Butchers like Muzac

This entry is the opposite of the last one...much longer and no pictures.

29/9/08
Happy New Year! Several other Jewish students on the program and I celebrated the new year by going to the synagogue in Valpo. I donned the nicest clothes I brought (slacks, button down shirt, tie, and bright yellow tennis shoes), picked up a bottle of $4 wine at liquor store, and walked over to the synagogue (conveniently located about a 10 minute walk from my bus stop). I met the other gringos a bit before and we easily found the synagogue located on a very dark, somewhat sketchy street. It wasn’t too hard to spot, the rabbi, as I learned later, was standing outside. He was exactly what you would expect a rabbi to look like in Chile – like every other rabbi there is in the world, somewhat older, short stature, big bushy beard, wearing glasses, and just a bit overweight. We did the mandatory greetings of “Hola” and “L’shana tovah” and everybody was happy. The one downside to the evening, was that they told us to go inside cause it wasn’t safe to have a large crowd of people standing outside the synagogue. There is, sadly, a larger neo-Nazi presence in Chile than in many other countries, and although to my knowledge there haven’t been any kind of attacks, apparently it is best not to broadcast the location of the synagogue for everybody to see. Side note: to attend the services we had to give them our passport numbers to prove our identities in advance. Not knowing what to expect at first, we walked up a narrow set of stairs that opened up into a circular room with about 6 doors leading off of it. We schmoozed a bit, and found the one other gringo at the synagogue who has been there a few other times (he’s been in Valpo for almost a year now) and he told us a bit about what to expect. Soon, however, we found ourselves ushered into a room that sat about 30 people. We took our seats awkwardly in the front (everybody else had already taken the seats in the back), and the service began. It was an entertaining mix of Spanish and Hebrew. The synagogue didn’t have any prayer books for Rosh Hashanah, so we used a Kabalat Shabbat service prayer book. The service was fairly short, but hit all the same major points of any service back home. Another aspect that was the same as services back at home, is that the rabbi took advantage of having everybody’s attention and going over announcements. When he got to the announcements for the following week’s Yom Kippur services a debate broke out amongst the congregation and the rabbi as to when it would start. Some argued for 8:30, but ultimately the rabbi won with 7:30 evoking actual Jewish law. The service ended, we said Kidush, and then proceeded to eat what can only be described as “once.” I think I have mentioned it before in a previous entry, but once is the light dinner that they eat here, which consists of mainly bread and sweets. There was plenty of wine and for some reason champagne popping and hallah that tasted slightly like the real deal. The convincing evidence for me, however, that this was indeed a true synagogue, was the presence of hummus and cream cheese! We all ate, sang songs, and eventually one of the members of the congregation set up a laptop and started blasting klezmer music…We said our goodbyes and called it a night. They seemed happy to have us there, and the service being in Spanish and Hebrew was really cool, so I plan on coming back for Yom Kippur services.

1/10/09
I’ve been living with my family here for almost a month now, and things seem to have really worked out. My Chilean mother (hope that term doesn’t offend you, mommy) is very nice and very concerned with me eating. I have to time my trips downstairs to coincide to when I want a meal. If I wake up and go downstairs, it’s breakfast time. If I go to get a drink of water around noon or 1, it’s lunch time, etc. This is only really a hassle when I have to use the bathroom and am not very hungry, that is when some choices have to be made. My brother here is kind of a goof and likes to crack jokes, which I don’t always understand (humor in another language is probably the hardest thing to get). A lot of days I only see him for an hour, though, cause we both have work/class then he gets home and immediately goes to the gym. He is borderline fanatic about it and is currently reading Arnold’s book Pumping Iron. My host [father] drives a collectivo at weird hours, and then when he is at home likes to fall asleep at any time any place, and I always know when he is asleep cause he snores and you can hear it throughout the entire house. I’m getting to the point where I need to decide where to live for the last month, and it is becoming more likely that I will be staying in the Valpo area. Now I just have to ask my family here to let me live with them for another month…

The plaza at the bottom of my cerro is a busy place. The local buses that go up the hills start from there. The collectivos have a pit row where they queue up and ‘collectivo pimps’ try to convince you that you really want to take the 38 up to Lo Venegas right now. There are at least 5 bakeries, 5 fruit/vegetable shops, 3 liquor stores, 2 butchers, countless bars, and 1 arcade filled with about 20 pinball machines. Add in roaming street dogs, vendors selling raw fish, and other street food such as ‘completos’ (giant hot dogs with massive amounts of mayo, tomatoes, and guacamole dumped on top), and things get to be pretty hectic. The fruit and vegetable shop owners like to yell out to the people walking by that they, not the store next door, due in fact have the lowest price for bananas, at which point the owner of the store next door yells back. The fish stand vendors try to convince you to buy dead fish that have been sitting outside for a dubious amount of time. The butcher has far too many pig heads on display in the window, and also likes to blast muzac that you can hear down the block.

Today, through a series of unfortunate events, I ended up having to go to a meeting focusing on sustainable building projects (more to follow). The only other person I knew there was “El Bru ja” the director of our community service project. Sidenote: as a term of endearment here, people are referred to as El/La _____(insert name here). Just by looking at him you can tell he is a man who works with his hands. He always wears work boots and his pants and shirt are always a slight tinge of brown because of a fine covering layer of dust. He has long, tangled hair and pulls back half of it into a pony tail leaving the other half to sprout off the side of his head. He gave a speech at the beginning talking about his work and how its goal isn’t to just give the people who live in the toma houses, rather, he wants to give them a neighborhood and a life. His project incorporates first building the actual houses then continuing on and building a library, a soccer field, etc. Then, much to my dismay, the academics took over. Three hours later, we finished the meeting. A lot of things here in Chile work differently than in the United States. I now can tell you though that academics are still the same. They are still the only ones that can push hot air around a room for three hours, never accomplishing anything, and never even having a goal in the first place. They each took turns droning on and on professing ideas that wouldn’t actually lead to any results. In fact, after about 2 hours Bru ja said just that to them (although slightly more subtley). At the end he taught me a Chilean phrase for what we had just witnessed equivalent to “blowing hot air” but much more lewd so I won’t describe it here.