National Heritage and Nibbles, a Sunday Morning in Santiago

The moneyed, the less-fortunate, the smokers and chocolate eaters all lined up for hours yesterday in Santiago to get their architecture and history fix. I had tweeted (@bearshapedspher, so fascinating, get your bearshapedsphere/eileen fix several times a day instead of just a few times a week (or less), and written about it on NileGuide's Santiago blog, where I'm now an expert for Santiago, which if living someplace for six years doesn't make you an expert, at least someone can come along and offer you a job which gives you that as your title. Come to think of it, it trumps many of my other job titles. I think now intstead of introducing myself as a blogger extraordinaire (as we'd been talking about earlier), I will just say, Hi, I'm Eileen. I'm an expert. And leave it at that.

Except I can't leave it at that! I have to tell you more. And one of the things I will tell you is that if you want to see all the fabulous buildings that Santiago has to offer and which open on Día del Patrimonio (Heritage day), you'd better live here for six years, too (or hope for rain), because yesterday was a glorious day, and as such, the city was packed to the gills, and even the uptown people (who we call cuicos, kind of the upperclass set, yuppies (or not so young) who want you to know) were out and about, in their Euro best with children in colorful sweaters and a studied thinness not often seen in other parts of the population. Bonus points for light hair, double bonus points for light hair and eyes.

But the good news is, if you have to wait in line for nearly 2.5 hours to get into a building, you can at least catch up with your friend who works at the optical shop and studies full-time at the same time, and who you never get to see since university started back up. And you can make friends and enemies with the people on line with you who wonder when, if ever you will just run out of things to say. Answer: never.

And you can hear the drone of the guy intoning "super ocho, super ocho, super ocho" (sounds a bit like supidOcho, if you were wondering) as he arrives with his taped-together boxes of this Chilean candybar. I guess it's something like a kitkat, with chocoate and wafers, but the whole candy bar only costs 30 cents, the chocolate seems pretty thin and maybe waxy, and they have lard in them, so I've never tried one. They're a very popular snack, sold on the bus, on the street, etc.



And then there was the guy selling Suny, 4 en cien, which are a little soft caramel wrapped candy, which my nephew loves (Aunt Eileen bring Suny, he says!), these 4 for 100 pesos, or 4 for about a quarter. Our neighbors on line bought some and gave us some, probably because we were their entertainment for so many hours.

And the cuchuflí vendor, which are disappointingly soft rolled wafers with manjar, or cream caramel inside. The neighbor on the other side bought some candied peanuts (maní confitado) from this vendor, who had a special going on, 300 pesos (about 60 cents) for one item, and 500 pesos (about a dollar) for two, so he bought the cuchuflíes to offer us as well. I guess we looked malnourished, or maybe he just wanted to shut us up. We rejected the cuchufliés. Sorry cuchuflí (coo-choo-FLEA) guy, I just don't care for them.

And then there came the people with the apples. Apples, you say? Not only were they giving out apples, but they were dressed as apples as well. Curious? Curious, indeed.



And you may be saying to yourself, as I was, what's up with the dudes dressed as puchos? (slang word for cigarettes). It turns out that this group of people (medical students, I believe)was trading cigarettes for apples, telling people that for each cigarette less that they smoked, they'd live five minutes longer. Sadly, there were no apples for those of us without ready access to cigarettes, as an apple would have gone down a treat with all the caramel being bandied about.

But this little girl's mom traded a pucho for a manzana (apple), so all was well for her.



And also her bunny backpack. Sweet.

Now is a good time to digress, I find, and so I will point out to you how this little girl is eating her apple. Where I come from, apples are eaten around the broadest portion, and then hinging off the top and bottom bands that are left. Not so in Chile. They eat one half, and then flip around the apple to eat the other half. If I had seen just one person eat an apple like that I'd have thought it was a personal proclivity. No, it's an apple-eating way of life. Do they do this where you're from? Do you find it as troubling as I do?

And so the wait continued.

And finally, someone came along and stuck these stickers on us (thanks optical-shop working friend for letting your chompa (Quechua word for sweater that we use here) appear on the Internet.



And we were led on a breakneck tour of Club de La Union, which is inaccessible to anyone other than members (a very elite group) and their guests, and most of the time it is men-only. Apparently there used to be bedrooms upstairs, but it was turning into a bit of a love-motel, and so now a) the rooms have been reappropriated, and b) licentious uterus-bearers are banned. Oh machismo! How we love you so! There were other interesting details, and a painted portrait of Arturo Prat framed in wood taken from the ship the Esmerelda, but this dato (fact) stuck in my head for some reason.

The place is an elegant study in imported French and British furniture, sculpture styles and over-the-top gold leaf, and gorgeous archways and capitals. It's gorgeous. And look! they have their own little shop inside, so the members don't have to walk three blocks to the Santa Isabel to rub shoulders with the ordinary to buy their tipple.



I don't know who the cellophane-wrapped baskets were for, but I suspected they were not for me, so I didn't take one, despite my friend's urging. The guy working at the shop assured us that it was open and that we could buy something, but there didn't seem to be any takers. Commoners, each and every one (myself included).

It was worth it to me to wait all this time in the shade, sun, and then shade again, because I got to see the apples, the cigarettes, the super ocho, the cuchuflíes, the suny, the maní confitado, my fellow humans, and because I got to see the inside of this institution, which made me feel small and alien, because the scale is truly grandiose. And so I will share one picture of the interior, the view from above, looking down, because I imagine that that is the posture most of its members take.



And then I jumped on the metro and flew away up towards the mountains, because having their snow dusted tops peer over your shoulder as you sip a cup of coffee is a kind of wealth that's available to all of us.



So, how was your Sunday?

One of my favorite windows (Santiago, Chile)

This is one of my favorite windows. Favorite window, you say? but of course. Everyone should have one.

Windows are openings, possibilities, glimpses, fresh breezes, cool winds that make you bundle up against the cold. They're neighbor's cooking smells and the sound of someone hammering in a nail or spray painting something. As city dwellers we are apprised of each other's activities. You know when I drop something and swear loudly, or when I've (embarrasingly) been playing the same Beyonce song ad nauseam (sorry).

But what I love most about this window is that it's the reward for when the elevator isn't working (which is not infrequent), and I'm hoofing it up or down, as this window is in the building's staircase. Sometimes its grey and dusty, but every now and then this window shines with the warmth of a sunset that almost hides its broken panes and ripped screen, and makes the tangle of weeds that crawls up the outside of my building (because no one is really in charge of maintenance here) look like a study in freestyle horticulture instead of extreme buliding neglect. And I usually just stand there for a few extra seconds thinking about how the right light can make anything look beautiful and how maybe carrying my bike down from the sixth floor isn't so terrible, at least for today.

Got a favorite? linkety do.

The case of the hot toilet paper/Going to the feria in Santiago

Toilet paper, tp, papel higiénico, confort, we all use it.



And when the tp runs out, or starts to run low, we think to ourselves "I must go down to the shops and pick up some more." What? you don't? Maybe you say, "Uh-oh, supermarket run a necessity, down to the last roll." Or maybe you belong to one of those clubs, like Sam's or BJs that involve pallets of toilet paper fighting for space with flats of ketchup in your vast expansive basement.

Not so here in Chilito. Here we don't tend to buy in massive amounts first of all because the store owners have not yet figured out incentive pricing whereupon buying 4X the amount of something does not actually cost 4X the unit price (to wit: if a regular sized can of tuna costs 800 pesos, a double size one costs 1650. I don't know why, maybe you're paying for the glory of the larger can. I buy the smaller cans because a) I prefer not to spend more money and b) who can eat a giant can of tuna at one sitting, and that stuff smells if you leave it in the fridge). So there is no bargain to buying giant quantities of things. The second problem is where you'd put giant, industrial qualities of TP. Under the bed? My under-the bed is just a few inches high, it would fit those handy packs of kleenex, but the cardboard cylinder covered in fluffy white tp wouldn't fit. Plus it would get dirty, because I'm not so good with the under-the-furniture cleaning sometimes.

So I found myself in need of this essential the other day, and was dreading going to the supermarket. I pretty much only buy milk, sliced bread, cleaning supplies and yogurt at the supermarket, preferring the feria or farmer's/outdoor market for most other things. I also really like my local verdulería (put that on the list of my hard words, means fruit and veg shop) to pick up things mid week including goat cheese which everyone is paranoid about now that there was an outbreak of some bacteria (listeria) a couple of years ago, but I figure so long as I buy it from the same person who buys it from the same supplier from the same farm and I haven't died yet, I should be in good shape. Thanks goats!

Back to the TP.

I happened to be at the local feria a couple of days ago, which for me is on Libertad, a street which means freedom, and there is a spillover (nonsanctioned) feria of people selling pretty much anything you could think of, and many things you could not, which I suppose is pretty freedom-inspiring. They're said to "colar" which literally means strain, but in this case it's from the use of the word that means cut in line, or sort of be a hanger-on to something you're not really part of. Anyway, so freedom. Or if I'm mistaken, the feria is actually on Esperanza, a street which means hope, and you will forgive me if I can't seem to distinguish between hope and freedom. I'm nothing if not language-impacted.

So there I was at the feria, my feria, full of hope and freedom, when I saw a man standing in the middle of the street selling comfort! (I mean confort, which is the Chilean word for TP, much like the American word for sticking plasters is BandAid. (or what are these called, if not bandaids?)). And I needed some. So I asked him how much a 4-pack was, even though I tend to prefer the brand the brand Elite. I was just thinking about how by cleverly buying tp at the feria, I could avoid the dreaded Santa Isabel shuffle (two steps towards the cash register, yellow light starts flashing, wait for manager to come with key, wait, shuffle two steps forward, and repeat, and no I do not want a bag, hey, bagger kid, with your lip ring, unfortunate haircut and pocket full of change, please look at me, because I am telling you that I do not want a bag, or twelve.

And so I asked about the TP, and he answered, and I pulled out a bill that was much bigger than what he'd asked for, and he abandoned his post with his tower of confort to ask the ferianos (people who sell at the feria) for change. And he skittered from person to person, asking for change, and weaving and bobbing and gesticulating in a way that only the very nervous do, and as I stood there, I realized something.

I was about to buy something stolen. And you, dear reader, you may be a better person than I, you might have told this stolen tp reseller, this man who makes a living by selling stuff he (or a friend) steals, and who ran all over hither and yon to make the change to give me cash to sell his ill-gotten toilet paper, you might have told him to take his stolen toilet paper and stick it where the sun don't shine (how fitting). But not me. I was so embarassed by my stupidity that I just stood there and waited for him to count out my change and pop the four-pack into my waiting bag. And more and more people came up to buy from him, and soon his tower was just a little building, and later just a tiny one-bedroom house, and then it was gone, and he was a bunch richer, and we all had tp and could not go to the supermarket to buy it and I am a criminal, and I don't even like the brand of tp I bought.

And every time I go to the bathroom I think about this story, and now I am sharing it with you so you can consider ways in which you've participated in the informal economy here in Chile or elsewhere, and how it was the wrong thing to do but you were so caught up in the moment that you didn't figure out that what you were doing was wrong until it was too far gone and making a scene would have made you a big jerk. For what it's worth, I don't buy pirated movies, but that's mainly because a) I don't watch movies and b) because everyone else I know does buy them, and so they lend them to me.

Want to go to a feria and buy some cheap veggies or reducido (fenced) tp? Here's a giant list, by comuna, with a shout out to Pepe of Joe's Kitchen for having this website easily on hand when my bookmarks would just not be organized.


(photo bearshapedsphere, and this is a legitimate business, with a licence and everything, and not the one from which I bought the aforementioned item, though it is from the feria in question, and the item behind the sign that says 1500 is an 8-pack of Confort, not my brand of choice, if you didn't catch that part)

And if you've got more TP running through your brain than you though possible, go check out Margaret's post on BYOTP and consider yourself warned!

Crying in public (not me this time)

Yesterday was a rare day in that I was downtown on foot. I prefer to do all business by bike, as it limits my frustrations to dealable levels. I will never get used to the pace at which people walk here (too slow!), or the fact that they spread out all over the sidewalk as though they were molecules in a super-cool liquid. So. not. cool.

And in being on foot (which I was because I had more time than journey to make, if you know what I mean), I saw a bunch of things I wouldn't normally see. And I probably grumbled under my breath not just a bit more than normal as my individualism trumped my love of my fellow human and my fellow human would not just get out of the way so I could walk at a normal pace down the sidewalk.

And then I realized it was me, and not them, so I slowed down and moved to a pedestrian street (Huerfanos), where I noted that despite inflation, it still only costs 300 pesos (less than 50 cents) to get your shoes shined, which I have never done. And I also noted that the strange cold-in-the-morning, warm-in-the-afternoon weather means you will see people walking side by side who look like they are dressed for totally different weather, which reminds me of the David Sedaris short piece called "can of worms" if I'm not mistaken, which has to do with some nematodes which were found in a desert, and which he hears about while sitting in a diner waiting for his dessert to arrive, which he then eats not point-first, and loses an opportunity to wish for something. Which has everything to do with how distractable I am right now (ooh! shiny!), and nothing to do with the point at hand.

Which is that yesterday I saw a high-school aged kid crying. I could see from far away, his eyes were red, his lips dry and wet at the same time, and he was leaning into a pole and talking animatedly but quietly, painfully to his galpal. I craned my neck to see if she was crying, too, imagining a teenage breakup, a pregnancy scare, whatever things could make a young couple take time out on a busy pedestrian street to cry publicly in a place where people don't cry. She was dry-eyed though, and only somewhat sympathetic.

And then I thought about that. People don't cry here. I mean, of course they do. Everyone cries sometimes. But the number of times I've seen someone lose grip on their emotions in public seems disproportionately low. Chileans seem to have a much beter control of their emotions, or a much thicker veneer than I remember seeing in the United States. Which is why seeing a teenage boy crying on the street me dio tanta pena (made me feel so sad).

And then I kept walking, because that's what you do in these situations. Hope he's doing better today, or at least found someone to give him a big hug.

When self-expression meets the grammar police

My Spanish is not perfect. And when I say it’s not perfect, I mean I make occasional, and possibly egregious errors. I actually can’t think of any at the moment, but if you introduce me to one of your more careful Spanish-speaking friends, I promise to offend.

I also have a bit of a speech defect in Spanish, characterized by my lack of ability to properly say a single r in close proximity to a d, especially when separated by vowels. That is to say, the following words are my nemeses: Rodrigo (sorry to all the Ro-ros out there, but your name? It gives me hives), adolorida (in pain (for a woman)), arado (plowing), and my personal word nightmare: refrigerador. I was recently told by a Chilean that everyone has problems with the word refrigerador and that it’s a French word and we should blame the French. Consider yourselves blamed, Frenchmen, and if you’re named whatever the French version of Rodrigo is, consider yourselves doubly blamed.

So, my Spanish? It’s not perfect. And I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for learners of English, having been an English teacher for several years both in the states and in Chile. There are certain typical mistakes you can see among native Spanish speakers when learning English, and what I love so much about this particular piece of vandalism is that it typifies three of them.



One, overuse of the article. In English we do not use the article the for general terms, like love, life or in this case, punk. In Spanish, “El amor es ciego” (lit: the love is blind), La vida es difícil (lit: the life is hard), etc. Here we have someone wanting to express something about punk, and they find themself in the posession of an extra article. Ten points off.

Next we have the lack of word-terminal s, which in this case leaves the poor sentence completely verbless. What should read punk’s for punk is, now reads punk, and only punk. Oh copula, how we miss you! Another deduction.

And third, we have a situation often seen, when not clear on how something should be spelled in English where a similar or same-sounding combination of letters is provided. Near where I live there are several coffe shops, and a bowling alley called Japimax, presumably for the great joy it brings you. And here we have madafaca.

And I don’t even know where to start with this one. Should I grab a can of pintura en spray rojo (red spray paint) and make the corrections? Or should I silently absorb them, realized I understand the sentiment and that that’s good enough, and what I’d want from people listening to me when I make my linguistic faux pas (there go those French again!). It’s really not mine to argue whether the punk is or is not dead. I don’t even know who “the punk” is.

Or maybe I should take one of the many new black conference teeshirts that have recently come into my posession, turn them inside out and write the same lema (slogan) across the chest?

The punk not dead madafaca.

I could win friends, influence people and misteach a whole new generation. So tempting.

And if you love actual, artistic murals, don't miss this smart blog about actual painted murals in Mexico and Chicago (thus far): mad about the mural

The sound of rain in Santiago (and everywhere)

What is it about rainy days that brings back every rainy day I've ever heard? The pattapattapatta on the flashing on my building sounds like rainy days at college where under the metal roof I sat bundled on my futon (convincing myself that this was comfortable, oh! youth) reading theoretical linguistics. It sounds like sleeping in a tent in Iceland, thinking about how going to the bathroom meant going outside, which meant getting wet, which meant just going back to sleep and ignoring it. It sounds like DC, where I wondered if my circa 1910 house would spring a leak, and like lying in my bed in Brooklyn as a child, tracing my finger over the "grain" on the blue-tinged wood paneling I'd chosen when I was little. It sounds like Portland, where I rode so many miles in the rain I thought I might to smell like rainbows, or something decidedly worse.

Rain is the beginning of many things in Santiago. This is our first true rain of the season, which beats the smog into submission, or at least washes it into the street where it splashes up on our pantslegs, angrily splotching them a brownish grey which does not come out in the wash. It is the beginning of hibernating, not going out unless it's truly necessary, of rainyday foods like sopaipillas pasadas (fried disks of dough enriched with pumpkin and served with a sugary syrup, more on them here) and cazuela (Chile's brothy soup with half a corn cob, squash and a cut of meat or chicken in it).

I knew it was going to rain today, as it was strangely misty yesterday, my hair a tangle of poodly curls. As I pedaled home last night around 11, there was a penumbra, a starry blurred shadow around every streetlight, and even most of the dogs were hunkered down (though one, apparently called "Ruso" did jump out and nearly scare me off my bike). And even knowing it would rain this morning, as consciousness creeped into my eyes-still-closed but brain-waking-up stage, I could hear the fuzzy sound of someone opening velcro, and it was the longest velcro in the world, ripping slowly and constantly, the sound of "snow" or static on the TV from when I was a kid, an exaggerated fffffffff sound.

And I realized it was raining, and it reminded me of every rain I've ever heard, and I wondered how that's even possible, for the soundtracks from all the rains to hang out in the same part of your brain, the ones from Brooklyn, from Massachussets, from Iceland, from Washington, from Portland, from places that the only thing they have in common is you, and the rain that washes them clean or beats down their smog into puddles where it splashes back on the clothes as stains that won't come out in the wash.

And the fffffffff keeps repeating itself, and it sounds like a tent, a house, a college dorm, my apartment in Santiago, and most of all, it just sounds like winter.

Want more talk about rain in Chile? Go here.

One-upmanship among travelers

My one-upmanship is bigger than yours.

I come from a long line of one-uppers. I wouldn't say it's my family in particular, though there is this tendency of instead of taking a second to say, oh that's interesting, I know a similar story, to just hop in and say that you know a more elaborate one (but maybe that's in all families). It could be a New Yorky thing, where everyone just wants to be the most superlative creature out there and will not rest until they may be considered the king of this particular minutely important thing.

Ouch. I've got my claws out, looks like. (And they are longer and sharper than... oh, forget it).

Well, it turns out that travelers have a tendency to sign up early to the one-upmanship game and some of them will one-up you under the table if you sit still long enough. Call it insecurity, call it searching for fifteen minutes of fame, but so many people have tales of how great, how perfect, how well-traveled their lives are, or of how stellar their trip was (with the underlying assumption being that by virtue of the fact that you are not them, your life is less technicolor and less enjoyable than theirs, and also that you have way less cred).

With these people, it's very easy to fall into a conversation that winds its way through the superalatives of the English language and which overuses the word amazing to the point where you start to imagine it like it sounds, a word with a labryinth inside, and no clear path out of the conversation.

Over the past couple of days I've been able to spend not a small amount of time with Dan and Audrey, who run/live/breathe/write for/think of/design and otherwise rock the hell out of Uncornered Market, who have (as of today) been on the road for 1252 days. I will pause briefly while you think about your 365-times tables.

It was Dan that got me thinking about the overuse of the word amazing, and so I'll tip my dorky penguin baseball cap in his direction (I believe he's in Valparaíso today). But it was a few words Audrey and I exchanged last night on our way down Cerro San Cristobal in the dark (be ye not so stupid) that got me thinking about one-upmanship. We were talking about one-upmanship in general, and the occasional traveler that brought out their laundry list when all we wanted to do was boil some pasta in the grotty community kitchen.

The conversation got me thinking about how here in my new home city, walking down a giant hill, I was in the presence of people who by every measure could one-up nearly every other human on the planet re: travel, adventure, food, experience, and certainly most other travel bloggers on fancypantsness, traffic, design, tech, content etc, and they are the most feet-on-the-ground regular kind of people you'd like to have a cup of coffee (or some ceviche, pizza and a mote con huesillo with) in the whole wide world.

That's right. They've been/done/seen/eaten/walked/experienced a world already, and they're still going. And they never play the game or shake out their cred while you're looking.

And that's the kind of circumspection and humility and down-to-earthiness you're only very occasionally lucky enough to meet.

And that (please forgive me, Dan) is amazing.

Waiting

What do you do while you're waiting?

When I worked as an editor at a publishing company in Washington, DC, where my most horrible day was a tie between the great hot cocoa spill of 1998 (all over the wall! and my wheat-colored pants!) and the day I had to confront my never-happy boss about his visualizing of a set of certain ladies of limited wardrobe on his computer screen (which faced the door), we had to do some research on the Internet (remember when we used to capitalize that, it was like a formality, but now that we know it well we don't bother anymore, like a family friend who you just call by their first name even though they're much older than you).

So, the internet. We had it. And I would use the Internet to search for important information on the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)'s website and the Civil Register, which if you don't know what it is, consider yourself blessed. Our first foray into having the Internet meant it was installed at a few central computer stations (which we also used to use Pagemaker, which I have an unnatural love for, to do layout for our publications). And when you had your query in mind, you would go out to the central computers, type in your query, and wait.

This was in the days when squirrels still powered the Internet, in a run-run-freeze kind of motion, and you'd bring along some other task (proofreading, copyediting, paper research) that you could do while you were waiting for the magic genie to return the answer to your question. Oh, they were fun times.

I'm not a good waiter (though I have been a damn fine waitress, South Street Seaport, two summers when I observed all the other waiters and waitresses drink themselves into a haze, and developed an aversion to all food that was grilled, fried, dipped, trimmed, cut, or otherwise prepared). So when I'm faced with having to wait for something, I try to think of another task to do while I'm waiting. As it happens, I have about fourteenkajillion projects that I'd like to get done, so even if one doesn't come down the pipe, I'll think of something else to do while I'm waiting for thing A to happen.

Right now, for example, I'm waiting for three main things. 1. further instructions from a new web gig, in the form of a training so I can actually start said new gig, 2. a chapter from an editing client which I edited yesterday, but may still have some points to clarify, and 3. another file from the same person that I'm going to do some wordsmithing on.

I click obsessively between the actual task at hand (reworking the inventory of places I'll pitch a set of stories also in progress), this blog entry, and my email, while waiting for the espresso to sputter and the rice to finish cooking. In the meantime, I'm trying to think of what to do with the six (small) cooked eggplants I have in the fridge and listening to the same song on Itunes an unwise number of times (Unwritten, Natasha Bedingford, and yes, it is a placer culpbable (guilty pleasure).

Then there's the issue of waiting for people who arrive late. I bring articles to read, or books, and small notebooks and pens with me, or reorganize information written on scraps of paper while sitting on the steps of the café literario in Parque Bustamante, or take pictures while I'm waiting in Plaza Italia. I've also been known to tweet about waiting, which should reduce my number of followers more than it does. What's up with all the followers lately? Twitter, you mystify me.

But what I really wish I could do is just sit. Just sit and wait for the page to load (thankfully not as much of an issue any more), be peaceful about the work that is taking forever to trickle down to me, sit and absorb what's going on around me instead of looking for more things to put my ever-darting mind to.

So, loyal blog followers and random clickers and others who've stumbled upon (but not stumbledupon) this post. Tell me, do.

What do you do while you're waiting?

I hope you will skip this post

if you are a) not interested in my media splash out or b) don't read Spanish. It will be dull, it will be boring, and if you read my blog, it will not tell you anything new. Shout out to the behind-the-scenes Beatriz Burgos who contacted me about this article, and is just an all-around nice gal, positive and pro-communication and media savvy in ways I probably never will be. She's got a hand in about a million and one projects (though who wouldn't have room for one more), and writes damn funny, wordsmithy copy. If you need to find her, I suggest Google-fu, or contact me and I'll see what I can do for you.

Also, in a small world coincidence, about the day after I got my copy of this magazine, Margaret from Cachando Chile emailed me and said, "oh that's right, I forgot you were going to be in Punto Net this month." And I was confused, because I was sure that I had mentioned this to almost noone, other than the nifty odontologist from the United States who took my picture in Rotorua as it appears in the article and maybe two other people. I was all communication upside-down in New Zealand, out of synch by so many hours I often didn't know what day it was. And I was pretty sure I hadn't mentioned it to Margaret. When I asked her how she could have "forgotten" something I didn't think she knew, she told me it's because she and Beatriz had been in contact about another project, and Beatriz had mentioned it to her. It turns out that they studied in the same Masters' program. Because Chile is not just a handkerchief (pañuelo), it's a child-sized one, that shrank in the wash (ha! as if I had a dryer or the capacity to wash in warm water!).

Anyway, as promised, the article. Click through to the flickr page if you want to see the text. I won't take over your reader with giant scans-turned-PDFs in a language you may or may not like to read. One day when I am trapped inside with nothing else to do, I might translate it for you. But right now? me da paja (I'm too lazy).



That's the first page, there are four in total, and they're all in this set, and you can click on each page. If it comes up too small, click on the plus sign that says "all sizes" and look at it in the orignal. The title means, "the strange and Chilean world of Eileen."

A couple of whoopsies that ended up in the article, probably due to communication mishaps re: Internet, we couldn't even talk on the phone due to post-quake communication breakdown is that Matadornetwork.com is the name of one of the websites I work for and publish stuff on, and it's both a magazine and community, and that I've pedaled to the coast ugh number of times. All the border photos are mine as well, and I love the ones they've chosen. They show my Santiago. Which may or may not be very different from yours.

Enjoy! I know I did! (and apparently so did the people at the Max Hoover (Max Huber) on Moneda, who greeted me loudly (and by name) when I walked in to pick up the scans.