The Santiago City Slicker Meets the Sunshine House

Valparaiso is an olfactory smorgasbord. Nestled into a cove in Central Chile, it's a town that would prompt Liam Neeson to want to release the Kraken on its filth. The beautiful sea breeze wafts rotting fish, sewer water, and dried-out cat poop up into your welcoming nostrils.

Luckily for me, I love things that are slightly shitty. They appeal to me in that I-just-graduated-from-college-and-can't-afford-matching-furniture sort of way. Valpo, like Santiago, seems to have been constructed by a woman who has great taste in style but no matching fashion sense; stately art deco buildings are flanked by Swiss-style chalets are towered by slim San-Francisican-style tenant housing. Think Hell's Kitchen meets Lombard Avenue meets shanty town. Much of the housing is seemingly waif. Almost all the rooftops, though, are made out of sheet metal (as are the fronts of most of the buildings).

Valpo winds crazily up a series of cerros, or steep hills, where the sidewalk yields to a series of steps, like a staircase out of a M.C. Escher drawing. The city has hired a team of local artists to paint the otherwise grey stone buildings and cement walls, and everywhere you turn there is a fantastical mural or a bunch of guys fervently working on something new. In this way, Valpo is a growing comic book of pop art.

About halfway up Cerro Yuguay (spelling?) stands the Sunshine House, home of the talented Jeanette Hardy (whose blog you can find on the CIEE website or through the link here on my page). Tosh, Jackie, Matt, Laura and I slogged up with bottles of champagne and orange juice, sweating in the indian summer sun. We colapsed on Jeanette's makeshift deck (the boards aren't nailed in but are rather cleverly balanced on a wooden frame).

The Sunshine House makes much of material: its outside walls are drywall, sheet metal, wood, and glass, which explains the leaking Jeanette described after the tormenta they received; but the house is like the massive tree-fort mansion every adult secretly wishes they could live in. The rooms are big and bright, with whitewashed walls and distressed floors. Paper lanterns hang from the hallway ceiling. Outside the wooden portico curls upon itself in a series of whispy spirals, the cracked blue paint adding to the house's unending charms. We chilled with our mamosas and looked out on the rough Pacific Ocean and watched huge battleships sail in. I felt small in the wake of the ocean, but warm and relaxed in the company of friends.

We spent the afternoon exploring the insanity that is the city (a map of Valpo's streets exist, but it isn't at all helpful), coming upon neon-yellow and orange houses cheerfully setting in the afternoon sun. We faced undending bluffs and cliffs where the road abruptly ended or turned. A street vendor sold earrings carved out of avocado pits. Street dogs protected us from curious stray cats. My sandaled feet turned black in the street sludge. Music wafted from a reggae concert somewhere beneath us. A child offered me his half-eaten Chupa-Chup. I was loving it all.

As the sun set into the sea, I took refuge in a cafe. Sipping an iced mocha, I sighed into my chair, perfectly happy that I had escaped my city for a town that had as much growing up to do as I have. But I was so happy to come home to the order and elegance that my Bellas Artes pad has to offer, and to fall asleep to the noisy din of the bar below me, and, gently underneath, the purr of the night buses on their beat.

The World's Tiniest Violin Playing Just For You

On May 17th, 2009, Your Lovely And Witty Author Of This Blog walked her sandaled feet twenty feet across a platform and received her college diploma. There was smiling. There were proud tears. And then, after everyone cleared out and I was left to move myself in to a big, new, empty apartment, there was the sheer panic of not knowing what the hell I was going to do.

People expect great and extravagant things from bright young people. So clearly I felt I needed to be great and extravagant. But there I was, working part-time in a coffee shop where I made less-than-minimum wage. I really loved it. I loved smelling like coffee grounds and sweat. I loved mopping the black-and-white tile floor at the end of the night. I loved how the skin cracked on the backs of my hands from the bleach water in the disinfecting sink. I was so tired of being cerebral and I wanted to be off the map. I didn't want to be responsible and I definitely didn't want to be an adult. All I wanted was to be back in my dorm room the night before my graduation, where we slowly drank ourselves into a numb depression, feeling the final moments of camraderie, knowing we had battled through four years of growing up and making grades.

Thankfully after college, something happens. This thing is called Life. Life goes on. Life doesn't wait while you decide to be a baby and drag your feet. Life gets in your face and tells you to go call the Wambulance.

So I applied to Teach in Chile. I felt proud. I rose to the call of being a bright young adult. I was going to do something great and extravagant.

I didn't realize how long ten months really was, though. And I am sitting in my living room and I haven't showered all day and I'm eating four-day-old pasta and feeling bad for myself. Tomorrow I have to lesson plan for at least the next two weeks' worth of classes. Winter is setting in and it is flipping freezing in my apartment and the sun sets at 5:30 and all I have is this flimsy blanket and it sucks. It isn't at all glamorous. If Life told me to go call the Wambulance right now, I'd tell Life to shove it.


I remember feeling so excited when I received the opportunity to come down here. I sentimentalized it. I told myself it was going to be a dream experience; what I had always hoped and wished for. In many ways, it is. But on a day-to-day basis, it's still life. And life has its ups and downs. We are all feeling the reality of being without our support systems at home. We've settled in to life here, and it's adult life: we pay our bills, we cook our food, we go to work. We take crowded subways. We battle with sickness caused by the never-lifting cloud of smog over Santiago. Our computers crash; our Ipods break; I cause fires by burning toast on my gas stove.

But I have this really adorable roommate, Emma, who is French. And as I'm sitting in my sadness and my own unshowered filthiness, she comes flitting up to me, with a tomato in her hand, and she makes the tomato talk to me. It tells me in French-accented English, "Hello, I am a little lonely tomato. I do not know if I am your tomato. But now I am alone on the shelf and I need to be eaten because I am rotting. I used to be the prettiest little tomato of my company." And then she runs away, la-la-la-ing into the kitchen, squishes the tomato into a pulp in her tiny hands, and chucks it into the wok.

Life here is weird. But it throws you funny curveballs just when you need it the most.