Mi Día en Espanol!

Because I am still trying desperately to learn Spanish, and because I want to practise my new found 'skills' in using more than one tense (two, in fact, the present and, more recently, the past perfect!), I have written this blog in Spanish.

Do not fear. There is a translation below.

Ayer, el cielo era claro y azul. Yo me desperté a las siete y medio y sentí muchas más alerté que antes. (Yo pienso que el (muy leve) sorocho es mejor). 

Yo me cepillé el pelo y las dentes. Me visté con pantalónes cortes y un polero rosa porque el sol es muy caloroso aqui. (Sé esta es muy aburrido, pero tengo que practico mi vocabulares!) Tambien usé un sombrero y bloqueador solar. 

M estuvo durmiendo. Yo le besé y desayunamos. Comí pan y bebí té en la sala de  comido y conocimos tres nuevos viajeros. Son Alemános y hablan Inglés  más mejor que hablo Español! Hablamos acerca de los actividades en San Pedro y acerca de los países en los que viajaron.

Antes dejamos, llenamos nuestras botellas con agua porque es importante  beber muchos agua cuando al altitud. 

Caminamos para Pukará, de Quitar.

Pukará es una fortaleza anciana y está tres kilometres desde la casa. A Pukará subimos el cerro. Llevé una bolsa y botella grande de agua y usé sandalias, y a veces me deslicé. Fue  caloroso y bebimos muchos agua. En la cumbre del cerro miramas la buena vista, y me gustó muchos. 

Miré las montañas y dunas de arena y pensé como afortunado nosotros estamos por este viaje. M tomó muchos fotos.

En la cumbre del cerro también conocimos los nuevos viajores desde la casa. No parecieron cansado, pero comieron muchas frutas y galletas!

Dejamos de la cumbre del cerro antes ellos, pero sin embargo llegamos después ellos! Yo pienso que caminaron más rápidamente que nosotros!

En la casa leé  una pagina de un libro en Español para practicar. Cuando estuve cansado, ayudé M a preparar la cena en la cocina. Él cocina muy bien. Yo lo amo! 

Después comimos, lavé los platos  y esperamos para nuestros guía por una expedición  a mirar las estrellas.

Yo voy a escribir acerte del expedición mañana porque nosotros vamos a volver muy tarde.

En Inglés: 

Yesterday, the sky was clear and blue. I woke up at half past seven and I felt a lot more alert than before. (I think the (very slight) altitude sickness is better).

I brushed my hair and teeth. I dressed in shorts and a pink top because the sun is very hot here. (I know this is really boring, but I have to practice my vocabulary!) I also wore a hat and sunscreen.

M was sleeping. I kissed him and we had breakfast. I ate bread and drank tea in the dining room and we met three new travelers. They are German and speak English better than I speak Spanish! We talked about the activities in San Pedro and about the countries in which they had traveled.

Before we left, we filled our bottles with water because it is important to drink plenty of water at altitude.

We walked to Pukará, De Quito.

Pukará is an old fortress and is three kilometers from the house. At Pukará we climbed the hill. I was carrying a bag and a large bottle of water and wearing sandals, and sometimes I slipped. It was hot and we drank a lot of water. At the top of the hill we looked at the great view, and I liked it a lot.

I looked at the mountains and the sand dunes and thought how lucky we are for this trip. M took many photos.

At the hilltop also we met the new traveof ers from the house. They did not seem tired, but ate many fruits and cookies!

We left the summit of the hill before them, yet we arrived after! I think I walked faster than us!

In the house I read a page of a book in Spanish to practice. When I was tired, I helped M to prepare dinner in the kitchen. He cooks well. I love him!

After we ate, we washed the dishes and waited for our guide for an expedition to look at the stars.

I'll write about the expedition tomorrow because we will come back very late.

....and yes. Admittedly the quality of the content of this blog has declined considerably but I am still quite proud to have done this. As you will, I am sure, be most impressed by, I have learned the past perfect tense. Turns out, if course, that there is also a second past tense. Which most of that post should have been conjugated in. But we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

For now, ciao!

Worlds Within Worlds

Despite my little exercise in Spanish blogging yesterday, I could not bring myself to limit my vocabulary when it came to describing our star gazing experience yesterday.

Sitting in chairs under blankets and wearing almost all of our clothes, we shivered in the desert night, and gazed upwards while our guide, physically skipping with enthusiasm for his subject, relayed the history of mankind's fascination with the night sky, the planets and the revolutions of them in relation to our earth, and, ultimately, ourselves. He explains the gradual, step by step transformation in the way humans have viewed the shape and movement of the earth, and the terrifying effect it had on many of our more ancient compatriots, threatening belief systems, power balances and, in the end, our own, ever shaky, sense of our place in this universe.

And well it might. Sitting, gazing upwards, understanding the galaxies within galaxies, the planets with their own moons, weather systems and natural resources, and the movement of the sky, which is, after all, only a movement of ourselves, so imperceptible and yet fast enough for the seven powerful  telescopes in our guide's back garden to require readjustment within five or ten minutes in order to remain trained on a particular object, is terrifying - or at least - awesome, in the literal sense of the word.

It is, quite truly, another world up there.

Our guide uses a powerful light beam as a pointer to show us the Southern night sky, something we cannot see well from our little island in the northern hemisphere. He points out the Southern Cross, which guides sailors by acting as a marker from which to place themselves in relation to the south pole, and the False Cross, which confuses them in those times when the Southern Cross is below our horizon. He points out the brightest stars in the sky, including Sirius, my personal favourite, which blazes above the Southern hemisphere.

Then he begins to focus the telescopes and I am simply not prepared for how amazed I will be. I look at clusters of bright stars which, with the naked eye, form only an empty space in the sky. I see Sirius, not as a blinking dot, but as a fireballs, blazing bright yellow, white and, sometimes, a fiery blue. I look at the 'Jewel Box' a cluster of stars so named for their twinkling colours, which glow red, green, gold and crimson.

We are all frozen, no longer able to feel our feet, but dumbstruck by what we are seeing.

"Wow", we say, and our ability to use other vocabulary is swallowed up by the enormity of the universe we look at.

And this is before he begins to train the telescopes on the planets.

Jupiter, with its stripes visible, and all four of its moons circulating in their various ellipses, beams down at us. I can't fathom a world so completely other.

Saturn is so clear it looks as though I could reach into the telescope and pluck it out of the sky to pop into my mouth like a penny sweet. (An odd metaphor I know, but that's just how it felt).

Finally, and with a flourish, our guide trains two telescopes carefully into the sky and announces,

" and now - the best of all!"

He has made this same announcement several times so far,  though admittedly, it always has been fairly fantastic, each better even than the last, and so it is not that I don't respond, more that I simply queue up for the newly trained telescope with the same level of excitement as I have for everything else.

When I first put my eye to it I simply see white and nearly pull away again, thinking I might be looking through the wrong eye piece. I am not, however, and when I do focus, the brightness almost hurts my eyes. When I blink the tears away and try again I gasp.

I am looking, as you may have guessed, at the moon. I can see craters and textures, shadows and lines. It is absolutely amazing. What is more, with the help of our, ever more amazing, guide I even manage to get a photo.

I don't have the words to tell you quite how amazing this evening was and so - I will revert to uploading a photo.

Ladies and Gentlemen - behold - The Moon...

Celebrating Absence

Today being an unusually cloudy day for San Pedro, we decide to visit the Museo.

It's a small building set up by a Catholic priest and housing some art works of his, but largely devoted to the artefacts, tools and general resourcefulness of the first indigenous people in San Pedro, this tiny oasis in the heart of the huge and arid Atacama desert. 

The imagination and staying power of these initial settlers strikes admiration in me, but I comment to M that I am not finding the translation of the Spanish information boards especially difficult, because, essentially, the story is the same. In any museum, anywhere, which has space dedicated to the lifestyle of the area's most ancient ancestors, there is a description of how they used clay and stone to make tools and cooking implements, hunted animals with spears, ate and skinned them, wove fabrics out of plant and animal material, and made fire. I am a cultural philistine, yes. But it leaves me just a little cold (and in this case, literally - the air at this height is cold, heated only by the hot desert sun so that when it's cloudy, it's freezing).

"But don't you think that the fact that all these ancient peoples, spread all over the world, were all doing the same thing, without consultation, is fascinating in itself?" he replies.

This is a good point, and I acknowledge it, but I still find that by far the most interesting thing in the museum, is the absence of something. 

Previously, this museum housed a large number of skeletal remains of the ancient Atacaman people and, most notably, a mummified body, known famously as 'Miss Chile'. 

In 2007 all the bodies and body parts were removed in response to what was known as an 'Ethnic demand' from the indigenous people living in the Atacama region, for the removal of them from public display for reasons of respect and religious sensitivity.

The museum now houses, in their place, a short film which records the actual discussions that took place amoung a special committee of individuals representing the museum and the indigenous people, to try to reach a mutual understanding and, finally, a plan of action. It is an impressively calm and rational discussion, with genuine intentions on both sides to reach a common understanding and it represents a movement which, according to an expert, is taking effect all over the world, known as 'new museology'. This movement steers museum best practice away from a sense that anything is justified in the pursuit of public education, to a more organic and unified relationship of the museum with its cultural environment. All over the world, we are told, museums displaying culturally sensitive items are opening dialogues with the affected community to try to find a new way of being, a new museology which represents education but without leaving out perhaps that most important part of education, tolerance and understanding of the continuing values and beliefs of the living generation of the very people whose ancestors are the subject of that museum.

This raises questions about, for example, the mummified body which I remember seeing in the National History Museum in London. Ironically enough, this was not part of British national history, but had been taken from the ground in Egypt and either lent by or stolen from the Egyptians centuries ago. Surrounding the showcase were information texts which explained, with some further sense of irony, how important it was to the ancient Egyptians that their families be buried correctly, with the appropriate items to facilitate their passing into the next world, and with the right positioning both in respect to the earth and the sun, and the posture of the body itself.  Alongside this understanding of that culture, we remove the body from its resting place, display it publically in brightly lit halls on another continent, and label and position the accompanying items in such a way as they might best be viewed by an impassive foreign museum visitor. 

Now it all sounds quite damning, but those ancient Egyptians are not, at least as far as I am aware, now represented by direct descendants who retain those beliefs. The museum is not continually inviting discomfort from local communities whose ancestors are on display. So who objects? The dead? But they're dead. They don't know about it. At least not in our cultural understanding of death anyway. Those silly ancient Egyptians, believing in special resting places to reassure the soul. Ha!  Especially as we know, for definite, what happens after death....no, wait...

I am not having a go at the National History Museum. I am simply trying to examine how difficult it is and how knotty these issues can be. I am all for New Museology, and where there are living, local people, actively offended by the content on offer, then I absolutely believe it is right to enter into the kind of debate that this museum, in 2007, embarked upon. Tourists are fascinated by such things - it's a draw - I know this is true because I have read Trip Advisor reviews of this museum, dating back to before 2007. But should everything be subjugated to the curiosity of the tourists? And is that curiosity about the lives and deaths of the ancient Atacaman peoples, or about death itself, that morbid fascination, and the fact that a body such as 'Miss Chile's' could be so well preserved over such a long time. At the end of the day, tourists are just passing through. And their lives will probably not be much hindered by missing out on one exhibit. The lives and sensitivities of a living, local, permanent community are much more closely affected, and that discomfort, interwoven with the daily life of a small number of inhabitants like San Pedro's, can have a much deeper and more lasting effect. 

But the discussion, even here, raises complex issues.

The museum staff raise concerns over the potential decline in popularity of the museum, the bodies being the major feature of it, and the resultant effect on the livelihood of those who work there.

The group spends much time discussing the ethical acceptability, or otherwise, of using a replica of 'Miss Chile' in place of the real body. Some people agree that this would be an acceptable compromise, stating that the issue is that 'Miss Chile' herself be allowed to rest in peace. Others feel that a replica is as intrusive as the display of the real body, stating lack of privacy, or of proper sensitivity in the method of display. Still others believe that the central issue is 'Miss Chile' herself, having become a symbol of deep lack of respect over a long period, and that a replica of a body other than hers, or, preferably, an example body rather than a replica of a real one, which would show the visitors how the ancient ancestors were buried without the display of any one ancestor in particular, would resolve the issue. Others still, feel that the representation of death in any form is in itself distasteful.

"We must understand," says one man, "the consequences of angering our ancestors. My mother taught me that such actions bring angry winds, excessive heat, drought, climate change, and bad harvests. It will be bad for us if the ancestors are angered."

His statement is taken with grave acceptance, though among the people there, there are undoubtedly those who do not share his convictions. And quite right too. Perhaps, in these situations, it does not matter whether these beliefs are born out in exact truth, as much as that they are there at all. Should a whole section of the community be in constant fear of disaster based on the actions of a few?

In general the whole committee agrees that there is, in some definition, a 'negative energy' about the museum as it then stood. For some people this was very literal, for others it simply constituted a bad reputation and bad feeling. It was agreed that the negative energy should be transformed, somehow, into something positive. 

The bodies were removed and put carefully into a special storage centre, with a ceremony held in honour of the dead. I am surprised that there is no attempt to return them to the ground they had been exhumed from, but, as somebody had pointed out in the committee discussions, so many people had lived and died for so long in this small oasis, there were many, many bodies already in the ground, which tended to be ruthlessly, if accidentally, uncovered each time the ground was developed or built upon. In fact, rather unavoidably, the bodies were being moved and unearthed in the path of progress, or just in the interests of daily life, constantly. Perhaps it was felt that the bodies would therefore be more respectfully laid to rest there, and more at peace. 

The storage was carefully designed so that it faced Mount Licancabur, which was, and remains, of deep religious significance to the Atacaman peoples. It is not open to the public and there continues a wide scale project to try to piece together remains in which the skeletons had been taken apart, skulls stored separately to other bones, and to store them in the facility as a whole body.

In place of the bodies and the skeletal remains, which had formed the main centre piece of the museum, there is now a focus instead on the way the people lived. 

I am a little disappointed that an idea voiced by one person in the recorded committee discussions had not been taken up though. He had suggested a special room, surrounded by solemnity and ceremony, in which the beliefs and practices of the Atacaman people, particularly in respect of the afterlife, would be represented. But perhaps that too, is a morbidity on my part.

Certainly this discussion holds for me the greatest fascination of the museum, though mounted as it is, a small screen in the corner, but could easily be missed. For me it symbolised something strong and positive in today's generation. I am pleased with the 'New Museology' movement and hope it takes hold and that, moreover, such reasoned and sensitive discussions could be had by opposing parties everywhere. Imagine, for example, if our politicians could sit around a table, dispense with the amusing insults and the immediate polarised stances and the self interest and the undermining of the competition, and talk it out until a final, mutually satisfactory solution could be found, in the interests of the larger goal of running the country. 

We represent Chilean people as hot blooded fire brands. But we could learn a lot from the discussions that led to the removal of the mummified remains of a woman who lived thousands of years ago. Perhaps those ancient civilisations continue to teach us, even now.

And maybe death is not the end.

Sat 23 - Sun 31 May - Bumming Around In The Desert

...which is essentially what we are doing.

We arrive in San Pedro in the Atacama desert on Saturday. As the plane wheels overhead, coming in to land I stare out of the window at an expanse of desert like a rippled brown sheet, dust rising from it like mist. Calama is a small patch of flat dust with some buildings on it and although it is a reasonable sized town it seems somehow temporary, as though the whole thing could be folded up and packed away, to be reconstructed somewhere else. In the bus as we drive from Calama to San Pedro the mountains rise red and burning, capped with incongruous white slivers of snow. The ground we drive on is flat, sandy and scattered with bleached plants and dust devils. The whole landscape has a feeling of being unreal, like a set in a play, or an imagined other works in a film. It's as though some creator has made this section of the universe for fun, but failed to add touches of reality, so that it is like a rather unrealistic set piece. 

San Pedro, when we arrive, feels rather similar, though the artist feels rather more human here. It is a natural oasis, seized upon by early settlers and now developed into a tiny, dusty 'one horse town' apparently existing purely for the sake of the tourists. German, American and English voices dominate and the tiny centre of town has tour operators in rows, punctuated only by restaurants and artisinal gift shops. The vendors of these various services seem to be actors, laid on for the visitors, and if it weren't for our hostal, placed as it is slightly outside of town, I might wonder if anyone really lives here. 

As it is, our hostal is in a row of residental buildings, and we walk towards town past an incredibly well maintained football ground, some small local restaurants and a market. I am a little relieved, here, to see local faces and hear Spanish voices. 

If I have made this out to be a sort of fakery, it really isn't, though there are clearly a fair amount of tourist related purposes and structures here. It is more that the whole place, with its unbelievable landscapes and dusty, laid back, dreamy atmosphere, freezing at night, baking in the day but still managing to be oddly cold in the shade, simply feels like a drifters fantasy, a sort of half asleep dreaming. The altitude helps in that it gives me, at least in the first few days, a sense of unnatural doziness and a soft headache, throbbing gently and rather lazily between my eyes. 

Through a mixture of fate and design, we spend the first week here, more or less drifting ourselves, like the slow dust devils and the dogs that live, sleepy and wild, on the open spaces. We have been warned to take things ready for the first few days at altitude, though we are more or less alone among the other travellers, who do not generally have the time to do so. The rest of the week happens mostly because the tours we need to take us to the more inaccessible landscapes which are the reason we are here, are more easily booked for the following week, as the random snowy spell on the mountains recently is causing some of the passes to be, well impassable. 

We have blogs to write and the atmosphere lulls us into a sort of drugged, relaxed existence so we sink into it and become the sort of traveller we have met before, lazing gently for days without any obvious sense of urgency. It's refreshing, and feels a little as though it is the sort if experience San Pedro requires. A dash through the various tours and then off into the salt flats might somehow waste this laid back marvel of a piece of world. 

The hostal is particularly friendly and we finding ourselves making friends and, once I am over the initial few days of vague altitude sickness, drinking wine in the evenings in the little courtyard of the hostal, wrapped up in blankets against the frozen evenings. It's a pleasant existence. If it wasn't for the fact we have things booked in Bolivia I could quite happily get stuck here.

This blog, therefore, is the backdrop to this week, and I will upload specific entries where there are days or events which are worthy of their own comment. 

And so, we bum around. In fact, to be entirely honest, we bum around taking drugs. 

I will clarify. Altitude sickness can threaten the enjoyment of this landscape, not just in San Pedro, but because the really breath taking landscapes which we want to see next week are even higher. A lot of travellers suffer and I am determined not to. The local antidote is something called 'coca', made from the same plant that is used to make cocaine. Coca has a tiny amount of the substance which forms cocaine, though contains no actual cocaine, which requires much processing. The leaves have properties which cure or alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness. I spent the first few days chewing coca toffees, saving the actual leaves to make tea with when we visit the highest altitudes next week. So they are totally safe and not cocaine related at all. In fact its a herbal remedy which has been taken by adults and children alike for centuries. But if I say that it rather ruins the effect, so I will bend the truth just a little and make out like a proper desert junkie.

So yes. I am bumming around in the desert taking cocaine. 

My mother will be proud. 

21 - 22 May - Lo Siente, I am sorry

Thursday is a national holiday in Chile and so there are no classes. We decide to use the day to climb the St Sebastian's hill in Santiago. Setting out, we find that we are not the only people with this in mind. The paths up the hill are full of people walking, cycling, skateboarding and even roller skating up the hill. We follow the main road up, visit the huge statute of the Virgin Mary which is impressive, though close up I don't find it as impressive as the view of it from the bottom of the hill, especially in the evening when it is lit up and looks for all the world as though it might alight from its perch and stride across the town, healing the sick as it goes. We sit for a while, admiring the cityscape - and the pollution - from the top, and then begin to walk down. We want to get down in good time to have a nice long lunch somewhere so we try out what look like alternative shortcut paths down. After a while of following one of these the territory becomes more or less unnavigable. There are deep pits and drops. After we encounter a number of makeshift ramps and jumps we realise that we are sauntering casually along a mountain bike path. Realising this, amazed by the hard core nature of the track given we are having trouble with it on foot, and somewhat shamefacedly, we make our way back. As we approach the top again in order to change our tracks and take the path, we realise there is a rather large queue of mountain bikers waiting to launch themselves down it.

Sorry.

The next day is our last day in school. We go in, pose for the obligatory 'graduation' photographs and leave, safe in the knowledge that our test results show we are capable of progressing onto level A2. I am sad to leave the school - I have been hugely impressed by its ability to make me like learning a language and to actually teach me something. I have become fond of everybody there and would quite happily do another two weeks, though money will not permit it. To celebrate, and because it is our last day in Santiago as well as at the school, we attempt to go out for dinner in our favourite vegetarian restaurant. However it appears I have been nursing some form of 24 bug or travellers tummy and it manifests spectacularly so that the evening ends in us leaving the restaurant rather hurriedly and me startling passers by, by pausing every few steps to hurl into the nearest drain, flower bed or other vaguely respectable receptacle all the way home.

Sorry....

18, 19, 20 May - Immersion

I don't have a lot to say about these few days, not because Santiago is not a hugely vibrant and interesting city but because we have immersed ourselves, true to the name of our 'Immersion' Spanish course - in the intricacies of the Spanish language. We attempt to speak solely in Spanish, though this lasts longest on the first day we try it and we have exhausted our vocabulary by the end. Still, we speak 'Spanglish' as much as possible and read the labels in supermarkets, adverts on billboards, notices in the street, anything we can lay our hands on. In Spanish.

I become quite confident and smug. Until one day I go out while M has his individual class, to attempt to post a letter. This involves speaking Spanish to the hostal receptionist, the man at the computer cafe where I have to print the documents I need to send, and the lady in the list office. Not a single one of them understand my Spanish. The receptionist switches immediately to rather amused English (though she is my favourite receptionist who I rather like having a chat to anyway so this is quite fun). The man at the print shop uses gestures and follows enough of an obvious script for me to at least vaguely follow his meaning. The lady at the post office exchanges half amused, half frustrated glances with her companion in such a way that I know they will talk about the annoying lack if Spanish spoken by English tourists when I leave, and the entire, rather complicated exchange is achieved essentially by playing pictionary. Neither one of us understands a single word of the other's Spanish.
"It is because in Chile we don't speak Spanish properly," says my favourite receptionist reassuringly when I return, a little dejected. "We skip words and take off letters and use slang all the time. You are speaking proper Spanish. That is why they don't understand."

I want to marry this girl.

But Spanish learning does involve a lot of emotional bouncing about between being hugely confident and hugely deflated. Reading, working out verb conjugations and writing are so much easier than speaking or understanding. We take a test ready to 'graduate' from the school and I get an astounding 75%, passing with the most flying of colours. M of course, gets 95% and then asks what he did wrong on the other 5.

Speaking takes guts and a self belief I don't have. Understanding takes the ability to think quickly and I am a methodical, ponderous thinker, not a sudden, bright spark.

When M understands much more than me as we interact with Spanish speakers I become correspondingly discouraged, even as I am proud of his brilliance.

Later, in San Pedro, I seek out help in the firm of 'Destinos', a ridiculously cheesy, shoulder pad strewn soap opera designed to help you learn Spanish. It's all about understanding spoken Spanish and it starts so basic I am able to feel smug and advanced as I watch it. I can become enormously proud of the fact I don't need to use the subtitles, either in Spanish or English and it will get harder as I watch so I can progress at my pace. Which is slow. M is not joining me for the Destinos watching so I can't be distracted by his snorts of derision.

What I want, assuming a miracle is not on offer, is a massive confidence boost. Frequently I am struck dumb in conversations with native speakers, realising later that I knew every single word and the grammatical conjugations for what I wanted to say to them, and more. I just couldn't summon it up through the hesitance. How much, I wonder, of speaking a language, is about blagging, contriving an arrogance you don't feel, and cultivating self belief?

16 - 17 May - Touching Two Worlds

On Saturday we visited the Andes, on horse back, accompanied by a French lady who had lived for many years in Chile and worked defining people's auras in holistic therapy, the man who runs the hostal and his young and very smiley girlfriend. The man could gallop at ease on his horse over crazily rough terrain with cries of 'yeeeee haaaa', calling his horse 'caballito' ('little horse'). It was a perfectly normal sized horse. Finally, a largely silent ranch hand, who spoke only Spanish when he spoke at all, rolled easily from side to side on his horse and led a second horse, loaded with wine, food and water, casually with his other hand. 

On Sunday we visited the coastal mountain range, in the national park set up purely for the conservation of Chilean palms, which have died out naturally, on foot, walking on clearly delineated and signposted paths, accompanied by other students at the Spanish school, who spoke to us largely in American English (the fluent Spanish contingent happened to be absent that day). 

The Andes are rugged, rough textured and a dry grey. They are beautiful in their loose stones, their burning sun, the dust clouds that fly from the horses manes, and the vistas of jagged hillsides, casting shadows on the flat, and littered with dry and brittle trees and shrubs of a faded green that suggests they have been bleached by the sun. The ground is uneven and slippery, scree falling from the horses feet and scattering down the mountainside with every step. The horses gallantly carry us up steep mountain side tracks, which have me gulping and gritting my teeth, gathering my courage against the steep drops and the slippery, rocky terrain by concentrating on the awe inspiring vistas. Sweat drips from the horses, their coats soaked and matted under their rope bridles and sheep skin saddles, they change colour in the dust throughout the day. 

The Andes are awe inspiring for their sheer inhospitality. I peer from under my wide brimmed sunhat (there are no riding helmets here) at scattered, sun bleached goat, cow and horse skeletons, picked dry by predators. The condors which we see wheeling high above take on a particular predatory nature as we realise it is this heat and dust inspired deathscape which feeds them. We stop for a rustic barbecue by a stream, incongruous in this landscape. The water is crystal clear and cold. We cool our feet and hands - instantly putting ourselves off ever drinking this water. I guess the animals don't mind. All the same, we encounter a near intact goat skeleton nearby. Our holistic therapist companion picks up the skull, which still, somehow retains its ears. For a moment I think she is going to read its aura or communicate in some way with its soul, putting it to rest or some similarly colourful action. To my relative disappointment it turns out that she simply thinks it is beautiful and is taking it home as decoration for her house. We relax against the warm rocks. It's more comfortable than any number of cushions and picnic blankets. I feel, leaning back, as though I am touching the world.

The coastal mountain national park has straight, clear paths, lined with huge green cactuses. I am amazed by the amount of green here, caused apparently, by the proximity of the sea, which means the ground is better irrigated. The rock face takes my breath away, it is geometrically patterned, carved out in shades of pale yellow of whitish grey, cactuses clinging to tiny ridges in the rock face. The Chilean palms, famous for their trunks which resemble an elephants leg, are dense enough to be considered, in the areas off the path, to be a forest. They make a chattery, clicking sound as the slight breeze rifles through their green fronds. Standing beneath them, looking up, creates a strobe like effect with the sun. This is not a parched and lonely landscape. This is a park full of walkers, with car parks full of cars (though only at the start and end of the tracks - this is not a Balinese motorbike shattered peace). There is a look out with benches. There are toilets at the car parks. The toilets have toilet roll and soap plus running water. In the Andes we simply ducked behind a dry tree or a rock and watered the dust.

In the Andes we talked in Spanish about our holistic friend's work and she told us her vision for us, read in our spiritual aura. She told us in Spanish and we understand about four words per sentence between us. Possibly the vision was that we were walking together in life, in perfect rhythm, taking exactly the same steps but, like students in school, individual people with individual personalities and aptitudes. Or she might have been saying there were gaps in our happiness. We are not sure, though M thinks the 'gaps' might have been in general, and were what she looked for in people and worked to heal. I am pleased with this explanation because I am rather tired of people assuming we have a collective 'gap' in the shape of children. Rubbish. We do not have a gap in our happiness because we do not yet have children. In fact quite frankly, we don't have any gaps. Our happiness, at least as far as I am concerned, is complete. We drink wine with the cork dug out of it with a hunting knife and blow ashes of the potatoes cooked directly in the fire, before eating them.

In the coastal mountains we talk in English about politics, immigration, environmental issues and have a rather giddy little fantasy about becoming 'wild tourists' living in the park when we get slightly lost. We cackle so loudly about this that obe if our number pointedly says that she will stay at the look out point a little longer while we go on ahead to 'enjoy the peace'. It is not motorbikes causing the noise pollution here, it is us. We eat empanadas from a small restaurant on the way home in the car.

I notice that the fantasy if living 'wild' is more prevelant and more inviting on the day we are living a much more civilised existence. I enjoy the horse trek, especially sitting in the rocks and the rustic barbecue, but am terrified of the horses slipping, plummeting with me down the arid rock strewn mountainside. That story, minus my fear, becomes perhaps more fun in the telling. Adventures are always more fun afterwards, when you know you survived. 

Two very different worlds to touch, two very different mountain ranges. Equally beautiful. And, in their own way, equally deadly.

14 - 15 May - The Truth and the Blame Game

"Cuanto cuesta la escuele en tú país?", (how much does it cost to go to school in your country?)  Liya, our teacher asks us.

Ostensibly we are practising numbers and general conversation but Liya (pseudonym) is nothing if not lively and nothing if not topical. At the end of the road the school is on there are two students sitting high up on top of a bridge, banging a drum. The Carabineros gather at the bottom, hauling out large mattress like structures in case they fall. More students are arriving on the street corner throughout the day, we watch them through the first floor window in our break. They carry signs, which are mostly confiscated by the police for the inclusion of wooden sticks. Often their bags are searched before they are waved on. The interactions are polite and peaceful. The protests are not about the police, who, post military government, enjoy a slightly better reputation in Chile. The protests are for free education.

"At first," Liya tells me, in carefully simple Spanish, in our individual class that afternoon, "we were told that our education was expensive because we were a poor country, and could not have free schooling like England. But then we realised that other countries much poorer than us, in South America, did have free education. And so people have been protesting ever since. We have a new government now and we are hoping that our president will change things. She has been talking about it, but it kept getting blocked." 

As I read in my halting Spanish in a Spanish newspaper in an earlier class, the Chilean president has, in what I took to be an unprecedented move, sacked all her advisors and brought in a new cabinet. She seems, though my Spanish is not yet good enough to capture all the meaning, to be making, or preparing to make, a lot of changes. 

I am interested in the protest, but have been warned somewhat direly not to get involved in any protest by the UK gov travel website. Though to be honest I don't know why I would 'get involved' anyway. I don't understand the politics and if something horrific was happening, would probably do more good appealing to the press in my own country and garnering international pressure than shouting something at a government I am not a subject of in a language I don't understand. Because the press, you understand, can be a force for great good. They aren't, often. They seem to chose to be a great force for spreading bile. But they can be. It is possible. Some already are. Maybe, in a utopia, these could be the majority.

Dirk is all for it,

"Let's go and join the protest!" He says, "there might be a fight!" 

He has, I hope, his tongue firmly in his cheek, though there is some collective amusement when someone suggests we go and join them, and protest that the Spanish school we are attending is too expensive. (It isn't).

The idea that all protests in Chile are dangerous and violent is a little reductionist, and is partly what leads me to believe that the reason the united nations was not quicker to step in during Pinochet's rule, was a sense if writing off all protests as simply part of a 'hot blooded Latin American' fantasy. In fact, Liya tells us, with a hint of scorn, that this is a small protest and that in Chile there is a protest every day.

I talk to her later about thus idea that protests in Chile are violent and her face clouds over.

"The problem," she says, "is that we think in Chile that it was protests that gave us back our freedom, and the years under Pinochet were so extreme. We protest a lot now. It is our way. We are proud of it. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't."

What happens, against anybody's expectations, is not revealed until the following day, and is the reason for this blog being an amalgamation of two days. 

Two students, in the act of painting a sign for the protest in a public place, were shot dead by a man who rushed out of his nearby house with a gun. And simply shot them.

Liya, her usually vivacious face deeply sombre, tells us,

"Everybody is very shocked. Because nothing like this has happened in Chile."

Chile has a violent history. It has a history of student protesters being shot by military police during peaceful demonstrations, of student communist sympathisers being burned alive walking down the street under order of the government. But it doesn't, at least from Liya's point of view, have a history of violence, one Chilean against another. 

This protest turned bloody, not because of clashes with the Carabineros, or governmental suppression. But because one unhinged individual managed to get his hands on a gun. 

Chile's gun rules are strict and the carabineros, thought not considered military hired murderers any more, are nevertheless not to be messed with. This is a one off event of the kind that happens, every so often in London. It's a one off. It is not repeated for some time. But it is horribly tragic for those who happened, through no fault in their planning, to be passing through the wrong place at just the wrong time.

That the students were protesting is probably not part of it. It may be that the gunman was against free education. It is more likely he was just not in his right mind.

The media, that great potential force for good, decides, characteristically, not to be. 

"I read a newspaper article in Spanish yesterday" says Dirk, seriously over pisco sours, "and it absolutely gave the impression that the police killed those students. The headline said something like, 'student protesters shot - police' and the whole first two paragraphs were written so that it sounded as though the police had shot them. It only got round to admitting it was a crazed individual in the last paragraph. If you only skim read it, you would think that what happened is that the police shot them for protesting."

And for my sins, when we first hear about it from Liya, my poor Spanish allowing me only a darkly reflection insight into what she is saying, it is my first assumption too.

Is it on these sorts of things that a country is destabilised, on rumours and heresay, Chinese whispers and suspicion?

Perhaps the truth is simply much harder to accept. That they died for no reason in an accident of circumstance. Maybe, like the British papers which insist that the recession is purely due to immigrants stealing our jobs from under us, you just need something simple to blame. Every story needs an enemy. Perhaps, as I have often found myself rather mournfully thinking, George Orwell was right

Maybe we should make up a fictional enemy and unite the whole world against that. 

Candles burn this evening at the gates of the university, and we pause with the other, silent onlookers, and pay our respects, for what they are worth. Flowers are strewn on the pavement. When one candle blows out, a young man quietly steps forward and relights it.

A few days later Liya tells me that the government has made a commitment to phase in a free educator system. From what we know of this president, she means what she says. Liya's only concern is where the government will get the money from. 

Either way, perhaps in some way, though they didn't die for their cause but for happenstance, the death of those two students accomplished something. Or at least, was not in vain. The gunman is in jail and Chile is at peace with its government. At least as far as I see it.

Let's just hope the media reports it truthfully.

Los Ancianos

This a brief entry, because today is a little bit of a missed target. We arrived home at past midnight last night and M's comment that he was 'destroyed' carried through substantiation into the day. I can barely lift myself out of bed, find my eyes closing in class and the grammar involved in making the distinction between placing an adjective before or after a noun makes my head spin. I don't quite manage to say basic phrases such as 'fine thank-you' when people politely enquire as to my health and mistranslate the time for my private class so that I am an hour late and miss it completely. 

"Are you going to the party at the club tonight?" asks the event organiser in Spanish and, for want of the energy to say no, we smile and nod.

Then we go home to bed.

The fact is, we are past it. Going out  until late, even where 'late' remains the right side of one am, and even though we don't drink more than one alcoholic drink, (unless it's free), is beyond us. Especially when we have studied all day and spoken in Spanish all night. Well, theoretically anyway.

We will leave the partying to the youth. Or at least to those who can have a good lie in.

The Importance of Being Arrogant

I will apologise in advance because these blog entries will become, I imagine, quite dull for the next couple of weeks, given that our cultural experience of Chile for now will be more or less entirely through the medium of learning its language. The course is immersive in every possible way. Classes are taught entirely in Spanish and we are encouraged to talk amongst ourselves also in Spanish. Martin and I speak a kind of Spanglish to each other even on our own and the evenings are filled with social events arranged by the school for us to practice our Spanish with other students. Today we have lessons all day followed by a 'Spanglish' event at a bar. It is exhausting. We fall into bed after midnight because the bar is am hours walk from our hostel and because we have got talking to some lovely spanish speaking people from Mexico, and lost track of the time. 

"I feel destroyed", says M.

Me too.

The best part of the day though, was our first one to one session. We each have a separate session with our teacher, to allow for the fact that each if us believes we would hold back the other! 

When I first start my class and the teacher begins to ask me questions in Spanish I freeze, panic and am finding it hard to hear the basic questions she is asking me because in my mind begins a constant barrage of 'see, you have no ability to learn a language, you are too bad at this, it is a waste, now you have no classmates you cannot hide.' The scarily rapid advance of this sort of conviction is drowning out her words.

Perhaps she sees this because she changes tack. (The teachers here are really very good). Abandoning the 'how old are you, how would you say hello', line of questioning, she asks instead about our travels. When it transpires that 1) we are on quite a journey and 2) I have lost some of my reticence in my enthusiasm about this subject, she pursues this line of questioning and hey presto, we have semi fluent spanglish emanating gloriously, if nor entirely correctly conjugated, out of my mouth. I forget that I am in a classroom situation, I neglect to think about whether I am giving the right answer, whether she might be thinking that I haven't got a hope of learning Spanish, what my grade will be, how embarrassing it might be to get it wrong - in short, when I stop thinking I am at school, I relax. And when I relax Spanish becomes, once again, a way to communicate cool things to nice people. I even get the grammar right more often because I forget to remember to over think it.

I bounce out of my lesson, abandoning my previous mentally prepared speech to M 'it was OK but I think I was right the first time about being no good at languages', and replace it with 'that was amazing. I loved it. I actually said things!'

The psychology is self evident, but I do owe our teacher a debt in that she can anticipate this and put a stop to my mental escalation. Interestingly we sometimes have another teacher in our classroom, who takes certain sections of the lesson, while our teacher leads it for the majority. My theory is that she is a trainee. Her style is notably different. Where our usual teacher is bouncy and energetic, laughing when we make mistakes, teasing us gently to help us remember, and making little exclamations of pure joy every time we get a tiny thing right, the other teacher is immensely serious, takes a correct answer as a cue to move on rather than as a reason to basically crack open the champagne, and has a terrifying tendency to suddenly point at you and ask you something in rapid Spanish. In short, she treats us as though she is a teacher and we are in school. Which in turn, despite being true, has the result that I clam up, my mind goes blank in panic and I am more aware of the other nine, (perfectly friendly) people in the room than I am of what the question was, let alone the answer.

So yes. I am certifiably low in the self belief department, especially where it comes to foreign languages. 

But what I have learned is that the key to being good at languages, is to somehow convince yourself you are good at languages. And if that means your teacher needs to pass out in sheer awe every time you manage to remember not to say 'work' when you are trying to say 'travel' ('trabajar' and 'viaja' - they are quite similar - well at least in my mind they are), well, so be it.

Buenas noches mis amigos, soy muy cansada pero muy feliz.

I will collect my medal later.

Me encanta Espanola!

Today was out first day of learning Spanish and I take it all back.

I take back my conviction that I hate learning languages, that I cannot do it (though that one may still be out there for debate!), and that there is simply something in my brain which blocks my ability to take it in.

I absolutely loved it! Everything seemed like an enormous game to me.

"Now we will play a game in which we describe famous people"

"OK! OK! I would love to play a game in which I describe famous people!"

I must interject here to clarify the quality of my descriptions at this stage of the day. I wrote the rather insightful sentence, 'he is the pope and he is catholic.'

Having said the quality of the teaching or the quantity of my overwhelming enthusiasm meant that by the end of the day,

"Shall we play a game in which we have to think of a sentence to describe (physically or emotionally) what we see in a series of still images of people?"

"Yes! Yes! We shall! I would love to play that game!"

...I actually had a whole host of phrases at my disposal.

Learning a language us not embarrassing. I now find. In fact it is hugely funny.

We play a game (nobody else calls them games, only me, but really - it did feel like being a long party, like a children's party on much more enjoyable and with alcohol (in the evening)) in which we split into pairs and each have to describe our partner. M and I have, half accidentally and half deliberately, sat separately so we get a chance to partner up with Seb and Donavan, who are in our class. 

We are both described as having blonde hair, with no objections from the floor, which is a testament I think to the sun's power to bleach, given that we both normally have dark brown hair.

Obviously everyone writes their descriptions using as much of their newfound skills and words as possible. 

I describe Seb as being very strong and very handsome to much laughter from the floor. Seb responds in kind by noting that I 'very soft'.

"What?" cries our teacher, in one of the only moments in which she speaks English to us, "did you FEEL her?!!"

Seb also informs everyone that I have straight hair, and no beard or moustache. I am apparently also 'clean and not dirty' and 'very alert in class'.

Both M and Donavan describe each other as 'very intelligent' and Donavan rather sweetly finishes his description with 'M es mi amigo'.

There is impassioned and uproarious debate about the colour of Seb's eyes, (there is no word for 'hazel') and about the fact that to say you are married, uses the 'permanent' form of the verb 'to be', whereas if you say you are married to somebody, you use the 'temporary' form. 

"But it IS forever!" insists Donavan, of his description of M as being married to me, "I refuse to imply it is temporary!"

"I am sorry," says our teacher, "we are a realistic people."

I never knew it could be so much fun. After class we are taken on a tour of the city, all in Spanish, followed by, to revive our flagging brains, some more speaking Spanish, this time to each other and whilst drinking the famous 'Terremoto'. This proves not as strong as implied, though very very sweet, but certainly not conducive to improving our Spanish skills! By the time we arrive home we are exhausted and fall into bed at eleven o clock which is frankly not nearly early enough!

As I fall asleep I think a little guiltily of Donavan and his policy to rejuvenate himself after class, which involves heavy partying till dawn, as far as we can see.

"Wow," said Seb in class yesterday, "it feels really weird to be here and not have a hangover..."

Even so, as I write this, preparing to launch myself into my second day, I must admit I cannot wait. Whether my skills can match my enthusiasm is debatable, however.

What I didn't tell you about that inspired sentence, 'he is the pope and he is catholic', is that what I actually said, much to everybody's amusement, is, 'he is a potato.'

Brilliant. 

Yo soy muy intelligente....honestly...

Policing the Piano

Today, in preparation for the mental onslaught that will be our Spanish course starting tomorrow, is a quiet day. We walk around Valparaiso drinking in the sunshine and the sheer colour that characterises it. The Cerros (hills) of Valparaiso are a bright, windey haven, full of unusual architecture (being built in some inhospitable territory, no house can be the same), with bright and inventive murals in tiny corners or appearing, suddenly, on vast stretches of wall, to reward you for looking up. We take in image after image, some cruelly reflective of a struggling port (Valparaiso now has a thriving income from tourism, though with the exception if one hill which is almost entirely given over to tourism, the more residential areas, bar the poorer neighbourhoods we were so sadly warned away from, retain their other worldly charm, a far cry from the bustle and relative grey of 'the flat'. However previously its income as a trading centre was almost obliterated by the opening of the Panama Canal, leaving many business destitute.) Others are a celebration, of birds and creatures, or of Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet. Some are darker and brooding, featuring skulls and strange, apocalyptic beasts. A few are downright rude. Others still, are rich and fantastical, featuring seas foaming with white creatures, who might be people, wraiths or animals. Some depict people, real or imagined, picked out in realistic or inventive portraiture, others simply swirl with complex patterns. All of them have something to say.  

"You can read so much in these," said our guide yesterday, "apart from the tags, which tell you nothing."

A 'tag', for those of you not familiar with them, are the names and words with which gangs and individuals essentially mark territory. We see them a lot also in England. They might be a slightly more artistic rendering (the gang or individual name picked out in block capitals which merge together in a distinctive font or colour), or simply a scrawled word. Or an 'x woz ere' type message. 

Tags, and in fact graffiti in general, are illegal in Chile. However, in a slight twist which I have not quite manage to grasp, the murals, or at least certain of them, are not, or are 'turned a blind eye to' in Valparaiso. The murals grew from the knowledge of new house builders, that their stretch of wall would be covered in tags almost as soon as it was painted. Once an artistic mural adorned them, however, the taggers would, especially if the artist was well respected, leave the wall alone. And would not tag over the top. And it's rather nice to have a mural on the side of your house. Artists tend to paint for free to gain notoriety and will in fact approach a new house builder painting a new wall to offer to paint a 'commission' on it. 

There is some confusion here though, firstly, as a UNESCO site, I believe that the rule is that you may not change the outside of your house. So are the murals all historic, or do they still spring up? Secondly, if graffiti is illegal, how did tagging become such a problem in the first place?

The obvious answer to the latter might be that it is not especially ferociously policed, but we were shown yesterday a set of steps on the edge of which was painted a set if piano keys, so that from the bottom looking up, the steps resembled a piano. Our guide told us we were lucky to see it. When the artist painted them, in fact a repaint as the original had faded, at the request of the neighbours, he got only half way through before the police arrived. Even so, and as per the usual indomitable Chilean spirit I have come to recognise and admire, everyone agrees that a piano looks nicer than just a set of plain stairs, and as soon as the piano is removed, it appears again, the general belief being that it us not now the one artist that repaints it. But that residents take turns in somehow contriving to put it back!

Which raises further confusion as to the legal system in respect of street art. If it is so actively policed that the piano disappears every few days, how are there still so many of the rather more ugly 'tags' adorning the non be-muralled walls? Or do they disappear and reappear also? And secondly, the murals themselves are not removed, the artists display their names and are well known, even building their careers on it. Are they UNESCO protected? Or do the police make an artistic judgement somehow over the piano in particular as not being artistic enough? If so, once again, how do the tags survive?

Further research sheds more light on this quandry. It seems that the murals are allowable so long as the owner of the building gives permission, and the image is not overly offensive. Furthermore, murals are in fact sometimes even subsidised by the government. This makes sense. The colourful nature of Valparaiso as being essentially a free artist's canvas is a boon to it, rather than a problem, attracting tourists and rendering the city an undeniable beauty which it might not otherwise have. Taggers are quick and difficult to catch or stay on top of in terms of repainting, but easier fought by putting a public value on them as not being beautiful, or policed internally through the taggers' respect for the artist. 

Everything makes sense, even the UNESCO rulings, if you consider that only two of the cerros are actually designated UNESCO sites and that the mural tradition is part of a thriving aspect of the city already in place when the UNESCO designation happened.

Everything makes sense apart from that piano. Why not subsidise that? Can't somebody commission it? It's hardly offensive.

Maybe, rather like Valparaiso itself, the sort of controlled anarchy that allows for the continual reappearance of the piano mural, is part of its charm. Perhaps, without that, it is only a few strokes of black and white paint. Would it have been so specifically included on our tour if it wasn't facing such a repeated threat of extinction? 

Perhaps not. And legality, like the UNESCO rules which prevent easy restoration of destroyed buildings but allow for their slow and deliberate destruction by natural courses, has a hard time making perfect rules which can work in their entirety in every case.

It is strange, and rather beautiful, that a city as full of colour as Valparaiso, can so clearly illuminate the necessity for grey areas.

Valparaiso, the Thriving and the Surviving

Having decided to visit Valparaiso for the weekend, prior to embarking on our study adventure, we manage to successfully (bar a few moments of gormlessness) purchase two boys tickets entirely 'en española'. We are hugely pleased with ourselves, given we have not actually started our course yet (I am conveniently forgetting that we have been trying to learn it through various apps for quite some time - and that my learning session via the app last night yielded the uncompromising message 'would you like to revise this section and correct your 19 errors?') and even more pleased when we realise that we seem to have been awarded a mystery discount so that our tickets are nearly half the normal price. We have no idea why.

"Awesomeness?" Suggests M. I am not convinced that there is a discount for 'awesomeness' and that, if there was, we would qualify for it, but we begin the day with glee. AND the fruit basket at the hostel this morning, normally containing a few sad, soon to be ex fruits, contains my favourite bitter green apples. Hooray. We are easily pleased. And even that fact is pleasing.

We proceed, having snored the journey away, to check in to our hostel. It promises a perfectly central location, clean beds and a 'huge' cheap breakfast, all of which it appears to deliver on, though, no doubt much to Seb's disappointment, there are no signs of anyone having sex in the corridors. Oh well, you can't have everything. We can always rectify that later.

The highlight of the day, and in fact our opening to the city, is a guided walk run by a company called 'Tours for Tips'. This is rather less disingenuous than the 'Free Tour' we took in Santiago which also turned out to be for tips, and there is a sort of semi compulsory nature to tipping here, and set amounts for different services. This tour was actually much better, and beautifully thought out, with small surprises scattered throughout, including sampling of a pastry, a glasd of Chicha, a sweet fermented wine drink, a Chilean folk  song played to us on the guitar by a leathery skinned, smiling musician perched on a wall on one of the hills.

Valparaiso itself is, as I had been told by somebody at the barbeque the previous night, "all about the hills'. Known in Spanish as Cerros, Valparaiso perches precariously on a series of them, and whilst there is town on 'the flat', it is for practical purposes mostly and lacks, I felt, the huge charm of the Cerros. Houses, colourful and each unique seem to balance, like cheeky children upon one another all the way up the hills. Murals adorn as many of the walls as possible (more about those tomorrow) and the steep nature of the terrain means that knowing your neighbours is very important to make living more comfortable up on the hills. Everybody knows someone who can provide some service, favours can be done for each other, And when somebody is going down to the flat, they might be able to pick up supplies for others. This description, compelling though it is told by our lively guide, is, I suspect, a little more in keeping with a previous time, before cars. Nowadays people can drive up and down the hills and carry things in their motorised donkey. Having said that, we saw very little in the way of traffic, and what there was, was hotly protested by the numerous stray dogs which were doing their best to reclaim that lost golden age of simplicity and save the planet by biting as many tyres as possible.

Valparaiso is beautiful, peaceful on the hills (assuming you chose the right ones - some are poor and so dangerous for tourists (a word on that later) and one taking the opposite stance, being very much set up for tourists), and it is rather like walking through an artist's workshop. There is mess, and a sort of disorganised anarchy, but art is being conceived, experimented, created everywhere. I fall a little in love with Valparaiso and its hill top living.

There are sad stories to tell though, centring mostly around empty houses, an idea which. In Valparaiso, where the houses have such colour, and the terrain has been so fiercely conquered to make it possible to live on, an empty house seems especially tragic.

We gaze at a beautiful building, full of gables and beams and colourful designs, a mixture if Italian and Chilean influence, known as the Palacio Baburizza, now a hotel.

However the Palaccio Baburizza was not always the Palaccio Baburizza, but the Palaccio Zanelli. It was built by a man with a dream for his family. Ottorino Zanelli wanted his family to be safe and comfortable, and he had the house built to ensure that generations could live in it.

Sadly, he died shortly after the house was completed and the family had moved in. In a horrible irony, his family found it too emotional to stay there, and so sold the house and moved away. Baburizza was in fact the house' second owner. He made some modifications and, when he left, the house was left for some time to ruin. It was used by vagrants and children to play in, and gradually the interior was more or less destroyed, before the city bought it, restored it, and turned it into a museum.

It makes me sad to think of Zanelli's big dreams, so transformed into a wrecked and disintegrating, and, most tragically of all, empty, house.

Zanell's is not the only empty house in Valparaiso. Our guide shows us a sad looking structure on one of the UNESCO protected hills, explaining that, whilst the UNESCO protection is in many ways a good thing, it also makes it very expensive and difficult to keep the houses in good repair. Once damaged by earthquake, fire or other natural accident, the house must he restored, at least externally, in exactly the same way it previously was, and this requires expertise greater than just how to repair a house. It becomes very expensive. The owner of this house was literally waiting for it to fall down naturally, so that he could put the land it stands on to some use. As the house has already withstood two fires and an earthquake, he may be waiting for some time yet.

Another rather sad story, a broken house representing an equally broken dream, is the old hotel on what was once the richest street in Valparaiso. Prior to the opening of the Panama canal, Valparaiso had been a port of great importance and that street had been lined with the grandest of hotels, restaurants and shops to service the demands if rich tradesmen. One building in particular, had been designed to be the most luxurious hotel in Valparaiso, however the opening of the Panama Canal and the accompanying reduction in visitors rather crushed its purpose. Having been bought with the intention of this development by an Italian businessman, he used the building as a home for his family for generations. Now only one old Italian lady remains, the sole living member of that family. The building is frayed and tattered, the planned developments never completed. The first floor is used as a store room by street vendors, for a small fee to its sole occupant, who lives entirely on the second floor. It is a sad reminder of what was once an embodiment of such big dreams, standing forlornly on what was once Valparaiso's richest street, now part of an area so poor we have been warned not to go there.

That particular warning rather exemplifies a general sense of resignation which pervades Valparaiso's attitude to its poor or its sadnesses, and forms a sadder base note to the otherwise jubilant and lively melody that fills this city. If tourists are warned not yo go to the poorer neighbourhood because the desperation and sense of hardened bitterness which tends to coexist with poverty when it is situated amid an otherwise affluent population, might lead to violence or robbery, it removes from those areas the chance to thrive on the same trade as the rest of Valparaiso since the Panama Canal came into existence - I.e. tourism. How can a poor area become any less poor if tourists are warned away? On the other hand, if, as may be inevitable at least at first, tourists are allowed to venture into these areas and are robbed or worse, the rest of Valparaiso would suffer from the resulting bad press, and the entire city may find itself cut off from its livelihood.

And so, we comply. We have dinner in the more prosperous end of town. The poor stay poor. We stay safe. 

Gods in Chairs and Drunkards at Barbecues

Newly energised by our Spanish experience the day before, we go to the Pre Columbian museum, which informs us about the habits, arts and artefacts of the pre Columbian dwellers, prior to the somewhat violent invasion of the Spanish, and attempt to read all the information in Spanish.

We actually do quite well, it is not so difficult to read another language as it is to try to speak it, particularly when there are helpful translations for each sign, which allows us to check what we think we have just read.

As a consequence though, I find I retain less of the particular habits and stone and clay carving attributes of the various Pre Columbian peoples than I do that 'nevertheless' is 'sin embargo', and 'developed' is 'desarrollado' in Spanish.

One thing that really strikes me though, is the concept of God that some of the Pre Columbian people had. Gods, when images of them were made out of clay, were often depicted as sitting down in a chair. The idea was that the Gods were so huge and so powerful and connected to the universe that they could maintain its balance, simply by remaining still and calm in their chair. At any point though, there was always the danger that a God might decide to get up out of his chair and walk around, sending the universe spinning out of control.

I rather like this idea. It's easy, in a Christian culture at least, to think of God so much as a benevolent, cuddly sort of being, which I'd perfectly fine, but sometimes it means you cease to appreciate the power of a God. That a God could be so powerful that he or she had to sit perfectly still for fear of wreaking havoc on the universe is quite a striking idea. And the added concept that, depending perhaps, on your behaviour as human beings, or on his or her whim, he or she could just decide to get up and stride about, destroying the world in the process, certainly gives that sense of power. Perhaps, in this concept, an earthquake or a flood is simply a twitch of God's finger. Whether accident, judgement or opposing force, quelled by the God just in time, I suppose depends on your characterisation of God. It goes some way towards providing some explanation to the age old question, if there is a just God, why so much undeserved tragedy in the world. It's one answer among many that have been proffered over the ages, none of them, in my mind, really satisfactory. I suspect such mysteries are not for our lifetime. 

As for the other problem, the problem of conceiving a God figure in a human mind, and the struggle to unite a sense of kindness with justice, and of power with gentleness - presumably the fact that the God has not, thus far, moved him or herself off that critical perch, is a way to understand that. God is merciful in his lack of action, a refreshing alternative in a world where we presume mercy to be an act of intervention, and become bitter in the face of a perceived lack of miracles.

Anyway - this rather knotty philosophy is soon knocked out of me by a large bottle of red wine. Well, a few glasses of it anyway.

We have been invited to the barbecue organised by the language school on the terrace. We turn up, shyly, wondering if our language skills will hold up. I take a glass and hesitate near the mammoth bottle of red wine.

"You can drink it," says a tall guy on shorts, holding up his own glass, "it's actually quite good."

I fill my glass.

"Brilliant." He says, "now I feel justified in having more, I felt weird when I was the only one drinking it."

We practice some mutually hesitant Spanish. The guy in shorts turns out to be called Seb (pseudonym). He's been at the school for one week. He introduces us to Dirk and Mary, who have also been there a week. We lapse into English for the sake of attempting a more interesting conversation. 

Mary is in her sixties and is travelling against the advice and much to the horror of most of her friends. She has always wanted to visit South America and, in her words, 'just did it'. She is afraid a lot of the time but takes the approach that fear is OK as long as it doesn't prevent her having a good experience. Refer to pretty much any of these blogs and you will know that I am afraid most of the time too, and, as she states, 'grit my teeth and do it anyway.' And then enjoy it. I have a lot in common with Mary, but am sad her friends are unsupportive.

"I really want to go home and say 'nothing bad happened so there'" she says, and I have a renewed rush of gratitude for my supportive friends and family to whom I will have no need to say anything to other than 'hello again, that was amazing, I can't wait to tell you about it and I am so glad to see you again.'

"But what," continues Mary, "if I do get mugged or something. Then I will have to go back and they have won."

"Absolutely not," I tell her, "you will be all the more brave to have had it happen and dealt with it, so you can be even more proud of yourself and you'll have an exciting story to tell."

Someone very wise and very much loved said something similar to me not so long ago, when going to South America had suddenly seemed daunting. The way, of course, that driving a camper van in New Zealand had suddenly seemed daunting. The way that each change of country suddenly seems daunting, and perhaps it would be better to simply stay in the first one, where everything is settled. And each time it is absolutely fine, more than fine. It is amazing. The ghosts of muggers, food poisoning, drownings and bus crashes fade away, until they are simply a vague clamouring at the back of my mind, buried beneath new, colourful and fantastic landscapes, people and experiences.

Dirk and Jordan don't seem to have encountered fear. 

"The best way to get over jet lag," says Dirk, "is to do what I did. I flew for 13 hours and then landed and partied for 24 hours. I was too drunk to care what the time was and then I went to bed finally and woke up, and I was fine."

"Are you going to Valparaiso?" Says Seb, "I stayed in a really weird hostel there. No one ever went to bed and everyone was just permanently plastered, and there were, like, people just having sex in the corridors. It was fantastic."

Dirk and Seb are thoughtful 25 to 30 year olds who are intelligent and friendly and not simply the 'Brad' like caricatures I make them out to be. Dirk travelled because he just had reached a point in his life where he felt restless and tied down. He came to the realisation that what he needed was to travel some time after everybody else who knew him. When he approached his boss to hand his notice in she simply said, "I thought so. So where are you going?"

And she meant 'country', not 'company'.

Seb had been working as a qualified dental practitioner for years when he realised he was miserable and that the money he was earning was not really very important to him. That being, at that stage, the only good thing about his job, he packed it in and packed his bags.

"I'm sort of emigrating to Canada," says Seb, "but I have to fill out the visa application and it's really complicated so....urgh..." 

He shrugs and stretches himself further down in his chair so that he is all long limbs and resignation.

"I'll do it eventually." he says.

Seb manages to give an impression of not caring about anything and being utterly disinclined to do anything involving effort. As I later discover in class he is actually working very hard to learn Spanish, an interesting thing to do when your ultimate plan to go somewhere that speaks English. He, of all of us is the only one who I see at Pisco Sours nights or Terramoto nights which happen to be held in the hostal he stays at, with his Spanish books under his arm having been doing homework. It's just he and Dirk happen to also take drinking, and smoking marijuana (legal in Chile as long as it's for personal use - though I am not sure how people get it if no one can sell...) just as seriously. 

"The lessons are really intense," says Dirk, "but I am always hungover."

We leave the barbecue when the alcohol runs out. Other than Dirk, Seb and Mary I have managed to talk a little in Spanish to some of the other people there. 

Dirk and Seb are going on somewhere, they don't invite us but I think that's OK. I think they might party harder and faster than I know how - or have ever known how.

We fall into bed. The Gods are in their chairs, all is good with the world. At least the tiny part of it we sleep in.

Beber es hablar (to drink is to speak)

Having excitedly dropped into the language school which we have booked for two weeks of intensive Spanish learning, starting next week, a week early, we discovered that not only does the school run cultural events in addition to the classes, but that we are allowed to join them even before we begin our study!

Thus being discovered we booked ourselves onto a wine tasting trip this afternoon, followed by a free pisco sours night, in which we will learn how to make, and drink, the ubiquitous Chilean speciality. (Later, we will discover that the pisco sour is also claimed by Peru as its speciality, but, at least according to our entirely unbiased Spanish teacher, Chile definitely invented it first.)

Eagerly, we turn up at the allotted hour for our wine tour. But we are not quite prepared for exactly how immersive the immersive teaching us going to be. A beaming Spanish lady, whose name we eventually gather is Jackie, rounds us up in what seems like terrifyingly rapid Spanish (she is actually speaking unusually slowly), and herds us onto a minibus. We sit ourselves safely near the back and proceed to watch in some dismay as a group of students clamber in after us, gabbling nineteen to the dozen, in what appears to be fluent Spanish. 

"These must be native speakers," I whisper to M, "surely. Maybe they are learning English."

Except that the school doesn't teach English. It is a Spanish school. 

We drive to collect some other students from another school, these events seeming to be run by our school, but available also to students of another. 

Every single one of them chatters to each other in rapid Spanish.

Some of them are blonde.

"They don't look Spanish," I say quiveringly to M.

"No," he says grimly, "I think they're German. Or American."

We sit in silence, listening. Both of us have done some study using various internet learning apps, and we have a smattering of Spanish words at our disposal. I don't recognise a single one.

"Do you think this is how good you have to be?" I ask, with no small amount of trepidation.

We make ourselves quite small and quiet and hope to goodness no one speaks to us.

"I think," I say to M under my breath, "that I am going to be the bottom if the class."

"Me too", he says, though I don't believe that for a minute. M is a linguist by nature. He picks up languages apparently without trying. He learns them. For fun. 

I on the other hand, have tried many tines but never really managed to pick up even the slightest skill so far as languages other than English are concerned. I got through my German GCSE by being good at exams and rote learning and consequently immediately forgot all of it, dropped French the instant the government gave me the choice to, and have been learning Spanish using an app which has been working mostly because it uses cats as the conceptual 'teachers' and I like cats. (I can't explain it any better than that - look it up, it's called CatAcademy). My Spanish words are limited and not very well remembered except where the phase particularly amuses me ('tú eres triste porque tú es un perro' - you are sad because you are a dog). The other phrase I particularly remember is 'los professores estan borrachos' - the teachers are drunk. I rather suspect that phrase won't endear me to the staff at the school. It does, at least, mean I know the word for 'drunk', which is the only one among the excited, and terrifyingly expert, chatter around me. Not especially surprising given that we are on our way to a vineyard and these are students. In my oral exam for Italian, which I had to learn a smattering of as part of my literature degree. I froze and spoke in monosyllables, these being mostly, 'yes' and 'no', until the teacher had to break off and explain to me in English that I would need to say something rather more impressive in Italian in order to pass. I seem to be missing the part of my brain which is supposed to house the linguistic skills that normal people possess.

"I think," I say to M, in an attempt to cover actual fear with humour, "that I had better make my own dunces hat and wear it to my first class."

"Well at least you'll be prepared." says M.

There is a gale of laughter in the minibus because some one has told a joke in Spanish. 

I am beginning to very much look forward to necking a glass of wine. Or two. As fast as possible. I hope the tasters are going to be generous.

When we arrive there is a period of waiting for the tour to start during which time I visit the toilet and then we both stand around attempting to appear invisible. Shyness, when it hits me, tends to do so quite hard and render me a little paralysed and M is a man of few words at the best of times. When the tour starts the young man leading the tour asks Jackie if he should do it in English or Spanish.

"In Spanish," she replies in Spanish, "but just go slowly. They need the practice."

They do? They seem to me to be word perfect.

The tour begins. I concentrate very hard, in case maybe I can simply absorb Spanish by sheer effort. I recognise the word for wine. And the word for bottle. And the word for red. Other than that I simply follow with a fixed look of what I hope is intense interest and absolute understanding on my face. Everyone else has the same expression. Except they ask questions in Spanish. So maybe the really understood. The questions they are asking don't sound like 'could you speak more slowly' or 'pardon', both of which, incidentally, are also phrases that I know.

We move to the actual tasting. I do neck the wine. With some enthusiasm. The tasters are not nearly large enough to match the situation. I stick to M like a sort of limpet.

Salvation comes when we arrive back at the school. I genuinely believe that if it wasn't for Jackie we might have taken the opportunity to slope off quietly home, and ducked out of the pisco sour night completely. But Jackie is a true professional. She rounds everyone up, says something in Spanish and points down the road. We are not sure what she's said but our Spanish and our deeply ingrained British politeness will not allow us to do anything other than follow directions. Luckily, our knights in shining armour, Jake and Ralph, (pseudonyms) choose to walk with us, realise we know almost no Spanish at all, and lapse with ease out of their apparently fluent Spanish and into their native American tongue. 

"Um..." Says M tentatively after the initial introductions have been made, "how long have you been studying here?"

"Nine months." says Jake.

There is a collective burst of various sorts of relieved noises from us both. Jake laughs.

"We haven't even started our course yet!" I say, emboldened, "but everyone is so good - we thought maybe..."

"You thought they'd been here a week?!" Says Ralph.

"Well...we weren't sure how fast you were meant to go on this course." I tell him, feeling simultaneously stupid and ridiculously pleased to be having a conversation with someone. In any language.

"She's been studying for years," Jake starts ticking people off, "he's been about six months I think, she's maybe three months..."

And so it goes on. We realise that the idea is that people practice their Spanish constantly, even out of class. So we try valiantly to talk with Jake and Ralph at least about Spanish, if not in it. They tell us the distinction between different forms if the word 'here' and lead us through the bewilderingly carnivorous menu at 'Sandwich Master'. The 'vegetariano' option, unsurprisingly in this largely hamburger based canteen, is not on, but the chef can do us some bread with cheese and mayonaisse and guacamole, with chips.

The chips are OK. The rest is fairly horrible, and the place is dubbed 'sandwich minger' between us from then on. We don't go back to eat there again, but we do have a hugely interesting conversation with Jake and Ralph, who are hugely interesting people. It is from Jake that I gain an insight into the American viewpoint on the rather smeary history of its involvement in the military coup that allowed Pinochet to rise to power, and which helped inform my previous blog about the Human Rights Museum. (This rather Dr Who version of time is allowable because I am writing both these blog entries long after the date on which the events took place so can borrow from future conversations to pad out previous experiences.) We have managed, mostly due to the lack of tables to seat more than ten people, to seat ourselves apart from the rest of the group and one of the girls, a very smiley brunette who introduces herself as Linda (pseudonym), is catching our eyes and trying to bridge the gap so as we leave the restaurant, successfully having been shepherded into going to the pisco sour night, we catch up with the rest. 

Of course, as we drink said sours, we become slightly more confident of our ability to speak Spanish and actually manage to speak some,especially with Linda who is possibly one of the kindest souls I have ever met, and who really dies speak Spanish near fluently and is doing the advanced course to top up because she is 'out of practice'. Nevertheless she speaks beautifully slowly and patiently to us throughout what must, for her, have been a very boring and frustrating conversation. I am still a little in love with Linda. 

As the evening draws on we shelve our newfound confidence (because there is only so much mileage in telling people your name, his old you are and where you are from), and settle back into more interesting chatter with Ralph and Jake.

A pisco sour is made from pisco (a strong liqueur), lime juice and sugar, plus whatever accompaniments Jackie is inclined to throw in (we try mango, red fruits and, my personal favourite, basil). 

By the time we roll home we are much lubricated and rather more inclined to believe it might be possible to actually learn some Spanish.

I might still make that dunces hat though. Just in case.