandering around the city, following the narrow curving roads down to the flatter, busier part of the city and then back up into the hills, admiring the murals and graffiti on the walls and the paintings that were sold everywhere you could see the ocean.

The second day we boarded a crowded micro that took us out to the beach where one of the parades for the festival of mil tambores (a thousand drums) was being assembled.  On the rocky beach the drummers were gathering, small groups circling and beating out a rhythm.

Closer to the water there was body painting, and men and woman stood topless while painters covered their bare skin in color, sometimes using sponges to make bold strokes but often using brushes to create careful designs.  Some of the paintings were abstract patterns that crawled up legs and twisted out over backs, but I saw other canvases holding pictures in their hands for the painter to copy, and we watched in amazement as faces and landscapes that had once been flat changed, curving with the shape of a body, so that a tree which had been just a tree now rolled up a woman’s stomach and between her breasts, coming to life as its leaves grabbed at her collarbones. 

Hannah and sat on the rocks in the sun watching all of this happen, spreading sunscreen over our arms and faces as if it were paint that just wouldn’t stick.  Now, thinking back, I realize that although we were only a few feet from the ocean, I never heard the waves.  Only the sound of the drums getting louder and louder and louder, as more drummers came down to the beach and their circles grew larger, until the rhythms being pounded out by the different groups began to merge together, a beat that I could feel in my skin, drumming in my fingers and my feet, my head and my hips, telling me that if my life was nothing but drums and paint and the sun on the ocean, I would be happy. 

The drumming grew faster, and louder, and faster again as the painters finished up their final strokes, encircling wrists or smearing color up necks, until finally, although no announcement was made or bell rung, they all began to move up from the beach, climbing the stairs into the wide street.  The parade began.

Paintings for sale in Valpo

One of the amazing murals that are all over the city

We ran into a tiny traffic jam--this car was having trouble

backing up while another (more modern and less interesting-

looking) car tried to pass it in the other direction.  The whole 

neighborhood--or at least the elderly couple in the window--

was watching

Body painting on the beach

More painting--this was one of my favorites

Another really beautiful example of the body painting

Drum circle complete with dancer

On cue, everyone picked up and headed towards the street

Loretta uses her thumb to wipe the smear of chocolate off Cristobal’s cheek.  There are only a few minutes left of recreo, and as soon as she has finished he races off to rejoin the game of throw-the-tennis-ball-as-far-as-you-can-and-then-everyone-run-after-it. 

“His mother told me to look after him,” she says, shaking her head as if she has spent decades keeping little faces clean.  Loretta is in third grade and just barely taller than my hip.

“Is Cristobal your brother?”  I ask.

She shakes her head again, sending the blue baubles attached to her hair ties wobbling.  “He’s just my friend.”

The bell rings, signaling the end of recreo.  Some of the students are lining up, but the boys chasing the tennis ball run past Loretta and me in a flurry of dust, still intent on their game.  When the ball comes back our way again Loretta catches it, gives her classmates a look of exasperation, and then marches off towards the classroom with her pigtails bobbing behind her.  The group of boys, sweat on their foreheads and dust on their navy uniformed sweaters, make their way over to the line outside the classroom door.  Cristobal, at least, has clean cheeks.

The music starts up as the file into the classroom, first the line of girls and then the boys.  The celebration of the 18^th of September continues for the entire month, long past the actual day of independence, and the school is preparing for the celebratory dance showcase that is happening on Saturday, when every class will perform a traditional Chilean dance as well as a piece from another country, and their parents and tios and abuelitos will come to watch them and eat empanadas. 

The music is especially loud here in 3A, close to the center courtyard where the stage is being built and the dances practiced.  The PE teacher is using a microphone to call instructions to the dancing students, and he is either holding it too close to his face or playing the volume too loudly, because his words are distorted as they bounce into the classroom.

I’m positive that we’ll never get anything done, but I close the door and Miss Cecilia writes the date on the board, and even though it sounds like there is a football match or a trivia night going on outside the students get out their books and stretch their hands up to answer questions.  Juan Pablo, sitting in the back against the window, looks out longingly towards the music.  We can’t really see the dancers from the classroom—just the occasionally teasing flick of a white handkerchief—but he leans out the open window anyway.  Surprisingly, he is one of the few students who can’t seem to ignore the music—Javiera, sitting next to him, is dying to tell me that camels have big flat feet and store water in their humps (we’re reading a book called Wonderful Wild Animals—can you guess what it’s about?)

The teachers cannot wait for Saturday, because after Saturday the dance practices will stop and they won’t have to yell over traditional music from any country.  The students are excited for Saturday because they have been practicing for weeks and they will finally get to wear their costumes, the long skirts and wide-brimmed hats.  I’m looking forward to Saturday because everyone tells me it is the best event of the school year. 

The classroom is decorated with red, white, and blue streamers, and a large Chilean flag hangs on the back wall, the bottom edge draping over the row of backpacks on hooks.  Loretta is the first to finish the exercise, copying sentences down from the board and correctly using “there are” versus “there is.”  Somehow, even with the sound of the music and the PE teacher calling out names and steps, almost everyone behaves, so at the end of class we give out stickers. 

All in all, not a bad way to spend an hour.

The Dunes of Ritoque

I spent last weekend in Ritoque, a beach about two and a half hours from Santiago and a few kilometers outside the nearby town of Quintero.  If you walk from the bus terminal in town to the hostel on the beach, you’ll see horses crossing the street freely, pausing in their journey from one field to the next to sniff the flowers on the side of the road.

The hostel is perched above the shore, three small buildings climbing up the hill, and as we ducked through the wooden fence that separates the dirt road from the beach my bare toes drank in the warmth of the sand.  The hostel dogs, Rainbow and Paltita, followed us, and before we had made it to the water’s edge a third dog had joined—a flea-bitten, short-legged mutt we named Groupie for the way he panted after the others.

The seven of us—four people and three dogs—followed the gentle curve of the coast, keeping far enough away from the water to avoid the frigid sting of the waves but close enough to hear the crunch of shells under our feet.  We walked for a while before we saw the path Angie had described, cutting through the small sand dunes that bordered the beach. 

It grew quiet as we walked past the first row of dunes, the ocean silenced by sand.  On this side of the world, where the sun didn’t have to compete with the wind, it was hotter, burning a little between my toes.  The sand at the water’s edge had been interrupted only by seashells, but here the ground was covered by squat dark green plants.  A set of railroad tracks, looking almost too old to be useable, ran alongside the dunes, its two dark metal rails reaching out towards the horizon.  We walked along the tracks, stepping from one wooden tie to the next, and the unnatural size of each step reminded me for a moment of Pennsylvania, where we used to do the same—shortening our steps from tie to tie, stretching our legs further to bridge the gap when a board was missing.

We turned left again at the next path, leaving the railroad tracks and cutting deeper into the dunes.  The dogs were still with us, scampering around the low-lying bushes and returning to the path every few minutes to check up on our ankles.  As we walked, the plants grew scarce and the path dissolved into dunes much bigger than the first ones we had passed through, steep hills of sand rolling up into the sky.

We climbed up towards that sky, blue and cloudless, running when the sand was too hot for our feet to stand.  At the top the wind was strong again, kicking sand up against out legs, but we let it beat at us while we stood and watched the world.  Behind us, the dunes seemed to stretch on endlessly.  The Pacific opened in the other direction, and from where we stood the waves that crashed on the shoreline and the bobbing shapes of the surfers waiting to catch them seemed tiny, nothing but specks of color bordering the endless blue.  Standing there at the top, my skin growing red from the joint assault of the wind and the sun, it seemed like there was nothing else: only wind and sun, dunes and ocean.  The sand rolling out from one horizon while the waves spilled out from the other. 

Paltita raced down the dune, a cloud of shining black fur and sand, and then collapsed on the side of the next hill, panting happily.  They were flying kites down on the beach, a few shaped like birds or airplanes but most of them the red white and blue of the Chilean flag, the strings that anchored them to the world almost invisible.  I sat down, burying my legs in the warm sand, and Paltita raced back up the side of the dune and then flung her exhausted body down next to me.  We watched the kites on the beach below us, Chilean stars tugging towards the sky.

View of the beach from out balcony in the hostel.

Spring is here, and it sounds like the Cueca!

This coming Monday is the 18^th of September, Chile’s Independence Day, and the country has been preparing since long before we ripped August from the calendar.  There are Chilean flags hanging on every building and being sold on every corner, and the windows of bakeries are plastered with hand-made signs reminding you to order you empanadas in advance.  In collegio, the students have been practicing the cueca, Chile’s national dance, during the periods normally reserved for both PE and music.

Today, my collegio hosted a Cueca competition that was attended by all the collegios in the EduCA network (there are currently eleven such collegios in Santiago).  Although the competition started early in the morning and lasted the entire day, classes continued as normal for the students who weren’t actively dancing.  As normal as you can get, at least, where there is Cueca music pulsing across the yard and pouring into the classrooms, so overwhelming that I found myself trying to explain grammar in tempo.  In sixth grade, Gonzalo slid the wide glass window back open no matter how many times I closed it, flooding the classroom with music while he leaned out to look at the dancers twirling their handkerchiefs under the wide white tent, spinning around and around each other but never quite making contact.

I can’t blame them for ignoring their workbooks, not when there was so much color outside.  Spring has come with September, with warm winds and a stronger sun, and I was almost hot when I stood on the edges of the tent during my break and watched the dancers.  The most fascinating part is the clothing; boys wear cowboy hats, flannel ponchos, and boots with gleaming, sharp-looking spurs while the girls wear bright-colored country dresses that are tied tightly at the waist by a white apron and then open out like bells into wide skirts.  No one dances without a white handkerchief. 

The older dancers I saw in the afternoon were beautiful, their steps precise, but my favorite to watch were the young dancers who had finished in the morning and spent the afternoon playing in their bright clothing, the boys kicking up dust with their jingling spurs and the girls running after them with their full skirts bouncing, their carefully twisted hair coming undone.  “Tia!” one of the boys yelled as he nearly ran into me, handing me a small branch of tiny white flowers, the kind that are blooming in the trees near the kindergarten classroom.  The flowers were slightly crushed, and a little dirty, and before I could thank him he had run off.  The bell rang, signaling the start of the next class, just as a new set of dancers took the floor and the music surged forward again.  I turned and went to class, where I knew the windows would be wide open.

                                         The giant Chilean flag outside La Moneda

I Like

Yesterday, in Primero Basico (first grade), we practiced I like and I don’t like. 

“What do you like?” I ask the class, and both hands and students leap into the air.

“Tomatoes! Tomatoes!” Juan Pablo yells as he jumps out of his seat.  “I tomatoes!” he is bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet now, ignoring my attempt at a stern look and gripping the edge of his desk so he can jump higher.

“Javiera?” I ask, turning to the tiny girl whose right hand is straining towards the ceiling. 

“I,” she says the first word exploding out of her mouth.  Then she pauses, thinking.  I squat down next to her desk so that I can hear her better.

“I like,” she says, pushing the k sound out of her mouth with effort.

I nod.

“I like cheese!” she says finally, and although her tongue trips a little on the harsh s at the end of cheese she is smiling.

“Good job!” I say, standing back up to address the dozen tiny hands still waving in the air.  I ask and they answer for the next few minutes, until Juan Pablo has settled back into his seat and we have discovered that nearly everybody likes ice cream.  Miss Yvonne, the head English teacher, is taping flashcards to the whiteboard when I hear Javiera.

“Miss!” she is calling, waving her arm in the air.  “Miss!”

“Yes?” I ask, sitting down on my heels so that the rest of the students can see over me.

“What does, ¨ she says, and then stops, her forehead furrowing with concentration.  ¨What do you like?” she asks.

I think.

I like when my train leaves the Vicente Valdés metro station, barreling up from underground and out into the morning.  It’s early, and only the edges of the sun spill over the mountains, spreading a soft light across the city.  I like the fresh smell of outside, a smell of cold and wide open space that pours through the open windows and flushes out the thick scent of the tunnels.  I like the sound of the train, the hum it makes as it slides along the tracks in a path that mirrors the curve of the mountains.  Most of all I like the mountains that stand steadily in the east, their white peaks pushing up into the sky. 

Sometimes, the clouds are so low and thick that its hard to tell where cloud ends and mountain begins, what is snow and what is condensation.  I like it more when the sky is clear and the sunrise colors the peaks pink, a shade of soft rose that fades slowly into tangerine.  By the time I get off at my stop, Las Mercedes, and come out from the station, the sun has pulled itself out into the sky and the mountain tops are white again. 

I turn to look at the board, but there are no flashcards depicting mountains or trains or the smell of a tunnel.  Yet I can’t complain, because there are plenty of options—ice cream, cheese, tomatoes, bread, and ham. 

“Miss?” Javiera asks again.

“I like cheese too,” I say, and it’s true.

View of Santiago from Cerro Santa Lucia, a hill in the center of the city.

I also like: fresh fruits and veggies from La Vega!

Sunrise from Line 4 (the photo doesn't do it justice)