MeMag - Me Magazine

Life lately has been boring. I am slowly getting used to Chilean existance and many of the things I found amusingly eccentric about local people and their behavior, is slowly starting to annoy me more and more. What drives me most crazy are the women. Slowly I’m becoming a misogynist. Every day I have to tackle their unpleasantness in various situations. Especially in the supermarket. They own the supermarket. You try to make it to a checkout stand with your two items… Some middle-aged hag sees you and makes a run for it, beating you to the finish line with her huge load of stuff. You then stand there forever while the old lizard go through her huge stack of coupons. Women always pay with cheques. First I thought there were financial benefits to that since all of the big supermarkets and department stores have their own banks, but now I think they do it just to piss me off. A middle-aged Chilean woman would rather be raped and eaten alive by a gang of perverted alligators than to treat someone else like a human being. They are all nasty. And what bothers me the most is that my own daughter is showing the early signs of turning into one of them.

Today, after waiting forever for my turn while the hideous cow in front of me completed her fifteen minute transaction of grocery payment, I was given a cold look by the checkout-woman. I had a loaf of bread without a pricetag on it. The thing is… here you have to weigh your vegetables and bread before going to the checkout counter. All the little pieces of bread are exactly the same size, but they still need to be weighed carefully. This is done for you by various tired looking employees who will also try to engage you in coversation about other things you may perhaps want to buy. Some christmas cake perhaps?

My loaf of bread had a fixed price. It said so on the shelf. But the checkout-dragon didn’t know this. I tried to explain it, but it was no use. She already hated me and turned away when I spoke to her. Besides I couldn’t quickly come up with enough words to convey it clearly enough for an arrogant moron to understand. Finally I asked her to put it aside and only bought the other unsalted bread. Which turned out to taste horrible. She punished me by giving me a very nasty looking bill and lots of small nasty coins as change. I hate small change. I mean… a coffee costs maybe 1.200 pesos and they still have 1 peso coins. Why?

I got even… almost… by giving the filthy, possibly blood-staied 2000 peso bill to another woman while I was buying guitar strings. After having been shown the strings by a small staff of employees, I had to climb a staircase to an upstairs office where I was to pay and get the receit I would then need to have stamped somewhere else in order to get the strings. I didn’t really try to stick her with the bad billon purpose, but it came out like that when I used all my small bills to pay rather than splitting another 10.000. Having returned downstairs again, I realized that I needed something else, which meant that once more I had to go back up to the office of the accountant woman. I paid with my big bill and triumphantly she made sure to give me the ugly 2000 peso bill back as part of change. I then gave her my most sugar coated smile and asked if I could get a 5000 note instead of the two 2000 notes and the one 1000. She took the money back and carefully examined the bill she had just given me while holding it up against the light. Then she reluctantly gave me my 5000 peso bill. I had won. At least one of the evil she-creatures would be going back to the hive with a lost cause to report.

Also today, after putting it off for weeks, I finally managed to get a haircut. I had originally planned to have it done in a beautiful ancient barber salon in Valparaiso, just so that I could write a diary entry called The barber of Valparaiso, or I cut my hair in Valparaiso. Or something like that. I don’t know why but I was really looking forward to that. I would also be a photo opportunity. Having three impatient women wait for me however, turned me off from the idea. But today I went to my backup plan salon, which was closed, and then to my second backup plan salon. In my mind I have been refining the sentences required for getting my hair just the way I want it. It has been maybe three weeks since my teacher wrote it all down for me and every time I have set out to have the cut, I have gone over the sentences and improved them a little. I can never think of the right words when I have to think fast, so a bit of preparation helps.

Today, as I walked in there, I was able to state my wishes with confidence and clear pronounciation, gestures and all. It worked well. Usually when I say anything in Spanish, people tend to swich to English, which really doesn’t help me much since the only English they know is usually either yes or no, or some bizarre sentence like I like your garden. Not necessarily helpful when you want your hair cut. But today it actually worked. I was a bit nervous as I sat down in the chair and only then noticed what an insanely bad haircut the hairdresser himself had. But it turned out fine.

On the family front, things have not been going terribly well. Yesterday I had prepared lunch for E15, expecting her to be home some time during the afternoon. She never came. At 10pm M sent me a SMS message saying that they were on their way home. Just to cover her ass really. At least this way she had sent me a message saying when they would be home. Which was 15 minutes later. It seemed that they had been to a final parent meeting at school where all grades were presented and such. I find it a bit hard to be a parent when all doors like that are closed to me. I’m just sitting on the outside where I can conveniently be blamed for not taking an active role. E15 herself hadn’t spoken to me in two days. That is… she did mumble “hello” yesterday.

And then everything suddenly changed again. I was once more sitting home alone wondering if the women would come home during the evening or what. M sent me a short message saying simply that E15 was with her. I was quite taken aback by being offered information like that without having to beg for it. A few hours later, another message asking if I wanted to meet them at a restaurant. I said that I would.

Arriving at the restaurant, I found the girls in great a mood. They had two friends with them, a couple of M’s Tai Chi girl friends. M ordered E15 to say hello to me, which she did without protest. After that she showed us different summer clothes, notebooks with cute things on the covers, manga action figures and other essentials she had bought in preparation for her school trip to Brazil the coming week. We even exchanged a few simple sentences. She seemed very relaxed. So relaxed that she grabbed my arm a couple of times and sunk her fingernails into it, something she does to M from time to time. I responded by biting her arm. It was a sweet primitive moment of bonding. When words fail between you and your children, you can always rely on a good bite.

I still haven’t been able to learn exactly how long E15 will be away. The answer differes between a week, ten days and almost two weeks. I suppose I could ask M once more in a very direct manner. Up until the restaurant, I was really just relieved that she would be away for a while. Every little thing I do in the house is a potential conflict situation. I plan everything. If I make myself a sandwich, should I offer her one? Should I say goodnight or not if she is busy at her computer? If I go out for a short trip, should I tell her? Will she be angry or pleased? I constantly find myself making the sandwich when she isn’t at home, not going to bed until she is asleep, and I try to make short errands part of my day away from the house rather than to go out again.

M said that E15 had been complaining that I hadn’t showed my photos to her, from our days together. I thought she wasn’t interested. When I have offered to involve her in things, she has always said no. A very shy girl. I think she understands that I am exactly the same way myself. Maybe she even takes some comfort in the fact that I am a great deal more like her than her mother. The problem is that we are not social animals. We can be terribly lonely and feel abandoned by everyone, and at the same time prefer to be alone. I should start more conversations about different things, but I can never think of anything to say.

Santiago is filled with beauty parlors. This isn’t the one where I actually cut my hair, but the one next to the closed one where I tried to have a cut

Having lost one day to sleep and overall drowsiness I awoke at 6:30 the next morning. This would be the day of our great trip to Valparaiso. Me and three generations of M’s, -herself, her mother and E15. The night before M had told me that her mother wanted to leave at 7:30, but that this was way too early. I therefore assumed that we would leave a bit later and took my time making breakfast, smoking on the terrace in the freezing morning cold and reading up on some uncooperative Spanish verbs.

At 7:45, after having terrorized the teenager for some time to get her up, M announced that we were leaving. I protested since I hadn’t had access to the bathroom for my morning shower yet. M allowed me a quick wash. I was just ready and dressed as her mother showed up, as usual somehow managing to look glamorous in a simple sweater, trousers and sneakers. I’m fairly certain that M’s mom was raised in high society, both from her manners and the faded photo album with holiday snaps from cruises to Europe in the ’50s.

The drive to Valparaiso took two hours going by the normal clock and about two days on my internal odometer. By the time we arrived, the women had managed to keep each other under a constant barrage of petty arguing and chatter. It is somehow reassuring to see that other families get along as badly on vacations as my own. Throughout the day they would skillfully keep the bickering at a constant acid level.

The first stop turned out to be a garage where they apparently planned to turn the car over to some guy. “You don’t have to be nice to him”, M said. “He is not our friend. He is just a mechanic.” Since I didn’t feel like being nice to anyone, unless they were offering me free earplugs, I kept my mouth shut. The mechanic then got in the car with us and sat down behind the wheel. He was going to drop us off somewhere before taking the car. How would we get back, I wondered. “Does he speak?”, the mechanic said after some minutes of driving. “He can speak, but he doesn’t know Spanish“, M replied. At least I know enought to understand that. I was starting to feel like the family dog.

The mechanic had dropped of in a residential area where a friend of M’s or her mother’s lived, I’m not sure which. Obviously, the friend wasn’t home so now we had to figure out the local bus system in order to get back to the area around which we had dropped off the car. On our way to the non-present friend’s house, M had managed to get hold of a map. One copy naturally. She now had the magic she needed to stay in charge.

What then started was a six hour walking marathon through the beautiful narrow and very steep streets of Valparaiso. Since M had the map and the power of knowledge, her mother constantly walked a bit ahead of us in order to be the one who decided which streets to take. M’s frustration level was rising and she was taking it out on E15. Every little thing was picked at. Don’t wear your jacket like that, walk faster, walk slower, etc. The young girl was taking it all in silently. I tried to make some inquiries as to where we were going, but as usual there were no answers, or M suddenly forgot her English and didn’t understand me. E15 wanted to go down a small sidestreet to look at a house there, but M sternly said no. Then she turned to me wiht a submissive look and said “we can go there if you want.” I said that it made no difference to me, but that we could go if E15 wanted to. M said no. “We don’t have to do what she wants.”

Eventually we ended up at Pablo Neruda’s house. I couldn’t care less about seeing some dead intellectual’s residence and decided to fight for a cubicle in the restroom instead. Besides there was a half hour wait to get in to the mansion. It is very important to Chileans to see all the cultural hig-brow things and avoid anything that tastes of normal working people and their lives. Having not wanted to go on this trip to begin with, I decided to keep my mouth shut and go wherever they wanted me to. Since I was never all that interested, I hadn’t done any research on the city, and I had no specific wishes regarding places to go. We wandered around, up and down the streets in the baking sun. For a while we ducked into a church and caught the end of a concert.

After a while we passed a DVD store and I declared that I wanted to have a look inside. It felt like a good opportunity to have a short break doing something that E15 and I would find interesting. But it turned out to be a bad decision on my part. E15 quickly found two DVDs that she wanted. In an attempt to introduce a little fatherly control, I said that she could have one of them. This she did not take well. She turned on her mother, furious by the injustice of only getting one expensive imported DVD. The insult of having to make the choice was so great that she wouldn’t even look at us for hours after that. She couldn’t have acted more hurt if someone had stepped on her favourite kitten.

M decided that it was time to have lunch and that we would all eat fish. Fine. I like fish. At the first restaurant, just as I was getting ready to order, the women suddenly got up and left, leaving a bewildered waitress standing by the table. I was never given an explanation for this incident. So we went to another place where we sat for a long time waiting to be served. Finally we got up and left from that table as well, which inspired other waiting guests to do the same.

M and her mother have two very different techniques for finding directions. M studies the map and then takes a decision while her mother smiles and asks someone local. I was starting to notice that once she turned away from the people she had asked, the broad smile fell into a look of slight contempt. What’s more, I noticed that the smile was the exact same one she gives me whenever I speak to her. I wonder what expression she adopts once she turns away from me. All in all, the woman seemed to avoid me all throughout the day.

E15 commented to her mother that I didn’t look like I was having a great emotional reaction to the beauty of Valparaiso. M translated this to me and I said that this was more or less true. The young girl seemed to take this personal. She loves Valparaiso, or so M says. Me, I just don’t like running around in the sun all day visiting every museum and landmark. And being hauled around like a child. M constantly points out how much like a grumpy little child I am. This is beginning to infuriate me. I am a bit tired of being bossed around and told how immature and difficult I am. Really, I just want to be allowed to make some of my own decisions from time to time.

Throughout the day, M repeated that it had been her great plan to show me Valparaiso so that I could return whenever I wanted and do whatever I liked. I felt like reminding her that I was only there because she had made a huge scene when I didn’t want to go, but I knew that in her mind, she had once again sacrificed one of her few free days to serve me. I let it go. When asked what I thought about the city, I felt that I had to come up with an answer that was at least slightly enthusiastic. I said that an entire day in Valparaiso was like having to eat two liters of chocolate ice cream. We climbed aboard the bus home. Grandma and the teenager no longer seemed to want to speak to M and she didn’t seem to want to speak to me. “What did I do to deserve this?”, she said.

The city is so cute they had to fill it with cats. They are everywhere. In Chile, by the way, cats only have 7 lives.

Small photos: 1.Valparaiso streets. Someone in the pink house was playing B.B. King. 2.E15 walks her own path. 3.E15 in a church. Not an everyday event. At least she didn’t burn it down or anything. 4.The wall at the restaurant where we finally ate our fish. The candles have little Santa Clauses on them.

Waking up early I found myself responsible for taking care of the sleeping teenager across the hall. M will be gone on weekdays like always, but from now on E15 will be home and I am under orders to make sure there is food in the house and that her room isn’t full of boys. I realized that I needed money for food and set off to the only bank I trust, which is downtown. I’d rather not have any of the machines in the strange local banks eat my card.

I left E15 one of my carefully composed notes with a cartoon drawing of me robbing a bank and an explanation of where I was. I also wrote that she could call me if anything dramatic happened. Once I had written that I discovered that I have lost my own phone number so I couldn’t add it to the note. I figured she would find it somehow if she wanted to. Either in her old cell phone or by calling M and asking for it. Of course I knew she wouldn’t call me if her eyeballs were on fire, but still. A gesture.

On my way to the Metro I stopped by the man copying keys and paid the 500 pesos (about $1) to have a copy made of M’s new postbox key. Keys here are so simple that you could probably copy them from memory, and the keymaker only needed 20 seconds to complete the work. I commented on his movie of choice today on his portable DVD player; Robocop. We were both in agreement that Robocop is one helluva guy.

In the Metro I had the pleasant experience of explaining to a Chilean man how to use the modern ticket machines. Well… it wasn’t an advanced explanation. I only said aqui, Señor and pointed to the right slot. He looked deeply insulted by having needed help from a gringo to get his ticket through the turnstile and didn’t say thank you. I felt great. For one quick moment, a little less lost and useless. Still, I would be slightly lost twice by the time I had gotten three blocks away from the downtown Metro station. Life is a series of these waves of successes and failures. You screw up from time to time, but the next wave will come along shortly and sweep you on past it all.

Chileans have a lot of expressions about waves (ondas). ¿Que onda? they will say. -What’s up? (when recognizing that there has been a change). There is also buena onda, mala onda and all kinds of other onda-expressions describing things of good and bad vibration.

Well onto the bus, I noticed that it turned left instead of right but decided to stay on it to see what happened. On the next stop I could see a temporary bus sign, so I relaxed knowing that it would be just a small detour. The street was probably being worked on or something. An old man at the back of the bus however, panicked completely and ran forward trying to get the drivers attention so that he could be let off. Nobody explained the detour to him. I knew that it would be more than my Spanish could handle.

At the post office it became clear that my newly copied key would not unlock the postbox. M’s original key did, allthough with some resistance. I was cursing myself for having tempted fate by thinking that all Chilean keys are alike. The friendly guard woman I have seen and exchanged smiles with a few times before was peeking around the corner to see if I was up to the task of opening the box. Which I was. Just not with the right key. I could have just pulled the box open if I had wanted to. They are flimsy things with thin wooden doors and loose locks that any self respecting toothpick could open in seconds. Anything could, I’m sure. Just not my key.

Having seen that there was no mail inside, I tried to leave. But the tiny helpful guard woman wouldn’t help me. She was asking me stuff in her bizarre Chilean Spanish. I interpreted it to mean “did you manage to see if there was any mail?” I tried to tell her that I had managed to see inside and that there was no mail. This obviously wasn’t good enough for the little freckled samaritan and she soon had the manager there to ask me the exact same questions. I then had to go through it all again, show him my non-working key and wait while he carefully studied it, looking like he was wondering what the hell one of those little shiny things are used for. Finally he handed it back and shrugged his shoulders. Then he said something like “you won’t be able to use it if it doesn’t work.” I thanked him for this profound new knowledge and was finally able to leave, still managing to hide my rising aggression. People just won’t leave you alone here. Everyone is so damn helpful. Stand still for a few seconds and they’re all over you. For some reason that really pisses me off.

A few blocks down from the post office is my new favourite café. I sat down outside for an enormous sandwhich with grilled chicken, guacamole, mayonnaise, tomatoes and a tall glass of freshly made peach juice. A glass so tall in fact, that you need to stand up to drink from it. Everyone turns and looks at you. It’s not a huge glass in itself, it merely has an absurdly long stem. I also ordered an extra sandwich to bring home to the baby. As I sat in the café doing my crossword puzzle, a man came over and asked if I was Dr. Alvarez. I wasn’t. He then said “my mistake” and went inside the café. I first thought this was another strange and pointless scam attempt, but a few seconds later, he came out again with another european-looking man with a beard, to whom he seemed to describe various symptoms in the stomach region. I hoped it wasn’t from the café food.

Back home, I parked myself across the hall from the now awake teenager who was chatting away merrily as usual. I spent the enire day in front of my screen as well. Occasionally we dropped each other little MSN questions, only a few of which were understood by the other. M was brought in a couple of times to convey a message. Which only added to the confusion. The internet connection was bad today and at point it disappeared for a long time. We were both silently checking cables and worrying. In a desperate moment we even had to revert to verbal communication. “Does it work for you?” “No”. “Que horror!” How would I be able to speak with my daughter in the next room with no network connection? It all fixed itself after a while. While I was looking at the cable modem in her room, I noticed that she had saved my morning drawing and message which I had left by the bathroom mirror. This pleased me.

In another surprising wave back on the network, E15 suddenly asked me what I was doing. Or I think maybe she did. I didn’t understand the question even though she made sure to use que instead of ke and things like that. We are now both trying to find a common simple language. I wondered if perhaps she had sent the message to the wrong MSN contact. Still, I answered that I was fixing the contrast on some digital photos from our christmas. She said “ah?”. Was she asking me what I was doing because she wanted me to help her with something if I had the time? Or was she just curious? Or was she asking something completely different? I asked if she wanted to see how I did it and she answered “not right now, but thank you.”

In the evening, I also asked if she wanted me to set up her new e-mail account. She said “no thank you, I’m going out”. I only really needed the computer and not her participation, but I don’t think she fully understood what I said. And I wasn’t able to explain it so that she would see what I meant. So instead I sat down and started wondering if I should ask her where she was going and who she would be with. Was it my business? Would she like that I took an interest and asked? Would she scream at me for prying into her life? I didn’t know what to do. Finally I decided that I wasn’t brave enough to demand a full report. Instead I would ask her to enjoy herself and to be careful.

While I was thinking, she suddenly stood outside my open door and said “well… bye… I’ll see you tomorrow”. At which point I was in a complete state of panic. Seeing my expression, she started laughing and reassured me that she was only going to her girl friend’s house and that she had called her mother and received permission. She seemed very relaxed and happy. I hugged her and said something stupid about staying away from comitting any serious crimes and such.

M came home late and pretended not to know anything about E15 ’s claimed permission to sleep over at anyone’s house. Again I felt lost and worried until she told me that she was only kidding. Most of the time, M and I don’t get eachother’s jokes. We often get quite upset before we are explained that it was not seriously meant. More emotional waves. Down and up. All in all we had one of our nice one-hour days together before M went to sleep. Before that she had a long telephone conversation with someone, through which she seemed to speak a great deal better English than I’ve ever heard her do with me. A bit eerie. Someone more paranoid than me could read all kinds of things into that.

Ahh… christmas… the time for getting on a bumpy old bus in the blazing heat, and driving through run down poor areas with political graffitis and shady characters everywhere in order to get to the pleasant irregated hills on the other side of town. You get off the bus along the dusty road and walk for a while in the burning sun until you get to the fruit stand where you place yourself under their shady sun roof and wait for a car to pick you up.

The last time I was there, a few strangers from the bus grouped together and shared the first taxi that happened along. No words were spoken. I don’t know how they discern which of the other people at the fruit stand also want a taxi. But they do. This time it was M’s mother who collected us in her small car, the make of which I failed to recognize. Being a chauvenist, I instantly became worried when M took her mother’s place at the wheel. Does she know how to drive? She doesn’t have a car. I hadn’t been able to assemble the many different straps into a working seatbelt, so as we went along, I felt that my life could be hanging by a thread. But she handled it very well.

Having grown up in a family of three, this was my first chance to see a huge family at christmas with children running around everywhere with their new gifts. Feeling a bit embarrassed about the huge load of gifts I had spoiled E15 with, I was relieved when she only brought with her the black bag with the red scull and crossbone on it, and the digital camera. The smaller children only seemed to have one gift each. But they were nice things. A small but very playable guitar, a flute, a Harry Potter watch.

I was fed barbequed chicken and sausages which tasted a lot better than the stuff I had attempted to grill at our picnic earlier. I felt that having two breakfasts earlier in the day had probably been a mistake. Still I managed to gobble up quite a bit of food. And of course ice cream. It was a great long table under the fruit trees. Afterwards everyone went for a dip in the pool while I talked to M’s brother, a fellow manicly depressed photographer.

The coffee ghost of injurious comments past is still haunting me and as the others drank theirs, I was told that a better kind was being prepared just for me. I felt stupid. Especially since I have gotten used to the Nescafé now. While the three or four other coffee drinkers enjoyed their communal instant coffee, two different espressos were presented to me in their individual kettles. I drank as much as I could handle, then headed for the bathroom. During the next hour I was approached by three other people offering me coffee. I politely declined. This of course was not accepted and the minute I sat down again, in what I thought would be the saftety of the other side of the house, another cup of espresso was placed in front of me.

Heading home, we stood for a long time in the beautiful evening light while we waited for our bus. I managed to shoot a few photos of E15 without any protest, until I sensed that she had had enough of it. The bus was another one I have been on before, bathing in blue neon light wiht loud taped music and an easily recognizable American flag hanging in the front. The driver had a girl next to him in his tiny stall.

Everyone on that bus looked like they were casted because of their looks. There was a huge man, maybe in his 60s with a fighter’s face and a big tattoo on the underside of his forearm. And some young men with bandanas where moving restlessly among the kissing couples while talking, -M later said, about one of their friends who had just been released after a long jail sentence. I wanted to photograph everything, but the bus was shaking and I was not brave enough. M also asked me to hide my camera and I think she was right. E15 looked terrified by the young criminals and I wished she had wanted to sit next to me. Since it was the last bus it quickly became completely packed with people and the ride seemed to last forever.

As we were walking home from where we had escaped the overcrowded bus, E15 apparently wanted me to install the necessary software for her new iPod. She never asked me directly. She started to, but then changed her mind. M kept saying “tell him in Spanish… he’ll understand if you speak slowly”, but she didn’t want to and quickly walked ahead of us. “She needs help installing that software CD for her iPod”, M said. “But she doesn’t want to ask.” The iPod had originally been a gift from me, but since my parents felt that they didn’t have a present to rival or outdo my digital camera, they persuaded me to let the iPod be from them. Which was fine really, since I had too many nice gifts.

At the apartment, I asked E15 if she wanted me to install the software or if she wanted to do it herself. She handed me the CD, mumbled gracias, and quickly left. I installed and configured everything while E15 complained to her mother that I had occupied her computer. She has the patience of lit firecracker. Afterwards E15 and I were back in our separate rooms while M prepared for sleep in hers. E15 was on the phone for a long time, obviously with a boy. M sort of casually asked who she was talking to while passing E15’s room, but received no reply. It was well after midnight. E15 and I both finished our separate computer typing around 3am. I waved silently to her as I closed the door to my room and she waved back.

Something rarely seen or photographed in nature: The elusive E15 outside, away from her computerized natural habitat and, incredibly, wearing a cheerful green top

Christmas eve, or Noche Buena as it is known here… A time for long late dinners and gift unwrapping. Since the only culinary desire I had for christmas was ice cream, I set out on a shopping trip with M before dinner preparations started. I had wanted to go downtown for some last minute panic-shopping, but M warned me that it would be so chaotic that I would perhaps not even be able to get home. She was right. Already the day before, buses and subway trains had been so full that I was unable to get onto them at my first attempts. And now it would be worse.

It took a while for us to get going. While looking for the tiny plastic christmas tree, M found her aunt’s old portable wind-up phonograph which she cranked up. We listened to some 78s of old dance hits. I especially liked Japonesita performed by Orquestra del Maestro La Calle & G. Carrasco. That was fun for a while by I was anxious to get going so that I could get myself something to eat. I seem to always be hungre here. M said that she was just about ready, and then started to wash clothes which took forever.

We had an excellent lunch in a very down to earth local café. It was great. They have a very flexible menu. You just say what you want to have and they make it. I had a chicken sandwich with mayonnaise, onion and lettuce. A great big thing. He put the mayo on the table so that I could just add as much as I wanted. We also had unsweetened melon juice and coffee. They only had Nescafé, but the good kind the have here that I don’t know from home. Again he left the box on the table so that we could mix our own. I think I have found a new regular café.

We then did out grocery shopping. M got some white wine for cooking and her traditional christmas Cola de Mono (Monkey’s Tail) - a cocoa liqueur-type drink made from aguadiente, milk, coffee and cinnamon. It tastes like a slightly unsuccessful attempt at making homemade Bailey’s. I got my Head & Shouders shampoo and some apple juice. So far I have found three different juice sections in that supermarket. God knows how many more there are. They just love to put similar things in different places here. They fill up half an isle with juice bottles… then some guy probably says “wait a minute… we better put the rest of these somewhere else. I think there is free space in the fish section.” Another slightly odd thing was that my shampoo bottle had an alarm on it which needed meticulous removal once we reached the checkout stand. The good wines are there in the open… but the shampoo… who knows what may happen if that fell into the wrong hands.

The ice cream place was steaming hot, but the product itself seemed well preserved in their coolers. Again I noticed how deeply depressed people who sell ice cream seem here. They just have all the sorrows of the world written in their faces. I got the following flavors of homemade ice cream: Pineapple and raspberry for E15, cinnamon for M, rum raisin, coffee and buttermilk for me. Christmas is not about sharing. It is about hogging more stuff than your family members.

Around dinner time E15 seemed to sink into a deep christmas depression. When asked if she wanted this and that to eat, she didn’t even answer, and just stared at a spot far away. She tried to answer but the words were very heavy. I know exactly how she felt as I was sitting there fighting my own brains attempt at sending me into a catatonic state. It happens, just not very often once you get older. It is like being caught in an undercurrent. You sink. And you want to keep sinking. A bit of distracting hugging and tickling from M and she came back, albeit in a rather mischievous mood. She took M’s beer during dinner, declaring that her mother can’t handle alcohol without becoming uncool things like cheerful, pleasant and outgoing. E15 then quickly downed the beer herself and became cheerful, pleasant and outgoing.

Then presents. E15 was too nervous to do the distribution of gifts so her mother did the job of reading labels and handing them out. The first random one she picked was the digital camera from me, which enabled me to cash in the first of many long hugs. I had strategically seated myself within hugging distance on the same sofa as E15. The other end of it of course. We were soon taking silly posed photos of each gift opening with theatrical frozen expressions of surprise, shock and fear. It was fun. Would be great to have an entire family album consisting in what looks like stills from an extremely cheesy play. But my photos didn’t really turn out well. I was nervous and I still haven’t figured the digital camera out. At the very moment when the others went up the creaky stairs to go to bed, I discovered how to adjust the manual exposure on the camera. Maybe there will be photos next year. I don’t really feel a great sentimental need to document my first christmas with my daughter. I have the memories. And they are better than digital snapshots anyway.

Even the micros are in a christmas spirit

Christmas shopping. Since I already have a secret stash of gifts, I only need a few small extra items in order to have a great number of individually packed little fun gifts. I bought M a DVD since I found the girls watching a movie on a new DVD player in M’s room yesterday. Seems that she bought the DVD player a few days ago without telling me. I also wanted to buy some old Mexican westerns for myself. Singing heroes with pencil line mustaches and huge sombreros. But they didn’t have them with subtitles.

Getting M to tell me what she wanted for christmas was a bit of a chore. The same woman who flatly negotiates with others what to give them, seems to be quite sentimental about gifts for herself. It needs to be a surprise. Of course… all gifts should really be surprises, except gifts for me. I hate opening things and then going into a method acting performance in order to seem genuinly grateful. M is great that way because once she had gotten me a gift, the first thing she did was to quickly tell me about it.

I tried to have lunch at VeraCruz and started off with a nice healthy ice coffee with lots of whipped cream and ice cream. They also have great croissants that aren’t really croissants there, and my favourite drink; the wonderfully titled Café Latte con Leche. But I never got around to any of those today.

As I was waiting for a waitress (they are called that because you wait forever for them to serve you), a man in a suit with an ugly red tie and a small nervous looking girl by his side then came over and said something like that the table was reserved. He kept on talking and I told him that I didn’t understand. This lead to more fast garbled talking. Finally I asked him in English if he wanted me to leave and he said yes. He was behaving very oddly and the waitress, who looked even more anxious than the little girl, was making warning gestures behind his back. I took my stuff and left, stopping by inside to pay for my ice coffee. Another waitress told me that the man in the suit and the girl were trying to rob me. I wonder what the object of this con is. Asking a guest to leave, there isn’t really much left to steal once he is gone. Maybe they collect napkins or something.

After my aborted lunch at VeraCruz, I started for home, but my feet took me to The Coffee Factory instead, with it’s mostly empty tables, safely inside where there are no evil thieves at work. The relaxed atmosphere allows for more time for waitress-flirting, thinking and writing. I can also see straight into the different buses outside and determine when they are starting to get crowded and it is time to leave before there will be standing room only.

The city is hotter and more hectic today than usualy. It feels like the body heat of countless frantic shoppers is raising the temperature a few notches. Everywhere pleople are carrying big boxes of cheesy things. Karaoke-machines, twinkling christmas tree lights and various electrodomesticos with brand names I have never heard of. I have myself been tempted to buy a small electric tabletop oven for making small pizzas, pies and warm sandwiches. You can get a good one for $50, which seems reasonable enough. The problem is that there is no free space whatsoever in M’s overfilled kitchen.

M announced that we were going to her best friends house in the afternoon (=evening). This was fine by me since I felt like seing something new and since she assured me that it was a very beautiful old neighborhood with plenty of things to photograph. A bit out of character, she also said that we would take a taxi which would be more convenient for me and all my camera gear. This was my third trip in a taxi here. M has said that I must never ever take a taxi alone because they will drive me all over town and bump up the charges. Still, even if they did, it couldn’t be too expensive. Taxis here are so cheap that if you are three people, it will cost less than taking the bus.

And it really was a beautiful neighborhood. I never did get to take more than one photo with the big camera since there was so much to see that I simply didn’t know where to begin. Compared to where we live, everything was very quiet even though this was only five minutes away from downtown. Again I was surprised to see that such an oldfashioned untouched oasis could exist so close to the madness of the inner city. The streets were a bit like those in the Mexican western movies I didn’t buy today. Low houses with ornamented metal bars in front of the windows. handpainted signs everywhere.

The house we visited was incredible. Tall ceilings, lots of big rooms and a big atrium garden in the middle of it with climbing grapevines and tobacco plants growing high as small trees. Everything was perfect about that house. The space, the tranquility… things like having two big refrigerators outside instead of in the kitchen. Window walls to the garden. And some genuinely nice people. E15 of course, wouldn’t come. Better to stay at home and watch anime DVDs. She has an enormous collection of movies that she has up until now only been able to see on her tiny old computer screen. Now with the new DVD player, she can see them on the tv.

After eating his food, I have to admit that the man of that house can cook a great deal better than me. There were three kinds of pizza, something I haven’t eaten in over four years since once I start, I find it very difficult not having pizza every day. But I couldn’t very well say no after all the trouble he must have gone through to make all of that food. I digged in pizza with palmitos, which is a combination that works very well.

I also learned that this was the emergency backup house M had arranged for me to stay in if everything went really bad between E15 and me. When she originally told me about that plan, the people were described as a very old couple who don’t speak a word of English. I suppose that what she meant was a couple that were really old friends of hers who only speak some English.

I have gotten quite good in M’lish lately and there are fewer misunderstandings which may lead to arguments. For instance “the maid will go at 4″ means “the maid will arrive at 4″. “She” means “he” and “he” means “she”. Some things are still hazy, such as why an SMS question like “will you work late today?” is answered by “thank you very much!” I’m sure it will all make sense eventually.

My new friends showed me the spare room and assured me that I could still come and stay with them whenever I wanted. In Norway such a statement would have been made without actually expecting the other party to invade your house. But here they really mean things like that. Maybe I should spend a few days there. Relax in the garden. Learn to cook palmito pizza.

The kitchen

The preparation of herbal tea

A palmito pizza in the atrium garden

Small photos: 1. A croissant according to Café VeraCruz. 2. An old and beautiful neighborhood. 3. An outside garden inside. 4. Candles” />

Had a very spastic day today. Started off by scratching the surface of my beautiful new guitar. Things like that depress me greatly. It would look good if it was really old and full of scratches, but a completely new shiny wooden surface with one ugly dent is horrible. Now I need to have a hundred more little accidents. One lonely little blemish just won’t do. Everything has gone slightly wrong today. All day I’ve been bumping into things and nearly breaking stuff. I completely screwed up dinner to the point where some of it wasn’t even edible. Dropped some of it on the floor too.

Still I was in a pretty good mood thinking about the weekend with no school or plans whatsoever. In class I’m running out of angles to attack the dirty coffee cups from. Each morning, looking sceptically at the smudges along the edge, I turn the cup a couple of degrees further than the previous day. Are those my lip marks? Who can tell for sure. Did I wear lipstick in class yesterday? I may have, I don’t remember.

E15 ended school today too. She will be free until March and hopefully have a little less pressure looming over her. When she came home today she just flopped down on her bed and fell asleep for several hours. I spent a good part of the day horisontally as well. Again only half asleep through the wind-generated racket of rattling windows and shaking doors and M’s infernal wooden wind-chimes. The wind only blows during the afternoon here, which feels a bit odd. It just stops dead about five minutes after I give up trying to sleep and get up.

During the day you need to keep the curtains drawn to prevent flies from coming in. But like the wind, the flies stop attacking in the evening. Chilean flies are also very easy to get rid of. They don’t move chaotically, like the European housfly. Instead they hover, move a bit to the side, hover some more, etc. To get rid of them you need to open the window, then move through the room from the other side while waving your arms. The flies will not whiz around you but stay in front of you the whole time as you move towards the window. When there s no more room in front of them, they fly out.

Another great piece of news is that the maid is coming in for the last time tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to life without her around constantly. There will be peace and quiet everywhere. No vacuum cleaners will harass me as I take my naps. Life will be good. We will be a happily united family, like in The Sound of Music. Instead of being The Crows, all depressed and dressed in black, we will be the von Trapps, singing merrily as we try to figure out how to keep a bathtub clean without a maid.

The Micros are breaking down. The city’s yellow buses are showing signs of decay. Every day you see a bus standing still with a pair of feet sticking out from under it. Yesterday one had broken down just on the corner where I usually stand to flag down my ride to classes. All the other buses flew by in the outside lane and it took a while to persuade one to stop. Today my bus started making strange sounds and then just died in the exact spot where there is only one lane to feed traffic onto Providencia, one of the busiest downtown streets. The driver had to give everyone their money back. I walked down the street to the nearest traffic light to jump on another bus when the light turned red. There is a technique to these things. How to jump on and off moving buses. Always be sure to have change… don’t step on the guitar player’s feet as you move towards the back of the bus.

I have reached level one or two in the art of Micro commuting. I know how to pick a bus which is likely to have a free seat, and I know that the best way of keeping your seat when a woman walks by is to quickly pretend to read or fall asleep. That’s what everyone does. Always choose a window seat when possible. Then it is more natural for the person sitting next to you to give up his seat to one of these arrogant cows. The higher level passengers are able to do things like putting on their makeup, unaffected by the ferocious shaking. At the top of the pyramid you find the people who have reached Micro nirvana; the salesmen and musicians who are able to stand still through even the sharpest turn without holding on to anything, while playing an instrument, singing, collecting change and pointing out free seats to new passengers.

And then there are the Sapos (frogs). The frogs are men who keep track of all buses moving through an area and who feed this information to passing drivers. How long since the last bus to Salvador passed? Was it full? The drivers either slow down as they pass a frog standing in the middle of the busy street, to get their info through the window. Or they just whiz by and get updated by quick hand signals. They then either slow down or speed up in order to score as many passengers as possible. The frogs are paid small coins and work all day on their feet. They are self-employed and not organized in any union. It is a hard life and nothing is sadder than an old frog, too slow to safely dodge the passing cars.

E15 got along extremely well today. Several words were exchanged… “How are you?” “Fine.” “Do you want anything to eat?” “No thank you.” She was in a good mood. She even managed an english word; “money”, bless her, when she needed busfare. The maid came in much later than expected so I had access to the washing machine. I could also bribe the kid with food when she changed her mind about eating half an hour after I had asked if she wanted anything. She wasn’t quite up to the task of asking me directly to prepare something, so she called her mother and then handed the phone silently to me.

M then asked me to prepare some of the instant pasta she had bought earlier. I on the other hand, had brought home a delicious sandwich made by a very nice and extremely patient woman named Olga. I get jealous when other people feed my baby and so I was very happy to make it home and into the kitchen before the maid arrived. I think M is also jealous since E15 still seems to prefer my cooking to her mothers’, allthough she is starting to worry that if she continues to eat the things I make, she will be fat. But today I was in charge. No stupid instant pasta would be served on my watch.

There are changes going on. Today E15 took down all the old cute childish posters of cats and such from the walls of her room. Something new will probably appear soon. I wonder what it will be. For now the walls remain blank and secretive about what the newest phase is. Will there be posters of boys? Photos of herself? Or will she paint the walls black, making them nice and gloomy. Who knows. I have to say that watching those white walls made me a bit tempted to attack them with some fingerpaint or something. That would be fun.

When the maid arrived she quickly marked her territory by starting various elaborate cleaning projects in ever room of the house. She somehow always manages to be in the room I try to use. I go to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich, and she is in there washing dishes and using the kitchen counter. I try to go to any of the two bathrooms, and she is there as well, cleaning the bowl. Today I gave up and evacuated. My idea was to go to the huge supermarket and fill the refrigerator with fresh food. For days I have been eating hard old bread since M still refuses me to buy any new until all the stale old pieces are eaten. I almost broke a tooth on a fossilized Hallulla this morning. But during the afternoon, while the kitchen was all mine, I threw all the old bread into the garbage and went out with the bag just to cover my tracks.

I never got to the supermarket. Instead I got lost and tried to ask for directions. Which of course didn’t work. The guy just wouldn’t answer. I looked around for other potential candidates, but everyone I passed seemed unsuitable. You just can’t ask anybody for directions here. You need to find someone who looks like they have some sort of connection to the outside world, such as a foreign band t-shirt or a skateboard. I gave up and took the Metro back home. I did stop by at another smaller supermarket and got the most basic things, but my plans for more elaborate dinners were foiled.

I felt very tired and frustrated today. M has been asking me if I want to join her mother and her on their day trip to Valparaiso next week. I said I would rather stay at home and get some things done. I really need a restful day with no noisy women buzzing around me. Of course M didn’t accept that. What started with “you can come if you want to” quickly became “please… please… why can’t you do me this one favor”. The result was of course that I childishly went from maybe not to absolutely not. I asked her flat out not to pressure me and she responded by saying that if I didn’t want to come then they would have to cancel the trip and stay at home. She wouldn’t get to see her mother and would have to work all day in the office she hates. No pressure. My relationship with M is decaying proportionally with how my relationship with E15 improves. I think we are both a bit tired and aggressive in the heat.

The buses are breaking down

I’ve had a few almost-communicating moments with E15 these last few days. Once when I was showing off my t-shirt folding talents to M and again when I showed her my arcade game collection. M pressured E15 to come and have a look on both occasions. Embarrassed I protested, saying that I was sure the kid would think it was pretty lame. E15 also protested, saying that she couldn’t care less, but in the end her curiosity got the better of her and she had a quick look. Then she said something like “tsk, how stupid”. But I could tell that she was really interested. Especially in the arcade games. She refuses to play them on my computer, but she badly wants them installed on hers. And she knows that there is only one person who can do that. It bothers her.

We also have little moments when she is teasing her mother about something or being a mañosa (a stubborn cry-baby) in order to drive M crazy, or when I am doing the same thing. We both sneak a short look at each other, each of us unsuccessfully trying to hide a smile. She knows exactly how I feel when M is nagging me about something, as do I when E15 is on the receiving end. I don’t know how to explain it but there are moments that suddenly seem very absurd and funny to me and it’s hard not to laugh. E15 gets the joke. And vice versa. I know that she also feels embarrassed by the idea of saying something to me using her mother as an interpreter. And I feel the same way.

Even though she is a stranger, I do feel that I understand the part of her that is like me. At the picnic this weekend I wandered around for a while thinking, not wanting to sit with the others. M wanted me to sit with them but I didn’t feel like it. She asked why and I couldn’t put it into words exactly. I was told later that E15’s teacher was a bit freaked out by my appearance when I zoomed out because E15 goes into the same state and nobody knows what’s going on in the kids mind at those times. I know. I don’t know why she will act like an outsider at times, because I don’t know why I want to. But I do know what it feels like.

Today the plan was to go to a birthday party for one of M’s friends, a woman I have met a few times already. I spent hours trying to track down a good CD for her as a gift. I had called M to inquire about the birthday girl’s taste in music and she said she had to think for a while. A while later she called me back and said that her friend wanted a CD with African music. I understood from the conversation that M had simply called the woman and asked what CD she wanted, which kind of ruined the surprise element of it all. Still… I do know a few good names in African music since I have plenty of LPs from that part of the world at home.

M gave me directions to a small music store across the street from the huge shopping center Paris. After having circled the block several times I called M and asked if she could be more specific. Since Paris fills an entire city block, there were 4 streets to choose from. M then revealed that the store was in fact inside another huge shopping center across the street from Paris. Typical M directions. Things would perhaps have been easier if she had just started by saying that. Especially since we have been to that perticular record shop together and I know where it is. I could tell that this was going to be an annoyed as hell by M-day.

The record store didn’t have any African music at all, even though M said they had a great selection. After another unsuccessful attempt, I ended up going to Billboard, a small expensive shop with imported music from all over the world. Afterwards I headed home to try and download and install some arcade games on E15’s computer while she was out. That took a few hours and I had to rush out afterwards in order not to be late. “I’ll meet you at Tobalaba”, M had said. Fine. I go by that Metro station almost every day, so finding it wouldn’t be a problem.

I felt great. I had a good gift, was wearing fresh clothes and my cool sunglasses. In Santiago you can wear your shades in the subway underground without being looked at like an idiot. Everyone wears sunglasses in the Metro. I don’t know if it’s too many cheesy action movies, machismo or what. In any case, it’s an opportunity to look silly and feel cool at the same time. And I felt very cool and extroverted and positive.

At Tobalaba I stood waiting for a while before calling M. “I’m 5 minutes away”, she said. Some 35 minutes later I called her again. By then my great mood was slowly slipping away from me. I tried to hold on to it, but my head was filling up with all of M’s bad habits. They were piling up on top of each other in there, looking for a fight. I swear… if women could just stop keeping men waiting and also shut up from time to time, there wouldn’t be any men being unfaithful, going on drunken binges or being abusive. Just those two small things.

After a long time, M finally answered the phone and said that she was there. “Where was I? Had I perhaps gone to the wrong Metro station?” I was starting to get furious. Over my head was a huge red fluorescent subway sign that said Tobalaba. Obviously she was going to turn this around and make me look like the idiot.

Another 15 minutes later, she showed up saying that I was at the wrong subway exit. Even though I had shown up first and told her which exit I was waiting by. I just calmly said that maybe she could call me in the future when she was almost an hour late so that I could find a café or something to wait in. For hours after this comment, M dropped small grumpy lines about how I sure was different than she had thought. That I had always seemed so calm and reasonable and that this was why she had “chosen me”. I AM FUCKING CALM, I thought. But I said nothing. M just doesn’t accept critisism. I’m trying not to give any, since I know it doesn’t work and also since I am living in her house.

We then met up with a very angry E15 who had also waited for almost an hour in another completely wrong, but probably correct location. We went to the restaurant and everyone ordered except me who was completely ignored by the waiter. He took orders from every person at the table, first food then drinks. On each round he just simply skipped me. I was holding my hand up, looking at him… saying things. Not even a look. Like with dogs, Chileans needs you to talk sternly to them, raise your voice and possibly argue a little. If not they do not respect you. How can you eat in their restaurant if you are not a real man? Finally I had to ask the woman sitting next to me to order two dinners and two bottles of juice for herself and then give me half of it. Which she did. She was a very nice woman except that she kept spitting on me while she talked. Each time a hand shot out towards me to wipe off my jacket or shirt.

In a strange turn of events, E15 suddenly started involving me in the conversation. M was letting her have a few sips from her beer and I think this was loosening the tense girl up. She was goofing off and jokingly pushing limits, hoping to shock us in various ways. This included opening her bag and showing M an empty cigarette pack she had in there and saying that she was not going to return from her upcoming schooltrip to Brazil. She tried everything her naive little mind could come up with… being a lesbian and having tons of boyfriends. Mature well thought-through things like that.

When she finally spoke directly to me, she said those sweet innocent first words a father remembers for the rest of his life; She told me that she was a nazi. Then she said that she had a knife and that she and her nazi friends were going to kill some leftie punks this weekend. It was all becoming more embarrassing than funny. “Don’t leave any fingerprints”, I said. It was the best I could come up with. Sometimes I think the girl shows signs of some kind of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But there are no such terms in use here. If you don’t do well in school you are simply lazy, or more commonly it’s the teacher’s fault. E15 has already changed schools because the teacher wasn’t good enough. I have tried asking M about it but she becomes as defensive as when I criticize her.

Going home, the three of us really together for the first time, the girls were doing some kind of synchronized air-swimming act in the subway. The train didn’t leave the station right away. There was a technical problem. We sat there in our orange plastic seats, smiling at their coordinated dance silliness for a long long time before we finally pulled away from Tobalaba.

Photo added later: Everyone wears sunglasses in the Metro

Sunday quietly tip-toed past me while I slept. In the morning I had gone to the market with M and gotten myself a nice red skin color. It was pink before. I think the red works better with my black attire. Pale nordic skin doesn’t seem to tan well in this country. You go from white to red and then back to white again. M said that this is the way the sun here works. In Norway I would have had a nice tan by now if I spent this much time in the summer sun. Eventually, I suspect some of the color will persevere. And yet E15 who has been spending all of her life in this region, remains perfectly pale. M has been coating the girl in SPF 45 for most of her life and now the sun doesn’t affect her anymore, or so M claims. When they returned from their week at the beach, M was the color of a coconut. E15 too, only the inside of a coconut rather than the shell.

M bought carrots and some other vegetables. I hope I don’t have to eat them. After the trip to the market, my eyes refused to stay open and I had a little 4 hour nap in my room, only half asleep it seemed, as the wind rattled the metal window frame and even the closed door to my cell. It was hot. Throughout the evening, as I tried to stand up, I soon lapsed back down onto the nearest chair or sofa. The plan was to use this rare day off to do some photography, a bit of Spanish studying and perhaps even write the christmas cards that keep eluding me. But it never happened. While the girls enjoyed a meal of once, some kind of 11pm lunch they have sometimes instead of dinner, I dozed off again, undisturbed by their playful arguing and friendly exchange of insults.

I awoke Monday morning feeling rested and ready for another week. Or almost ready. I have become quite tired of taking the same route to the Spanish institute in the morning. The classes seem longer and longer and I feel that the more of them I take, the less Spanish I understand. Each morning I quickly review old entries in my notebooks and now the oldest pages are all beginning to look new to me. Day by day I grow more confused. I have to find excuses to prevent M to try helping me, as she tends to take everything the teacher has said and dismiss it as nonsense. Being a teacher herself, I think she is very jealous of the fact that I am turning to another woman for answers.

Coming back home after classes, I found E15’s room half-full of teenagers studying for an exam. For those who aren’t up to date, modern study-techniques include loud music, laughing and a bit of running in and out of the room while making a great deal of noise. More or less the same as in previous generations, except for the background computer gaming and chatroom messages. I think M expected me to be some sort of stern father figure, preventing boys from putting their hands on our baby and stuff like that. I don’t know. Frankly, I didn’t have any girls in my room until well after I moved away from home, so I don’t know how much cause for concern there is. I suppose that if they are dead set on misbehaving, they have a huge city full of other places they could go.

After a while it started to become clear to me that they were all actually trying to study, except for E15 who kept going back to the chat and turning on various loud songs as the others were reading and asking each other questions from the text. I kept wondering if I should go in and say something if things got a bit out of hand. But what? I was also nervous about how they would all behave when the maid went home. I figured that if I said something and E15 decided to confront me to show off to her friends, I wouldn’t really be able to do very much. Ask the others to go home? Would they even understand what I said? I waited.

Eventually they left. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went somewhere else to do some actual studying. Exams weigh so heavily here that even if you get the worst grades possible in every subject, you can still make up for it all by performing well on an exam. And I have yet to see E15 do anything school related for more than three or four minutes. In Chile, even the guys who pack your groceries at the supermarket have a high school diploma. The ones who don’t are beggars and street venders. It sounds a bit black and white, but my understanding is that there is no welfare or anything like that to lean on. Quite frankly I think that it’s up to her to choose her priorities. How important is it to be cool and nonchalant in front of her peers. Important enough to flunk every subject? I can’t just waltz in here after all these years and lock her in her room with some books. In any case, you cannot force someone to learn if they don’t want to. Or maybe you can. I don’t know, that’s the problem.

After everyone left it became very quiet. Hours went by. I was in my room and E15 in hers. At one point I walked by her door and she turned around and we looked at each other for maybe two seconds. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She turned back to the computer and I walked on. I wanted to ask her if she would like to do something… play a game… watch a movie. Even though I knew the answer would be no, I wanted to ask. But for some reason I couldn’t. A little later she was watching a movie on her computer. It was hard to make out what was said at first, but I recognized the dialogue from somewhere. It sounded eerily familiar on more than one level:

“After that night, I didn’t speak to my father again for three years.”

and just after that:

“The truth is, I didn’t see anything of myself in my father, and I don’t think he saw anything of himself in me. We were like strangers who knew each other very well.”

I wanted to go to her door and ask if it was the movie Big Fish, which I had held in my hand only yesterday at the market, wondering if I should buy it or not. Finally, even though I was close enough to see her screen and hear the words clearly when sitting at my desk, I sent her an MSN message instead of talking directly to her, asking simply “Is that movie called “Big Fish?” She simply answered yes. The end.

Vegetable market and girl in bikini

Saturday was the day of the big picnic with a few of E15’s school friends and their parents. We carried a great amount of food, drink and kitchy plastic plates and utensils downstairs to the parkinglot where we then stood waiting for one of the other parents to pick us up. For a while M disappeared to buy bread. There is a tiny kiosk in the parkinglot where they sell groceries and fresh vegetables and bread. It is always open. E15 clearly didn’t want to stand waiting next to me, so she started wandering off, further and further away. When the other parent finally arrived, the girl was one block away and had to dash back in her strange running style and asmathic breath.

At the park, we had to pay to get in, which ensured us a day without beggars and other undesirable elements. It was a big park packed with people. The idea was that we would arrive early and pick out a good spot before the others arrived. But there didn’t seem to be any benches left. In a typical M moment, she suddenly just took off, leaving us behind to wonder what was going on. She does have a way of staying in control by giving others a minimum amount of information. That way we have no choice but to do things her way. Finally she called E15 on her cellphone and then she took off without saying anything, in long strides. I ran after her. M had found a free bench.

I wanted to get the barbecue going before any other males showed up and started interfering. The only problem was that the pieces of coal were huge and there was nothing proper to light it with. They don’t sell any fuel for barbecuing here. I had managed to track down a tube of thick napalm-like paste which was supposed to make anything burn. It didn’t, even though there was a picture on the label of a barbecue burning merrily. I was adding dabs of the stuff until there was no more left, but the damn coals just wouldn’t burn . Not even when I tried poking them with a nice stick I had found on the ground.

After a while Pablito, the former boyscout came and fixed it all with an elaborate system of folded napkins and such. We also tried the normal Chilean system which is to put the entire bag of coal onto the grill, paper wrapping and all and then set that on fire. It worked surprisingly well with Pablito waving a plastic lid in front of the fire to feed it air. I could only stand by watching with my useless pathetic stick of wood and my wounded male ego. I had lost control of the fire to one of the younger males of the tribe. My time as a picnic alpha male was over before it had begun. I was in a bad mood for hours after that.

More and more people arrived. Both in our group and at the surrounding bences. Next to us was a large group of typical young Chileans, heavily tattooed and dressed in black. They put up a banner saying Los Satanas and set up a play area for their children close by. I recognized a fat guy with a Ramones t-shirt I had seen in the supermarket the evening before on the other side of town. This was the third time I have seen him in different places. I don’t know what’s more scary… the fact that I keep bumping into a guy who is one of these Satanas, or the fact that he never changes his t-shirt.

The next few hours was true hell as countless mothers around me debated their kids progress in school. I was bored almost to tears. For a while I tried talking a walk, but there were people everywhere and I couldn’t get very far without wandering through someones family outing. I was also worried that the armed guards would take interest in me if I strayed too far from my bench, so I headed back. I tried going to the public bathroom, which was another small nightmare. I’m too shy to stand next to a bunch of strangers so I went into one of the stalls, but the walls only reached up to my elbows. A bunch of kids started collecting next to the stall. They were staring and laughing at the gringo who was standing in a stall to take a leak. It seemed like forever before I was able to achieve anything.

Back at our bench the women still talked. And talked. M more than the others. She wanted me to eat the turkey sausages she had bought instead of the ones I had bought for myself. Why? I threw them all on the barbecue. E15 was on the grass with her friends for most of the time. Suddenly she was standing in front of me, smiling and offering me a bite of her empanada, containing dead cows which I don’t eat. I was taken a bit by surprise and said I didn’t want any. Afterwards I thought that this had been a tactical mistake. So be it. Too late now. Maybe there will be other bonding empanada moments.

A strange hyperactive man came over and asked if they could use the barbecue after us. Which was fine. For some reason he knew my name and where I came from when he arrived, even nobody had seen him before. He must have talked with someone from our party on the way over. He turned out to be… not very surprising… another Chilean black metal guitarist, who had been to Sweden once on tour. He kept shouting things like “rock ‘n roll.. yeah!” Which of course was amusing.

With him was a quiet American who looked more military than metal. Conservative clothes, short hair, very tall. Something very odd about those two very different people and they way they wanted to make contact. The yank owns a small shop near Providencia that caters to various international customers of some distinction. A very friendly and intelligent man. He has lived in various South American countries and speaks better Spanish than most of the locals here. M took one look at him and said that he belonged to a certain well know intelligence organization, for sure. My only problem with that statement is that it seems unlikely that they would have placed a man here who looks that much like an operative. It would just be too obvious.

A while later I was back surrounded by women talking about their kids in a language I don’t speak. M seemed set on staying for a good while longer. So I split. I hitched a ride with one of the ladies and managed to navigate her car all the way home without speaking more than a few single words in Spanish. Having been in that awful park all day, I was eager to get back to a civilized bathroom. Afterwards I went out to buy my weekly ice cream. On the way to buying the ice cream, I had a ice cream-coffee just to be on the safe side. Sometimes the ice creams you buy in the supermarkets are completely unedible and Saturday is my ice cream day, so I wasn’t about to take any chances. I was served my tall calorie bomb by a deeply depressed-looking overweight girl with a nametag that said Macarena. Which got me back in a good mood, naturally. There are worse things than a sunny day filled with parenting, ice cream and international espionage.

I made M buy things in different colors instead of just one color for everything

Started the day by redoing the network cabling from E15’s room to mine. It is now completely invisible. There are still plenty of cables lying across the badly fitted carpeting but at least mine is discreetly hidden. This way, if she trips and breaks any bones, it will not be my fault. A solution everyone is happy with, I’m sure. Of course, I still need to go into her room to turn her computer on in order to use mine, but at least I’m not occupying it and filling it with my threatening presence.

For a while I enjoyed the relative quietness of the house with no noisy women around, and then I set out to find the Pueblito Los Dominicos, which is another touristy market of hand made things. I made it as far as the closest Metro station before realizing that I had forgotten my map at home. I could have asked someone, but I was standing by that menagerie of highways on top of highways and I really just wanted to get out. Two competing taxi businesses where set up on oposite sides of the street and they were both aggressively trying to recruit customers by attempting to shout louder than the traffic. What a nightmare.

I turned around and went back into the Metro station instead. The next thing on my list was to find a second hand bookstore I have been recommended for buying a new dictionary, since E15 doesn’t want me to use hers. Not that she has any use for a Norwegian-Spanish dictionary. It’s just… hers. Books are heavily taxed here and very expensive. Would help to find a second hand one. I can afford a new one but spending money on books is no fun.

Halfway to the station close to the bookstore, I changed my mind and decided to have lunch in one of my regular places instead. I got off the Metro, went to the café and sat for twenty minutes without being able to attract a waitress. Around me everyone were having the tasty lunch special I wanted. I gave up and left.

Feeling terribly sorry for myself, I went to the place where I had the amusing Cappuccino earlier, thinking that a little sugar might cheer me up. They also had a big selection of sandwiches so I ordered a ham and egg one to start off with. It arrived and was so bland and dry that it was like eating a handful of sand. A raw egg has more flavor. My mood was darkening. Then the Cappuccino, which today was totally different. No glass of strawberry juice. No toffee. But to compensate there was a small chocolate ornament on top of it. It also had a nice silver cocktail parasol. In a Chilean comedy moment, the waiter placed a dispenser with sugar next to it with a flamboyant hand movement.

As I sat there, I realized that I had also forgotten the christmas cards I was going to write and send, my guide book that I was planning to finally have a look at and the addresses for the christmas cards. This prevented me from buying new ones. Sometimes it’s a miracle that I make it home. Back at the apartment, the maid was vacuuming the same exact piece of carpet right outside my door that she did yesterday. I closed the door and called my parents, which meant the usual discussion with my father who wants to know why I don’t call home every day and why I won’t change my ticket and come home. Plenty of waiting for M to appear as we were supposed to go grocery shopping in the afternoon.

M came home around 6pm, which proved my suspicion that her definition of “afternoon” somewhat differs from mine. After a while we finally got going and spent around an hour and a half in yet another huge supermarket trying to find the things needed for a barbeque M has decided that I am to go to tomorrow. We have started to argue about little unimportant things, just like real married couples do. She feels the need to decide what kind of sausages I will buy, even though she is a vegitarian and doesn’t eat dead pigs herself. I tend to complain a lot about about little things, such as spending 90 minutes buying food while the nice evening photo light outside fades away.

Back at the ranch, we were both in the kitchen trying to hog the best casseroles and pans for our respective dinners. I made M inquire if E15 wanted any sausages or not, but the girl didn’t feel like dignifying her with an answer. So I cooked my Chorizos the way I wanted, pooring in a lot of spices. I also cooked the Champignons M didn’t want to let me buy and enjoyed a nice hot dinner. Finally something with taste. I started to feel in a better mood.

While we ate, E15 who was making another rare appearance at the dinner table, told some story about cops and guns and a crashing ambulance and someone telling her that it was dangerous and that she couldn’t be there. The rest I didn’t get. It was a long manically narrated story. I really don’t understand much of these womens weird accents and slang. M for instance, insists that she speaks a very proper classical Spanish, but I’m starting to suspect that it’s closer to the garbled working class slang she herself looks so down upon.

I was studying E15 in one of her moments of being unaffected by my presence. Her constant fidgeting and gestures. Her ever shaking hands clawing and clutching at the tablecloth. I think the girl is hyperactive or something. Whatever it is, she sure is behaving strangely. Not that I am all that mainstreem myself, I suppose.

After dinner, M didn’t yell at E15 to get off her computer, which can only mean that the poor tired woman was asleep in her room. E15 was playing some music that for once didn’t sound like someone being raped by a large unlubricated chainsaw. I sent her an MSN message saying that I liked it. And I said goodnight. She said goodnight back. Networks are great. All families should have them. Much easier than real human interaction. It turned out to be a good day after all. All I missed was another one of those Cappuccinos to devour before I went to bed.

Here it is. The Chilean Cappuccino. Notice the extra sugar behind it and the ever present salt in the far background

M came home late last night with the perfect gift for a man; a long network cable. As soon as E15 left for school this morning, I ran into her room and started to hide the cable discreetly along the walls. This went well until I got to the door and realized that I needed to stretch it across the carpet to get to the other side. I have now made a perfect tripwire for her to stumble on in the dark. Her door probably won’t close either. I forgot to check that. I will probably have to figure out something else tomorrow.

My Spanish class went extremely bad today. I couldn’t remember anything whatsoever. I kept sneeking peeks at the clock on the wall. My teacher always catches me when I do that. She kept feeding me coffee. Each time she had to go out of the classroom to get something, she came back with another cup. But my brain just wouldn’t start. Finally she gave up and we just spoke English for the remaining time. But something good came from it since she possesses the greatest secret in Santiago; how to predict where the buses go. It seems that there is a schedule after all, just not an official one. And the schedule has been in my bag all along since it is in the guidebook M gave me. After almost a month, I still haven’t been able to calm down enough to sit down and look at the guidebook. But theoretically I should now be able to go anywhere in the city. A very scary thought. Where would I go?

I did finally buy a guitar today, after spending maybe an hour and a half in a store, preventing the poor guy from going to lunch. They close some stores, such as music stores at noon or one 0′clock and then reopen after a long lunch and stay open until nine in the evening. It is not a siesta or anything like that. They just need long lunches with a workday of over twelve hours. I forgot about the lunch breaks and the man never said anything. Before I found the guitar I wanted, I had done the usual route to the more hip instrument stores where they have some of the most obnoxious salesmen on the planet. At each place I felt uneasy and quickly moved on to the next. But once I found the quiet store with the nice guitar, I completely forgot about time.

This guitar is a rarety in Santiago. It is an acoustic steel-string guitar made in Canada, and it does not have a built in michrophone and equalizer. I want as much quality wood and resonance for my money and not some volume knobs I’ll never use. They don’t normally sell completely acoustic guitars with steel strings here. They all come with michrophones and preamps and whatnot. In fact, steel string guitars are generally referred to electroacoustic guitars here. They are also called folk guitars. If you say steel strings, they don’t understand what you mean. Similarly, nylon string guitars are called plastic string guitars or just acoustic guitars.

I carried it proudly home, but didn’t dare to use it, as the house was full of women. One of which was unusually bitchy today and did little else than to demand food, complain and behave badly towards her mother, who had the audacity to offer to help with difficult homework. I feel a bit badly towards the maid who is being treated like a slave by certain young elements. Me, I still keep a low profile and won’t say anything. Since I’m more a guest than part of the family, it isn’t my place to dictate behavior. But I’m sure there is some sort of confrontation looming on the horizon.

Also today, I had another nice unhealthy fried chicken with a glass of melon juice at one of the old diners. I felt like I was in a movie and didn’t want to leave. After eating I just sat there for a long time, taking in the faded beauty of the waitress and the locale. A man was cooking huge hamburgers covered in mayonese behind the lunch counter, taking less than a minute to prepare each dish. In the corner, a tv set was playing a very dramatic soap opera starring a blond girl and a man in a cowboy hat. I asked if I could photograph the place, but the owner wasn’t in and the waitress didn’t dare to make a decision without asking him. So I only stole a quick snapshot which didn’t look like the actual place at all.

Had another surreal encounter with Chilean logic today when I tried to buy a very small and reasonable Hallulla with ham and cheese for lunch at a small bakery. The Hallullas were lying on the counter just in front of me, so I pointed to them and asked for one by name. The lady, perhaps remembering my earlier Empanada purchase of last week, went to the window of the store and found a big Empanada with ham and cheese instead. I said no… no Empanada, and repeated my pointing and request for the small Hallulla. It was about two inches below my finger. She gestured ferociously and mumbled something fast and incomprehendable. Then she put the Empanada into the microwave oven.

I probably should have left by then and made some reference to her sexual preferences and a donkey, but instead I silently paid for my huge greasy Empanada, got my usual meticulously hand-written receit and left. You would think that it would be possible to buy things by pointing or picking them up and saying simple things like one please, but that doesn’t work here. Again I have confirmed that Chileans have no talent for putting two and two together in situations like this. You don’t automatically get what you ask for. In order to get what you want, an argument is needed. And I am always too surprised and lacking in vocabulary to have one.

Today I was too tired to do much of anything. I had coffee at the place where a woman had been staring at me a few days ago. I was sitting in the exact same chair, quite by chance since it is a huge place and you are assigned seats. Another woman, this one maybe in her 60s was sitting in the same sofa the staring woman had been in. Another starer. This one didn’t even blink. She just stared continuously for five minutes without blinking once. Maybe the smoking section of Gatsby is a hangout for gigolos. The way I have been spending money, this could provide a possible way to make some new cash. I need to arm myself with some pick-up lines. ¿Tienes Fuego, Señorita? Do you have a light? That’s a hot looking walker you have there.

I went for a walk along the lovely Mapocho river. Then home. Back at the apartment, I tried to sleep but couldn’t. The maid was vacuming just outside my door and those burning raccoon eyes of the woman at the café kept haunting me. No one else was home all day and I was too tired to read or write anything. E15 eventually showed up, just sort of leered at me coldly and disappeared into her room. She was probably having a bad day. I thought about asking why, but her look had told me to leave her alone. I don’t know her well enough to pry into her personal life anyway.

I’m finding it hard remembering who I am, or was until a month ago. How did I use to kill time at home? Do I have hobbies? What does someone like me I enjoy doing? I can’t think of anything except that I know I watched an insane amount of movies back home. Is that really all? Didn’t I do anything? I can’t remember doing anything special. How much have I really changed in this short time? And will it be permanent? Did I really never do any housework before? Ever? How weird. Memories of myself are fading and I’m not sure what to replace them with. I still feel out of place here and at the same time the thought of home and it being winter there seems very abstract. I feel I need to do something recreational here. But I never have any free time. And still I’m bored.

The lovely Telefónica building next to Rio Mapocho, a favored suicide spot for many a depressed Santiagan. The river that is, not the building

Woke up with the Chilean cold, which I have decided to christen Tobalaba’s Revenge, after the great Mapuche chief. Everyone in Santiago has it. There is violent sneezing on every bus and in every restaurant. Once or twice a week, E15 sounds like she is trying to eject one of her lungs through her nose. But it’s not really a cold. More likely it’s all the pollution in the air that clogs up the sinuses from time to time. The result is ferocious sneezing for a while and a general sensation of having a cold. But the sneezing only lasts for some minutes and the puffy feeling of having a cold passes after about an hour. You are then back to normal until Tobalaba digs his vengeful claws into your nostrils again.

I finally made it to the Feria Artesanal, -a market with hand-crafted things. I even managed to ask someone for directions. This time I chose two men my own age. The last time I managed to frighten a middle-aged woman by asking for the way to the subway. I don’t think middle-aged women here enjoy being talked to by strangers. They really seem to enjoy very little, except to behave arrogantly against everyone they come across.

In Norway, women over 70 prefer to sit on the isle-seat of the bus. Here every woman over 40 does the same and they refuse to give up the free window seat, even though the bus may be packed full. I have noticed that middle-aged women don’t say please or thank you to anyone. They also insist on entering the metro trains before anyone has had the chance to get off. This, I believe, is what happens when you treat women like queens as they do here. Every man in Santiago immediately gives up his seat to a woman. After a while the women probably take it for granted that they have special rights.

The market was full of typically indigenous Chilean artifacts, such as Bob marley t-shirts and sunglasses. The stereo system was playing We Are The Champions by Queen. But there were also a lot of things that at least looked hand made. Most likely none of it is produced here though. The leather goods probably come from Argentina. According to M, there just aren’t any cows here. I find that a tad hard to believe, but it is possible that there are no leather goods produced here. I would have enjoyed coming home with some rough wool garments with a few Llamas on it, but all the clothes are made for dwarves. Peruvian or Bolivian dwarves, most likely.

I also decided to have another stab at finding a playable guitar which was as hopeless as ever. The second I picked one down off the wall, the usual teenager dressed in black let it rip on an electric guitar. This happened in store after store, except for two places. In one I found a really beautiful guitar which was horrible to play. In the other I found a second hand guitar which may sound good if somebody puts a full set of strings on it. I told the vender that I wanted to hear what it sounded like.

He closed the door to the noisy mall. Then, since I had told him, after being asked, that I was Norwegian, he proudly put on his a-ha DVD and turned the sound way up. He wanted to know all kinds of personal things about the band members, like it was given that they were all good friends of mine and seemed disappointed when I told him that I wasn’t a big a-ha fan and couldn’t provide him with enough info. Very disappointed. So disappointed in fact that he asked me to leave. I went home on the metro, trying to dodge the various explosive sneezes around me.

Another day that just flew by. My Spanish teacher was in a bad shape and we cut classes a little short. Her altered stomach is causing her great pain. I was eager to escape the classroom and get something to eat anyway. My stomach is fine. I have however failed in my effort not to eat the most expensive café lunches in Santiago every day. I’m back on my Quiche (pronounced “kitt” here) and Latte diet in the more posh places. Whenever I can make myself understood, that is. A Caffe Latte is on the menu, but if you ask for it you are met with blank stares. You can’t point either because menus are often just chalkboards on the outside of the café. Still I have to try. I need to treat myself to a little something every day if I am to remain reasonably sane. Also I have a thing for waitresses. They have something cinderellaish about them, running about with their tired feet and forced smiles. I watch them work and try not to make their day worse.

After lunch I was planning on going to a market with various handmade things. Not that I am very interested in that sort of thing. M keeps suggesting it, so I thought I’d better go. Maybe I could find a nice poncho or something for when I go back to the cold north. Anyway, I never made it to the market. On the way I tried to shoot some photos of various old beauty parlors and tailor shops with big retro hairdryers and hand painted ads on the windows. I was trying to shoot a shop with an old seamstress sitting inside, and she saw me through the window and panicked. She jumped quite high on her chair and then hid her face with both hands. I felt stupid. I did think about asking first, but it didn’t seem necessary. It was only a photo of the shop, even though she was visible inside.

A little later, after she had gotten over most of her shock, she came running down the street after me, yelling, and I felt even more stupid. I said I was sorry, but inside my aggression level was rising. Years of being told off by people because I carry a camera is starting to wear at me. I’m fast approaching the stage when I either yell “it’s only a camera you senile old slut”, or hit somebody. For some reason I still haven’t learned what senile old slut is in Spanish. But if I am to get into a fight, a 70 year old woman would be the perfect choice of opponent.

After that I was in a really bad mood. I never did get any good photos of any of the best looking shops either, since I couldn’t hold the damn little digital mini-camera steady in the low light. Then my battery ran out and I just wanted to go home. I realized that I had been standing outside one of the hair salons for over an hour, waiting for the lady watching tv inside to turn the nice orange backroom light back on, which I had missed in my first shot. She finally did for a few seconds and I missed it again. Then I stood for almost as long outside the shoe repair shop, where I had previously bought my nice shoelaces (of different length but very good quality). I was hoping the repair guy would come and stand in the doorway or something since there were no customers, but he never did.