Well, I wrote this Friday morning, but our internet was not working then, so I didn't have time to post it before we left for the countryside for the weekend.
Happy Chilean Labor Day! In a few hours I’ll be off to the Chilean countryside with my host family, where we’ll spend the 3 day weekend. No internet, no distractions. Just me, my host family, and my take-home midterms. Hopefully I’ll get a lot of that done this weekend, especially without the distractions of the internet—Facebook, e-mail, watching The Office online with Spanish subtitles to help me catch a lot of useful words and phrases, etc. I’m looking forward to it, and especially now that I’ll be without a computer, my entire vocabulary this weekend will consist of only Spanish. My Spanish has improved a lot since I’ve gotten here, but it’s still not at the level I’d like, so I know these next 3 days will help me immensely.
I spent last weekend in the Lakes District in Southern Chile in a city called Pucón, which is about 11 hours south of Santiago. It’s labeled as the adventure capital of Chile because of its proximity to lakes, mountains, and volcanoes, and I’d liken it to a mini Lake Tahoe. We took an overnight bus to get there Thursday night, and after 12 or so hours of driving and 2 hours of waiting for the bus to get fixed after it broke down at 5AM (I slept through all of this) we arrived, and spent the day exploring the lakes around the city. We started off Saturday early to climb the nearby volcano, Volcán Villarrica. It’s a beautiful volcano that rises from the ground in almost-perfect triangular form that is constantly billowing out smoke and last erupted in 1971. We paid for a guide up to the top (they don’t let you go alone), spent the morning hiking up, but by lunch time had to turn back. We stopped about halfway up the volcano, as soon as the ground turned to complete snow and ice, for lunch to wait out the wind, but it didn’t let up. Even after putting on our cramp-on shoes and suiting up for the ice trek, we got to a ledge where it was just too unsafe to pass, and had to turn back down the mountain. The top was far too windy to be safe, and the guide thought that it wouldn’t be safe to trek all the way up. I was really disappointed—I thought it would be an awesome experience to hike to the top of a volcano, peer down inside of it, and especially see the view from the top. Had the weather been clear, you can see all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Argentina from the top, and much of the entire Lakes District as well. It would have been an awesome spot to really feel like you were on top of the world, and it would have been a real feeling of accomplishment to climb all the way up it, so I was really disappointed the weather didn’t have it in store for us. It was perfect weather Friday and Sunday, but the clouds and winds rolled in Saturday and didn’t relent. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll have the chance to do something like that again in the future.
On Sunday, before our bus back to Santiago at night, the hostel recommended we check out a place called Ojos de Caburgua. We took a bus (along with about 5 Chilean kids staring and pointing at us the whole time) and walked a little bit to get to the ‘Ojos’, which turned out to be a beautiful area with waterfalls, creeks, and shining blue pools. I was very tempted to jump in because the pools looked so refreshing. We decided to spend the rest of the day going to the city of Caburgua, which is about 5 kilometers away from the Ojos. There’s a bus that goes from the Ojos to the city, but we decided that we had enough time to walk. So here we are, 5 gringos, taking a long walk on the side of the road through “podunk” Chile, passing local fútbol games, farms, and Sunday-afternoon family get-togethers, for 2 hours, with people pointing at us and cars honking at us the entire time…Finally we arrived to Caburgua, which turned out to be nothing more than a very small town that is practically deserted in the non-summer months, but it backs up to a beautiful lake with mountains rising from all sides. We spent a relaxing few hours there before taking the bus back to Pucón, grabbing a bit to eat, and taking an overnight bus back to Santiago.
This past week hasn’t been very exciting—just midterms, meeting with our language partners, reading, and watching The Office in Spanish. I did have a very interesting conversation with my host family, though. We were sitting at the dinner table a few nights ago, when they asked me to try and say “ferrocarril”, a very hard word to pronounce for gringos because of the 2 rr’s, which both require a rolling of the tongue, which a lot of us gringos can’t do. I said it mostly correctly, and they were surprised. I decided to turn the conversation around on them. One sound that I’ve noticed they have a hard time pronouncing is the “sh” sound, which they pronounce more like a “ch”. For example, I’ve noticed that they say “suchi” when they’re talking about “sushi”, so I asked them if they could pronounce it with the “sh” sound. Turns out they could, and the reason they pronounce it “suchi” is not because they can’t say the “sh” sound, but rather that the “sh” sound is thought to be lower class in Chile. The poorer people, they tell me, pronounce “Chile” more like “She-lay”, and words like “sushi” with the “sh” pronounced. They didn’t pronounce it that way because, well, that wasn’t for their socio-economic level. They make a lot of comments and observations like that, about the “humble” members of society, those like our maid, Rosita. Now, they’re a great family and all, and I’m not saying they’re exceptionally racist or classist. They have said things about other races, as well, like the Peruvians and the Mapuches, but most of their remarks like that tend to focus on the poorer members of society. But rather, I think it’s Chile in general that is this way. They tend to be overly honest with their comments, and generally a bit racist. What I find most interesting, however, is the amount that race and class go together here. Racism and classism are not two distinct entities, but are bundled up with each other and practically identical. The higher classes are mostly all light skinned, with European backgrounds that trace back a few generations. My family, for instance, is Spanish-German, and is a 3rd generation Chilean family. The lower classes are mostly all dark skinned—Mestizos, Indigenous (about 10% of the population), Peruvian, etc. There are completely difference customs and cultures between the classes (the foods they eat, the way they pronounce their words), and they are extremely divided. Of course classism exists everywhere, and there are many examples of it I could draw from the United States. Of course, there’s always a divide between the rich and the poor. But here in Chile, that divide is so strong and the cultures so different, and the different socio-economic classes are so tied in with race, it’s astounding. A lot of the things I ask my family about Chile’s culture, such as fútbol, festivals and food, they label as ‘lower class’, as things they don’t identify or associate with. Maybe my family is an exception, but the divide between classes is something I have noticed quite strongly here. It’s almost as if there are 3 different, distinct Chiles here—the rich, the average, and the poor, and their cultures do not mix. It doesn’t create a distinct, Chilean culture, but rather a mesh of a globalized upper class who eat sushi and drink Starbucks, an impoverished lower class, and a middle class that tries to find a place in between. It’s difficult for me, if not impossible, to describe the Chilean culture without talking about the different socio-economic classes, and it just turns into a blended country that, in my opinion, lacks a distinct personality.
Oh well, there’s my opinion/a bit of a rant on classism and culture in Chile. Now, off to the countryside for the weekend! ¡Chau, amigos!
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