Ryan's Blog

A fallen leaf lies on my shirt in the laundry bucket.

I knew it was undeniably fall in Chile when leaves kept dropping into my laundry. While I washed my clothes outside last week, yellow leaves landed in the sink, rinse bucket, and spinner. As timing would have it, that was my last time washing my clothes at that house. The seasons are changing, and so is my program. On Monday we moved everything from my home to an apartment in Santiago, ending a decade of volunteers living in that house.

Our program is in a state of closing, albeit a slow one. Last July the governing body of the Congregation of Holy Cross decided to re-evaluate the vision and purpose of the Associate program. While that process happens, the current Associate program, both in Chile and the U.S., is closing. Whether it will be born again in a different incarnation remains an open question for the future. For the present, as part of this transition, it fell to my roommates and me to close our house in Pocuro.

Associates have been in Chile since 1978; they have been in Pocuro, the small town where I lived, for about 10 years. In that time 33 recent college graduates have lived in my house. Each person formed relationships with people in this little pueblo. Each person has memories of this place. Each person was an owner of one particularly peculiar dog, Memo. Each person left something behind. In fact, having cleaned our house and packed it into boxes, I have to wonder if each person also left behind dozens knick-knacks.

We had a farewell gathering Sunday after Mass. Many people commented that it was a shame we were leaving. Our current group of three didn’t have personal relationships with all of them, but most of the people there had been friends with one associate or many over the years. I think it was also the idea of a legacy ending that was saddening. Not every 1,000 person Chilean town has a group of gringos that pass through every year.

Chilean-flag cupcakes for our farewell gathering.

The gathering itself went swimmingly. I whipped up three batches of frosting and Natalie made Chilean flag cupcakes. We set up tables with all the junk that has accumulated in the house over the years for people to go through. I had faith in the “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure” adage, which I think is doubly true in Chile. Though we had quite the assortment of odd items, I expected everything to be taken. Which it was—not a single item was left over.

On Monday morning, we packed our house into an impossibly small moving truck and shipped it 90 minutes south to Santiago. Then we cleaned the house and left it as empty as it has been in many years. To every thing there is a season: a time to begin, and a time to finish.

Posted by Ryan at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

When I speak Spanish my train of thought often passes by a lingering preoccupation that hovers in the front of my mind: try to sound smarter than a second grader. It’s not a grandiose goal for a college-educated individual, but it is a realistic one, and these days there is something to be said for unadorned realism. Realistic or not, however, it is not always easy to achieve. A single slip of the tongue, one misplaced letter, and you are back in Dumbsville. It is exactly this fear that paralyzes many language learners, so I recommend that you ignore it. Besides, if you don’t keep talking, you won’t end up with comedies of errors like these.

At a planning meeting for a retreat I noticed that the meal list budgeted a half-pound of angel hair pasta for 80 people. That seemed like an inadequate amount, so I asked if we needed more. My credibility was shot though when I said caballo de angel instead of cabello de angel. One letter was the difference between angel hair pasta and angel horse pasta.

One day in class a professor asked me how I was. “No tan casado como ayer,” I answered—not as tired as yesterday. “Really?” he said. “Did you get a divorce?” Cansado is tired, but casado is married. I had actually told him that I wasn’t as married as the day before.

In the Spanish Mass you end prayer petitions with roguemos al Señor, let us pray to the Lord. During a Mass with a group of high school students, Emily ended one such request with “Reguemos al Señor.” Afterwards she was confronted by snickering students. Her letter change switched from the very rogar—meaning to pray—to the verb regar—meaning to water, as in your lawn. “Let us water to the Lord!”

Speaking of chuch, I mentioned to a Mormon woman here that I come from Utah, Mormon Ground Zero. We got into a conversation and at one point, for whatever reason, I said, “The Mormon Church has many traditions.” Except instead of tradiciones I said traiciones. I got a strange look and then I had to explain what I meant when I said, “The Mormon Church has many betrayals.”

Mark Twain famously remarked, “It is better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” I’ve done plenty of doubt removing here in Spanish. Fortunately there are billions of people in the world and if you make a mistake with one person, you can always find someone else who doesn’t know that you’re a fool. At least not yet.

Posted by Ryan at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The internet has always been a top-notch place to while your time away. During college, I think I was responsible for wasting a couple hundred man hours by telling people about Zookeeper, a popular Flash game. I ended up not playing it very much myself—I wasn’t very good—but a couple friends just couldn’t get enough. Senior year, guys in my dorm would get together for shared bouts of Yahoo’s TextTwist (try to beat our high score of 1,033,310).

I may be walking down the same road now: I don’t have very much time in front of computers, so even if I spent every online moment playing, it wouldn’t add up to much. Here are a couple new sites that I found out about recently.

Nintendo8.com plays on the heartstrings of any child of the 80s. There have been Nintendo emulators around for many years, but this site is the first to integrate a Java emulator with ROMs distributed online. Translation? Click and play hundreds of Nintendo games in your browser. You’ll need to have Java installed, but your browser should be able to help you with that. If you don’t know where to start, check out the top games.

If you’re looking for something less involved, check out Zwok which is a new version of a very old game. It’s like Worms, Artillery, and a dozen others. Move your character, choose your weapon, fire, and see what happens. The twist in this version is that you play in your web browser against people from around the world. Each turn takes about 30 seconds; a complete round might take a few minutes.

Visit at your own risk. If you have any tests or major work coming up in the next several days, do yourself a favor and don’t visit any of these places. I can’t be held responsible if you do.

Posted by Ryan at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kate and Percival overlook downtown Santiago from atop Cerro Santa Lucia.

Two weeks ago I didn’t write anything online because there was simply no time to do it. I was busy catching up with Percival and Kate, two friends from college who I hadn’t seen (like most of my friends!) since graduation day. Their visit almost didn’t happen—the East Coast blizzard that hit on March 16 canceled their flight for two days, then their rescheduled flight barely got them to their connection in Miami. When they did arrive, we had to make up for lost time by squeezing as much as possible into seven days.

After they landed, we wasted no time with resting or eating. We went on a walking tour of Santiago, from the main Alemeda to the Plaza de Armas and Mercado Central. I also made them climb Santa Lucia, the park on a hill in the middle of downtown. I got away with these things mostly because we hadn’t seen one another in almost two years, but also because Kate is into intense vacations too. We drag Percival along with us.

From Santiago we traveled west for a day to see Valparaiso and Vi˜a del Mar. Though it was overcast, we still saw the city’s historic quarter, Cerro Concepción, and Pablo Neruda’s house La Sebastiana. We also took a taxi ride more thrilling than most roller coasters and a good bit more life-threatening as well.

The next day we came home to my town of Los Andes. There we visited a little archaeological museum, which I, strangely enough, had never taken the time to see. Kate, who studied anthropology and did her senior thesis on pottery, explained some of the pieces to us. We marveled at the museum’s prize piece, a mummified mother and child preserved in the dry sands of the Atacama desert. At sunset we continued with our theme of hill climbing by hiking up Cerro Patagual down the street from my house. In the morning we took a tour of the nearby vineyard, San Esteban, and visited the sanctuary of Chile’s first saint, Teresa of Los Andes.

Vehicles climb the winding road to Mendoza.

To make the trip truly international, we decided to end the week with a field trip to Argentina. Mendoza is the closest city in Argentina, on the opposite side of the Andes mountain range from my city. The steep roads make the trip long; it takes six hours to cross just 115 miles. The payoff is the amazing passage through the mountains. At one point we zig-zagged up a Andes-sized version of Lombard Street in San Francisco. Cars, vans, semi-rigs, and double-decker buses like ours snakes along the road. The vehicles looked like toys in comparison to the mountains rising around them.

In Mendoza we made a rafting excursion down the Mendoza River. I was undeterred by the fact that none of Kate, Percival, or Caitlin had been rafting before, nor by Percival’s failed swimming classes in college: I signed us up for the all-day trip on “moderate to difficult” rapids. It was a blast. The four of us were alone in a raft with our sometimes encouraging, sometimes critical guide Mario. He was very concerned about our paddling form. To his credit, once we had been coached sufficiently, I think we looked fantastic on the river. Our form was top-notch, and you would never have guessed that we collectively knew zilch about rafting. A hidden photographer took pictures of our descent. According to her pictures, I surprisingly don’t seem to know how to hold my paddle. I maintain that it’s just a problem with her lens.

I feel compelled to point out that Percival’s face is not one of sheer terror, but one of trying to save his contact lenses from the vicious rapids. If you’re curious as to what happens with all that water approaching the raft, check out this picture.

Kate, Percival, Caitlin, and Ryan hanging out in Mendoza’s beautifully tiled Plaza España.

The next day we strolled through Mendoza numerous, impressive plazas and ate ice cream while we nursed our sore bodies. In the evening, we took the bus back to Santiago. The following day, after some last minute sight-seeing—the Pre-Colombian Art Museum and Neruda’s Santiago house—I dropped my friends off at the airport and sent them back home exhausted. Sometimes the best vacations are the ones where you need a post-vacation vacation to recover.

Posted by Ryan at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Runners in the Santiago Marathon at the 5km marker.

Caitlin ran the Santiago half marathon yesterday, so we turned out to cheer for her. I don’t know much about being a marathon spectator, but Emily is a seasoned pro (OK, semi-pro, she’s cheered at the Chicago Marathon) so she and I teamed up and hit the course at 8:00am. We mapped the different race points on a map of the city buses and subway to select three different points where we could meet up with the runners.

As it turns out, marathons aren’t extremely popular in South America. Although there were many Chileans running, many of the participants were foreigners. My guess is that local reasoning goes something like this: “Run 26 miles? Sure! Wait—you’re saying there’s no soccer ball? Are you crazy? Count me out.” Even less popular is marathon spectating. Emily and I jumped the 305 city bus and saw Caitlin pass at the four-mile marker. It wasn’t hard for her to pick us out, though. Apart from the silent runners, we were the only people in sight. Not a single other individual was watching early in the course.

Traffic on some main Santiago streets was paralyzed when runners reached key intersections.

Undeterred, we continued by walking five blocks and getting on the 405 bus to meet the runners at our next point. Our plan was mere seconds from succeeding. The bus that was about to pick us up was stopped at the intersection for 45 minutes as the 10K runners’ course shut down the road. In some places ten blocks worth of irate traffic was backed up while the race went on. So we skipped the next rendezvous point and tried to make a break for our next best public transportation route. The only hitch was that our options were closing one by one as the runners closed down more of the main artery, Amerigo Vespucio. Our only chance was to out-run the 10k runners to get to an available city bus.

That didn’t happen. If I were fast enough to outrun 10k runners, I would have been participating in the race, not watching it. During my brief, five-week stint as a runner in high school, my event was the 200 meter, not the 10,000. Luckily, we were able to catch the runners during the final section of the race. I found Caitlin and ran the last mile and a half of the course with her. I should do more running under those conditions. Running on fresh legs with people who have just completed 11 miles makes you feel pretty good about yourself. That way I didn’t have to deal with any of the fatigue, profuse sweating, or bleeding nipples that other people did. (I kid you not—bloody nipples is a common problem for men whose shirts cause chaffing).

Michelle, Natalie, and Roy were waiting at the finish line to cheer. Caitlin finished at just a minute under the time she predicted, although due to somewhat poor planning the marathon organizers had run out of medals. With the end of the race, public transportation had once again been opened and we took the subway home.

Posted by Ryan at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)