thanksgiving

yesterday was the first time i've ever eaten thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant. it's not something i'd recommend. you miss out on some of the best parts of thanksgiving, such as seeing the platter piled high with turkey, getting a choice between light and dark meat, eating until you couldn't possibly eat anymore, the sense of family, and, of course, the leftovers. here's what the main plate looked like - some mashed potatoes, turkey with a bit of gravy and stuffing, and a bit of what i assume was cranberry sauce. the food did taste pretty good, and was preceeded by a caesar salad and followed by pumpkin pie, so it sufficiently reminded me of thanksgiving. but it was in no way the same. oh, and i forgot to mention that it's almost summer here so it was warm out too.

classes are winding down, so that means i get to write a couple of papers this weekend. i'm so excited. yay . . . well, i suppose i don't have much choice. it looks like i'll only be taking exams for two of my four classes since i'm exempt from the other two, so i guess that's good.

time to go work on those papers and then go see a photography exhibition.



oh - in case you didn't notice, over there in the sidebar of this page, underneath the stuff about the past, is a link to some photo albums i put in internetland.
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ultimate photos

it's late, i have to get up early to go to the beach tomorrow, but here's the link to the photos from ultimate on the beach. photos let me know if it doesn't work, or if there are problems viewing this blog. i'd be glad to fix them for your viewing pleasure.

APEC

just a quick update: there's all sorts of interesting things going on in santiago because of the APEC meetings - lots of detours, protests, and universities being closed. of course, none of this really affects me personally since i live so far from downtown and i'm certainly not going to be doing any protesting (i'm told to do so would risk my visa being revoked, and i wouldn't want any of that).

today's been a nice day so far - went to look at an apartment which was pretty nice, though i'd like to find somewhere a bit cheaper or maybe a couple blocks off the main street so it isn't so loud. after that i went to the museum of beautiful arts (museo de bellas artes - maybe i should translate it as fine arts, but i prefer the literal translation) and saw a couple really cool photography exhibitions.

now it's time for some reading and/or a short nap

beet

back from the beach with a sore body and some sunburnt feet. yes, i know, sunscreen. trust me, i put it on. but apparently i didn't reapply appropriatly, and there is also the possiblitlty that the ocean washed of some of the sunscreen, as well as the other alternative that the sand, known for its exfoliating properties, exfoliated the protected layer of skin and left me with softer yet more vulnerable feet. in any case, they are nice and red now - we'll see if wearing shoes is possible tomorrow - it might be a few days of sandal wearing for "medical" purposes.

don't think that this hot sun burning my feet in any way affected my weekend. i quite enjoyed myself. we played probably 5 or 6 games (5 on 5 with 1 or 2 subs, play to 7) on saturday and another 3 sunday. i was right about the beach being windy - luckly though the wind was essentially parallel to the field, so we didn't have to deal with the oh so annoying and unpredictable crosswind. instead, the team that was throwing with the wind just had a tremendous advantage. this led to a number of games being point for point races, and the winning team was the one that could score into the wind. we played on the beach (so a couple discs did land in the surf when thrown particularly horribly) on a field marked off with some white elastic bands staked into the sand. at first, the field was nice and flat, relatively well-packed sand. that of course changed after one or two games, making all those muscles in your feet have to work extra hard to run, well, as close to running as you can get on the beach. after a long day of playing ultimate, we had an asado at the cabañas (read cookout at the cabins). chorripans, antichuchos, y pollo (sausage-on-bread, shish kabobs, and chicken). quite satisfying.

it's getting late, so i am going to get to sleep - i slept well last night, but all that exercise made me a bit tired. my body needs to rebuild all the muscles i tore.

oh, i suppose i forgot to mention earlier that i'm probably one of the worst players who went to the beach. it could be that i'm out of practice, but i blame it more on my overall lack of athletic ability. but not to worry - it was still a good time, and maybe i learned a thing or too, or at least found people with which to play in the future. they play once or twice a week, so hopefully that practice will allow me to improve.




i suppose i'm not supposed to comment on the title i just decided upon, but it makes me wonder: how is it that i never ate any beets before i came here? not that i've had a lot here, but i did have them for dinner 2 nights on my trip to the south - and they are good, not to mention beautiful to look at. such a rich color.

ice cream

well. i am officially bad at keeping an up to date web log, even though i am probably on the internet every day. somehow the urge to update this site doesn't come to me when i am at the computer, and when i am not it is a bit tough to do so. yeah, i could right these posts on real paper and then post them later, but i don't much like that idea. well, rather i like it but don't do it. i think i fear the electronicization process, and the fact that i would want to change what i had written to such a degree that there really is no point in writing anything out before i sit down at the computer. now, if i had a secretary, or a voluntary secrectary, things would be different. or maybe if i actually wrote things here that i felt expressed anything more than the moment i am writing them - i mean, if i put some really well-written things in a notebook, i don't think it would bother me much transfering them. but this page isn't so much well written, and i don't see that changing in the near future.


enough blather. you are reading this not to find out about how i write these silly posts but instead to find out about this city and country i am living in, or at least my actions in this strange place. hmm. well, today i went to a couple classes, read a really good story on the micro (micro=bus)("cuello de gatito negro" [translates as "the neck of a little black cat"] by julio cortázar), and went and saw some bad music performed by a group of musicians who wear clown noses. don't ask. the tickets were free. that is definitly the only reason i went. now i understand why they were giving away tickets. beware of free tickets found on the internet: there is a reason they are free.

i asked my math profesor if there were any math-related things i could do in the summer in the city. short answer: yes, but they are boring or unofficial. long answer: i could be a ta or something, but the word on the street is that in the summer that is not the best job to have. lots of discussion sessions, lots of papers to grade, and students who don't care to much and just want to pass the class they failed so they don't get behind. so my profesor offered to lend me a book which i could work through and learn things, and he'd be about to help me and talk about things. while this might be nice, it is in no way something i can use in any official sense in the future. well, i realize now as i write this, i could take a proficiency exam when i get back to school and get credit for a class about what i learned. so this idea just got a bit more attractive, but i'm still looking for something better to do with my summer. and there's always traveling . . .

this saturday i am taking a little trip to the beach to play ultimate on the beach. never played frisbee on the beach - i fear it might be a bit windy, but we'll see how it goes. this is related to the fact that on sunday i played ultimate for 3 hours or so with a bunch of americans and a handful of chileans. they are a group who plays 2 times a week (though i have class during one of them), made up mostly of americans who are in santiago for various reasons, but in the past it was apparently half chilean and half estadounidense. {now is as good a time as any to point out that this whole continent is america, and chileans are americans too. i can't say "i want to go back to america" because in reality i never left. that being said, it is hard to refer to residents of the united states in english in any other manner. so i will most likely continue to do so, but you should be aware there is a cultural issue here, and i cringe every time i am forced to call my compatriates americans.}

yesterday i saw some really amazing improvisational jazz (and free too). the piano player played the inside of the piano, something i hadn't seen before, and also put a piece of paper in the piano to make it sound differently. good music. tomorrow i might go see another trio in the same program.

hmm. i seem to have run out of words to add to this mountain. just one more to top it off:



cherry

books and movies

sorry for the excessive delay in posting anything.

last week i had to write a paper and give a presentation on "anything that has to do with latin america." obviously the idea was that we chose topics that were interesting to us. i chose to write and talk about nicanor parra, a chilean poet, or, as he is known, antipoet. antipoetry is just poetry that breaks with the erudite poetic tradition and brings poetry to both everyday life and coloquial language. basically, makes written poems be like the poems we see an experience every day. quite a good poet. he also makes, well i guess he still does though he is 90 years old, artifacts, which are objects together with a few short verses, for example, a bottle of cocacola and a little card that says "message in a bottle." the idea is to mix common objects with common phrase and create an altogether uncommon result that he then procedes to call art. the mere act of calling it art makes people look at it differently. i could obviously continue on for 7 pages about him, but i'll refrain from that for now. i'll post any poems i find that he wrote entirely in english (since he has a graduate degree in physics from brown university and speaks english fluently).

friday (and i guess saturday too) i went to a 24 hour movie marathon, cine adiccion, of movies that are hard to find in chile. unfortunatly i fell asleep during the one movie a really wanted to see, the holy mountain, directed by aleandro jodorowsky, so i'll just have to find it somewhere and watch it again. another good movie was the tulse luper suitcases, and also i will walk like a crazy horse. 24 hours is a long time to spend in a movie theater.

tonight, or rather in about 10 minutes, i'm going to the 24th international book fair, where i'm hopefully going to hear a professor of mine talk since he is one of 14 new chilean poets there is a presentation about (and i know he will be there since he cancelled class so he could go). hopefully i'll also find some more good books to read - i'm almost done with the perfume: story of an assasin that i'm reading in spanish, translated from the original german. if not, i'll just go to the library - i want to read more by jodorowsky and parra.

time to go.