Sí, po!: October 2011

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

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

Saturday, October 15, 2011

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.

Monday, October 10, 2011

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.