Semi-Cama Buses & ALL the Beaches: Viña, Valpo, Concepción
PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m posting this before it gets too out-of-date (I’ve had it done for two days now, but the wifi at my hostel in Pucón wasn’t strong enough to upload photos, and then a storm last night wiped out all electricity in the city [currently stealing a friend’s hotspot to post this]) even though it’s not quite finished. Will go back later and put in all the photos I want to share. And will write a separate post about Pucón and how wonderful it is here. And will hopefully also finish my post about feminism in Chile. So much to do WHOO! Hope you all are having lovely weekends. xoxo
EL PARTE DOS: photos up, two more posts coming your way in the next few days (I get to Puerto Natales on Thursday evening and plan to spend two weeks there—I’m looking forward to settling in somewhere for a little!).
I’m writing from a bus to Pucón, in the south of Chile. We’re sitting in a parking lot outside of a rest stop in Santa Maria de Los Angeles, sweating in the thick air of the top floor of the bus. I think we’re waiting for more passengers to board here, and that those of us who are continuing on could get out for snacks or to take what I imagine would be a relatively depressing walk around the peeling orange walls of a shut-down supermercado. But I can only understand about half of what our steward is saying, so I’m going to stay put here and just sweat out the Chilean wine I drank at dinner last night because I’d rather be hungry than left behind.
In this next installment of a continuing series, KP Can Barely Speak Here (Let Alone Quickly), I’m reflecting on what my goal is for my Spanish. Is it to be understood enough to navigate my trip? If only that, I think I’m not too far away—I can buy a bus ticket, ask for directions, order lunch. I need to build my vocabulary up and get more comfortable switching tenses and get used to the Chilean accent (I thought it was bad enough that in Spain they don’t pronounce h, but here they’ve also decided to lose the s) but I can get by. But I don’t think that’s my goal. I think I want to be able to build relationships, and argue about politics, and experience literature in Spanish. I want fluency. But then I look at what I’m doing to achieve that goal and I know it’s insufficient to get there.
I remember going to Spain right after passing my university’s proficiency exam and being shocked at the difference between tested proficiency and true comfort in the language, and then turning that shock into fuel to improve: I wrote daily essays en español and had Nieves correct them; I kept a list of new vocabulary words, asking anyone and everyone who taught them to me to write their meaning and participation down; I only listened to Spanish music and watched Spanish movies and guarded my English time to three metered activities: daily journaling, biweekly Skype chats with family and friends, and reading Game of Thrones. And that probably wasn’t enough. And here I am, years later, doing a fraction of that and then getting disappointed and frustrated when things aren’t easy after a week and a half.
But I also know I don’t want to do anything more. I like walking around a new city, finding its biggest and greenest park, and curling up on a bench to read all day in the sunshine (I finished The Power in Concepción’s Parque Ecuador yesterday and it was fabulous; I want Naomi Alderman and Jay-Z to do a sequel to the “Family Feud” music video together). I don’t like feeling embarrassed when I hear my bad accent as I ask questions to a waiter, so I just order the thing I’ve already had instead of trying something new. This level of meekness and laziness feels pretty at odds with the rest of my life, and I don’t really know what to make of it. Is my desire to look good that overpowering that I’d pass up learning opportunities on a regular basis? Am I actually much less determined than I’ve always considered myself?
I’ve had some opportunities to think about those questions over the last week or so.
I’ve been staying with Mariscal and Javier, for whom my budding language skills were cute at first and then grew to grating, I think (what’s that euphemism? “Houseguests and fish both stink after 3 days”?). I’ve already written about my first day with them; later that weekend, they brought me to an asado (barbecue) with Mariscal’s family on our way to the coast at Viña. It was a lovely afternoon, filled with her sisters and cousins and familial warmth and lots of lessons in Chilean slang for me. It felt like a safe space (I can never say that without seeing Jim roll his eyes now)—Mariscal’s dad was so sweet to me, her sisters folded me smoothly into their hospitality routine, she kept checking in on me to see if I had questions about what was happening—and I didn’t feel embarrassed to ask questions and get in the mix.
That evening, we drove to Viña del Mar, a little city on the water—the fourth largest city in Chile, with a population of about 350,000—which was a bustling port at in the mid-20th century and whose main industry now is tourism. We went for a walk around town, visited the circus, ate churros filled with dulce de leche, and walked home to Mariscal’s family’s apartment on a warm, beautiful night.
Staying with Mariscal and Javier gave me powerful deja vu to when I lived with Nieves and Alfredo in Spain and I never really knew for sure what we were doing or when we were going to do it, a fairly big departure from my normal life (where I’m usually a planner), and possibly another example of me being afraid to look stupid (or consideration towards my hosts, to not disrupt their normal lives? maybe those two things are related?).
I’d be part of conversation about upcoming plans, but pertinent details like the sequencing of events was often lost on me, and now, like then, I often felt too embarrassed to ask a third time for the logistics. It turns me into whatever the opposite of a control freak is—someone who is ready to do almost anything at almost any time and is totally fine having no say in the matter.
And that’s how I ended up surfing for the first time!
No, but actually. On the drive from Santiago to the coast, Mariscal and Javier had told me about the towns just north of Viña that had much better beaches—Reñaca and Concón—and asked me if I’d ever surfed. I said no, but that I wanted to one day, and they said Concón had great surfing and maybe we could go.
The day after we arrive in Viña, we drive to Concón, go for a walk along the beach (Mariscal was right—it’s beautiful), and Mariscal stops at a surf shack to ask how much was a lesson, and did any of the instructors speak a little English?
I could’ve (and should’ve) asked more questions that morning, it’s true, but there’s something about me—that combo of desire to please/be easygoing + fear of looking dumb, I think—that always keeps me from doing it. So there I was, changing into a bathing suit (I’d brought one stuffed into my tiny cloth bag because, again, traveling and semi-illiterate Kath is all about being prepared) in the back of a car, then forking over 15,000 pesos (about $25—a steal compared to the $150 I considered paying in Santa Monica the last time I was near a surfing beach) for a wetsuit and board for the afternoon and an hour and a half of private class with Martín, a chubby, curly-haired instructor with kind eyes.
After warming up, practicing paddling / jumping up on the sand, and a lecture about the poisonous vs. harmless medusas (jellyfish—don’t you wish we called them medusas, though?), I was ready. Martín and I waded into the water and started our lesson there.
And I immediately began getting facefuls of saltwater up my nose, in my eyes, down my throat. I was standing too far forward, somersaulting into the water as the waves rose and flipped my board. Then I was standing at the right place, but too close to the edge, so as soon as I got up I’d swerve into the next breaking wave and have to jump off, regain my footing, and reel my board back to me by my ankle leash to try again. Then—after maybe 8 tries—I tapped into the calm that I felt descending over me like a heavy frost. Martín positioned my board, I paddled with quick, even strokes, and I popped up, just as we practiced—and I was surfing!
I’m nowhere near good yet. I need several more lessons til I could safely surf by myself, and then hundreds of hours of practice, but I’m happy to have tried and looking forward to next time.
And how is learning to surf that different from learning Spanish? They’re both new, hard things where you can’t be afraid to look like a fool. Somehow, the physical flailing was way less embarrassing to me than the mental / verbal flailing is.
After a long and exhausting morning surfing, we tucked into lunch at a tiny beachside shack serving up an all-fish menu del día.
Later that day, we stopped in Reñaca to visit a family friend’s house and siesta on the rocky beach. I read The Idiot (like Knausgaard but for 20-year-old women learning languages and growing into themselves instead of 45-year-old-men bemoaning the shackles of family and reflecting on boyhood—would highly recommend) and didn’t get sunburned—two wins.
The next day, we headed into Valparaíso, by way of a small purple-and-orange bus driven by an absolute madman (it felt like I was on the Knight Bus on my way to London) who zipped over and around the coastline curves and slammed to a stop in downtown Valpo. Upon arrival, we did two frustrating things—activated a Chilean SIM card for me that didn’t work, but that they refused to take back because it was opened, and took a boat ride on a smelly barge whose seats were plastic deck chairs bolted to 2x4s that were in turn then nailed onto the wooden floor of the ship and whose tour guide spoke Spanish too quick for me to understand more than half of what he said—and then just started walking around, exploring the corners and stairways and murals of downtown Valparaíso.
At home later that day, I laid by the pool and read The Queen’s Thief (would not recommend) and eavesdropped on the Chilean kids splashing around in the shallow end. Children’s chatter is the best way to learn any language, I’m sure of it—they aren’t complicated, they’re friendly, they call each other all the mean names that you need to know if you’re to have any street cred.
We drove back to Santiago, and the next day I got on a bus about six times nicer than the one I took to Pucón (finishing this blog from my hostel bar, drinking the pale ale I won in hostel trivia night)—it had wifi, headsets, movies dubbed in English and Spanish, and the terminal itself had literally everything you could’ve wanted, from Q-tips to fried chicken—and rode six hours south to Concepción.
I only spent 36 hours or so there, staying with a friend of Mariscal’s in a lovely apartment overlooking a lake, but it was enough to criss-cross the entire city, read in every park, visit two art museums—including the Casa del Arte at the University of Concepción, where I stood, awed, in front of “Presencia de América Latina,” the most beautiful mural I’ve ever seen, for nearly an hour—and go to a potluck dinner at the house of a friend of Margaret’s, where we ate fish and daal and fresh-cut pineapple.
Our dinner crew was a motley one—Americans, Indians, Austrians, Haitians; it was the first times I was at an English-speaking dinner in a week—and it was lovely to watch the sunset with them, drinking cheap Chilean wine and learning about each other’s lives and cultures. It was another safe space, of a different flavor, but being able to tease my newfound friends in English only made me want to be able to do it in Spanish even more.
Miles to go before I sleep.
[which won’t be for a while since I just got to Pucón and have half a liter of beer to drink and am researching whether I should go hike up an active volcano tomorrow or the next day—good choices I get to make, amirite?]