here's la araucanía. the namesake of the district, also referred to as "the monkey-puzzle tree." i think that's because of the thorny nature of its bark. click on the photo for a close-up.
a lot of people (family, coworkers, friends, la bachelet) seemed to think that this whole "flying solo for a week" idea was a tragic set of circumstances tantamount to when mufasa died and simba fled to the jungle in shame. to extend this analogy, i guess what it actually comparable to was when simba fled and thereby found timon and pumba, had the time of his life and discovered that it's all butter. my timon and pumba? my backpack and digital camera, which even in it's moribund state showed me love.
the weather wasn't always sunny, but i've lived that life so it didn't bother me none. i stayed with my grandma in temuco, in a congenial, usually filled but completely deserted hostel in pucón, and found myself in a fully restored 19th-century wooden gem of a hostel in Valdivia, though it was more like a 21st-century squatters paradise for travelers and students with paper in their wallets.
while out of santiago, i found myself, found god, found chile, found truth and thereby beauty, and somehow only managed to lose about $172 USD. also, apparently when it rains in chile, bridges collapse. of course the only bridges that collapse are the ones connected to crucial arteries running through the country (actually, the bridge was a part of the 5 freeway, the same 5 freeway, continued all the way down to south america... se llama "panamerican" here. it runs from the south of chile to alaska... who knew?). i almost got stuck in valdivia and didn't make it back to teach on monday, which would have made me yet another cliché (french) of a gringo (spanish) who gets stuck on weekend vacays and needs to cancel classes. luckily, i made it back on monday and rapidly resumed my quest to unsuccessfully teach adverbs of frequency to twenty-somethings in chile's capital city. santiago is north so that's where i'm coming from. some of my finest paint-work, dedicated to mr. collin richard tiegs:
LEGEND:
T = Temuco. P = Pucon. V = Valdivia. P = Pucón.
what none of the following will capture is how inspirationally beautiful the majority of the people of the south are. whether it was a cab driver calling me a gentleman to another passenger for coming to his country to volunteer and going out of his way to help me find my way home or a hostel worker sharing his dinner with me, people consistently amazed me during my southern jaunt. most notable of course was the family of my host mom angelica treating me, a brown-strangerman as one of their own not because they had to or felt like it was the proper thing to do, but because they were just that rad.
the bus that eventually brought me home and saved me from having to talk to my boss.
scroll down for the beef.
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