I leave Sunday, December 16th, and I’m faced with the difficult task of summing up about two weeks sans blog entries as well as trying to get the most out of the two weeks I have left. So here are a few key moments from the last two weeks neglecting to mention a whole lot, in non-chronological order just to be slightly edgy:

--“¡Vamos, vamos chilenos, esta noche podemos ayudaaaaar…..!” kept running through my head as a made my way up the winding alleys and stairways of the hills of Valparaiso, stopping every minute to take another photo of the Chile’s main port city with its hills littered with colorful houses, incredibly vibrant graffiti and street murals, and huge cargo boats heading off into the distant, blue Pacific. “Let’s go Chileans, this night we can help,” is the one of the theme songs of Chile’s annual Teletón, in which every channel broadcasts a 27 hour telethon to raise money for physical therapy for children with physical disabilities. It’s full of enthusiastic television personalities, over the top musical numbers, ridiculous comedy acts, sexy dancing girls, and a whole lot of Chilean pride. When I looked out over singular Valparaiso from the top of Cerro Alegre, humming the Teletón jingle in my head, I too could feel the goofy exuberance of Chilean nationalism.

-- “Do I smell chocolate?” I asked Eva as I swirled my glass of deep purple Malbec and took one hearty sniff. “Yeah, there’s some of that,” she responded looking doubtful of my future as an enologist. Meanwhile, our Italian-Argentine guide babbled on about los sabores viejos y maduros as he flipped his curly black pony-tail beside a huge oak barrel in the show room of his family’s traditional bodega. We were baked from the sun, and hopped up on riding bikes through tunnels of trees beside expansive vineyards, the Andes glittering in the distance. We might as well have been in Tuscany as we gorged ourselves on salami and bread earlier that day sitting in the shade giggling and flushed from the hearty Malbec of Mendoza, Argentina.


-- In the center of the former prison yard of the former prison that is now an cultural center with muraled walls and scattered barb wire sculptures on one of Valparaiso’s tall hills I entered the circus tent. Rueda is a performance piece with three actors that prominently features a tire swing. And it was awesome. Without words the actors communicate everything through their bodies, toes, fingers, hips. Swinging through the air, the lights of Valparaiso glittering around us, I too felt high on acrobatics and prisons cum art refuge.

-- To celebrate the first night of Hanukah I helped my host mother decorate their synthetic Christmas tree and ate fresh peaches, and reveled in the utter weirdness of celebrating Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. Gloria hummed to herself while stringing up gold ribbons on the branches, and told me she would probably come back tomorrow and decide she didn’t like the way it looked and change everything. While placing a bushel of golden rubber grapes, I explained to her what us crazy Jews do for eight crazy nights, she made approving faces and responded with lots of “¡que divertido!” and “oh, interesante.”


--Tipsy on red wine and a sweet, highly alcoholic Brazilian drink that I can’t remember the name of eventhough the waiter told me three times, I looked around the room with jungle wallpaper and swirling colors at my Stanford cohorts laughing and chewing on savory meat that waiters serve them from big metal skewers. Thanking Helen and Peter Bing once again as I stuffed a tender cut into my gaping mouth and felt the oncoming thin gasp of queasiness.


-- A man in a green shirt raised his arms to a bronze statue of Jesus as my friend Shira and I passed on our way to Salvador Allende’s grave in the sprawling Cementario Nacional. We were slightly lost in this city of the dead with its wide avenues lined with trees shading the marble mansions of the affluent and dead, and pointing towards smaller side streets in their shadows. Even in death Santiago is a city divided by class, the poor resting eternally in project like stacked graves, their remains piled high in crumbling towering walls of cement boxes. In the hot afternoon sun, we walked to the outskirts of this necropolis to find a massive granite wall inscribed with the names of over four thousand people, los disaparecidos, those who went missing during the years of Pinochet. We made our exit as a stray cat crossed in front of us looking for refuge from the mid-day spring sun.

-- I sat in my professor’s office, Sergio Micco the former vice president of the Chile’s Christian Democrat party, as he madly searched for a book for me about television’s role in Chilean politics and muttered Chilean curses and laughed to himself. Meanwhile, I observed one shelf displaying tiny tin figures of twentieth century world leaders, Russian stacking dolls painted with the faces of Putin all the way down to Lenin, and The Little Black Book of Communism and The Little Black Book of Capitalism at opposite ends of the shelf.

-- I sipped a hearty mug of Escudo, Chile’s cheap national beer, and nibbled on my fried seafood empanadas and looked out at the Pacific Ocean, the faint sound of surf mixing with the soft bossa nova playing from within the restaurant. In the small town of Horcon, worn down boats and hippie craft stands line the shore and you have the faint feeling that you too could buy a little ocean side shack, sell macramé bracelets, and disappear forever.


As I come to the end of my time here, I feel all sorts of regrets…I wish I had tried harder to make Chilean friends, I wish my Spanish had improved just a little bit more, I wish I had spent less time at the Stanford center and with Stanford students, etc… But then when I collect these moments in my head, I can’t really feel that regretful and in weird ways I’ve learned all sorts of things.

I hope you all are well, and most likely I’ll see some of you soon.
Suerte.
Daniel Hiiiiiiiirsch