Trabajo and Tear Gas

I love this city more everyday…Santiago has a way of growing on you. I liked it at first, sure, but day by day it gets even better. I had an uneasy feeling going into Santiago because I had neither a job, nor a place to live, I had a hostel for ten days. I’ve been in my apartment for over a week and get along famously with my roommates. We have a gym in the apartment building, and my roommate Claudio has decided to come with me the past two times I’ve gone. The first time we were in there, there were about 5 other people. Claudio looked like a fish out of water…he was moving from one machine to the other, lifting and then back to the bike for 2 minutes, then lifting, then bike. I let him do his thing, maybe there was some type of method to his madness. Come to find out he’s never been to the gym, but didn’t want to ask how to do anything. We went up again yesterday and I put a routine together for him. Claudio knows only limited English, but every time he was struggling to get a repetition he’d scream “FULL POWAAA!!”

My other roommate, Cristian, has been beside himself. He’s 25 and buying is first car today, he’s been glowing from ear to ear talking about his Ford Explorer. He’s paying about $8k US for a 97 Explorer. In the States, that would be over-paying, but here that seems to be the going rate for said vehicle. To him, cruise control is something from the future. “!Transmision Automatcio y puede controlar la velocidad con sus manos!”
“Ay si, ‘cruise-control.’” He was more than a little disappointed I knew what it was. He keeps sticking his hand out like he’s driving, bouncing it up and down and yelling “Boom, boom, boom! GRINGO, vamos a coger minas en mi Explorer.” I don’t know where all the bass is coming from with a stock cassette player, but that’s really not the point.

Last Saturday my Scottish buddy, Andy, and I took off for coast to go to the beach. When I first met Andy, I thought he was, at the most, 26. Turns out this kid is not quite a kid, 32, but I’d say we’re on the same maturity level. Rather than being a compliment to me, this is more of an indictment of him. He is a professional graffiti artist and has made enough money to take off for a year to go travel South America. His website is: http://www.asonedigital.com/ , check it out, he’s damn good. He’s somewhat of a rough character from Glasgow, but he reminds me a lot of my boy from home, DK, with the way he’s always telling stories and is DFW, down for whatever.

We had grand plans to go to the beach with our Chilean friends Yenny and Sandra, but, last minute they cancelled on us…I’m pretty sure these girls have boyfriends and have just been using us for free nights out. I told my roommates about these girls who don’t think they need to pay for anything when we go out and they told me to get rid of them “son gallinas de yeso”, something about them being ceramic chickens, haha, I think it’s a reference to a piggy bank where you can put money in, but it never comes out.

Saturday was hot here in Santiago, about 82F, but after an hour and a half on the bus, we got to the coast in Valparaiso and it was cloudy and everyone was wearing jeans and sweatshirts. We were planning on spending the afternoon in Valparaiso, but the part of the city where the bus station was just turned us off completely to Valparaiso. Everyone looked mangy and had a scowls on their faces. We get off the main avenue and right in front of us a man drops-trow on the sidewalk (Tim Kumnick, anyone?) and proceeds to relieve himself on a telephone pole, mind you this is 1:30 in the afternoon. We look at each other, thinking let’s go! We hop the next bus to Viña del Mar, which is only 15 minutes up the road and you can go for about a buck. Viña was quite nice, lots of nice buildings and hotels and horse drawn carts going all over the place. By 2:15, the weather cleared up and we ended up having a hot beach day. The beach was great, too. It was good to get some sun on my pasty, winter in Massachusetts, body. The water was FREEZING. The water on the coast of Chile is constantly cold; the El Niño current circulates water from the Antarctic to the coast of Chile making it uncomfortably cold year round. So after talking to various people back in Santiago, we made a big mistake leaving Valparaiso so soon. We landed in the worst part of the city and there are supposed to be very beautiful parts which we didn’t care to take the time to see…I’ll have to go back soon, which won’t be too hard to do since my roommates travel there every weekend to visit their girlfriends.

We got back to Santiago, ignored calls from Yenny and Sandra and went out with my Peruvian friend Cesar. He looks 15…he’s about 5’6 120 lbs soaking wet, but is actually 22. I ended up going out with Cesar, Andy and Cesar’s three friends from the University in town. One girl was from Colombia and the other two from Brazil. Talking to a Peruvian, a Colombian and two Brazilians, I had an epiphany… “wow, I do understand Spanish!” Chileans have the most garbled, fastest, slang injected way of speaking Spanish that makes having a coherent conversation with a Chileno quite difficult. I had a great time with these fellow foreigners because I could understand what they were saying and they could understand me. The Colombiana’s description of her home country makes me want to go badly. She told me that as long as you stay out of the mountains you won’t be in any danger, just stick to Bogotá, Medellín, and other major cities and you won’t have any problems as long as you keep your head about you and avoid the bad parts of town at night…seems to be a common theme in South America. She told me the people are all the people are friendlier, happier and more fun in Colombia and they have better beaches. I’m definitely going to have to get up there.

Let me be Laverne, you can be Shirley. You want to be Laverne? Fine, it doesn’t really matter… “We’re gonna make it after all!” And by we, I mean me. This week has been beyond excellent on the job front. I was supposed to have interview with the Burford Institute this Tuesday, the goal was to have them help me obtain a work visa. Manhattan, the Institute for which I am presently working, offered me 24 more hours a week; I’ll have to go to “Molymet”, a mining company just outside the city. This place is a big time refinery here in Chile, a multinational corporation. I’m teaching eight hours a day Monday, Tuesday and Thursday here. This job alone will almost give me enough to get by. In addition to this I have 6 hours more with Institute for different classes, I do have enough to get by, but just barely, and they told me they will help me with the Visa…stellar. Today, I made 60 copies of my advertisement to teach English here. I went to Providencia, where a lot of wealthy people live, and handed out about twenty on the street; it’s tougher than you might imagine having someone accept a flyer that you hand out. For every “yes”, I got about four “no”s.

Opportunity knocks where you least expect it. I was sitting on a bench, talking to a Chilean gentleman of about 60 when my phone rings…it’s this guy Cesar who’s teaching at Molymet as well, he teaches there privately and is probably making three to four times the money I am. This guy is Chilean, but speaks English with an affected British accent. “Daan, are you available to teach more classes?” Turns out he has more work than he knows what to do with and thought he’d direct his extra private lessons to me. I need to talk to him later this weekend, but it sounds like he has plenty of extra private work for me which means more hours at about triple what I make at this institute…If anyone’s thinking about coming down, do it…it’s not as hard as you think. Things have all come together for me in just under 3 weeks. I took off with a vague idea and a general plan of attack, and it has all come together better than I could have imagined.

I’m rambling now, I know, a lot happens in a week, I’m going to need to write more frequently to avoid this five page week recap…For class today, the accountant, Rodrigo, treated me to breakfast instead of sitting in his office. We just spoke in English…no book work, it was great. We go our separate ways and as I walk closer and closer to the city center towards my apartment, there were about 300 or so police officers scattered around dressed in riot gear. There were assault vehicles and police busses full of policemen dressed for battle. Today is the 33rd or 34th anniversary of the murder of two Chilean brothers at the hands of the police. This happened under the Pinochet regime, but every year people still protest their murders. The government’s completely different now, the police are the least corrupt in all of South America, but people still decide to riot on this day every year.

Sitting next to this Chilean gentleman of 60, my lungs start to burn and my eyes begin to water. I’m breathing fine, but am straining every so slightly. I look around and everyone’s wiping their eyes and covering their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs. I ask him if this is pollution for which Santiago is notorious for causing everyone’s eyes to burn…he laughs at me and says if the pollution were this bad no one would live here…it’s tear gas. A few blocks away the police tear gassed a group of rioters and the wind took it over to us. To me, the most amazing part is that the vast majority of people didn’t pay any attention to the riots, nor the police, nor the tear gas for that matter. People covered up their faces and carried on conversations, sat and ate ice-cream like it was an everyday occurence. I was apprehensive at first, but sitting next to the calm senior citizen I didn’t worry too much. I didn’t actually see any violence, and was only affected with a slight breeze of tear gas. These riots happen twice a year, March 28th and September 11th, the day when Pinochet took over in 1973. Why people still protest these things is beyond me.

OK enough for one night.

Off to providencia.