El Terremoto

First off, we're doing fine. Emotionally, a little "off" but just fine in every other capacity. Our three-year-old high-rise apartment building took to the massive shaking with aplomb! Yay, building! It was swaying like crazy when the big one was happening, but it passed the post-quake inspection with no prob.

From yesterday morning on, Matt and I have been walking all about the city. We're walking to the point of exhaustion, actually, but if we're moving, we don't feel the seemingly constant and creepy aftershocks as much. Here are some photos (click to enlarge):

Below, some very hard hit buildings. I hope the people that were inhabiting them are doing ok.

We chose to live in our neighborhood, due in part to its proximity to this museum, Bellas Artes:

Extremely damaged church:

There are cracked, crumbling, and destroyed buildings at nearly every turn on our walks:

Broken buildings = displaced people:

Broken glass, everywhere. The amount of glass and small rubble on the streets and sidewalks is probably one of Santiago's biggest problems post-quake (hot city's not sandal-friendly ahorita):

Lines into the grocery stores are becoming common (the lines at checkout are worse):

More to come? Hope not.

A walk around Providencia...

...a cute, semi-crumbly (yet sort-of upscale) neighborhood in Santiago (and the neighborhood in which we stayed upon arrival).

Paz = Peace. Watermelons for peace. I'm on board.

I love crumbelivable neighborhoods. Therefore, Latin America is right up my alley; or the crumbly alleys are right up my alley. Or something.

It's summer here, and the sun is super-intense. It makes for great shadows (and subsequently great photos).

Okay, I'm going to go off on a tangent for a moment.

I believe there are two types of people in the world: Dog People and Cat People. We two camps don't understand each other for many reasons. I do honestly believe that Dog People and Cat People have different personality traits. I am an extreme dog person. A dog fundamentalist, of sorts.

I don't trust cats. I can't read what they're going to do when they approach me. When they do approach me, I think (sometimes out loud), "What do you want from me, Cat? Are you gonna do that supposedly friendly cat thing where you drag/rub the length of your body along my leg, or are you going to use your extreme jumping skills to claw or bite off my face with your ungodly sharp talons and incisors???" We saw this cat every morning, and it meowed and glared at us, and we didn't know what it wanted. Any thoughts, Cat People?

Chile produces a lot of delicious wine! It's cheap here, too! This billboard, translated, says, "And today, why not?" Good advice, indeed.

Phase II: America del Sur

I woke up this morning, out of an intense dream, feeling confused (but sufficiently rested). “Where am I?” I thought to myself, as I felt and heard the oscillating fan blowing some relief, the hot morning sun already slinking its way through the gap between our window and its heavy shade. “Oh, yeah,” I said to myself, “I’m in Chile now, and it’s February, and it’s summer." An obvious addendum (though a realization, nonetheless), I thought to myself, “I’m not in Mexico anymore.” With that revelation, I felt a slight pang in my heart. This past week’s logistics of moving had put me into a state of fogginess and autopilot. Emotions were pushed to the side, and now I can register feelings and can come to grips with leaving a place I enjoyed a lot.

Santiago, when compared with Mexico City, is incomparable. So clean, so much quieter, smaller here. Are these good things? Bad things? I can’t tell you right now. Perhaps I’ll never be able to. But it is different.

Our hostel is nice. We’re staying in a cute private cabana unconnected from the rest of the hostel. We’ve met some lovely people from all over the globe, on holiday in South America. I love hearing peoples’ traveling stories. In addition, we’re speaking a lot with the workers of the hostel, gleaning advice about logistics related to living here. My Spanish ear is good (even with heavily accented Chilean Spanish); I understand a lot. Getting the words out of myself, though, is a different story. That’ll come, I hope. Matt’s doing an excellent job with speaking, and I’m feeling proud of him.

Home is an important concept, especially when one's "away from home," or at least it's always been important for me. What does home mean to me right now? Not to mention, what has home meant to me the past five years? We’ve done a lot of moving in that small amount of time. Of course, home will always be synonymous with our beloved Minnesota and our family and friends. But that means home is really, really, REALLY far away, and that can be disconcerting. Sooooo, as terribly dorky as it sounds, I guess home for me has also been defined as Matt, or, our relationship. In the midst of changes and multiple instances of being “in-flux,” and now, in the case of feeling slightly heartbroken over our time in Mexico being a thing of the past, there’s something comforting in knowing that I’m always at home with my Matt.

Puke, barf, how cheesy, no?

Puerto Escondido

Whoa, man. I feel busy. We're moving from Mexico to Chile in two days. It's not every day you find yourself saying that.

I could write a large, verbose entry about our weekend trip to Puerto Escondido, but I don't have the time for all that jazz. So, in its stead, I present pictures.

Puerto Escondido is a small beach town on the Southern Pacific Coast of Mexico in the state of Oaxaca (pronounced Wa-ha-ca), known for excellent surfing beaches. It's beautiful.














Where we stayed:



































Coconuts everywhere:














A moustache:

Empty, hatched eggs of sea turtles:

Yeah, we helped endangered sea turtle babies enter their new home, the big ocean. Don't even get me started on how awesome that was. I wish all these cute tortuguitas a happy, healthy, and peaceful 100+ years of life!

The Sprawl

The rain and winds of last week cleared away a lot of the thick, omnipresent pollution of February, Mexico City's version of the winter doldrums. Thus, it was a good day for us to view the city from the sky deck of the earthquake-safe Torre Latinoamericana. We arrived at dusk. It was incredible. In case you were a doubter, this is truly ONE BIG CITY

In this first picture, in the distance, two snow covered mountains are visible! The pointy one is Popocatepetl, an active volcano! They've never been visible to us, before yesterday:

This Week...

Seeing: Art at the Dolores Olmeda Patina Museum. We went on Tuesday because entry is free (!) on Tuesdays. Unfortunately, the Frida collection (i.e. the main reason we went) was closed. Of course. Ah well, the grounds were pretty (for confirmation, please refer to the peacock in the previous entry).

Hearing: A melange. Beach House (stupid name, better songs), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's daughter), Marvin Gaye (one of my all-times). Yeah, so I kind of gave up on that whole Latin-music-only thing. This week at Spanish school, I learned past tense. Para los primeros meses en DF, escuchaba música latinoamericana. Ahora, no.

Eating: Vegetarian "Indian" food in Tepoztlan (more like hybrid Latin American/Indian food. The samosa bordered on empanada, and the sauce on the parkora tasted a bit like a peanut/tomato-based sauce that is popular here). Nonetheless, it was a tasty lunch! And cute!

Wearing: Begrudgingly, it is time to part with my favorite boots. For those who know me, I'm talking about my gray ones. I've had them for years. I love them. I wear them constantly. They're easy for walking. They've done more globe trotting than the average human being. But the holes enveloping them (especially the holes on the soles) are just getting too big. And I think they're starting to disintegrate. Let go, Christine, let go.

Below: Me, Boots, Santiago de Chile, 2008.