Almost there!

So it's been a while. I spent this past week working. a lot. Almost as if I was a real student. I finished my incredibly long paper--20 pages single spaced, with a 3 page bibliography and an annex (what?) with transcripts of all of my interviews, and came to a grand total of 39 pages. After this and three more exams this week, Thursday at 4pm could not have come fast enough. But it's here! Only one more exam and one paper left, and I’m on vacation!

Last weekend we went to Santiago’s gay parade, or as they called it 'open mind fest'. We walked around for a while and I was impressed. In general, I've found that  the people here are not very open to gays, and that might be a bit of an understatement. But this 'open mind fest’ shows the society is changing, that the people are moving towards having an open mind, which is so important. The youth of today are the children of those who spent most of their youth during the dictatorship (1973-1989). The life of the youth today is completely different than life around 25-35 years ago. It's pretty cool to see the changes happening, and it makes we wonder what's in store for Chile in the future.  This was my excursion for the weekend, and I spent the rest of my time in my room working. Not so much fun.

Yesterday we went to the general cemetery of Santiago. The place is absolutely huge. Apparently over 5 million people are buried there. What was so interesting about the place was that the class divisions are so clear. Each section is separated by a small road. We started in the wealthiest area, which had small buildings, really intricate and beautiful. Sometimes the coffins were housed in the buildings as opposed to in the ground, which is more common in the states. The above monument is a memorial for Salvador Allende, the president from 1970-1973 before the coup d'etat with Pinochet. Our guide (the same one from villa grimaldi) explained the irony of Allende being buried in the wealthy area of the cemetery because one of his goals was to work on the social inequality.

As we continued to walk through the cemetery, the buildings got smaller as the burials were for upper middle class. Then instead of buildings, they were single burials. The pictures above are from middle class, (I think, I can't really remember). Victor Jara, from the bottom picture, was one of the most famous Chilean folk singers, who was killed during the dictatorship. His tomb had a lot of flowers, and there was a guitar close by that a lot of people had written on.  His wife had him buried in this part of the cemetery because it was where she thought he would want to be buried, which is pretty humble.   As we were in the cemetery we watch a funeral procession, and the people were in street clothes, which I thought was interesting. Our last stop in the cemetery was the wall of remembrance for those who disappeared or were killed during the dictatorship.  There were a lot of names on the wall, which was pretty powerful.

Not sure what's in store for today or tomorrow, I should probably do some work but once again have lost the motivation. This past week or so was an exception to the rule. By this Wednesday or Thursday I will be done. Then it's travel time! After our goodbye dinner Thursday night (our own version of Thanksgiving), a friend and I are off to Peru! We hope to spend a few days at Lake Titicaca and do a one or two night homestay with people who live on the islands in the lake. I can't wait!!!

We're almost done here, I just can't believe it. Where has the time gone?

Villa Grimaldi

Today was a tough day. We spent the afternoon at Villa Grimaldi, which just 26 years ago was one of the over 700 secret torture centers during Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1989), where people were murdered and 'dissapeared'. While it was not easy to visit this place, I think it's important in Chile's recent history. The place was beautiful, which I feel is a little ironic. Our guide was a guy who had actually spent time as a prisoner in Villa Grimaldi in 1975, which made the experience especially emotional. After a brief overview of the history of Chile immediately before the dictatorship, we started to walk around, and we took the path that the prisoners did.

We first went to the  front door. The plaque above says 'Here began the prisoners journey. Old entrance. This door will stay closed forever. Today the entrance to Villa Grimaldi is at the other side. The old door is locked shut.

One of the next stops was the first torture chamber. All of the buildings were destroyed at the end of the dictatorships, but some have been recreated. Hearing about the torture techniques almost made me sick. The peoples' legs and arms were tied, and they were blindfolded, with one time a day to go to the bathroom, and 3 minutes to eat lunch. I won't go into detail, but the inital torture treatment was between 1 and 3 hours of electric shocks, along with beatings and so many more terrible things. The second room involved more electric shocks, but with metal bunk beds, so that one could listen to someone else suffer.

Torture room. Metal beds with electiricty

Although you can't see very well, this is a wall of names of people who had dissapeared. We next walked over to a tower where some people were kept in solitary confinement and taken out once a day to be tortured. There is a beautful rose garden dedicated to all of the woman murdered and raped in the torture centers in Chile. 

Throughout the tour, our guide shared some personal experiences, or experiences of friends who had spent time in Villa Grimaldi, and the stories were heartbreaking. It's so hard for me to fathom that this was happening less than 30 years ago. Our guide was 23 when he was taken to the torture camps, and spent 13 months in total in 3 different camps. 23 is not that much older than I am, and I can't imagine being in that sitution. Seeing this place- this evidence- made me so angry that there are still people who deny, or try to diminish the important of existance of the camps. While I can understand the opinion that Pinochet did good things for the Chilean economy, how can you disregard the violation of human rights? I would say the Chile is still very politically divided. About 40/45% of Chileans agree with the dictatorship.

One story our guide told me affected me especially. He told us that there was a man who wanted to get married at Villa Grimaldi. While the first thought was that the man was ignorant, uninformed or insensitive, the reason was that his father had dissapeared at Villa Grimaldi, and he wanted his father to be with him on one of the most important days of his life.

This visit eerily reminded me of the holocaust. While I know they are completely different,  hearing about the horrible treatment of these 'communists', the feelings were similar.  I felt like I was walking around a concentration camp. The idea of this place though is a memorial, and just like the holocaust, it's our reminder of the past to ensure-never again.

It amazes me that our guide gives tours 1-2 times a month. He has to relive these horrible memories every time. They have to be so strong.  It's so important though, we need to remember even the horrible parts of our history.

Sorry if this was a bit of a downer, and a bit more serious that usual, but I guess this visit impacted me a lot more than I had expected...

Salsa, Poll dancing, and Halloween

We spent the weekend in Santiago which was nice since we hadn't really done for a while. Being ambitious, we decided to go out on Thursday night. Since I started teaching English Thursday mornings and having to get up at 6:30, I usually am so tired at night that I go to bed early. I decided to rally this time, and we went to a barrio we had never visited, Barrio Brazil. It's crazy that we've been here for more than 4 months, and theres still so much more to see. We went to this Mexican restaurant with delicious food and margaritas. We wanted to go out dancing after, but the club we were looking for was closed on Thursdays. We went to another neighboorhood, and walked around, but of course at 12:30/12:45 everything is still empty. We sat at a club that had a live band, and I was falling asleep in my chair. I decided it was time for bed. I made a valiant effort though--got home around 3am.

Friday afternoon we had a talk about Religion in Chile. I'm taking a religion class this semester, and I think all of it is so interesting. There's so much about religion that I don't know about, and especially in the context of Chile, which is a rather catholic country, it's especially interesting to learn about. I went to a salsa club for a friends birthday. I hadn't gone salsa dancing in a few months, but it was extremely fun. At first I was horrible, and not that I magically became fantastic, but I started to get the hang of it. It's nice because at salsa clubs people will ask you to dance, you will dance for a song or two,  say thank you and then you part ways. Its fun to dance with different people, and not have to worry about the creepers you might find at other types of clubs. We got there early, around 11:30ish, and after dancing for a couple of hours, everyone cleared off the dancefloor and there was----a poll dancing competition. of course. The lucky contestants were two woman, one guy who probably should have kept his shirt on, and then one tiny woman in her 30s or 40s who climbed up the poll. Bottom line: very entertaining. At around 3 they started playing reggaeton music, and we decided it was time to go.

Saturday, Halloween!! Definitely not as popular here. Apparently it because a holiday as we know it about 5 or 10 years ago. There were a lot of parties that probably were 'halloween parties' but no one really dressed up, it was very easy to spot the foreigners. We decided we had to dress up--i mean it's halloween, so we bought wings and went as fairies. We went to a club in an ex-factory, which was huge, and had 3 or 4 floors all with different types of music. It got packed really fast. When we decided to leave, there was a line of people waiting to get in, at around 3:30am. I don't think i'll ever get used to the nightlife here...
out 3 nights in a row, impressive right?!

I'm in my last 3 weeks of classes, crazy! Time to do all the work that I didn't have all semester, uh oh...