regresando a los EEUU...

I got back to the US on Tuesday--I went running in shorts the day I left Santiago and arrived in the US hurriedly pulling on my gloves to walk out into a chilly Atlanta sunrise. I'm still getting used to seeing blonde people again and not being the tallest person whenever I walk into a room. English has left me tongue-tied a veces, like today when I tried to say fermented and said fermentadoed, but I'll admit that it was nice to go buy groceries today and  not be asked for my carnet, or if I wanted to pay in quotas. I miss Santiago a lot, and I have a feeling I'll spend most of winter break trying to paint and write about the last five months of my life.


There were days that seemed to be eternities, passing slowly by me as I remained trapped in a sort of purgatory that looked and felt like a crowded metro car at hora punta, in which all the passengers were trying their damnedest to out-cachai each other, an insanity-inducing monotony broken up by fro-yo, episodes of the Big Bang Theory and grooveshark dance parties, and yet, looking back now time seems to have passed in a blur. I saw the Atacama Desert, los Andes, the Pacific Ocean all for the first time, and my eyes are still struggling to catch up and let my brain process it all. Chile to me is a country marked by contradiction, and this contradiction both damns it and redeems it. Revolution and the status quo coexist in Chile but they have not yet learned to talk to one another: conformity is valued and enjoys overt prestige, and yet, creativity also flourishes and art is everywhere in Santiago if you know where to look.






Order/Chaos. Anarchy, but contained anarchy, the kind that produces paros that fail to produce policy change, the kind that realizes that the absence of a state is not really an alternative to state power, but continues to chant the old anarchist slogans anyway because they are familiar and roll off the tongue and have a certain sort of cadence, a weight borne out of struggle. Materialism is too new to many to be condemned and yet there is a certain hollowness lurking behind the corner of every shopping mall full of stores selling things people can only afford to buy in sixty months worth of quotas. Yes, there are McDonald's and Starbucks in Santiago, but there are also views like this:



Modernity is about synthesis but is also about learning to live with irreconcilable contradictions--to me, Santiago is a city treading a fine line between the two, at times frustratingly inefficient, segregated, and marked by disparities and invisible lines, at times, bohemian and artsy and carefree and young. (not hard to tell which part I loved and which part drove me insane...)


In trying to sum it all up, words escape me. I think this quote from L'auberge espagnole comes close:  (here's a trailer, I couldn't find one with English subtitles but it's an amazing movie, yall should check it out!)

"When you first arrive in a new city, nothing makes sense. Everything's unknown, virgin... After you've lived here, walked these streets, you'll know them inside out. You'll know these people. Once you've lived here, crossed this street 10, 20, 1000 times... it'll belong to you because you've lived there. That was about to happen to me, but I didn't know it yet. Later, much later, back in Paris, each harrowing ordeal will become an adventure. For some idiotic reason, your most horrific experiences are the stories you most love to tell."

--Xavier. L'auberge espagnole

Study abroad? DO IT. Dale, by all means :)