This Thursday night

I am told by many people that Santiago de Chile, for a city of six million, is very provincial; it is no Buenos Aires, and certainly no New York or London or Paris or Tokyo. But to me, a boy from a city of barely more than 200,000, Santiago is an enormous place of blocks and tall buildings and pigeons and plazas. There are no Markhams or Kavanaughs or Dave Wards here—but there are Providencias and Vicuña McKennas and Franciso Bilbaos. When I walk home from school I count taxis and palm trees and pisos of apartment buildings.

 Tonight I went to a barbecue at my school, in celebration of graduating students (that’s me in less than two months) and las fiestas patrias, September 18, the Independence Day of Chile. I met almost every student at the school over red wine and empanadas and kebabs, made plans to travel to Mendoza and Machu Picchu, and later, outside a bar, had my first run-in with the carabineros (look it up—and I promise it’s not as dramatic as it might seem). It was one of my best nights so far in this new country, speaking confusedly a vaguely familiar and labyrinthine language, running across empty streets and humming along with my iPod songs from the Smiths, Talking Heads, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West.

 (Should you be interested, my main stomping grounds, between school and home, is Roman Diaz 257 and Eliodoro Yañez and Ricardo Lyon 1690. Mapquest it, if you must.)

 I wish that I possessed the patience to explain, detail by detail, the goings-on of my school day and a typical Friday night or Monday morning, or to document the way that Chileans live and the way that I live among them, but because I send too many emails and watch too much CNN (in English, I lament to say) it is sadly not possible. Life here is exciting in a way that can only be understood by the studying abroad or the studied abroad, people who know what it’s like to be in another part of the world doing things that are not entirely untypical, and entirely untouristy—it is the same life played a half-key off, consciously different and yet still the same. Frankly, I love it—every minute of this opposite America.

There are pictures on their way. At the moment my camera is in the apartment of a friend who is out of town, but by next week they should be here or on Flickr.

Until my next disjointed entry, Ciao.