cueca!

The cueca is the national dance of Chile. It is apparently inevitable that we will be asked to cueca at some point in our communities, and since we had the extra time, Allyson and Rad arranged for us to have a cueca lesson. This turned out to be in a restaurant with most of the patrons gone, and the tables pushed to the side. The instructor was Chilean, but might as well have been Irish to look at her, blonde with a hint of red, white freckled skin, and wide cheekbones.



We danced for about 90 minutes, while this older woman in her 60s or so looked on and really enjoyed watching all the gringos having fun trying to learn this thing that Chileans learn as soon as they can walk. When we reached the end of the class, she asked our instructor if she could demonstrate for us--with one of us four guys.

Of course it was me. In any group of normal people, if you need someone to do something potentially embarrassing, I'm your guy. (If you have a group of theater majors or a cappella singers, you'll have so many volunteers you'll have to draw straws.)

A word about how well I can move: it generally excludes dancing. I do very well with aikido, and any sport involving a racquet, and after lots of martial arts training, I can do reasonably well at a lot of other sports. I have a lot of trouble adding in the part of the brain to get myself moving in time with music.

I wasn't any better at it this time, but I did keep up and paying attention and not getting completely lost. Quena (her name) was really good, and a lot of fun to dance with. There's no video; I'll post photos later.

aikido

In the Southern Hemisphere we have to turn in the opposite direction.

Sorry, bad joke, and no good for any non-aikido folks.

I trekked down to Aikido Hakusan tonight. (Sorry, the website is in Spanish. I know that doesn't do you any good, but the dojo's in Chile. I don't know what to tell you.) Gabriel was teaching; first row, far right. He's every bit as nice as he looks.

Visiting a dojo can be dodgy. There are people who do aikido in ways that I'm not interested in: hard, rough, involving lots of pain. I chose Aikido Hakusan because at some point recently they hosted a teacher named Dan Messisco, who a lot of my friends like, and I figure if they hosted someone my friends are interested in, they're probably okay.

Class started, and pretty quickly Gabriel's style looked familiar: he was doing aikido very much like Jane and Neville at Aikido West, and I racked my brain to come up with the name of their teacher, Takeda Sensei. Actually, my first clue was my first partner saying "Oh-toh!" when I took his balance; Jamie at Aikido West, another Takeda student, especially does that, but I've seen it from other Takeda students. It's a funny thing, but I was like "Really? I only know one tradition that says that." (Taking a fall often induces some vocalization as the air pushes out of you. "Oos!" is one, various grunts and noises are others, and somewhere in the lineage of Takeda's teaching, the students say "Oh-toh!".)

And it was fucking awesome. I love. Doing. Aikido. It's amazing to be on another continent and walk into a dojo and have everything be substantially the same. Aikido and Zen were the only Spanish I studied before I left, and it was a Basics class, so I was able to help the beginners I was training with, the same way I find a single sentence to help people at home. Gabriel is a great teacher, who came around to help my partners and play with me a bit, which was tons of fun.

Yay!

the shoehorn quest: conclusion

I'm still uploading photos to Flickr, but I have to share this one, because I could not make this shit up. This is where you buy a shoehorn in Santiago:


Yes, that's an orthopedics/medical supply shop. They sell back braces and foot orthotics and such. Apparently, also shoe repair. And shoe polish. I had a brief neurotic moment of wondering if I wanted to pay $2 for a shoehorn when I already have one I like better (albeit on the wrong continent), and then I thought, "Wow, you're an idiot. You need a shoehorn, and this is a symbol of triumph."

No joke. I passed by a galería and for some reason I thought, "This is the right block; that might be the one the guy was trying to point me to." I asked a guy at the nice clothing store--the first person in Santiago to know what a calzador is when I talk about it!--and he pointed me a few doors down.

Chris 1, Chile 0. Yeah, bitches!

In the States it's obvious to us: a place that sells shoes that need a shoehorn, will probably also sell shoehorns. New research project: do Chileans actually think, "I need a shoehorn. I'll go to the shoe repair shop that is also a medical supply store?" Or do they think "shoe repair store" and this just happens to be a weird one? (That's possible, one respondent did say I needed to go to a reparador, which would make it just curiously different rather than thoroughly bizarre.) Time for more research.

Today we did an Amazing Race, which is sort of like a scavenger hunt but with an emphasis on speed, and the things to gather weren't very hard, just awkward to get to. It was pretty epic: Jeremy and Sharon took several cabs, but even so they only beat me and Brandi by 3 minutes. We in turn took one cab, but arrived at the final Metro station at the same time as Corrie and Heather, giving us a neck-and-neck final sprint. They'd budgeted 3 hours for the whole thing, but I called them after 45 minutes to say we were on the final mission.

I'd wanted to go running this morning, but instead I spent an hour literally running across central Santiago. So now I'm going to bed.

unrattled.

I guess I slept through a 6.1 aftershock last night. Mind you, it's impossible to walk into my room without waking me up. But apparently earthquakes don't bother me.

I did think about it

I'm sorry about the lack of pictures. I have many--and a video of the changing of the guard at the Presidential office!--but I haven't felt like trying to push all that data through the hotel's pipe. Maybe one morning this week.

This morning 7 of the volunteers ran a 10K race to raise money for earthquake relief. I thought long and hard about doing it, but I've never run 10K before. That's not to say I couldn't do it, because if I pushed myself there's every chance I could. But I thought about that level of activity, combined with how I've been eating, and decided not to add any major stresses to my body just now.

It turns out kilometers 2 through 6 or so were Cerro San Cristobal, so I felt especially vindicated. 10K would have been hard enough, but 30 minutes running uphill? Nuh-uh. Three of us who hadn't run the race hiked up the hill afterward, and it's not a tiny hill, really.

I've been out with the gang the past couple nights: Friday night was California Cantina, and last night we had dinner and drinks with Don and Jessie, volunteers from last year who are extending into this year (although without Ministry support, because they're in the VIII region, even though their towns are fine, the Ministry doesn't want them in a disaster area--it's a long story). Actually it was just Jessie, because Don apparently has a girlfriend here in Santiago and appears to be running on Chilean time, because he didn't meet us during the 2 hours we were at the restaurant, and then failed to meet us for the hour we were at the club before I left. For dinner I had a half-liter of beer (a schop) and a pizza, both bigger than I expected, and then I had my first really good Pisco Sour at the club.

Yesterday I went to La Vega, the big market on the north side of town. I didn't take any pictures, because it was a hot weekend afternoon and I was the only gringo in a narrow, crowded marketplace and I was kind of overwhelmed. Rad (Radford, our Orientation Assistant) had described it as the cheap place to get fruits and veggies; she didn't mention it was HOLY CRAP THIS IS WHAT MOST OF URBAN LATIN AMERICA LOOKS LIKE HEY DO YOU NEED SHOES OR SWEATPANTS OR NOTEBOOKS OR CANDY BECAUSE YOU CAN BUY THOSE TOO. You cross the (completely disgusting) Río Mapocho that runs through the city, and you're immediately in another world. I recognized it from Mexico: dusty, dirty, flaking paint, cracked buildings, street vendors. But I'd never seen that side of things in a gigantic city. It's daunting.

I'm excited this week to try and make it to an aikido class and a Zen sitting. The odds of even one of those actually happening are not good, since, you may have noticed, I'm in Latin America and these things rarely happen on the first try. But it's good to have goals!

a failure to communicate

Apropos to my experience trying to find a calzador ("shoehorn") yesterday, here's a story. Anna and I were at an aikido party last year at a home in Fremont. There were these adorable little bilingual kids running around--the mother is Japanese, the father American.

There were dogs running around, so I ask the little four-year old girl: "What's the dog's name?"

"Natu."
"Natu?"
She looks puzzled. "No, Natu."
Now I'm confused. "Natu?"
"No! Natu!"
I'm in the Twilight Zone. I look at the guy next to me, who says he doesn't get it either. I ask again.
"Natu?"

The little girl screws up her face in confusion and walks away.

Later on I find her mom in the kitchen and ask about the dog's name.

"Natsu."

Right. Little kids have trouble pronouncing 's'.

on a quest

I own two pairs of shoes that benefit from a shoehorn: my Clarks, and my canvas running shoes.

In a fit of false economy in my last-minute packing, I decided not to bring my shoehorn. I thought, "Nah, I can get by without it." The stupid plastic shoehorn weighs less than my glasses. And my running shoes are actually really hard to put on without one. What the hell? This was not a smart decision.

Okay, so I need to buy a shoehorn. Now, I've never tried living day-to-day abroad outside Latin America, but one of many things Chile has in common with Mexico is that if you need something, you can safely assume that someone sells it, but that it won't be where you expect and it's like a scavenger hunt to figure out where it is. For example:

1. I'm in La Vega, the big market across the river (more about that later). I ask the guy who sells household sundries about a calzador. He looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. I don't have those."
2. Find a nice lady and ask if there's a shoe vendor.
3. Ask the shoe vendor. Nope, he doesn't have them.
4. Head south back into the Centro.
5. Stop at a shoe store and ask about a calzador. The guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. I don't have those. You need to go to a place that sells dress shoes." Right! Off I go.
6. Stop at a dress-shoe place and ask about a calzador. The guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. You have to go to a reparador, they sell them. There's one down on Paseo Ahumada, between Compañia and Huérfanos."
7. If there's anything like a reparador on that block, it's closed and has no outside sign.
   
8. Stop at a Hush Puppies store and ask about a calzador. The very friendly and helpful guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I point to the metal shoehorns in the glass case in front of him. "Oh! Yeah, a calzador." "Do you sell plastic ones?" "No, and these aren't for sale, they're for people to try stuff on. If you go to a regalería, they'll have them. There's one right around the corner, [garbled] La Igriega. They'll have them."
9. There is, needless to say, no La Igriega anything where I'm pretty sure he told me to go. I set aside the shoehorn quest, get my ice cream, and come home for a nap.
   

There you have it: at least an hour spent walking around a huge city, from store to store, trying to figure out who sells shoehorns in this culture. And apparently there's something wrong with how I pronounce "calzador" that I need to work on.

(UPDATE 3/28/10: By asking someone else today, I discovered the guy was saying "la galería", not "regalería". A galería is a rabbit's warren of shops in first or lower floors of a building, clustered roughly by type: shoe stores, photo stores, etc. This makes future success more likely.)