lots of poetry and sunshine

The sky was blue, the air cool, the sunshine warm, the breeze playful, and the day perfect. perfect for Neruda.
Pablo Neruda was one of the best Latin American poets ever and one of my favorites. I got to go to his house on Saturday. It might seem silly, but it really is a big deal. Catie and I dressed especially for the occasion. I even wore a flower in my hair in order to be more poetic. We boarded a bus as we have done so many times before while searching for adventure, and found it when we stumbled into the adventure of Neruda's world and his words. He was a very quirky man, a collector of strange things like figure heads from old ships, sea shells, bottles, ships in bottles, masks, and many other oddities. But mostly, he was a collector of words. An arranger of words. an artist. he had a way of making words more than words. something higher, bigger, more beautiful, something from the soul.
He of course had several houses throughout Chile in his life, one of which is actually here in Valparaiso, but I haven't had a chance to go there yet. This particular house we visited in in Isla Negra, a small coastal town about an hour and a half from here. It was his last house, the one in which he spent his final days and the one in which the culmination of all his artistry and quirkiness culminates. He built it room by room, adding on as he saw fit. there's a whole room just for his mascarones(ship figureheads) which range from nude mermaids to saintly figures. He built a room specially to house a giant paper machet horse, a cherished artifact from his childhood, and had a huge party to welcome it and make it feel at home. The concrete of the floor has smooth round seashells in it because he liked the way they massaged his feet. The forest was his first love, but he was also fascinated with the sea. Despite his love for the sea, he was also quite afraid of it and settled for sailing in a small boat in his garden rather than ever actually sailing. The house is built on a cliff over looking the Pacific where the turquoise waves constantly crash and spew diamond-like seafoam against the great boulders, worn smooth with the passing of so much time and water. Catie and I sat on those rocks and felt the sea spray on our dusty lips and marveled at the milky mermaids in the seafoam. It was all just a little too much magic for one place.
So we came home and ate a mountain of gelato while sitting on some different rocks by the ocean, watched as the sun sank into the sea like a great tomato into a bed of velvet and shuddered with delight as the evening tide brought enormous waves up against the sea wall where we unknowingly picked the one spot where the water couldn't touch us...most of the time. The moon came out in all her glory to shed her luminous silver garment on the sea and created a living watercolor on its surface as she mingled with the last colors of the day that hung in the dusky sky.
So there's my Neruda day. now go read some! here is the first one i ever read and one of my favorites: http://www.soupsong.com/ftomato2.html
he actually has a whole series of Odes to simple things like socks, wine, a spoon, a book, and even to the city of Valparaiso. You should google him and just read any of those...

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On Sunday I went with my host family to Palm Sunday mass on the beach. I was initially really excited about the idea of church on the beach, but it didn't turn out to be as awesome as i had hoped. We were facing away from the ocean and directly into the sun. I'm not sure if it's jsut because I'm not used to Catholic mass yet or what, but it was just off. Everyone, including my family, bought these funny little woven palm things with leaves and rosemary in them from vendors on the sidewalk to wave around while we sang some fun songs. I will say that is the first time I have really seen joy in mass. But other than that, it all just seems so arbitrary. I couldn't help but think that the beautiful 5 year old girl who was exploring the properties of sand, burying her moms feet, laying in it, making pillows out of it, just loving the grainy golden heat of it, was experiencing god more than everyone else there with their solemn prayers and nasty communion wafers. Then at the end the preist walked, or rather waded, through the throngs of people who were crowding around him, sprinkling the little palm things with holy water, blessing them so people can hang them in their houses for the rest of the year. weird.
anyway, after church i ate too much for lunch and went with catie to the beach closest to our houses to bask in the afternoon light that seemed to be dripping from every tree and rooftop, letting it soak into my already pink skin, thoroughly heating me all the way down to my soul and the tips of my toes.
at night after a particularly lovely once(eveining meal) catie and i hung out some more, as usual, and ended up having yet another existential-meaning-of-life-and-purpose-and-god talk/freak out and decided we want to go to Bolivia to do some kind of volunteer program in july before we come home. then i embarked on the arduous journey of figuring out classes for next semester. While navagating the complicated sea of credit hours, spread sheets and course numbers, i realized that if i don't get a second major in Spanish, i can very likely graduate in a year. So i think i'm gonna do that. which means that none of the Spansh I'm taking here really counts for anything, which means that academically I came here for no reason, which I am totally ok with! Somehow it kind of adds a little more validity to my life here. Catie and i always said that we aren't really here for school, but school is just an excuse to live here. and now that's even more true. PLUS this also means that I dont have to take that painfully difficult spanish literature class that made gazillions of pages of impossibly long and incomprehensibly old spanish hang over my head all the time.
instead i'm taking Italian Language and Culture(basically Italian I) with Catie and a Latin American poetry class with all gringos which should be pretty lovely.
so there's that.

things i've learned:
*there is a reason you are supposed to see your advisor before you leave the country. it's so you don't have to try to figure out all this crazy credit and graduation stuff through email...suuuuuuuck
*despite what most chileans(including my host family) apparently believe, you cannot get a cold from not wearing enough clothes, from being in the house without shoes or slippers, from leaving your window open, from not blow-drying your hair, etc. the common cold is a virus in the air and has nothing to do with the weather. except that cold weather can dry out your nasal passages and make you more succeptible to the virus. but it still has nothing to do with sleeping or going outside with wet hair. nor am i going to get an ulcer because i use three scoops of nescafe.
*narwhals have an oversized tooth/tusk that grows through their lip and can be up to 3 meters in length. there is no practical use for the tusk, and it's not even symmetrical(they only grow it on one side of their face!). Pablo Neruda has one in his house and catie was all kinds of confused because she didn't realize that they weren't just mythical creature, hence the google-fest that brought about this fountain of knowledge...also, queen elizabeth once payed the amount of money it would take to build a castle for a cup made of a narwhal tusk.
*NEVER make plans with chileans. they will always fall through. or if you do make them, just get ready to be either disappointed, frustrated, confused or any combination of the three.
*art projects are the best.
*the indigenous people of Easter Island(which politically belongs to Chile) are actaully descendants of ancient India/Pakistan. my professor for my history of modern india class discovered this when Chle hired him to do a study proving that Chile had a rightful claim to the island(he didn't do a very good job of that). but he figured it out because there were something like 100,000 "linguistic coincidences" between their language and ancient sanskrit. and according to him there are no "linguistic coincidences" because language is the DNA of culture. if two languages share something or have common words, it is because they came from the same place or converged somewhere. sooooo interesting! i really like nerding out in that class...
* being without a camera sucks. catie's got stolen last weekend(go read her blog!) and i think mine has sand in it or something, or at least the motor can't work. either way, it can focus on anything and makes lots of scary sounds.
*i am discovering that i am silmultaneously a lot more ready to be grown up and petrified of it than i thought...funny how that works
*i miss clothes fresh out of the dryer
*this isn't really anything a learned, but just a fun tidbit - my host dad brought home another pet turtle(we already have one, his name is Alex) for my little host sister and she let me name it! I chose Bartolomeo. i wanted Beatriz, but then she told me it was a boy...
*mine and catie's sameness of mind and soul is getting creepier every day. and yet we are growing in such different ways.
*the Chilean mail system is a lot more trustworthy than i previously gave it credit for.

ok that's enough.
PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE leave comments. even if you don't really have anything to say. they really do make my day.
besitos!