Fishy Fishy

8/9/08-10/9/08
On Sunday night Chile played Brazil as part of the 2010 world cup qualifiers. They (we?) lost, but it was kind of expected. I think the Brazilian team is on paper worth about 200 times more than the Chilean team. I watched the game at my uncle’s house with the rest of the guys of the family. I learned the country’s chants and watched people run around draped in gigantic Chilean flags. On Wednesday night Chile played Columbia (each country plays 2 qualifying games within a few days every 2 months or so), and I went to a bar with some students to watch it. We got there a bit late cause of our community work, but got to watch most of the 4-0 trouncing. It was nice to go out to some place and cheer on a team because I will be missing most of the football season and half of the basketball season.

Wednesday morning we went to Caleta Portales, which is where the docks are located for the local fisherman. They go out at midnight and fish until about 8am, pull into the docks at Portales, and just sell their fish from there. It’s a very colorful place in the sense that there is a lot of blood and fish parts flowing down the pavement, in addition to the colorful people we encountered, of course. We walked around for about an hour talking to the local fisherman and watching them gut fish with incredible speed (there is a girl on our trip from Alaska who has fished commercially all her life and even she was floored by how fast they did it). As of Sep. 20 this year the Chilean government will lift fishing restrictions on major industrial fishing boats and allow them to fish in the same area as the locals. For a certain amount of time every year this happens, and it effectively puts every single local fisherman out of business for a span of months. It’s a pretty crappy situation, and it usually leads to violent protests. Apparently in the 90s the fisherman stormed the congress building (located in Valpo), and set a boat on fire and left it in there. They pointed out that one of the boats (relatively small) was already waiting in the bay for the ban to be lifted. These fishing operations are run out of other countries, so the government makes money off of taxes but the local economy sees nothing. Supercrappy. We then watched some sea lions swim around the docks for a while to try to lift our spirits, although they weren’t cooperating and letting me get any good pictures. After getting bummed about the fishing industry, our profesor took us to the fisherman’s restaurant at the port where he told us to get empanadas. I got a crab and cheese empanada and it was without exaggerating the best empanada I have ever had (although that doesn’t hold that much weight, but our profesor agreed). After reveling in the deliciousness of the empanadas we had class outside on the beach.


A shot of a few of the boats lined up and the little shops in the back.


The yellow and blue boat in the background has been docked in the bay for the past week waiting for the restriction to be lifted.

Wednesday afternoon I went to my community work site. I spent most of the day either with a crow bar dismantling a patio or using a gigantic steel javelin to dig holes to put wood posts. It was good, hard work that I hadn’t done in a while. I definitely missed the feeling of earning a meal and some rest. I was thoroughly exhausted at the end of it, but definitely a rewarding afternoon. As I mentioned earlier, we are working on a toma. I hadn’t realized, though, until Wednesday evening that the family friends whose younger kid is always over here live on a toma down the street from us. It was definitely a cold does of reality. I’m going out to the fringes of the city to help families, and my Chilean mom told me that this kid who lives a 2 minute walk from us doesn’t have a kitchen or bathroom in his house. Even after seeing a lot of the hardships and conditions some people here live in, I was pretty shocked to learn that, literally, down my street here there are people, nonetheless friends of ours, who live without a bathroom or kitchen. I hate to sound enlightened or righteous, but that one really hit me.

On a lighter note, I’ve started keeping track of most played artists on the micro, and Madonna is holding solidly at numero uno. Michael Jackson is a close second. Everyday I take the micro I like it more and more. On the way to class I get a workout cause the micros go tearing down these winding roads and it takes a fair amount of effort to keep from falling down (usually I have to stand cause they are packed). Not only that, but the entire time the driver is (most likely) blasting really awful 80s or 90s American music. Besides the artists I already mentioned, they also like Spice Girls and Journey.

11/9/08

Today is September 11, which also has major implications in Chile. It was on September 11th back in 1973 that the golpe militar occurred and Allende (then communist leader of Chile) was overthrown, and the dictatorship that Pinochet would soon assume began. We watched a very widely known movie called Machuca, which focuses on the relationship between a cuico (rich/snobby) boy and a boy from a toma. Side note: my Chilean mom calls me a cuico everytime I go to Vina. (it is in general more of a vacation city) It’s a great movie for anyone interested (yes, there are english subtitles), and afterwards we listened to testimony from some of the directors of the program who were living in Santiago the day of the coup. After spending most of the day being somber inside, a group of us went down to the beach and played some 3 on 3 ultimate in the sand until sunsetish. We had several fans, 2 were dogs that kept digging holes in our field until they finally lay down and watched, and one was a guy wearing a loin cloth sunning himself against a nearby wall. All in all a great time had by all.