She could be a great chilean

So, I don’t know about the greatest Chilean of all time and I’m not even shore I can come up with one of the greatest, so I’m going to write about someone that I don’t really know enough about but I’m increasingly interested in.

It turns out that it was my birthday recently and my cousin, who knows a lot about books (he studied literature), gave me a book by a Chilean author that I had never heard of at the time, Lina Meruane is her name. He wasn’t surprised that I didn’t know about her because apparently in Chile she is very unknown, known mostly amongst academic circles and people who study and teach literature.

At the beginning of the book you can read a little bit about her life and work. She was one of the first writers that, after the dictatorship in Chile in the 90s, started writing novels with the intention of criticizing the transitional process and the ‘fake celebrations’ that came with it. These types of critical novels have made other authors more renowned, like José Donoso for example, but Line Meruane has never been really known amongst people of her own country. She has also written about the position of women in society, questioning our imposed roles and criticizing the control system.

 She has won many prices abroad, but apparently in Chile her books haven’t been published many times, and their diffusion has been lousy. I guess this has to do with the fact that she is a woman and also a critic; these two characteristics combined may turn out in unpopularity at least when she started publishing, more than twenty years ago. Despite all this, lately I’ve noticed that she has been participating more actively of cultural occurrences in Chile, which could help her make her work known. I think it’s important because I don’t think we (as Chileans and as women) have read much about the women’s point of view about the things that happened during the dictatorship, and I think they should have a lot to say about it. I think it’s important to remember our past with different and new points of view.

I would ask her in which ways being a female writer and critic has determined her work’s diffusion. 

To work around nature

For some years now I’ve been wondering what it would be like to live outside the city. I’ve thought of this because from time to time I get sick of it, and the feeling is only increasing. The idea scares me a lot because I’ve never lived elsewhere; I was born and raised in Santiago and I feel it’s the only place I know how to live in. Also, I’ve heard about some people that have tried this but in the long run, they can’t get used to living without its ‘comforts’. Despite of this, I think I’m still going to try it at some point in my life, maybe not immediately after I get out of my career but definitely while I’m still young. I fantasize about living in the south of Chile, in the far south; if I ever get to do this, I would probably choose a place near a national park so I could get a job there. I would happily work as a park ranger.

I started dreaming of this when a friend of mine told me the story of a guy that had this type of job for a whole season. It was in a park up in the mountains, in the south of Chile, and his job was to take care of the park during the low season, that’s to say, when very few people –if not none- visit it. Even though it’s sounds kind of lonely and isolated, I would love to find a temporary job like this. I think it should be whole new experience to live around nature and nothing else, kind of what it would feel like to be an animal for a little while. It makes me very curious as to what it would feel like.  And even though I currently don’t have knowledge or experience in this field (sometimes I think I should have studied eco-tourism), I still hope someday I will get to work in something involving nature and hopefully, live far away from the city.

My oldest friend

In this post I would like to talk about one of my oldest friends (if not THE oldest). I remember the day we met was the first day of second grade: I’m guessing we were around seven years old, and there was this short girl standing in the middle of the classroom, looking at everyone and everything with a confused expression in her face. I asked on of my classmates who she was and she told me that she was new in our class, and that she was Argentinian. Her name was Belén. Now this next part of the story I don’t remember so well but, I’m not exactly sure how, we started talking to each other and ended up becoming really good friends. We did a lot of things together and even our parents became friends, so we got to plan trips with both families and had a really good time. As we got older, around the beginning of high school, we kind of drifted apart for a while but became good friends again the last year of school. We’ve been close ever since.

I would say that now we have new things in common that we didn’t know we liked when we were little, for example the outdoors. We both really like to go camping and enjoy nature, and we also like to go hiking sometimes. Another activity we often do together is going to the cinema; we both really enjoy big screens. She studies Environmental Biology in Universidad de Chile which is also in our campus, so from time to time we make plans to have lunch and update each other about what’s going on in our lives. We also see each other when our school group of friends get together. I feel so lucky to still have her as a friend because I feel she knows so much about me and we’ve been through so much together, that I know I can tell her anything.

A shirt form a complete stranger

About three years ago I was bag packing with my sister and a friend through the coast of Ecuador, during the summer holidays. Around the second week of our trip we arrived to a little town called Canoa; it was a very quiet place, with nice local people and a very large portion of sea line. You could hear the sea from anywhere in the town, and at that time of year there weren’t many tourists around, so I got a really mystic sense of Canoa. We camped in the simplest camping we could find, and the next morning we started meeting some of the people that were also staying there; there were all sorts of people, but a specific couple caught our attention. They were Europeans, I don’t remember from were exactly, but they didn’t talk Spanish nor English. At first I thought maybe they just had a particular look, but they were different from anyone I know. They didn’t talk to each other, at least while being in public, and were always together. They would look at each other very intensely and would touch each other’s hands very expresivly, like communicating without words and with their bodies. They didn’t talk to anyone but smiled at everyone and gave away a good vibe, so it wasn’t awkward either.

There was a night during our stay that we desperately needed water to kook but it was too late to buy some and the kitchen was broken. Spontaneously these young couple offered some to us. We were very grateful and promise to give it back the next day, and so we did. That same day they were living the camping and arranging all their stuff. Suddenly the girl came close to us and handed over three shirts. We didn’t understand what was going on, and so she tried to explain that she was giving them to us, apparently she wanted to travel more lightly. We were very surprised but gladly accepted the gift.

I have never used that shirt because it’s way too little for me, but I steal keep it in my closet as a nice memory. 

Maybe Costa Rica

There are lots of places around the world I would like to visit, so it was hard to choose one for this task, but I finally remembered that about a year ago I met a person that had been in Central America, specifically in Costa Rica, and I got the impression that it was an awesome place to visit. 

First of all I've never been in Central America, but I've always been very curious as to what I would find there. As it is very close to Latin America, I would hope to find some similarities in the way people relate to one another, because I’m guessing that they are very warm with each other (I guess Chile it's not really an example of warm social relations) but in the other hand, they are very far away and maybe the fact that they are also “americans” doesn’t really mean we have things in common. 

About Costa Rica I don’t know very much apart from a few experiences I have heard over the years. The one thing that has been common in each story is that people there seem to be happier and more relaxed, that they seem to live life a little bit differently than us. Beside the cultural factor that I don’t know much about, I would think that based in other experiences, the warm weather and the fact that it’s basically surrounded by the ocean could be reasons why people there seem to experience life very differently than what I’m used to. I would very much like to see it for myself. 

I want to adopt a dog

I've been wishing to adopt a dog for some time now, but I never thought it would take me this long to make up my mind. The thing is I live with my parents and my sister and I can't make this decision before asking for their opinion first, because having a pet around would definitely cause some changes around the house.

We use to have a dog called Maxi but he died about four years ago. His death was especially traumatic for my father, who was really close him. He was the one that fed him, took him out four walks and took care of him in general; we all loved him very much but none of the other members of my family were as involved as him. I think maybe it was because we didn’t really notice the amount of time my dad took taking care of Maxi.

Anyway, now I want to adopt a dog but he disagrees. It’s not that he doesn’t like pets because he does; the thing is he doesn’t trust that I will do everything I would have to do to take care of one. I understand his reasons because he fears ending up taking care of a dog he didn’t want in the first place, but I resent that he doesn’t trust me when I say it’s not going to be like the last time.