I am sitting in, of all places, at an internet cafe in a rather large and highly american-looking shopping mall on the quasi-suburban outskirts of santiago. my shoulders are as close to sunburned as my skin could ever be, i'm listening to the 80's soft rock being blasted through the mall, and just finished reading an email notifying me that i've been accepted into the department of history's phd program with full funding plus stipend at johns hopkins university. hmmm.

the past few days have been a blur at best, but i'll try to pick up where i left off... the discoteca de valparaiso. it ended up involving a lot of alcohol and a lot of underage chilean men, and a lot of really bad american music, including bon jovi's less forgivable efforts. i don't know. i actually got really upset afterward because of a comment some chilean guy made to this white american guy in our group about "trading" a brown girl for a white girl. it wasn't so much the comment made by a dumb asshole than the fact that almost all of the other travelers in our gang didn't understand why i thought that was incredibly disturbing and why i personally, as a brown american woman in a country where european features are generally prized over indigenous ones, was upset... anyway. i realized the next day that i need to avoid this ameri-canadian travelers' clique anyway because they all speak english all the time. but the rest of valparaiso was itself terrific. we mostly wandered around and rode the funiculars and visited pablo neruda's house. but i most enjoyed the small quiet streets that shoot up the steep hills in wild zigzags and the spectacular view of the pacific from the higher regions of the city. i'm looking forward to returning. quick photos, not very good, but all a quick google search yielded:
wait. shit. the upload function doesn't work on this computer. grrr.

back in santiago, all is very well. it's truly the heart of summer here at the moment - the sun sets at around 10, and it's definitely at least 90 degrees if not more for a significant portion of the day. spanish classes have begun and i'm already very pleased with my performance - turns out i've returned a lot more from high school than i expected. it's a bit difficult to understand the speedy, slurred, informal spanish of chileans, but i am mostly able to do so, and hopefully will be expressing myself in most situations with ease in a few days. i just need practice.

santiago itself is a bit baffling. i knew it was a first world city, but i never expected it to be so aggressively so. skyscrapers, a flawless metro, shopping malls like this, amazing air-conditioned buses, fairly organized city planning, smog, etc... the area in which i'm staying is fairly commercial, though i'm a good 20 minute walk from most of that. the streets around me are thus fairly residential and actually quite green and pretty. i haven't ventured into the real city center at all, however, and i'm curious and looking forward to doing so, as well as exploring the non-gentrified sections of the western part of the city

but in the meantime i'll wait here for cristobal, who works in this part of the city and rents a room from the lady i'm staying with. we're going to see some chilean movie at the cineplex here. i'm a bit woozy from the pisco sours i inhaled with a lovely peruvian lunch a couple of hours ago.
in a discussion about insects in class this morning, a girl from seattle offered the following insight: las avejas grandes son como autobuses de escuela borrachos cuando estan volando - big bumblebees are like drunken schoolbuses when they're flying. cool.

as a product of six years of Johns Hopkins myself, best of luck at Homewood...

as it's summer in Chile, I remember Zapallar as being nice on the coast. stay out of the water, though- it's freezing...

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I am honored to drop a line here and say thank you for keeping this great site online.

I am honored to drop a line here and say thank you for keeping this great site online.

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-- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy", stardate 3201.7
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