sivan left this morning. at 3:40am the transfer came to pick her up, and in a chaotic rush (a la sivan and magie), she was gone. not before she drove off with my house key, therefore locking me out of the house, and having the transfer driver reverse back down the street so she could run out and toss me the key, both of us laughing hysterically at ourselves.
nearly three months we spent together...the longest consecutive time i have ever spent with another being since i was in my mother's belly probably. (thanks mom for putting up with me for 9 consecutive months!)
so i shall most likely be going through sivan withdrawls. well, i am already actually.
the past two weeks have been preparation for the final leg of my journey...
first i had to find a room to stay in so i wasn't wasting my life away in a hostel, having delusions of poisoning british backpackers. it took a while to find a room...calling up all the ads in the classifieds can be so tiring. jeez it made me value craigslist SO much...you end up talking to all these viejitos or odd people, and it takes practically the whole day to get to a room you want to see, only to find it has no windows or is way far away from transportation or is just awkward. anyways so i finally found a cool room, in the barrio brasil, 2 blocks from the metro, with a big window. yay window. a young artist-architect couple owns the house, one of those big old colonial houses with internal patios and lots of random odd-shaped rooms. my room for example is a long skinny rectangle. it suits me fine. there are two other room-renters living there, two british girls studying here for the year from cambridge. (mish) they are very friendly and not the annoying british types i usually encounter travelling down here so all is well. the couple also has a 8 month old baby Columba who is super sweet and giggly...she's always smiling and just doing cute baby things.
so the room situation was set a week ago. the past week has been spent, celebrating sivan's birthday...she turned 24 on sunday and we celebrated by:
- hanging out in a park for 12 hours with our friend peewee and a bunch of crazy chilean students. yes, 12 hours. its what they do every friday, apparently. the onda of parks in santiago is something you just don't find in the states...everyone just hangs out, playing music, drinking, laughing, being weird...i love it.
- listening to music and drinking mojitos at La Casa en el Aire in bellavista, this cool bar/music place where chilean folk musicians come and play and get all political. we sang along to victor jara and molotov and silvio rodriguez and it was soooo fun. the whole place was singing along and dancing cueca
- partido: colo colo vs. u de chile. that's right, a craaaazy soccer game of the two rival teams in santiago. we were on the colo colo side (since u de chile is supposedly the fresa team) and it was crazy but fun...we learned all the chants and songs and had confetti thrown all over us and discovered we were the only girls there not accompanied by their boyfriends who were dragging them there. girls don't like futbol? we do! "campeon, campeon, campeon hay uno solo, se llama colo colo...." the only crappy part was that NO goals were scored, lots of almost goals, but it was rather anticlimatic. at least there were no riots.
- eating a super good cake marta made for sivan's cumpleaños. chocolate+cream+manjar oh jeez we almost died.
- tuesday we went to see inti illmani play for the día del trabajador (mayday)...it was awesome, lots of classic songs, everyone dancing and singing and jumping along, except short...they only played for about 40 minutes and the alameda was filled with people who didn't really know what to do after that...we all started clearing out slowly but the pacos were impatient to get the alameda cleared and the micros running again and so only a few minutes after the concert ended, they guanacos started hosing the crowd. i finally understood the people's anger toward the police here...they act violently toward crowds of people, no matter how peaceful the marcha. its the possibility of the people getting out of control...the power that a crowd of people has. that is what scares them...
so soon we were running down side streets, everyone dispersing in different directions, with guanacos and armored cars waiting around every corner. i renewed the memory of teargas, sucking a lemon that was passed to me, and tried to cover my nose and mouth with my scarf. everytime we tried to go one direction down a sidestreet, people would be running away from the pacos in the other direction. i asked our friends where do we go now? and they said eveyone goes back to their homes, the end of the marcha. why why why why why is it this way?
so what now. tomorrow i start translating my thesis. it will be an endeavor, but i'm ready for it. i feel like this is what i need to do right now, for the next month.
and then in a month i shall be home. home again home again jiggidy jig.
