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Published: February 22nd 2006
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My three and a half weeks of holidays will soon come to an end, and I guess this means that I will soon be into the everyday life of working in Valparaíso... Spendning just over two weeks of travelling and holidaying with Chileans has however been quite a good way of getting into the culture, comparable to an intensive course 24 hours a day. During this time I have experienced a few diferent aspects of the chilean way of life, which I intend to share with you in this entry.
My new friends from Valparaiso live a life that's not to far away from my own in Sweden. Most of them live in shared houses with friends, some of them live alone, and some are still living with their parents. They are working (for some reason are about 80% of the people that I've met so far psychologists - just for you to know that my conclusions not exactly are representative for all Chileans), studying (or "trying to finish" their thesis), training (yoga, running, going to the gym and yey!! there is capoeira in Valparaíso for me as well), eating everything from pasta with tuna, empanadas (deepfried pastry with variuos
fillings), "meaty" bbqs to sushi , wearing all types of clothes (sometimes seeming to strive towards "less is better", like the Swedes in the summertime I guess) and rocking to quite a few different types of music apart from the usual cheesy latino love ballads (next Monday I'll for exampel be watching Franz Ferdinand play at the music festival in Viña del Mar ogetehr with two friends). They are involved in all sort of relations with people of both the same and the other sex (although same sex couples don't seem to be quite as open in public spheres) and they love to party. In fact they are a lot better than the Swedes at partying late. Staying out til four or five in the morning and going to work they day after doesn't at all seem to be unusual. I'm doing my best to catch up 😊
There are however also aspects where I feel that we differ a bit more. It will for exampel take me some time to get used to having a lady coming to our house once a week to clean the house, wash our clothes and prepare lunches for me and Anita for
the coming week. But maybe this is necessary in order to have time for the incredibly extended social life that my friends here seem to have. We have had guests in our house every day that I have been in Valparaíso so far and I have due to the great hospitality of my friends and their friends been over for lunch, coffe, beer or chilean wine in just about as many people's houses.
Running out of petrol in a boat out on the sea (after having been chasing dolphins...), about a kilometer from the nearest island is to me not a lifethreating situation (there were no sharks, hardly any waves and the sun was shining..). I can of course understand that not everyone would, like me, actually enjoy the situation, but getting all hysteric about it or desperatly chanting out yoga mantras is in my opinion not a very constructive way of handling the situation. We did of course make it to a nearby island eventually, despite the two not very competent and pretty young tourguides' incapacity of using the oars. While the two youngsters, supported by an older man that apparently had a little bit more experince of
the sea, finally stopped spinning the boat in circles and managed to hold a somewhat more direct course towards the closest island, I took the opportunity to study the dynamics of the group. The whole situation was a schoolbook example of how different roles will appear in the group during a somewhat stressful situation, making it very interesting to follow for exempel who was given the authority to lead the group through the process. I think almost every man that in the boat, after a while, took part in the rowing, physically or by giving different solultions regarding how to row the boat in the best way, while two of the girls were so afraid that they in the end threw up, and the others turning to the men for comfort and protection.
It is of course not just me that find that my friends here are acting a bit strange sometimes but the same goes naturally vice versa. To start with it's a bit strange the whole thing with me having moved to the other side of the world all by myself. Secondly; the whole mix of the things that interest me such as capoeira, rock music, politics,
climbing, trekking and wild life are to them a very strange combination, especially for a girl. This is of course topped with my absolute ignorance for everything that has to do with lotions and different skin products except for sun screen.
Despite all the differences (which as you might have noticed mainly have to do with different views and aspects on gender and roles of the sexes, which of course also can be found in Sweden), I find that the influence of the citylife still, in many aspects, make us a lot more alike than for exampel many of the people living in San Pedro de Atacama, which was the goal for our little road trip. San Pedro de Atacama is a small town (or village) with about 5000 inhabitants situated on an altitude of 2500 meter, in northen Chile in the middle of the Atacama desert - one of the dryest deserts in the world. The climate and the nature is pretty harsh, there's little water (usually only in morings up till 1200 or 1600) and also little electricity. The people that come to live in San Pedro, working with tourism as guides or in bars or resturants,
are quite a strange mix of people. We were living in a tent on the sandy yard belong to a small community of about five locals (one of them a friend of my flatmate Anita) that had a little shed each and a common "outdoorkitchen". There were Pablo - a crazy horseman, taking tourist for rides to the nearby moon- and deathvalley, Fenja - a "capoeirista" (!) working at a local restuarant but with a background of having lived on the streets of Rio and Bogotá for about 12 years (making me both for myself and for the others having to motivate why I'll be working with streetchildren during the coming three months), Pato - a pretty quiet chef that however once having started talking about food and recepies never seemed to stop, Fabian - originally from Uruguay but stuck in San Pedro working as a guide never letting go of his "mate" ( a type of tea originally from Uruguay) and Marie-Pierre -that changed her life completely from being a socialworker in Brussel, to working as a guide in the desert of Atacama when she fell in love with a local.
During the 10 days that we lived
together with these people I came to really like and respect them, but did at the same time feel that it would take quite a lot for me to leave my life to go and live like they do. I missed the sea or any kind of water, was pretty sick of finding sand just about everywhere (in my sleepingbag, in my ears and on my sandwich...), and did already get they feeling that I knew all the people in town and that they knew even more about me. Scary! No wonder people go a bit nuts in the desert..
When rain finally arrived, it turned the town upside down. Apparently it never rains in San Pedro. The houses are built in clay and many don't have roofs. The roads to the town were destroyed and there we were - stranded.. What started as quite an exiting phenomenon soon grew a bit more anoying when we realized that we really couldn't leave the place. The only cashpoint in town ran out of money, the people that usually arrived on Thursdays between three and four to open the bank office couldn't come due to the situation of the roads and
few places where it was possible to pay with credit card lost their connection with the banks due to the floodings. And all this because of two afternoons of rain (in total maybe 8 hours of rain).
In the end I did of course manage to leave the San Pedro and the desert behind me, with all my clothes covered in mud but a quite a few experiences richer...
*******
For thoose of you that might want to get in touch with me I have now got a cellphone that works every now and then... Sending textmessages from abroad doesn't seem to work at all, but calling does sometimes.. The number is +56-87966433
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