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.