After the Rain

Last week, during a break in the rain, I climbed up the Cerro Santa Lucia (Santa Lucia Hill) by my house to take pictures. The rain cleared the smog out of the sky and we had a gorgeous view of the Andes, which are already half covered in snow. And it's going to get colder. . .


Entrance to Cerro Santa Lucia


Gabriel Mistral mural at the Cerro Santa Lucia


Neptune Fountain at the Cerro Santa Lucia


Looking east to the Cordillera (the Andes)


Looking northeast to the Cerro San Cristobal and the Cordillera


Garden at the Cerro

It’s now definitively winter in Santiago. It’s been damp and a bit rainy the past few days, but this morning it was unseasonably warm and humid, until the afternoon when ominous dark gray storm clouds gathered over the city and began to let loose. There has been flooding in some of the tributaries of the River Mapocho and they’ve had to cut the water in parts of the city, so we’re storing it in pots and pans just in case. This sort of weather is not typical of Santiago (nor was the day it snowed last year), but neither is 100-degree weather in San Francisco in mid-May (which, I must say, I prefer).

Winter here does not feel at all the same as winter at home. At home in California, we rush from heated home to heated school or office or store and back: the weather is an interruption. Here, indoor heating is rare and expensive and so the cold is something that you learn to live with all the time (and it’s only just beginning.) We wear wool socks and long underwear and at night dread getting out from under the many layers of wool blankets and comforters of the bed for any reason.

At home in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter’s dreariness is mitigated by holidays, good food, parties, family and friends. But in Chile, there are no important winter holidays. In fact, all of the holidays are taken out of their metaphorical (or metaphysical) context in the Catholic countries of the Southern Hemisphere: Easter, the paradigmatic spring holiday of new life and regeneration, is celebrated in the fall, while Christmas, a metaphor for finding light in a time of darkness, is celebrated in the middle of the summer at the beach.

Winter without cozy heated homes and the holidays to look forward to makes me feel as if I’m living in some sort of Dickens novel. The feeling was heightened the other day when I was at the hogar: nothing like a group of ten little kids sitting around a dining room table at an orphanage praying before dinner to make you feel like you’re living in 19th century England.

And then on Tuesday night, I rushed through the rain from school to meet my friend Lauren and her sister Brooke, who is visiting from New York, at the Teatro Municipal, a gorgeous neoclassical concert hall, where we saw Puccini’s La Boheme. The theatre was the perfect setting for the opera: we watched the Italian maestro’s classic tragedy centered upon a group of young Parisian bohemian artists from what were truly the cheap seats just below the painted ceiling, before going back to my chilly apartment for a cup of tea.

Ah, what would life be without an overactive imagination and the ability to see myself as the protagonist of any number of well-worn narratives?



The Bundy sisters

Marriage Equality at last

I just now saw the American headlines about the gay marriage ruling in California and I’m overwhelmed and elated. I can think of only one or two moments in my life when I was this pleased with political developments. This decision will allow me and many of the people I care about most in the world to marry the men and women we love.

Marriage is the ultimate social sanction of a relationship, and I felt that immediately upon reading the headlines. How can anyone now look down on gay and lesbian relationships as somehow inferior when they have not just the same legal rights but the same status as heterosexual relationships? How can anyone look down on gay families?

I’m optimistic that California voters will support gay marriage in November, even though they didn’t in 2000. And even though I believe the governor is a slimey, opportunistic, misogynistic *******, I am incredibly grateful that he is supporting gay marriage. Please help spread the message to everyone you know to support full equality for all Californians this November.

A very silly weekend

This was a very silly weekend.

On Sunday, the whole crew (Me, Vero, Udai, Marcelo, Lauren, Zach and James) went to brunch at this cute European cafe nearby. We joked that is was a Mother's Day celebration in absentia. "Brunch" is a very American concept, and it was fun to deconstruct: etymologically a combination of breakfast and lunch, but in fact a very leisurely weekend meal with lots of people you love in which you're allowed to eat anything you want. Afterwards, we headed over to the park because it was unseasonably warm day. Vero and I did some really goofy interpretative dancing to make the boys laugh, and then we went to see Iron Man and Vero was inspired to dress up as the anti-offensive odor super hero (see videos below.)


Udai: "I don't understand why women kiss men. Men are disgusting!"

Marcelo (in Spanish): "Katy, teach me English! What is this?"
Katy: Those are dishes.
Marcelo: Hmmm. . . like fishes, only dishes.

Katy (to Marcelo, in Spanish): "You're not 24? I always thought you were the same age as me."
Marcelo: Katy, you're 23.
Katy: Oh, yeah.



Interpretive dance in the park



Vero the Superhero


Zach, napping contentedly on my couch


James and Vero


Ydai getting ready to go out


Vero, Me and Marcelo in the park

Pesach in Santiago

The weekend before last, I hosted a Passover seder at my apartment in Santiago. Passover is one of my favorite holidays, and I was sad to miss out on it, so I decided to do it myself.

I'd never hosted a seder before but I had a great time putting everything together. I created my one liberation haggadah by combining elements of the original Civil Rights Seder, the Women's Seder and the Labor Seder (if anyone wants a copy, just let me know and I'll send it to you.) I really enjoyed the process of going through the different haggadahs and thinking about what Passover means to me.

The weekend felt just like Thanksgiving at home. It was chilly but clear and the city felt quieter than usual. Udai got into Santiago in the morning and he and Zach helped me do the grocery shopping. I spent all day chopping vegetables and marinating the chicken and making charoset --it was a lot of fun. Having grown up in a family of great cooks (who love to be in the kitchen), I never got to do much of that stuff when I was a kid. In fact, I only really started cooking last year when I lived on my own in San Francisco and it turns out that I really love to cook. I'd never cooked for so many people before (there were ten of us) but it all turned out great.

Zach and James and Lauren came a bit early to help out and James made homemade matzoh, which was very impressive. Then Genaro and Eduardo and Marcelo and Javiera got there. With the exception of Marcelo, Lauren (and Udai, of course) we all live within a few blocks from eachother. Only Zach and James had been to a seder before, so it was new to everyone else. And we were quite a cosmpolitan crew: Chilean atheists and Catholics, a Venezuelan, an American Catholic, American Jews, and an Indian Hindu. Pretty cool. Not so different from doing a seder in Berkeley, I guess.

As always, there were lots of jokes about the length of the haggadah, the amount of wine we're obligated to drink and whether we'd ever get to eat! But we made it through the haggadah, sang Solidarity Forever, Study War No More, and We Shall Not Be Moved, talked about when liberation meant to each of us, talked about the war and the day after pill and class and racism, drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of food and laughed and laughed. In other words, it was exactly what I hoped it would be.

Enjoy the photos and (though Passover is over), Chag Sameach!


The crew


Zach and James


Me and Marcelo


Udai and Javiera


Eduardo and Genaro


Lauren


Vero


The chicken (at last!)


Dinner


Yum, yum


L'chaim! The second cup of wine (or is it the first?)

And if you want to read more, my friend Lauren wrote an article on the seder for her internship at the Santiago Times:

A nice week

We had a very fun houseguest this week, Udai, who is a friend of my friend Joyojeet from Berkeley. (Udai and Joyojeet worked together on a research project for Microsoft in which they designed computers with multiple mice to be used for collaborative learning in elementary school classrooms in developing countries.) Udai, who is from Delhi but was living in Bangalore, is traveling around the world -- he started in London and he's planning to travel through the Americas and into Asia. He got in last Sunday, just in time for our liberation seder, which I will write about in another post, and left yesterday for Easter Island. We watched Hindi film clips on Youtube, had a "Leaving on a Jetplane" sing-a-long and talked about our favorite places to travel in India. Udai was dying for Indian food (after months of the relative bland South American diet) and we managed to find a great Indian restaurant nearby (I was thrilled). Altogether, it was a cozy week -- my friends kept popping by and it seemed like, in addition to Vero and Udai, Lauren or Marcelo or Zach or Genaro was always around. Actually, it felt like being back in Berkeley, like home.


Udai and Vero at my apartment before their jam session.

Pastillas, pastillas, pa' todas las chiquillas!

On April 22, I went to an amazing protest against the Supreme Court decision on the Day After Pill (see earlier postings for more information on this decision and sexual politics in Chile.) The protest began at 7:00 at night, when it's already dark out, in the Plaza Italia, the traditional starting point for major demonstrations in Santiago. Apparently, it is quite common to hold marches and protests at night in South America -- the Chileans got the idea from the Argentinians -- and I have to say that it's about 100 times better than holding a protest during the day.

Aside from candlelight vigils and the occasional guerrilla Christmas carol action, I'd never been to a protest at night, and certainly never to one of this magnitude. Estimates of the size of the crowd ranged from 10-20,000 people. Many of us had expected the crowd to be mostly women, but were happily surprised by the gender parity. There were people of every age and social extraction.

One of the best things about the march was that everyone was focused on both the gender equality and class issues of the Supreme Court decision at the same time: they were outraged that the government was dictating what women could or could not do with their bodies (and essentially saying that all sex must be for procreation), but were equally or perhaps even more outraged that this decision would really effect poor women, while women of the middle and upper classes would continue to have greater access to contraception and abortions.

Because of the late hour, the size of the crowd, the music and chants, it felt more like a street party or carnaval than a protest. I was there with my collective, who played drums through the whole march, and we made up chants as we went along. My favorite was: "Pastillas, pastillas, pa' todas las chiquillas, Condones, condones, pa' todos los hueones" (The pill, the pill, for all the girls; condoms, condoms, for all the dudes, but it sounds a lot funnier in Spanish.)

Nearly everyone I know was there: my roommate, my friend Lauren, my friend Eduardo -- my friend Genaro watched the whole thing from his balcony. My friend Marcelo was coming from his apprenticeship graduation which happened to be held at the Universidad Catolica on the Alameda. Since the crowd thought the students were from the Catolica (the wealthy, prestigious, and conservative university), rather than construction workers, they yelled all kinds of obscenities at them, poor guys.

The march ended across the street from La Moneda, the presidential palace. There was a huge police presence to keep the crowd in check, but I don't think there were any problems. The march ended with a free outdoor concert and rally. Despite the enormity of the event -- many people said it was the largest protest in Santiago since the Pinguinos -- it got barely any press coverage. (And remember, this is a country where traffic accidents make headline news.) Though of course, it's unclear what, if any effect, this will have on public policy. Hopefully, we'll be able to keep the momentum up and see a change.




My collective


Me, at the end of the march


Concert across the street from La Moneda


La Moneda at night


360 degree video of protesters chanting "UDI, escucha, andate a la chucha" (UDI -- the right wing party - go f*** yourself) in the Plaza Italia on the Alameda