Hello friends around the world,
I'm writing to you during my last few hours in Santiago, before heading up to Panama overland. Internet access the next week will be scarce, and internet access in Panama may also be limited, so know that I may not respond for a little while if you send me anything. I would still love to hear from you.
The Immigrant Job
I stopped working at the cafe about ten day ago. I wanted to give myself some more time and energy to do some exploration around the city before I left. It turned out to be a good decision anyway because by the last week I was getting really tired of working there. This was mostly due to the fact that about two weeks before I left there was a giant drain of people leaving, including some of the workers that had been around for a little bit longer. It turns out that they all left because the bosses weren't given them certain benefits they were promised when they started, and that are actually guaranteed by law. One person left because she kept asking when she would get her Sundays off (she was promised two free Sundays every month) and after about two months of not getting them she decided she had had enough. The other employee left because he was asked to work several double shifts (about 12 hours) and was not given a lunch break or really any type of break. I got along decently well with both of the people who left, so I was a little bummed to see them go, but what made working so unpleasant was the result of them leaving. First, we had a weekend when management didn't have time to hire new workers, so we were short staffed, which resulted in very good tips but also really exhausting shifts. Second, one of the workers who left was a barista, he made the coffee. At this cafe, that is considered to be a special skill requiring special training. As a result, none of the other employees could take the position, and they didn't have any luck finding new baristas. So instead the manager had to work the coffee machine. The manager is generally nice enough when he's just on his computer ignoring us, but when he works behind the bar he is extremely frustrating. He constantly has unreasonable and unpredictable expectations, and he always assumes what he is doing is most important and most urgent. There is not nearly enough room to do what needs to be done behind the bar, so we are constantly moving and squeezing past each other, and asking each other to move. Mr. manager would instead yell, push, and never accommodate someone else when they needed to get by. It made the work environment much more stressful and unpleasant.
The other realization that I had is that in someways, I was occupying the space of the immigrant doing the job domestic employees didn't want to do. By the time I left, only three of the more than 10 employees there had been there longer than I have, and several had come and gone within a week. Considering the workers were leaving based on poor working conditions, I had a fun time toying with the idea. Obviously the situation here is completely different because I was not that desperate for work, there are lots of Chileans ready to take on the job, and realistically conditions at the cafe job, including pay, were way better than the pay and conditions most low wage Chilean workers have to face. It's also important to note that most undocumented workers who endure illegal work conditions in the US do not report them because they either don't know the law, or more importantly, are afraid of being deported. Although i didn't know the law at first, I'm writing about it now, so I was clearly able to learn about it. And as far as fear of reporting, I always said I didn't think the cafe would try to pull something like not paying me, because whereas I could risk deportation, I'm already planning on leaving the country, and they risk having their business shut down. The thought of being an exploited immigrant worker is clearly misleading if not completely unfounded here, but I still found it entertaining to speculate on.
Wonderful Hosts
I've had amazing luck for the last few weeks with my hosts. They've been some of my best couchsurfing experiences to date. First I stayed with Paloma, who lives in a downtown apartment alone, and then with Angélica who also lives in a downtown apartment alone. Staying with both of them involved a great amount of freedom and lots of late night conversations. We were also able to go out a few times and do somethings together around town.
Perhaps the most interesting experience to tell about was when I stayed with Rocío and her family. They live in a somewhat poorer neighborhood, still considered middle-class, but on the lower end of it. The house included an atomic family of 6 -- parents and 4 kids age 16 to 27 -- and a cousin. But there were always other people in the house: friends, boyfriend, neighbors, family friends. The house was constantly full of energy and excitement. The somewhat frazzled and chaotic nature of the house also made me feel much more at home. The whole house looked a little bit like the front yard of the Burrow, and generally made me think of collective housing. There were glass bottles of various shapes and colors hanging all over for decoration, plastic containers connected to the walls filled with soil as make shift planters, make shift shelving lined with jar that had different herbs and spices that often didn't match their label, a freezer larger than the refrigerator, and something like 8 cats, two mothers and 6 kittens that had just been born. You could tell much of the inspiration came from the mother who is a woman of amazing energy and passion. She describes herself as esoteric, runs a small bookshop out of the house, which sells a mix of standard bookstore things and esoteric materials, and has a small office where she does tarot readings and Reiki. I think what made me feel like a part of a collective house more than the physical elements was the feeling of day to day life. The house was constantly full of energy, love, action, and semi-ordered chaos. And amidst all of that, they were ready to embrace me wholeheartedly from the minute I walked in. It was absolutely wonderful.
The other great thing about this family was that spending time with them gave me a deeper glance into Chilean mentality in Santiago. Every couchsurinfg experience I had has taught me about mentality and culture here. For example, the 36 year old man who has been married and divorced twice, has a son who comes to stay with him a few times a month, but still has his mother come to clean his house, do his dishes, and iron his clothing was also an educational experience. But because of the breadth of conversations and topics covered with this family, I feel like I got a little deeper. The two main things that stick out are getting a better sense of ways in which the dictatorship continues to influence life today (brief history: late 60s/early 70s Chile undergoes major socialist reforms, 1973 a military coup establishes a dictatorship run by Pinochet which promotes extremely neoliberal capitalist instituionas and governing styles, 1990, Chile returns to democracy, but neoliberal capitalist institutions remain largely intact). The mother of the mother in the family was a somewhat bigger name in the communist party at the time of the dictatorship, and the communists were enemy #1 for Pinochet. She recounted many vivid experiences and reflected on the impact they have until today, on her and on the country as a whole. The other experience was that my last night there, there was a reasonably strong earthquake. Earthquakes of that magnitude are not uncommon in Chile, and have been happening at greater frequency since the big one two years ago. Even though all of my earthquake experiences have been in Santiago so I am by no means an expert, this earthquake didn't feel that strong to me, but the family had a minor freak out. Everyone was running around trying to get to the room that was best reinforced. The mom stood in a corner chanting something. And after it ended everyone was calling friends and family, making sure everyone was ok, and later one of the daughters came down saying she couldn't fall asleep because she got scared by the earthquake. It was my first chance to see Chileans reacting to an earthquake, and it was very clear that the big earthquake from two years back was fresh on their minds.
On "Travel"
One of the ways I spend much of my time is trying to explain to people what I am doing. This is difficult because I don't really know what I am doing, especially not in a sense that I can easily explain with words. In Boston this wasn't as much of a problem. I think that was in part because I hung out with a crowd where just existing was more acceptable. But more than that I think it's because I didn't stand out. In Boston I was a young guy who for all relevant purposes for anyone I was interacting with was American. I was normal. I would get the question "what do you do?" which would be hard to answer, but I had ways to answer it which made it seem like I lived there, which is how I like to think of my time there.
In Quito and Chile, that didn't fly as well. In these cities, my broken and heavily accented Spanish mixed with a tall, white, and in no way Latin physique meant that the first question wasn't along the lines of "what do you do?" but rather "why are you here?". It was clear to anyone that I didn't belong, that I was foreign, that I didn't really live there. As a result, people always wanted to know I had traveled to in the area. I've seen the same scene unfold with gringo friends of mine who have been in Chile much longer; one of the first topics is where they have visited in Chile. But with me it was even worse because no matter how I tried to explain it and how well I did at avoiding the word "travel", the impression people got is that I am a traveler. In Ecuador, I had at least traveled around a bit before arriving in Quito. But in Chile, for most of my time here, I had only visited Santiago. People were not only surprised, they were actually indignant and upset that I would come all the way down to Santiago and not travel around, especially as a traveler. Santiago does not have a reputation as a beautiful city, so only visiting Santiago in Chile, which has so many lovely sights, was downright offensive.
It's interesting for me to see how deeply engrained the idea of exploring as many places as possible is, and more so how much it does not appeal to me right now. The perfect example is with a city called Valparaíso. Valparaíso is a smallish city on the coast about an hour and a half from Santiago. It is the place for tourists to go. It has a pretty bay. It has a bunch of hills covered with pretty, old houses. And it is a bohemian artistic haven, so there are random artists of various sorts all over the place, and the walls in the city are covered with street art/graffiti. It is also supposedly a great place to go clubbing, in fact I was told it is a sin to go to Valparaíso and not go clubbing. People were most upset with me for not having visited there, so I decided to go during my last weekend. When I returned and people asked me how it was, I would answer "good" or "pretty" because that is about all there was to say. That's not to say anything bad about Valapraíso, but I was only there for one day, and it was not at the level of breathtakingly life-changing amazing (like hiking for three days in the Andes or traveling through TIbet). It was pretty.
In my current position I am just not that interested in walking around and seeing a new place that's pretty. I was thinking today about how some wording differences between English and Spanish help to highlight my feelings. In Spanish there are two words that are generally translated as "to know". One refers more to informational knowing, where as the other aligns more with experiential knowing. If someone wants to ask if you have been to a tourist attraction or to a city, they ask if you know it, using the experiential form of know. I think this helps me get at the crux of the difference because for me a visit is not enough to know a place. After a month and a half, I feel like I know Santiago. I don't pretend to know it at the level of a local, or even of my friends who have lived here for over a year, but I still feel well enough acquainted to say that I know it. I am familiar with the streets and the neighborhoods, I've observed and experienced several forms of living here, I worked a low-wage job, I participated in a protest and got sprayed with the tear-gas water. I know it enough to have a feeling, something like a flavor on my tongue, that helps me conceptualize it. I know it well enough to have friends here, to feel welcome here, to be able to give directions, to feel that if I were to come again, I would not be coming for a second visit but rather be coming back. I can't say a single one of those things about Valparaíso. I would not say that I know it, I would say that I have seen it. I have images, I have pictures (which you can see here if you'd like: https://plus.google.com/
In my current journey I am not as interested in going around to see things. And there are three limited resources: energy, time, and money, which mean that I often have to chose between the two. If I had gone to visit some more places nearby, I would have had less time in Santiago, less energy to explore and engage in Santiago, and less money down the line to keep going. That's why I generally try to avoid the word "travel". I think for most of the people I have met, the word is associated with going around trying to see as much as possible. the goal is to collect as many unique sensory experiences. With it come the crazy and entertaining experiences of traveling which also draw a lot of people. I am in no way trying to say this is bad; in fact I have often traveled that way and assume I will do so again in the future. What I am saying is that it's not something I am that interested in right now. Right now I arrive somewhere and try to amass as many interpersonal and cultural experiences as I can, because it is the people and the bonds between them that make the place what it is. I would much rather spend my resources on that adventure. And yet I move a lot, within a city, and between cities. Despite staying longer and not leaving very much, I still only spend 1-3 months in a city. the question is, how do I describe what I am doing? If I am right that most people understand travel the way I have described it, then I need to find a different way to talk about my current journey.
On the Road
For the next week or so I'll be in transit to Panama, and after a few weeks in Panama I'll spend a week or two in transit to the US. I'll probably have limited internet access during that time, but I'll try to check in and keep everyone update on my progress.
