Thank you for vandalizing!

In Chile, we've got vandalism, and we've got signs. Two great tastes that go great together. I live in a world where people scratch letters off of signs (or insert extras) to make them say "funny" things. Funny where the word funny is a stand-in for childish, taunting, double-entrendrey, in a word, puerile.

Commonly scratched-off signs include:

ceda el paso (changed to read "ceda el as", which means "give up the ace, but can be read to mean to give up something else, the original sign means, simply, "yeild.")

cuidado con el peldaño (changed to read, "cuidado con el ano" which means, watch your um, excretory outgo, the original sign means, watch your step (sort of))

And then there are the famous signs that read "mariscos," (seafood), which are changed to insert an n and remove the s, for an anti-gay epithet which I shall not repeat here.

So it was with great joy when I got to see how New Zealanders vandalize their signs.



It makes me want to go out with a bunch of triangles and a glue stick (and maybe a ladder) and see what I can make. Any ideas?

(this was outside of Auckland, and thanks to Shantiwallah for a) taking me there (we were on the way to Piha beach) and b) not laughing at me when I insisted she stop the car to let me take a picture and c) taking one, too.

I have been to the end of the earth (Finis Terrae)

I was invited recently to give a talk/panel (where I was the only participant) at the University Finis Terrae, which means the end of the earth. So I went to the end of the earth today, and you know what? They have a whole lot of bikeracks there. Seriously, at all the universities I've been to/taught at, I've never seen such a vibrant bike culture. Thumbs' up, end of the earthers! (Also near the junction of two bike paths, the one on Pocuro and the one on Antonio Varas, and if you need to ask if I got lost on the way there, then you don't know me at all (and hey, I love that song by the Weepies.))

So there I was at the end of the earth, invited by the professor who teaches a class on blogs and another on interviews, sitting up at a tableclothed table and drinking bubbly water (love the bubbles!) in front of a set of maybe 20-30 people who study at the Journalism school at Finis Terrae, and they asked me questions.

They asked a number of questions I expected:

Why Chile?
What do you like about Chile?
How do you think of your topics?
How long does each entry take you to write?
How did you feel when X happened (when X in this case is going to Villa Grimaldi)?

And then some I should have expected:

You've been here for six years, you speak Spanish well, will you blog in Spanish?
Why a blog, and not just a personal diary?

And then there was this zinger:

How do you manage the ego portion? (indicating that I'm fancy, and that I should somehow have an inflated ego because I have a blog that some set of people think is tasty. I mean interesting (oh, but wouldn't it be great if you could eat it?).

This is the part where I'm blogging about being a blogger. So go dry your hair or sort your socks or whatever you do when people talk about stuff that's so navel-gazey and annoying that you'd rather eat the rest of a can of tuna (packed in water) that you didn't finish yesterday. (or is that just me? goodness, its late and I haven't eaten lunch).

Ego.

For being a blogger.

It's strange, of all the things I thought could happen upon having a blog (people would hate me, people would love me, no one would read me, one ex would stalk me from his home computer, and yes, I know it's you, and dude, that's weird that you still care, or that I'd continue or that I'd stop or that someone might discover me and make me the postergirl for expat blogueras in Chile, or expats, or travel bloggers), well of all of that, it never occurred to me that I would be self-important because I have a blog.

I'll admit. I'm happy you like it. Like really, really happy. It brings technicolor to grey days and great moments of glee when I make connections and feel like a part of a crazy community of people I have met, haven't met, might meet and will never meet. But an ego? about blogging? Are there people who are full of themselves because they have a blog? Do they thrust their hand out to unknown people and introduce themselves and so-and-so, blogger extraordinaire? Me daría plancha. (that would just be embarassing)

I'm reflective. I like to analyze, I like to talk. I also write a bit (a lot?). I almost feel like being a blogger is a bit like being a gamer. You're a dork who sits around with your computer all the time and sees blog entries (or photographs, or whatever it is gamers see) wherever you go. Why would that give anyone a big ego? My blog buys me a couple of cups of coffee every now and then with the mad revenue (as though I need more caffeine). I suppose I like that. But the idea that I might have to wrangle an ego of uncontrolled, helium-filled proportions never occured to me. Maybe my balloon has a hole in it, but I just write because I have to, and I choose to share it because I thought some people might get a kick out of it. You do? Woohoo! You don't? Then go bark up someone else's blog.

I was also asked the question whether I go out and seek new posts, or do things specifically to blog about them. I don't know how to say "seamless web" in Spanish, and that's a term I learned in law school, about how there is no beginning and no end, and it's all connected. I suppose I go out and do stuff because I like to, and I write about the stuff because sometimes it's interesting. But I have not yet run out of what to talk about (see: navel gazing) enough that I think I need to shake up my life and run around so I have something to say. I can say that it always makes me laugh when you see a sign that says "No responsable por robos o hurtos" (Not responsible for theft or damage) becuase hurtos is not a word we use often, and it makes it sound like they're not responsible if your bike (or car) gets a yaya (boo-boo). Which my bike did not, in the bike parking at the university, about which I'm pretty pleased.

So thanks to all you people from the ends of the earth. I really do look forward to your emails with questions, comments and blog links. One thing the students did was call me out on not really reading any Chilean blogs, about which I feel a bit guilty. So I'm hoping they'll push me in the right direction. Education is a two-way street and all that (and a bocacalle (fork in the road), which is a shout out to one particular blogger, and she knows who she is).

But you've got to make your own path.

On Visiting Villa Grimaldi

I have mentioned before that I feel like the dictatorship makes people do this:



It is not mine to make people talk about, but in places where there's talking going on, you can be sure I'm giving it a listen. So yesterday I tasked myself with going up to Peñalolén, a comuna (neighborhood/district) about ten miles from where I live to pay a visit to Villa Grimaldi (location website, in Spanish)

Villa Grimaldi (on Wikipedia, in English) was a privately-owned country home that was appropriated at some point by the dictatorship, and used for what the dictatorship saw fit from 1973 to 1978. 5,000 prisoners were brought here, and in the end, 240 of them were disappeared or killed.

The area has been made into "Parque por la Paz" (Peace Park), and since 2004, people have been able to come, learn, reflect, and be educated on the dictatorship. It has taken me this long to make a trip out there, but the family I ended up meeting has a longer story. They've been in Australia since 1978. You do the math.

I have pictures of plaques explaining which type of torture or mistreatment or threatening was used in each location in the villa, but I'd rather show you these.


Plaque at the entry


Faces of Villa Grimaldi (close to the entrance)


Memorial installed by MIR, which in the time of the dictatorship was said to be an armed opposition movement. Many of the tortured and disappeared at Villa Grimaldi were involved in MIR.


Sala de la Memoria, a small exhibit with personal effects of the prisoners. The room details the invention of damning evidence against the prisoners. It's locked on the weekends, but during the week you should be able to gain access. It has wall text in English (very well-translated).


Fountain, representing cleansing (so told by the guide, a volunteer, who told our small group that her family was staunchly right-wing (derechista) during the dictatorship but disavowed knowlege of Villa Grimaldi's purpose and others)

Here I have to take a deep breath.

I was walking, reflecting, learning as I wound my way around the area. I had started on the left side of the memorial, wandering from place to place, reading, and skimming the information. It was at this point I met up with a small tour group led by the volunteer, who actually asked the Australian /Chilean family and one other Chilean family if they'd like a tour. I joined because I'm like that (though I did ask). I met them in front of the wall that has the names of the disappeared etched into a set of plaques.



It was here that I started to connect the names with people. Maybe to you, as a reader across an ocean or across a landmass, these are just names. You don't know anyone with names like these, yours are Swedish or Lithuanian or South African. The thing is, I know people with these names. Armando, Juan, Oscar, Luis, Manuel, Luis, Julia, Elizabeth, Alejandro, Jorge, Jose, Pedro, Marta, Julio, Hector.

These are the names of people I know, or the names of people I met at a party last night, or that I'll meet today watching the kids at the skatepark. Likewise their last names, Sepúlveda? Check. Retamal, Salinas, Miranda? Check. I think moreso than seeing the faces (which I'd seen at the Museo de la Memoria, detailed here on Matador Change or watch the slideshow I made here, these names pulled me back to reality.

Further on, a rose garden from the time of the dictatorship was replanted with roses in recent times, with plaques representing the women disappeared or executed.

I was happily snapping, thankful for a bit of a reprieve, thinking of how roses are not carnations (red carnations being the flower used for funerary purposes here).


Not a carnation

And I even got a shot of the whole garden, before looking more carefully at the fountain.



And then I saw the inscription.



Todas ibamos a ser reinas.
(We were all (meant) to be queens)

This quote is from the Gabriela Mistral poem, partial translation here.

And I was thankful for the Chilean Australian family and even with their anti-US sentiments, and the Chilean family who was silent and the right-winged family tour guide, and especially the little girl who was running through the rose garden, ignorant of all of it. And I wished for a minute that I could be, too.

Deets:

Location: Peñalolén, Santiago

Address: José Arrieta 8401

Hours: 10 to 6, every day. Access to archives, museums, etc during the week. Tours with advance planning or if you get lucky day of, no info in tours in English.

Transportation: 513 bus from downtown (runs up Compañia/Merced) or from the Plaza Egaña metro, or take the D09 from the same. It's on the other side of the Americo Vespuccio (the beltway), and if you say "Villa Grimaldi" to the bus driver, he is sure to know what you're talking about. It's about an hour's relaxed bike ride from downtown, mostly uphill. Take Santa Isabel until it turns into Diagonal Oriental, and changes names several times, finally turning into José Arrieta.

Other points of interest "nearby":

The Herbarium, a garden, nursery and workshop space where gardening classes are held, open M-Sat. José Arrieta 9960.

On lapas, limpets, and piggy-back rides in Chile (more language ha-ha)

It's me again. With the language thing.

The other night, I was at a friend's apartment in Ñuñoa, a pretty residential neighborhood with probably the swankiest and most pleasant plaza in all of Santiago with a giant fountain and benches and places where you have to step over the ornamental bushes to sit on the grass and make out if you are a teenager, which I am not.

And there at the house, we were eating a homemade pie de limón (how did I not already know my friend could make this "Chilean" dessert which bears a striking resenblance to key lime pie, except it's made with regular lemons, but it has the cookie crust and the meringue top and all that.) And while we were eating the pie and the lemon zest was making its presence known, someone started telling a story of some far away childhood time when people were giving each other piggy-back rides.

And I intuitively knew what they were talking about, but didn't recognize the expression "a cuestas" that I thought I knew for this, and so I backed them up a bit so I could get the exact expression they had used. The only kids I spend a lot of time with also speak Portuguese, and whatever they say for piggy back ride is not this.

"Alapa" they said. (or so I heard).

So I divided up the word as best I could and got "a lapa."

Which means, something to the gist of "like a limpet."

What? You know not this limpet thing? Let me take you by the hand and introduce you to some limpets I met in New Zealand.



These are limpets, or lapas here in the Spanish-speaking world. They're basically a small mollusk that holds onto the rock with their muscle side, and the single shell is out towards you. You can't pull them off a rock with your fingers, and to say that someone "se te pega como lapa" (sticks to you like a limpet) means they're a person that gloms onto you and won't let you go. They stick to you like glue. And having as much coast as we do, there are all kinds of ocean-sayings in Chile, with my favorite possibly being "es un lastre" which means "he's a drag," as lastre is the word for ballast. (or maybe this is not Chilean, advise dear readers, please do).

But back to the lapas, which were photographed at the Moeraki boulders, which you've already seen, but look how pretty, again!



Anyway, I was happy, I had a visual to help me remember, and I was now in the ownership of how to say "piggy-back ride" in Chilean Spanish. Plus I had the pie de limón. What could be bad?

And I repeated it back, and with that surgical precision that helps Spanish-speakers to hear a difference between ardilla (squirrel) and ardía (it was burning), they immediately heard that I'd had a little case of what I like to call "l migration."

My l was on the wrong side of the word divide, because it is not "a lapa" but "al apa," from the Quechua apa, which means load, as in a load of something. As in when a person is heavily laden. And yes, I had to look that up, of course. Aside from a few words I learned living with a family in Ecuador, I don't speak Quechua.

But when you give some kids a piggy back ride, some of them stick on like glue. Which will help me to remember this whole misunderstanding if my Quechua ever fails, which I think it already did.

What did you say?

If there is a word for "to mumble" in Spanish, I have yet to come across it. Sure, there is "hablar entre dientes," which means roughly "to speak without opening your mouth" and you can say that someone "no modula" (doesn't enunciate) of that they "habla muy cerrado" (speaks with a closed mouth) or pa' dentro (that they don't project), but that mumble-jumble, that word that you get to tell people to stop doing? It just doesn't exist.

Which is really a shame. Even though (and perhaps because) I've been speaking Spanish for years, I still get stressed out when someone speaks and I don't quite get what they're saying. It is an affront to my linguistic geekery and full-of-my-selfness in the language department to have to say, "what?" (cómo? qué fue? perdón? qué dijiste?)

Now, the lack of a direct translation for "to mumble" does not prevent people from doing it. There's the regular Chilean "eating" (swallowing) of ds, ts and s's depending on where in a word they occur, and then there are these people who talk alot like the adults in the Peanuts, only more quietly. And I can't understand what they're saying.

Which is another issue. For some reason that may be explained by physics, or may just be a complete misappropriation of a word, Chileans tend to describe someone who does not enunciate, and speaks very quietly as speaking "despacio."

You would think that despacio means "quietly." In fact, it means "slowly." In fact, one of the first phrases you learn in Spanish, right after "Dónde está el baño?," is "Puedes repetirlo?" (can you repeat that? which I would actually say "Me lo podrías repetir por favor?"), and then comes "Mas despacio, por favor." Slow it down, buster.

And certainly everyone understands that when you want someone to speak "mas despacio," it's that you want them to slow it down, not to speak more quietly, which when asking someone to lower their voice, you say that, "puedes hablar mas bajo? por favor."

I'm supposed to be a descriptivist, that is, a person who describes what people say, rather than a prescriptivist, who tells them how they should talk. It's a division among grammarians, a separating of the extreme geeks from the super geeks, if you will. So it should not bother me that people say "despacio" when they mean to say "bajo." I should note it in my anthropological linguistic notebook and move on.

But I hear this in my head all day long. Despacio, despacio, despacito (very slowly!) And I can either write about it or puzzle about it as I should be working on something else. And if my mind would just mumble, I wouldn't hear it so clearly, or maybe if it spoke lower (or even more slowly), or between its little mind-teeth, it wouldn't bother me so much.

But it does. And now it can bother you, too.

You're welcome.

Grammar Police strikes early

Sometimes I wake up in the kind of mood where I sort of vaguely want to be helpful. This morning I guess was kind of like that. I got a mass email from Un Techo Para mi País, which is what Un Techo Para Chile is part of. For the non Spanish-speakers, a small lesson:

un (one, in the case where the following word is masculine, otherwise it's una)
techo (roof, as in bajo techo can mean "indoor" or at least "shaded."
para (one of two words for for, the other of which is por, and most native English speakers still get hives when trying to explain the difference)
mi (my, not me)
país (country)

So Un Techo Para Mi País is a nonprofit that helps to build rooves, and the houses underneath them for people who are currently sin techo (homeless, literally, roofless). It does this in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, The Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. As you may have heard, Chile has way more people living in encampments and inadequate housing than we used to, due to the 8.8 earthquake suffered on February 27th.

Un Techo Para mi País, sent out a mass email this morning with a giant, glaring, unforgiveable grammatical error.

Can you spot it?



So I sent them a very nice email in my sweetest tone of Spanish writing, assuring them that I know I'm not a native Spanish speaker, and apologizing for any errors I may have made (and I'm sure they were various), and letting them know that there's been a small snafu. The second sentence also reads strangely, but at least it's not getting ten points off the grammar section.

And do you know what happened? Remember what happens when I make fun of grammatical errors, as I did here? Quick like bunnies, changes are made, and I stand around scratching my head because I wonder if I imagined it and had failed to take a screen capture (mac, command shift 3, you won't regret it!), and then nothing.

But you know what happened here? I got a thank you, a "you're correct" thank you for supporting our cause and a have a nice day.

I didn't get a personalized email for the part where I "signed" a "check" (by which I mean, clicked the button on paypal), which took a bit more effort on my part, but any organization that can find it in its bureaucracy to write me a little note deserves a shout out. Plus they do good work. So if you're wondering what to do with your tax return (or a portion thereof) when you get it, might I suggest looking for an organization that helps people with some basic needs? It may be grammatically incorrect from time to time, but winter's a coming somewhere in the world, and we're all just a bit shaken up at the moment.

Edited to add: and if you want to see what it looks like when glaring mistakes are published (in Spanish) by the Chilean government, give Abby's post a read.

From the department of self-promotion (with a pinch of love for others)

Note: People clicking over from LP and other points, I nearly always blather on a bout my observations of Chile. Today's a different kind of day. If you want to see the normal stuff, click around. Or check out this story about my encounter with the medical establishment here.

Point one:

I have these friends, these crazy, energetic, creative friends. And they have projects galore and all of them could use a personal assistant or a giant whiteboard on which to write down all the fabulous whirlwind of things that they juggle throughout the day where a day includes 24 hours because some of them also don't sleep terribly much.

One such friend is Tina. Tina is tinaseamonster. We worked together a lifetime ago, me writing about environmental law for a publishing company and her doing the fun part of publishing, the pagemaker part, and the web part (this was a long time ago, spring chickens we are not).

Tina has energy. Energy to do stuff, to make stuff, to think stuff, and to talk about stuff.

She talks about a lot of stuff, including television zombies, something I know nothing about. She and some friends recently launched another podcast, doomhouse, and asked me if I'd give a blather about what it's like to love another country. And so I did. So if you've ever wondered what I sound like speaking English, click over and hear the audio that accompanies this nifty masthead.



Point two:

While I was in New Zealand, I got a set of emails and blog contacts from a woman named Beatriz Burgos, a journalist who works for a magazine that one of the Internet providers here in Chile puts out. Punto Net, it's called, and some of you may receive this magazine, or may leaf through it at your suegro's (inlaw's) house or whathaveyou. At any rate, Beatriz and I had several email exchanges, though we both would have preferred to have the interview either in person or on skype, but with distance and post-earthquake communication breakdown, it was not meant to be.

In the end, there's this (OMG) four-page article about me, and my blog and the funny things I say about Chile and Chileans. If you read here, you pretty much know what she says, but she strings it together very well, and the article features a whole bunch of my photos as well. It's in Spanish, and very strangely, does not exist in a virtual version, though I keep thinking I'm going to head over to Max Oover (that's Max Huber to you) and get it scanned. In the meantime, if you run into me, feel free to ask me to see it, since I've been carrying it around for days thinking I might end up at Max Oover, which I never do.

In the meantime, look at the silly (taken with my computer, thus the mirror image).


(Title, The strange (and Chilean) world of Eileen.

Also, my living room is light blue, not pukey as it appears in the picture.

Point three:

Vivek Wagle and I go way back. The preceding is false. I am familliar with him because he was one of the judges or maybe coordinated that blogging contest I was a part of (oy, remind me never to do that again, my nine-year-old self does not need to be resurrected), and I know him through blogsherpa, Lonely Planet's write-for-recognition program where I let them legally take my content and repost it on their site. He's a fancy editor at Lonely Planet and will certainly never read this, but if he does, I hope he considers my latest email where I tell him I can't wait to do something for Lonely Planet that actually has a price tag on it.

Anyway, Vivek contacted me recently and asked me to write a guest post about Chile, post-earthquake. I pitched back that I wanted to talk about the psychological part, how people in Santiago are using talking about it as a kind of self-therapy. He said yes, and bob's your uncle (only he didn't say that part).

I don't think Lonely Planet needs a giant graphic here, but you know where to find them, and here's the link to the guest blog post. Thanks to them for giving bloggers a chance to say what they need to on a larger stage than we might otherwise get to perform on.

Point four:

There is no point four. Just how full of myself do you think I am?

No es muy católico

(photo explained below)

No es muy Católico (it's not very Catholic) is what you say in Chile (or what they say, I haven't quite gotten my brain around this one), when you're talking about something that's not quite right. The last time I heard it, a friend had prepared a dish that didn't exactly zig where it was supposed to, and ended up somewhat unconventional (but still delicious). It was a dessert made of cherimoya and a whole bunch of sugar and cream and probably gelatin, and it was more liquidy than he had planned, and well, you know, "not very Catholic."

Because I spend a lot of time asking people about language, some of my friends have now taken it upon themselves to wonder about their language themselves. And so, untriggered by me, three of my friends recently had a conversation about what it meant for something to be "not very Catholic." They settled on "unexpected, nontraditional, not quite right," and then asked me if we had a similar expression in English. And all I could some up with was a similar use of the word "kosher" or "not kosher" (but strangely, not "traif" which is the word that means "not kosher.") where a situation seems not to be exactly on the up and up, where we would say something like "that doesn't sound very kosher to me."

And of course, I'm living in a majority Catholic and definitely majority Catholic-controlled country, and so certainly I don't expect anyone to start talking about whether or not something is kosher.

But re: Catholicism, I wasn't really expecting this either (explanation follows):










(From the Cuasimodo celebration at the Maipú Temple in 2010. This event comes from times when bandits would attack priests on their rounds to give communion to shut-ins after Easter. A citizen militia joined in to accompany them on their rounds, and this is what remains of the tradition. The most old-timey one is in Colina, but the logistics didn't work out, so here are some photos from Maipú. Margaret has put hers up as well (Go look! But then come back).

Monkey Painter! A trip through the Chilean slangtionary, again.

Quick quiz:

Does the above expression refer to

a) a person who paints monkeys
b) a person who paints sloppily and with both hands and feet
c) a person who insists on being the center of attention
d) a person who likes to paint, and uses monkeys as the subject

C, my friends, C.

Today's bit of wonderment is brought to you by the uniquely Chilean expression "pintamonos."

These days there's not too much Chilean slang that comes my way that surprises me or leaves me scratching my head. I've been here for long enough and talked to enough people and paid close enough attention and am pretty good getting the idea from context, that well, I start to feel pretty cocky about the thing. In fact, every time I hear an expression that someone expects me not to understand that I get, I feel a secret tiny gram or two (much less than an ounce, certainly) of pride that by jove, I've got it.

The pintamonos in question is a personaje (character) in the cast of characters that are people that go to my gym. He's a bit excessive, from his shortie shorts (which no one wears) to his weight-flinging and high jumping and lopey body language. The guinda en la torta (gravy, if you will) was his use of a weighted vest during a combat aerobics class the other day. Chileans in general aren't too fond of stand-outers, which is why this monkey-painting expression exists to begin with. You could also say he's a florerito, or centro de mesa or that "se cree la muerte" (he thinks he's the sh!t).

The interesting thing about this guy, in addition to the fact that he's all muscles and spring in a place where we tend to slightly less superherolike, is that it shows once and again how much Chileans enjoy el chaqueteo, or the devaluing of someone who has achieved success or the prevention of said success. It's the whole "crabs in a bucket" thing you may know from English, about how people will try to impede another's escape from the mundane.

Though I can think of few things less mundane than trying to paint a monkey, and I do wonder if you paint them before or after you fry them (vete a freir monos (go fry up some monkeys) means basically, go to hell). Which is probably what the pintamonos would tell us all to do if badmouthing people in Chile wasn't mostly done in whispers and behind people's weight-vested backs.

We talk about slang all the time here. Blogueras, and others, link to your favorite slang post and we'll go group posty on this one, or write a new one and I'll link you up.

Pedaling the open road, NZ report

I could never tire of biking down roads like this one. Tire physically, sure, but tire mentally of having the world so open, so expansive, so cloudy and bluesky and mountains in the distance and fresh air and the hum of the occasional vehicle? Never.

I don't believe I ever told the tale of where, and so for the curious, the map-loving and the soon-to-visit New Zealand folk, I give you the following: (distances approximate, and missing more than 150 km of backtracks, in-town wanderings, etc)

Greymouth to Ross (65 k)
Ross to Franz Joseph (108k)
Franz Joseph to Jacob's River including detour to Fox glacier lookout (75k)
Jacob's River to Haast Township (82k)
Haast Township to Makarora (79k)
Makarora to Wanaka (64k)
Wanaka to Queenstown (68k)
Queenstown to Alexandra (93k)
Alexandra to Ranfurly
Ranfurly to Middlemarch (total here 140 km, not sure of the breakdown)
Dunnedin to Palmerston via the coast road (61k)
Palmerston to Oamaru (61k)

All of which tells you nothing about the cruelest headwinds (into Queenstown), the two flats (one in Dunnedin, one on the Waitaki road out of Dunnedin), the "worst" hills (in order: Haast Pass, Crown Saddle, third of three hills from Franz to Fox) or how it feels on a perfect day to have nothing but you, your bike and all the marmite and peanut butter sandwiches you can eat. Mock if you must, but they dragged me up and down this stunning landmass.

I admire the hell out of real cyclists, I just played one for a couple of weeks. I'm itching to get out there again. I miss my roads!

On rabbits and possums in New Zealand

To travel in New Zealand for any period of time is to get a lecture on possums and rabbits. Possums and rabbits, I tell you. They are the scourge of the country's native wildlife, and no kiwi conversation is complete without a serious talking-to on the ills of importing animals that don't belong and a justification of the eradication programs, including an unofficial one undertaken by farmers where they illegally imported a rabbit virus from Australia while lawmakers wrung their hands and decided what to do. People look upon dead possums and rabbits with a glee I could not possibly have predicted, nor have I seen elsewhere.

There are dead possums and rabbits everywhere, all over the roads, and these seemed to be thickest on the west coast moving south from Greymouth to about Bruce Bay, where they thinned out a bit. Leaving Wanaka and heading to Queenstown, they turned to rabbits, virus be darned. As a cyclist, you get an up-close view of the critters, and even knowing how voracious they are, and how stoats (another famous villain in New Zealand) kill and break eggs for sport, it's hard not to get a glimmer of thinking it's not their fault. Worry not! You will soon be disabused of your love for things furry, and will occasionally offered them on the menu, like at the Bushman's Center in Pukekura on the West Coast, where I posed for a picture that shows me as better rested and significantly younger than I would feel on the rest of the trip.



And I snapped this shot of a menu which details the roadkill offerings:



And then you can always get a possum pie.



Which hopefully didn't get into any of this poison before giving up its midsized possum ghost.




But the most curious thing of all to me is not the introduction of foreign species, nor the plans to eradicate them, or even the joy in finding them dead on the side of the road, nor even making them into yesterday's lunch. What I could not get my brain around was this practice:



It seems to involve hanging the dessicated remains of a rabbit from the farm fence. A warning to other hippity-hoppers? A sentinel? Some kind of offering to the great beyond? I do not know if you pick up a fresh one and hang it up or wait for it to dry out and then fly the dead-rabbit flag. I asked several people about this practice and they claimed to never have seen it, but I saw it on several occasions. This particular one was going over the Crown Ridge from Wanaka to Queenstown, during which a loopy and fun Canadian I met named Eleanor passed me in a car and shouted out the only piropo I heard the whole time I was in New Zealand. Which luckily did not cause me to run over a rabbit or a possum, though perhaps that would make a better ending to this story. There are a couple of pictures of me on her blog, if you're feeling scrolly.

Home safe! (Thank goodness for aiport security).

I am not sure what the people at the airport in Lima believe travelers might have secreted on their person (or in their carry on luggage) between the first time they were xrayed and metal-detected and arriving in the airport for their international connecting flight, but it never ceases to amuse me to know that I must be rescanned. And by amuse, I am actually transmitting to you a sense of frustration, a what-do-you-think-is-going-oninness, an incredulity. But I am a sheep (much to my chagrin, see previous post), and I must stand in line and watch from a distance as my precious items disappear into xray land, as I listen to comments such as, "te juro que me compro una hebilla de cartón" (I swear, I'm going to buy a cardboard belt buckle), this as a man whipped his belt out of its loops and laid it in a gray plastic bin along with his laptop. No mention of a cardboard laptop though.

It all seems so random, when you get Xrayed again, when you have to take off your shoes, when your items must be in a ziplock bag (how happy are those ziplock bag people about this?) in three-ounce containers, and when they may float freely among your beach togs n whatnot, welcome to spill and frustrate and coat everything with your not-well-sealed toiletries. Not that this has happened to me.

It is rumoured that the liquids restriction is only about flights to the United States. I say rumored because I had my stuff rifled through before getting on the plane to New Zealand from Argentina, about which the only American thing on that flight was me. Signs in the Cancún aiport indicated that they, too, would restrict our liquids, and I considered, however briefly, going into the bathroom to tuck my toothpaste into the waistband of my jeans. It is four ounces, you see, and imported from the United States. I am fairly fond of my high-flouride content/sensitive teeth toothpaste and did not wish to lose it into that bin of scissors n such. But in the end I opted not to do the toothpaste tuck, for fear of starting an international toothpaste smuggling incident, which could occasion me being detained, or worse. I risked it, and it turns out that from Cancún to Mexico City, you neither have to take off your shoes nor segregate your liquids. They did ask me if my camera bag contained a laptop, which is a testament to how big and heavy my camera bag is. My camera is also not made of cardboard.

Which is a long winded way of saying I hope to never be in the air for so long again or take so many flights unless I am going someplace truly life-changing, though my family is pretty darn interesting and hilarious and oh! the inside jokes and get-out-of-my-brain and we are all pretty much cut from the same cloth even if we do live on different continents.

And just like that, she was home, and is spending all day Saturday in front of the computer and working, thankful (but somewhat embarassed) that her houseguest did some cleaning, and enjoying the smell of flowers left in the carafe part of her french press as a gift for the homestay. And looking forward to getting back to regular life, whatever that might be.