tiny little ants

my cat wears a chicken hat

man, this all seems so much more serious now that i'm back in the states. should it? i don't know, but i suppose it shouldn't matter, not one bit.

anyway, i'm jumping back on that horse.

i'm not sure if it's just senior year melancholy or life events that have taken place since school started, but i have been down in the dumps, for a little bit. after reading the first chapter of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, however, i re-realized that shit man, it's all on me to fix myself! jaja. oh dear, oh life. it's good. but now i've lost my motorcycle manual...

yesterday i picked up this softball-sized bright green thing that fell off a tree in front of the tuscaloosa news. it looks like brains and it smells very nice. i do not know what it is.

something simple, something true

life is really fantastic. that is all. i like it.

la raja!

shit. we are leaving for peru in 8 days!!!

i have a new roommate: amanda from texas. the poor girl has been going pretty much nonstop since she got here because i think now brett and i are in exploring mode. it's almost time to leave the country. and really, it doesn't seem like i've been here for six weeks.

last night a few of us chilled at cafe con letras, a cute cafe that is also a book store--with reasonable prices! imagine that. i had coffee, juice, a ham sandwich, panqueque con manjar, another coffee, apple pie. oh dearie me. then to la piedra feliz for the usual thursday night blues assignment, then to an irish pub where we had dark beer (barba negra, made in valpo) with some kind of chocolaty goodness in it. divine. i never thought i'd like something like that. hah!

today brett, amanda and i woke up and were out of the house before noon, after going to sleep at 5 or 5:30 in the morning. so proud. explored valpo a bit, ate the best empanadas ever, and now i am back in vina. fixin' to go to sleep before we head to the ex-carcel tonight for some kind of theatre somethingorother. awesome.

sorry for the boring narrative post, but this is about the extent to which my sleepy mind can think right now.

observation

funny story:
brett and i have decided to go to peru! that's not the funny part though. this afternoon i took the micro to lider mall to buy the lonely planet guide to peru. an easy enough goal. i find the book store, make a beeline for the travel section and fish past a row of spanish books to the lonely planet. check for prices... the only one listed is the one in USD that's printed on the back. $22.95 or something. so i figure... i know books in chile are expensive. so maybe it will cost about 15 mil, which is equivalent to about 30 USD. fine. go to the register, the girl says my total is a little more than 24 mil. FIFTY DOLLARS?!?! for a lonely planet book??

so I'm wondering what the deal is. why are books so expensive?

for starters, chile has a 19% value-added tax on books. what other items have this tax, i don't know. but not food and not clothes. i looked up VAT, but i still don't really understand the economics of it all... but according to wikipedia this pretty much is equivalent to a 19% sales tax. ok. so that accounts for about $4.50 of the extra cost.

in addition, it's expensive to import books into the country and publishing prices are high, too. big deal.

i just don't understand. why on earth would a country make books so incredibly expensive? isn't it prudent to give discounts on books instead of raising prices in order to have a more learned and intelligent society? also, a people that knows more about the rest of the world than populations who don't have relatively easy access to books? seems to me that taxing books so heavily is reminiscent of the communist government that chile had 20 years ago, only because dictators never want their people to know about other places. but of course, i am no historian and certainly no economist.

an interesting blog:
http://c.hileno.com/2007/05/in-defense-of-chiles-exorbitant-book.html


on a happier note, here is the itinerary brett and I came up with today...


maybe if you click on it you'll be able to read it...

also, there is another protest tomorrow! i'm going. i think.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LjRs2AJdgnI/SGxTtkUrGJI/AAAAAAAAAIo/
wBoOBVdJQXw/s1600-h/muralpar8julio2008.jpg

sr. alvaro reyes

so i am super super cold! my poor toes.

just want to recount a couple things...

one night last week a couple neighbor kids came over to the house. my roommate answered the door and called me downstairs, saying that they wanted to ask us some questions for a school project. there was one, sebastian, and another who was a couple years younger. sebastian did all the talking and the little kid whispered comments to him every so often. so once they laughed and anette and i are like 'what?' and sebastian tells us our house is 'desordenado.' we said no... no it's really not. we're students. one day he will understand. then they tried to tell us that they were 14 and 16 years old. definitely not, they were maybe like 10 and 12. but sebastian said 'yeah, all us chileans are small, you never can tell how old we are.'

then we got ding dong ditched for the rest of the night!

tonight i worked my second show. jorge gonzalez, who is supposedly the father of chilean rock. he even sang a song about how his rock is different than the gringos' rock. 'we are... sudamerican rockers.' then why are you speaking spanglish? ok so really i understand the spanglish thing, but this guy was not good at all. so much for father of rock and roll! he's certainly got nothing on elvis.

but one good thing did come of this incredibly boring show.

while i was packing my stuff and most people had left, an old man who was sitting near me said something to me about 'taking a lot of photos.' so we talk... he tells me he's an artist and shows me this silver ring he wears on his pinky finger. the top part is a circle with a llama's silhouette protruding out. this man, alvaro, tells me some story about how this ring was his mother's and maybe that his mother wore this on her middle finger but he has to wear it on the little finger... maybe about how he's grown up so now he can't wear it on any finger but the pinky. i don't know, i was just caught up in how darn cute he was.

so we exchanged direcciones and now a random cute old man has my address. maybe not such the best idea but... what was i going to do? seriously? he was so cute.

defeating the purse snatchers

well, since i've been royally slacking with writing in the blog and i now have something else to avoid doing, this seems like the perfect time to update.

last night i shot my first gig in chile--a blues/rock show at a venue called La Piedra Feliz--The Happy Rock. that name really made me happy. i had no idea what to expect, really, in regard to the show itself or the exact nature of what my assignment would be. in reality: 1. take pictures. check. easy. 2. write a 1000-word review. in spanish. not so easy, considering i have never written an entertainment article, nor have i ever written anything 1000 words long in spanish. i have been toying with ideas in my head all day, but have yet to actually write anything substantial. oh well. here's to procrastination.


[El Cruz, a santiago-based blues-rock band]

the band was good--like i said, i had no idea what to expect--and man, their harmonica player could waaaail. but i could not stop staring at this guy--he had a serious case of bulging crotch. i still haven't decided if i think he stuffed it or not. probably not but... it just didn't make sense. ok. awkward.

there was a minor mixup with my assignment last night… i got there at 8 p.m., was supposed to get there at 10. no big. so i decided to go back to viña for an hour, then to valpo again for the show. i took a collectivo, which is a group taxi that has a set route. this was the first time i’d traveled between the two cities by myself. also the first time i realized for an extended amount of time where i am in the world. chile! something about the combination of a wild driver, tiny successes and the orange lights from the sprawl of houses thrown onto the hills just got me, i guess.

we’ve gone on trips the past 2 weekends, so these next couple days will be a little more chill, just staying in viña and hopefully exploring valparaíso some more. i like to think of myself as being very independent, but so far here i’ve just been sticking with the group, feeling the place out. i’m just afraid of getting mugged and my camera being stolen. i hate to admit it. the language barrier thing is what gets me, i think. like if some crazy dude is running up to me yelling stuff i’m not going to have any idea what he’s saying. now i feel like i’ve got a better handle on the situation though, and i’m more comfortable in the city. plus, my spanish is getting way better.

brett and i just decided that we're going to bolivia her last week here! i'll still have 5 days or so, so who knows where i'll go after that...

p.s. chilean hot dogs are kickass. they come with tomatoes and a ton of guacamole. se llaman 'completos.'

me gustas tu

yeah? yeah. yeah.

it's late. so i will just leave you with some pictures for now.


[me and the pacific ocean]





[the boardwalk of viña with lights of valparaíso in the background.]


[lots of cute little kids live in chile. no kidding! this is one of them.]

failure

so i tried to make a post earlier but the internet at my apartment sucks. it even had pictures!

viviendo en chile

if you're anything like me, and your mind is oftentimes not exactly where it 'should' be (i.e. you're with a bunch of people and instead of contributing to conversation you just watch and listen to those around you), you'll understand this. maybe you will even if that made absolutely no sense.

i feel like i'm in the U.S.

for the most part, viña del mar looks like it could be bellingham, or vancouver or maybe even alabama. riding a bus is like riding a bus anywhere else. shopping at the grocery store is no different than at home. all the stores at the mall have their own credit cards. family dinner is, well, a family dinner complete with questions and jokes and laughing at the antics of a 6-year-old. i can't get enough of the fact that although i'm in a different country, hemisphere, time zone, coast... everything is still the same. granted, people talk faster than new yorkers on crack and they're all speaking spanish. that's even not so terribly hard to deal with a lot of the time. i'm surprised with how much i can understand (when they talk slowly!). speaking is a different story, but that will come in time.

my arrival was messy business, what with paying $150 USD for a taxi ride to viña , arriving to no roommate (and no key), and brett coming to save me. all in all though, not so bad.

tomorrow i begin spanish classes. 9 a.m.-1 p.m. mon.-fri. i should actually probably get to sleep now, so my brain will function in spanish mode en la mañana. eesh.

no pictures yet. they'll come soon enough.

the magic city

[downtown birmingham]

cripple creek

[my grandmother cooking breakfast thursday, mm-mm good]

pretty much ready for this here trip. clothes are laid out, one of my books has come in the mail and more are on the way, all's left is to put everything in a bag and say syonara to the South for a while.

oops, i still have a whole week until takeoff. guess i'll have to occupy myself somehow.

why not take silly pictures of myself all the livelong day?

[this is how i watch tv sometimes. i always wondered what this looked like. now i know, thank goodness.]

one of my uncles sent Grandmother four mother's day cards. he signed one of them "larry." i asked my grandmother about it and she said nobody'd ever called him larry in his life. must run in the family, since that's the kind of stunt i'd pull. man oh man, the mabrys are such tricksters.


[i'll add this picture just for kicks; i love this dress and i love this banjo. so, there you have it.]

i had a thought today. this had probably crossed all our minds at some point, maybe. why don't we take pictures of our normal, everyday lives? sure, we think they're nothing special, but that's only because we've stopped seeing the trees on the side of the road as we're driving home and don't bother to look at the sweetened condensed milk label. (there's a really cute cow on publix brand cans. i found him today.)

people sure are proud of their coffee, i know that much. everyone talks about coffee. random old men in bellingham, alabama railroaders, my friends, my family, steel mill workers, everybody who's anybody loves to talk about coffee.

the reason i mention the coffee is because lots of people, when they visit other countries, take photos of the cappuccino or signs or anything at all that they take for granted when they're at home. and i'm not using and accusatory "they," i do it too. understandably, the novelty of the italian hotel breakfast is enough to warrant a picture, but what about the breakfast at the super 8 or whatever in starkville, miss? hm? yeah i didn't think to take a picture either.

one of these days i'll start writing about interesting stuff. no promises, but i'll give it the ol' college try.

the first ever, the last ever, what's the difference?

[whitney at pevine falls today]

i saw the coolest lizard today. okay, maybe not the coolest, but he definitely looked like a tiny dinosaur. but when i pulled my camera out of my bag, the lenscap caught on the edge and sprung off and almost hit the little guy.

since i've been home, i feel like i've been spending a good bit of time lying on the floor just staring at the shadow of fan blades moving across the ceiling. plans for after graduation get crazier and crazier in my head, but somehow seem more realistic than the alternative of actually getting paid to take pictures for a living. i've got a year, anyhow.

leaves look the same all over the world when you look at them the same way:



[pelham, ala.]

[bellingham, wash.]

[amazon rainforest, ecuador]

it's things like this that i get a kick out of.