Dog. Drum. Duet.

Up at Metro Tobalaba, where the Tip y Tap beer garden fills the plaza in front of the entrance to the metro, a couple of musicians had set up shop. One had a guitar, another a drum kit, and they were good - I mean, really good, or at least they almost certainly would have been, but when I came into the plaza, the guitarist was putting away his guitar with a face like a sucked lemon, and the drummer was going at it on his own.
            The dog thought he was fabulous.  He was a big black dog - mostly labrador, with a bit of mastiff about the shoulders, and he had parked himself nose to brass with a cymbal, and every time the drummer hit a drum the dog barked a great big whoouff.
            The drummer hit a drum.  The dog barked. The drummer hit another drum. The dog barked bigger. The drummer drummed faster.  He reckoned he could out-bark the dog. Pretty soon he was going about a hundred and fifty beats a minute, but the dog's tail was going about double that -
            As far as that dog was concerned it was an ecstatic, practically hallucinogenic, full-on meeting of souls and minds. It barked and it barked and it barked.
            The drummer was beginning to look a wee bit lemonish himself. He and his guitarist had counted on a beer-generous Tip y Tap audience, and what they had was about fifty people laughing their heads off and holding up their cell-phone cameras - not even pointing at him. They were all aiming at the dog.
            I would have love to have stayed, but I was late for an appointment, and slipped past them into the metro station.  A machine-gun whoouf-and-drum-kit duet followed me all the way down the stairs.


It was a GOOD day.

The Jacaranda trees are in blossom, and the wisteria is blooming on the fences.  In the park, a young man and woman climbed a tree to sit in the canopy and kiss up there. It's a nice day.

WorkPlace Health And Safety for the Win!

As seen on the streets of Providencia today.

The Copa América: Chile vs Argentina!

Tonight is the Final Match in the Copa América, and it's Chile  - vs Argentina!

We're the defending champions.  Last year we beat Argentina, so this year, there's honor on the line - on both sides. 
            The streets went through a mad rush of unseasonable traffic a little while ago (traffic jams on Sunday night of a long weekend?  Did the festival of Peter and Paul agreeably accommodate itself to a night when the whole country wants to sleep in on Monday morning?) as people rushed home to their televisions, but now the streets are so empty you could walk down El Bosque with your eyes closed from Apoquindo to Eliodoro Yanez and not meet so much as a shadow.
            It's so silent out there.
            So still.
            You can hear a pin drop -
            Until a Chilean grabs the ball and the cheering rises up - and the hooting and shouting and barracking and the choirs of men singing footy songs and the children who've been unwisely given vuvezulas stick them out of windows and set off the neighborhood dogs -  and we're only 15 minutes in to the first quarter.
            We're settling in for an amazing night.


Update:  Chi-Chi-Chi!  Le-Le-Le!  (We won.)

Dogs in the Dark

Last night, being a crisp, cold, clear sort of night, I walked down to the park.  Wrapped in an aura of twilight and church bells ringing the local faithful to evening service, I wandered all the way down to the slides and swings, and was standing happily under a lamp post when two small dogs came boiling out of the dark. Their teeth were pinned back over their lower lips and in a torrent of snarling and snapping and loud whuffs, they were aiming directly for my shins.
            I shouted "NO!" in my biggest baddest "bad dog" voice, and to my extreme surprise, they actually stopped. The schnauzer subsided a lunge-length from my knee and with a filthy look, commenced to growling:
            "Boy oh BOY," it said.  "Boy oh BOY.  If you ever let me to get my hands on you, I'll, well I'll -" and it flung me a look of such furious passion that it brought him to its feet in another howling hail of barks. "Get you get you get you get you" - and the dachshund joined in  - "Yowowowowow!"
            From the darkness outside the cone of light came a voice.  "It's your hat."  The voice said.  "They don't like hats."
            Me and my winter hat stepped forward into the dark.  A man stood in front of me. He was wearing a hat himself: a woolly beanie pulled right down over his ears.  A cigarette flared.  A woman sat with her feet up on a park bench, nodding her head.  
            "They don't like hats."  She had one of her own as well - a wrap of elderly fur.  Behind them, another young woman - hatless - wrestled with something enormous - possibly a wolfhound - on a leash.  It leaped in silence, but the silence was pregnant with menace.  The little dogs boiled around my feet, yapping shrilly, telling me they wanted blood, - or at least a bit of skin from my knees -  and an enormous German shepherd looked up at me with liquid brown eyes and pressed her nose against my hip pocket.
             "Shut up, dogs." The man said casually. He aimed a kick at the dachshund and they subsided abruptly into silence.
            "That's Sofia" he said, pointing at the shepherd.  "She's a good dog." 
             Sofia sighed and looked up at me, and her tail thumped, once. I reached down and scratched her ears.  "GOOD Dog, Sofia."  I said. "GOOD dog."  
            She sighed again, and lowering her chin into my hand, sat down at my feet.  She was clearly ready to sit there forever, to settle in there with me for the night.
            Behind her, the little Schnauzer cocked its head.  He looked at Sofia, and he looked at me; you could practically see the little cogwheels working inside his little skull. Perhaps a different approach was in order?  With a short, conciliatory "gruff!" he trotted over and sniffed my trouser leg. 
            "Nothing doing, kiddo."  I said.  "After the way you carried on?"
            I bent and scrubbed at Sofia's soft neck, by way of illustrating what he'd missed.  Sofia got in on the game with gusto - twisted half on her side, she was leaning heavily against my legs and  banging out a tatoo on my thigh with her long brown tail.
           The schnauzer gave her a disgusted look and turned her back.  I stuck out my tongue.  Behind her, the dachshund made a spluttering sound.  The young lady with the wolfhound had clipped a leash onto its collar.  With one furious bark it leaped for the wolfhound, aiming for its belly.  The wolfhound yelled in shock and bit its own leash, and the schnauzer, yapping joyfully, leaped into the fray.  The wolfhound tried to eat its leash, the dachshund tried to eat the wolfhound, and the schnauzer was getting in a few good bites anywhere it could.  The man in the beanie was in the middle of the fray, bellowing and flailing.  The young lady tried very hard to go in several directions at once, and on the bench, the lady in the fur turban contemplatively extinguished her cigarette.  Fur was flying, sand was flying, and in the middle of the scrum, Sofia got up and lay down on the man's feet and rolled herself around on her back, tugging his trouser legs and begging for a cuddle.
            Very quietly, I tiptoed away.

Christmas Carols

For the past five hours  a bird has been sitting in a tree outside our window, singing. Since he began he has not stopped, or barely even paused for breath. He is singing his little heart out - he chirps, he chirrups, he warbles, he hopsup and down his branch, working up the most fantastic runs, tweeting and whistling and chortling, harder and louder and louder and faster until he chokes on his own whistle, and with only the slightest of pauses to clear his windpipe, he starts again -
            It is three o'clock in the morning, We can't sleep. The sound of this one small bird echoes off of the building to our left, and echoes off of the building to our right, and bounces up and down the parking alley between the two buildings across the street, and on its way back to us, meets the bird's next terpsichorean assault, and it grows and it grows and it grows-

We are afflicted with a lover. You know the guy, the one crouched below the window of his beloved and strumming furiously on his guitar - the guitar strings are smoking, his fingers have turned to rubber and his shoulders are on fire and the stem of the rose between his teeth has been crushed to a bloody pulp, but he will show her -
            He'll show everyone - 
            Beneath his love the world will give way -
            Ooooh, you just watch and see how deep is his love.
            Right above him, his senorita's daddy is out on the balcony, ready to dump a bucket of ice water over the edge.
            Or if we're back to talking birdies, he's got a cat.
            It might have been amusing, but an hour ago the lover from hell was joined by a second bird. They are not friends. Feather to feather, they are trilling their little beaks off. There's no quarter being given - this is war. If one pauses for breath the other finds it in his tiny diaphragm to double his volume and show of just what sort of deathless devotion he is made -
            The father is still upstairs on the balcony, but this time, the he's got the full complement of family retainers lined up on either side. Sleepless and grim, they've all got buckets, ready to go.  He's traded in his bucket for a shotgun. And the señorita is inside on a sofa, with an ice-pack on her head.
 
Merry chirping Christmas.

Christmas in Santiago

Summer in Santiago

Summer Summer has hit. For real. The air is light and balmy, the platano trees are a mass of green and a bird is chirping its little heart out just outside our window.
            This afternoon I went places. I took a taxi. We were stopped at a light; the windows were down and I lay in my seat with my head back and my eyes closed, enjoying the early summer warmth, overlaid with the smells of petrol and hot tarmac. There was music coming from another car nearby, happy boppy summer pop-
           "Look." The taxi driver said.
            I opened my eyes. The music was coming from the next car over - a red Volkswagen beetle; not fire-engine red, but ladybird red, which is brighter and more alive, and behind the wheel was a girl. Her lips were painted a bright barbie pink. Her long hair fell down a high ponytail, tied up with a blue twist, and she was dancing in her seat, shaking that long fall of hair, bouncing her fingers on the wheel, singing and shimmying her shoulders, sending her summer-blue shirt slithering and slithering from one bronze collarbone to another.
            It was a performance, but she wasn't playing to anyone. She was dancing her heart out for herself in her bright red summer car.
            "Look." The driver said again, and his voice was one long sigh. "She even has a flower."
            I looked. There was a flower, a peony tied with a bit of ribbon to the rear-view mirror.
            "Es ella una maravilla." (She is a marvel.) "Una maravilla." He folded his hands on the wheel and watched.
            She was Joy, and in a whole day full of summer, she was the most wonderful thing I saw.

Today I saw...

I wish a phone could capture the light the way it really looks.  It was the most extraordinary evening - not the faintest hint of smog - you could see clear to the ends of the earth and the sky was filled with that golden liquid light that you get before a thunderstorm.
            At one point in the evening, as dusk fell, I looked out the window and gaped - it was falling like molten gold on the glass panels of the buildings and the sky was very dark and stormy and the shock of that bright gold against a dark sky was the most extraordinary thing.
           A few of us crowded onto the balcony and stood and watched while it faded.

The Estufa

When you live in an earthquake zone, reliably solid stuff  like walls and roofs and windows are somewhat less reliable than they are in places where the earth doesn't rumble and realign itself every other week.
            Walls develop cracks.  Inspectors and building contractors smile and tell you that the cracks are superficial and happening exactly where they're meant to - along slab lines or down the side of a core - places where the building is designed to flex. Because Chileans build really really solid.
            Structural integrity is a very good thing, but in the day-to-day, non-crisis scheme of things -
            There are air gaps everywhere!
            Doors work their way off plumb, and spaces appear between door and frame.  (Our front door has been sticking pretty good since Wednesday last. Opening it takes a shoulder and a shove.)
            Windows rattle out of alignment and lean tipsily in their frames, and narrow wedges of empty space keep the air circulating in and out.
            Every couple of years you call in a man who spends a couple of days pushing on the glass, whispering to it, and tapping gently at pressure points with a rubber mallet, and you're right and tight again for a month or three  But mostly you shrug your shoulders and be glad that no room is sealed too tight for health or happiness. 
            In winter, it takes bit of remembering.  Winter storms whistle straight through your healthy, happy environment- running up and down the curtains, ruffling furniture, knocking over bottles over the kitchen -
            It makes you feel like a protagonist front and center in a really theatrical surround sound experience, but a winter storm that breaches the walls and comes right in the apartment and cozies up next to you on the sofa is cold.
            The first really cold day of autumn nuzzles its way into your bed in the night and burrows deep into the thermal mass of the cracked concrete walls and  the next thing you know you're sleeping under four feather quilts and wearing hot- water-bottles strapped to your waist under your winter coat. (This isn't an exaggeration. I've a friend on the top floor of a building in El Golf who wears a hot water bottle every year from May to September.)
            Freezing isn't actually mandatory. Most of the apartments built in Santiago in the last half century have radiant heating.* 
            Unfortunately, running radiant heat is extremely expensive. Chile has no natural fuel reserves. Hydro exists only in the south where the rivers are.** Coal, oil and natural gas are imported from overseas, and the prices reflect it.
           Most Santiaguinos spend winter wrapped around their estufa. An estufa is a small portable gas heater that sits on a little wire trolley. You trundle it around your apartment from room to room to work up a nice localized fug, and you are very happy that the local geology has blessed you with natural ventilation that lets the fumes out as fast as they build up.
            The average human being is not overly gifted with foresight. In Autumn we watch the leaves fall and we talk about the cold weather that's coming but hardly anybody remembers to fill their kerosene can in advance of the winter.  On the first really wet, windy morning of the year, the whole city rolls out of bed, winces as warm toe meets icy floor, and lets out a collective damn.  
           Because now you have to queue.
           The kerosene that fuels your estufa is purchased at your local service station. There's snow on the mountains, which would be cause for celebration, but you can't see it because of the low grey mist rolling between the trees and the buildings. A slow rain works steadily down your collar, drip by icy drop. The chill creeps up through the soles of your shoes into your feet. The gas station attendants have to fit filling kerosene cans in between serving the cars that are pouring in (because anyone with a car is torn between filling the kerosene and getting up into the mountains to see the snow in person) and it looks like this -
 

* Most of them under the floor as per general spec, but in our first apartment here in Santiago, some unsung architectural genius installed the radiant heating network in the ceiling. The only winter we didn't spend in three layers of sweaters and a woolly hat was the year the people downstairs had a sick baby and ran their own heat all day long. They burned whole gas-fields keeping the temperature up to 70, and we walked around in shirtsleeves and bare feet.

** There's a major political kerfuffle right now over a possible huge high-voltage power line that would run 2000 kilometers from Aysen up to Santiago.
 

Replicas!

The best part of the 6.2 quake last night was the fellow outside yelling "YeeeHAAAA!"

If you've decided that you want to live in a city right above a major fault-line on the Ring of Fire, Chile is a good country to pick.
            There are a few things in our favor.
            First of all, the geology of Santiago is very different from places like Christchurch in New Zealand,  or Urayasu in Japan, where earthquake liquefy the ground and swallow buildings.
            Secondly, and very importantly, Chile possesses some of the most stringent earthquake building standards an anti-seismic regulations on the planet. 
            These stiff/rigid/inflexible (seriously, all of the options here are totally tasteless in this context) building standards permit us to rattle through earthquakes that would utterly level other cities.  Under normal circumstances, we laugh at anything below a 6.5. (It takes at least a 7.0 to catch our notice. Or a really shallow 6.4.  At least, that's what we pretend. In my experience, anything over a 6 has even hardened Chileans braced tightly into in their safe zones, waiting in silence for the awful shaking to stop, because is it going to stop at a 6-ish?  You just don’t know. And when it stops we walk around full of bravado saying "Pssshhhh.")
            The bravado has entirely and thoroughly worn through.  Last Wednesday's 8.3 earthquake left us strung like over-strained banjoes, and every good rattle since - 
            all of the many good rattles - 
            especially all the ones that happen in the middle of the night - 
            Have sounded to us like the soprano tones of  banjo-strings going "PLINK."
            On Monday, all of the last frayed strings went and let go for good. Monday was a rotten day.  We were woken up at 3 in the morning by a good, juicy 6.3.  A 5.0. hit around noonish, then a 6.5 at three in the afternoon, and then a 5.8 at four, and 5.7 at five in the evening - all of them on top of  the eight other sub-5s that gently rumbled us across the day - 
             A teacher friend and a young man coming home from school both reported classrooms full of panicked tears, and as for the grown-ups - 
            All of our philosophical shrugging and "good to get all the stress out in smaller ones, eh?  What else can you expect after a big earthquake?" gave way to a wide-eyed need for buttonhole everyone you vaguely know and ask "did you feel that one?  Did you feel that? Where were you?  When will it bloody-damn-all end?"
            And that question was solidly answered at four o'clock on Tuesday morning by a 6.1 that hit like an artillery blast.
            In our building, the person who has it worst in an earthquake is the concierge downstairs in the lobby.  The room is built with lots of big plate glass windows. After the 6.4 hit last year we waited it out next to the structural core, and then we remembered that we had guests coming in an hour and needed to nip out to the corner market to grab drinks.  (That's Chile for you.  A 6.4 earthquake hits and soon as it stops you snap your fingers and say "D'oh!  Soda!  You want coke or ginger ale?") 
           Down in the lobby, I  found the lady concierge sitting at her desk in a state of blank shock - when a quake hits, those windows go berserk - roaring and booming and billowing like waves - and the general effect is that of a freight train coming through the front door. 
            Last week's 8.3 was exponentially worse, and the poor man on duty was in a pretty bad way.  A resident sat with him and held his hands as the night rolled on and slowly drew him out of his shock,  but none of the night or day duty fellows have had a very nice time since.
            For all that, we're doing very well here, considering. I have a friend who lives on the 26th floor of a building in centro (the historical center of Santiago.)  She was in her apartment at the time of the 8.8 in 2010, so when last Wednesday happened, she figured that if the building had come through 2010 in one piece, she had nothing to worry about, so she dedicated herself to hanging on.
When the earthquake stopped, she and the other residents evacuated and down in the street she shared a few beers with the other 26th floor folks, and among them they found a brand new neighbor.  He had arrived in Chile from Egypt the day before.  
            Can you imagine? Your very first day in a brand new country, and an 8.3 earthquake hits while you're 26 storeys up. The poor man was certain he was going to die. 
            Every sway was one sway closer to the moment that the pendulum would stop and the building would fall and take him with it.  He didn't know how tightly Chileans build - he'd only just arrive! 
            Down on the street afterward, safe on solid ground (that wouldn't stay solid) the poor fellow was having a very bad time of it. They held his hands, and a big burly man from Ecuador wrapped him up in a bear hug and held him tight until he thought he might be alright to stand on his own once more.  
            As for my friend, the endless aftershocks at that height have entirely eroded her philosophical equanimity.  She's can't sleep at night because of 'when' and 'just in case', and her jolly memories of community solidarity down on the street have turned into phone calls at all sorts of hours about a dog. 
            "The damned dog. My neighbor's got a pug. You know how overweight those things can get, yeah? You know pugs have rotten hearts, right?  And buggered sinuses?  And basically anything, right, that makes an animal unfit for even walking?  We carried that damned dog back up 26 flights of stairs.  Do you have any idea how much an obese, under-exercised pug with a dicky heart can weight?! We traded off - every four floors we had to stop, and wait, and hand over a hairy heaving snorting snuffling ton of bricks.  And the damned building kept shaking and the damned dog kept wriggling and licking at my chin and I didn't need its bloody gratitude! I needed it to walk up those stairs on its bloody damned own!!"
            Her new next-door neighbor has decided to leave the country. 
            The concierges in our building are not only entirely out of strings, but the entire banjo has gone up in splinters.
            The rattling persists, and so do we, and I get another phone call: "Have I told you yet about the damned dog?"

Gustery, Blustery, Oooooooh....

This winter has been a rotten one for Santiago. With the exception of a storm on the 12th of July, we've had almost no rain at all. The occasional apologetic drizzle doesn't count for much, and day by day the air has gotten fouler and fouler and measured in how far the amber air-quality alert shades into emergency-red and by which license plates are allowed on the road in today's restricción vehicular.
            It's been absolutely awful.  Nobody in the city has dared to hope for more; we've been continually promised breaks in the weather, but the sheer act of hoping has caused the clouds to perversely shear off and go somewhere else. Anywhere else.
            But this week it happened.
            Mum called me on Monday.  "The satellite says you're getting rain this week." 
            "Shh!!" 
            "It's going to be enormous. The temperature is going to drop, and then it's going to pour-" 
            "I'll believe it when I'm walking through it. Seen any good films lately?" 
           "-and it's going to last for days.  Aren't you excited?" 
            "Of course I'm not excited!  We've been refusing to get excited about it for days now!  Stop talking! If you keep talking, you'll scare it away!" 
            Mum kept talking, but somehow, the rain still came. Not even the weight of seven million tentative, tremulous enthusiasms turned it from racing straight toward Santiago, and when it hit, it hit hard. 
            First the wind, howling and snarling, and then the rain, bursting through bedroom windows and flooding roads and overpasses. 
            That was Wednesday. Thursday was bigger than Wednesday, and Friday was bigger than Thursday, and I sat in in our living room with the whole apartment sealed tight and the curtains swelled and billowed while winds came whistling through through -
            The reality of life in an earthquake zone is that a sealed building envelope is more of a concept than an actual thing. Every quake shifts doors and windows subtly out of alignment with the walls, and the cumulative effect is - well, in big storms, it's actually rather fun. 
            Today, the fourth day of the storm, was a howling torment. The curtains on the (sealed) living room windows billowed and snapped. The venetian blind on the (sealed) bathroom window clattered so loudly we wound it all the way up and then we stuffed a sock between the (closed) bathroom door and the door frame to stop the slamming door driving us irretrievably demented. Outside it poured and blew, and we went back to bed with books.
            Sometime around four it stopped. Just stopped. The clouds blew away and the sky turned cerulean and a golden light illuminated a world that for once was fresh and clear and bright clean out to the mountains, which stood up stark and crisp and heavy with snow.
            It was magical.
            And half an hour ago the clouds came back in and the wind began to rise and the trees are bending and the evening is flat and grey - not evening dark but storm dark.  Heaven.

Today it Rained. Lots.

A large city surrounded by mountains is not necessarily a pleasant place.  Santiago's air has been foul this winter. The contaminación has been at its absolute peak - the worst it has been in sixteen years.  When the sun hits the air, clear vision extends for about twenty meters, and then there's haze. Across the street is fuzzy, the air tastes foul and scorches your throat and causes nasty gnawing headaches that linger for days.  Wheee.
            Since our one decent rain back in April, we've had nothing.  Bone-dry and static cling. Sweating through these last months before the winter rain has become an exercise in spiritual endurance - closing one's eyes and closing one's windows and steadfastly - for want of alternatives - not thinking about the air. We've had driving restrictions (40% of license plates ordered off the roads) for the first time in almost a decade, but as a solution it's cosmetic, and ignores the lumbering elephants of root causes and tacit acceptances of levels of industrial and auto output that could (and probably has) choke a horse.
            But last night the rains came. We were woken at 4:30 this morning - a tremendous gale had set off car alarms up and down the street.  The rain began, and the wind began to howl and whine and squeal through our (closed) bathroom windows and set the curtains on our (closed) living room windows flapping and billowing. (Living in an earthquake zone renders perimeter seals more of a theory than an actual thing. It doesn't help with the contaminación either.)
            By ten this morning  the storm had blown itself out and settled down to a persistent, drenching rain. The streets and sidewalks were invisible - you could hardly tell where one started and the other stopped, because the platano orientale trees, which normally hang onto their brown leaves all through the winter, had had almost everything blown off at once!
            The poor concierges of all of the apartment buildings have had their work cut out for them.  Santiago possesses (in the spirit of possess insisting on too many esses) a mania for keeping one's pitch impossibly immaculate. A gentle autumn breeze is the concierge's bête noire- the most particularly dedicated sort will spend whole afternoons hovering just outside the front door, rake in hand, primed to pounce on each leaf as it drifts to earth.  It's personal.  
            Solid freezing rain wasn't going to put them off clearing their lawns.  No, Sir -
            But the rain fell and the leaves kept dropping, and wet sacks of sodden leaves in a sea of more leaves took on the most sad, futile aspect - 
            And by mid-day pretty much everyone had given up.
            Mr Tabubil and I splashed out through the rain and leaves up to our local supermarket, and came home and made the best brownies in the world and roasted a chicken and left the window open while we ate.  Fresh, clear air is worth dinner in down jackets, as often as we can get it!

The Copa América

Anyone foolish enough to run out of dish soap on the day Chile plays in the final of the Copa América deserves what they get. The shops are bananas.
            With extra banana.
            This is the first time in 99 years that Chile has made it to the finals, and the whole city has gone joyous fruit-salad levels of happy.

This afternoon I had to get to the fabulous Tostaduria Talca.  The metro was divinely mad- trains running slow, trains interrupted, trains jam packed past the gills, with horns and vuvuzelas spilling out the doors!
            The streets were even madder.  Flags, hooters, more vuvezulas, and every other male in a tricolor hat or Red National Team Jersey. But not one teeny tiny solitary taco (traffic jam) - anything like that would interfere with getting home in time for kickoff.  It was the politest set of crazy streets I've ever seen!
            The wooden shelves of the Tostaduria Talca  (a hole in the wall paradise, source of the best nuts, spices and dried fruit in the city and purveyor of dry-goods otherwise unobtainable in Chile) - were bare. They practically echoed. Not a single thing vaguely snack-like was left in the place. The staff were weary and pushing left-over customers out the doors -  I grabbed three packets of pecans (Pecans! Pecans in Chile!) that had been overlooked in a corner, and bolted.
            Coming home, the metro was even more ridiculous than before, but a taxi was out of the question  - the few yellow-topped cabs on the roads waved me off - they were heading out of the city and home as fast as the polite traffic would carry them.

So I went down into the metro and waited patiently for a train - and worried about my next stop, the supermarket  - where I'd been told that the queues were worse than Dieciocho (18th of September - Chile's national day) or Christmas.
            When a train at last squeezed sluggishly into the station, getting myself on board was a feat of mindless strength and courage, but deep in the crush of the train, there was room for a young man beat-boxing with a microphone. The sound was bouncing off the walls, gonging off our eardrums, but he wasn't busking - just riding so high on anticipation that not singing was entirely out of the question.
            The supermarket was worse than I could have anticipated. Checkout queues half-way to the warehouse at the back, and carts piled high with cuts of meat, crates of booze, and house-size packets of potato chips like the world was coming to an end and it was potato chips that would see us through the apocalypse and out the other side.  More potato chips than I could have believed possible.
            And I walked home through waving flags and car horns.
            And my whole block smells like BBQ and beer.
            Life is tremendous.

Zephyrs and Divans and Ladies of Leisure

It's been a quiet few months here at Tabubilgirl. A medical situation has turned me into a Lady of Leisure, and I have spent the spring reclining genteelly on a sofa (proper divans being in short supply) watching the world turn green outside my window, while the Platanos Orientales unfurled their green canopies across the street -
            Which meant coughing (genteelly) into a hanky as the year's first warm zephyrs drew the platano pollen out from between those green leaves - and then coughing less genteelly and with more steel as the spring winds built in force and the damn trees dropped their annual load of toxic yellow fuzz all over the damn place -
            At which point, picking platano pollen out of my teeth, I decided that Ladies of Leisure were more inclined towards Farscape marathons in a darkened room with the window firmly shut than quiet contemplation of nature's annual miracle.
            That particular miracle is a loaded one. Both barrels.

This past Sunday, when the zephyrs were turned off for the afternoon and the fuzz was away on half-holiday, Mr Tabubil took me for a stroll around our local park. As we progressed toward the children's playground, we noticed that the children we passed all seemed to be lightly tinted pink.
           Their mouths were sticky, their fingers were worse, and their little faces were either dazed and ill or carooming off the trees in some sort of hyperactive fit- 
            Leaving Mr Tabubil in the dust, I made a beeline for the playground. The Fairy Floss man was here!
            Our fairy-floss man pushes a hand-cart with a treadle-powered fairy-floss machine. Pumping the treadle with his foot, he dips a wooden stick into the spinning sugar vat, and neatly twirls you a cloud of pink sugar-floss larger than your head. 
            Mr Tabubil treated me to a stick, and I ate it, and life was very good.  We wandered back up the park, and I found a man with a hose who let me wash my hands and drink some water, and life was even better. Fairy-floss is divine, but sticky is sticky. 

Halloween in the Calle Rosas

This morning my mother-in-law  took a little trip into Centro - the old heart of Santiago -  for a little Halloween shopping.
            Our first stop was a little arcade just outside the Plaza de Armas- the arcade was mostly hairdressers and cell-phone-cover stores, but I remembered a little toy store in there that had a wall of boxes full of rubber animals. You know the sort of thing - rubber snakes and technicolor stegosaurus and wolf-spiders with fangs the size of hubcaps. I wanted to see if they had any plastic rats.
            Did they have plastic rats? Does New York have a Big Apple in it? Did Gustave Eiffel design some rather nice train stations in South America? Did they have rats?! -
            We left the shop with a bag full of big black red-eyed rodents, a handful of little black mice and a clutch of nasty rubber spiders. My mother-in-law insisted on carrying the bag.

On the back side of the Plaza de Armas is a street called Calle Rosas. Down the west end of the street there are shops selling fabric and sewing machines and fabrics and parts for sewing machines, but what Calle Rosas really does is parties.
            Chileans take parties seriously. For a start, you need a pinata. And hats, lots of hats. Not the good old Australian party standby - the paper cone with an elastic band to go under the chin and maybe a streamer at the top, but crowns with jewels on, and policeman's helmets, and dragons to roost on your head and coil down around your ears, and Egyptian cobras done in gold lame, and pirate's tricorns, and veddy English top hats, and feather bonnets, and green fedoras and flapper cloches -
            Hatted out, you need your streamers and balloons. And banners, done up in glitter with the name of the guest of honor written three feet high, and horns and hooters and poppers and silly string - 
            Imagine all that and then, add Halloween. Calle Rosas had gone bananas. There was no other word for it - the stores that normally can't breath for confetti and paper streamers were tricked out (see what i did there?!) in balloons and paper bats - there was so much Halloween dangling from the ceilings of the stores that you had to enter in a sort of semi-crouch and sidle around barrels full of rubber masks and plastic pitchforks with plastic blood on to even get inside. 
            We started in the smaller stores that exist wistfully on the fringes of things where Calle Rosas bumps into Veintiuno de Mayo (21 May 1879, the Battle of Iquique. Chileans like to name streets after significant dates) and, creeping bent between racks of vampire capes (basic black, sex-bomb red, virginal white, or cotton-candy pink) we came away with bunting and streamers and bags and bags of little black plastic spiders. 
            And we bought Mr Tabubil a hat - a black bowler with cobwebs and big round eyeballs on it, and dangling wads of grey cheesecloth from around its ears. It is glorious.
            Our purchases were bagged by fellow in a cowl and a hockey mask, who gurgled liquidly when we said Gracias. He had coughed at us when we entered, liquid and hacking, and when we flinched, he had  reeled sideways into the arms of a dancing skeleton and clutched at a plastic pike with plastic blood on the handle - he was having a wonderful day. 
            After that we braved the bigger party stores.  Who knew what we'd see?  
            If we could get through the doors.  It wasn't the flying bats or the whispering ghosts or the jiggling hanged men with battery-operated jiggles - it was the flying bats and the whispering ghosts and the jiggling hanged men.  But mostly it was the people.  I don't know if any stores made any money anywhere else in Santiago today, because the entire city was out shopping in Calle Rosas. The only thing that made the experience bearable was the army of pumpkin-shirted men and women that patrolled the crowd, looking to latch onto anyone sufficiently wide-eyed and desperate, and took you and your shopping list in hand and dragged you bodily through the scrum.
            They did abandon us, sporadically, so that we could be menaced by men in hockey masks (clearly the spook-face of the year) and army jackets that looked as if they'd been shredded by claws and buried for a month. A monster would come close - and closer, and we'd notice that behind the hockey mask was another mask - this one with scars and maggots and a reek of fresh rubber. Bending down, he'd shrug, slightly, and we'd notice that the clinking sound we were hearing was the chains that he wore draped across his shoulders and over his chest, and we'd see that his leather motorcycle gauntlets were shredded by the same steel claws that had done for his coat, and once he'd seen that we'd seen, he settled down to make us feel really uncomfortable.
            Above us, the ceiling howled and cackled and laughed manically, mechanically, because every single square foot of it was occupied by those whispering ghosts and jiggling hanged men, and a little girl, screaming with laughter, was jumping up and down and setting them all off.
            We laughed too, and our hockey-mask maniac winked at us and shuffled off to menace someone else.
 
Outside the store, we walked to the end of the street and there was no more Halloween, anywhere at all.  It was a whole festival confined to that one street, and nowhere else in the city. We caught a taxi and drove home and unpacked our loot on the kitchen ledge.
            It's all about context, I think.  Take our Ghastly Severed Hand, for instance.  At a Halloween store, no-one would look at it twice, but at mid-afternoon outside the Calle Rosas, when Mr Tabubil came around the corner from the laundry and saw it lying on the kitchen ledge, he hit the ceiling. 
            Quite literally.  He screamed and then he jumped.            
            It is a rather good severed hand.  
            Also, there is a small black rat sitting on Mr Tabubil's nightstand.  My mother-in-law and I are trying a small psychological experiment.

The Park When the Weather is Unseasonal

This weekend, the winter went on vacation. The temperature rose, and the skies turned blue, and Mr Tabubil and I took a nap on the floor in front of an open window, while a breeze blew air at twenty-four degrees celcius across our faces.

            And after that, we went to our park. With the winter somewhere else, it was a rather busy park. The children's playground was one big buzzing sea of primary-colored sweaters (chilean mothers dress their offspring to the season, not the weather*) and away from the pre-teen scrum playing cards and smooching on the benches, the lawns under the trees were practically standing-room only.  It was exactly like one of those cardboard picture books that you give to small children with fascinating and singular activities hapening in every square meter of green grass - 

Look!
            Here's a man walking a little Scottie dog on a leash with its white whiskers hanging down, and its long white tail standing up, and its white legs twinkling as it runs.

            Here's a group of little boys playing football with a big red ball almost as tall as they are.

            Here are a young man and a young woman having a picnic. They are sitting on a blanket and drinking wine from long stemmed glasses and smiling at each other, rather foolishly.

           And here's a baby, pushing along a plastic walker that plays Farmer in the Dell over and over and over, while his parents cheer him on and he makes enormous grunting noises with the effort of every step.
            Here's a group of girls with a life-size cardboard cutout of a singer, grinning wildly and taking selfies on their cell phones.

            And here's another baby -  a baby bulldog with great rolls of puppy fat around his shoulders and enormous puppy feet. He's as big as tank, and he's yanking his leash out of his owner's hand and  bounding about the lawn, tangling up the football game, desiring to bepetted by every single person in the whole park, all at the same time. Doesn't matter if they want to. He'll make them want to - he's bigger than they are.

            The baby with the walker is looking hard at the couple on the blanket.  Now, all on his own, he is slanting, unblinking, towards them across the grass, and they are sitting very still, side by side. The woman has put her glass down on the grass and is holding out her arms-

            One f the girls with a cell phone is knocked flat. The puppy bowls over her like a panzer tank, a cardboard cutout with a marvelous white smile goes flying andthe air fills up with screams. The baby with the walker loses interest in the man and woman on the blanket and angles away.  The couple sigh deeply and sit back on the blanket, like puppets whose strings have been cut and the woman reaches out for her wine and drinks, deeply, looking at the grass.
            Above them in a tree, red aerial silks are slung over the highest branch, and another man and another woman practice their twists and falls high above the ground -

           And a Canadian sits with an Australian on another blanket.  They are pretending to read books and watching every single thing -

           We watched until the sun went down, and then sometime in the night, I became cold and dragged an extra blanket up the bed.  And in the morning we woke to a chill, damp fog. The winter was back from vacation and we could scarcely see the building next door.

*Winter is winter and what the weather is actually doing in the streets is an irrelevance. The calendar says that winter starts June 21st, and on June 22, women push strollers filled completely by small humans wrapped in woolly hats and fleece vests and puffy coats and layered over of their padded trousers, hand-knitted woolen leg warmers. And after all that, the occupant of the stroller is buried under so many blankets that half the time you have to take the existence of the baby on faith.
            When Sarah and Miles were visiting us last year, little Laurie was going through a growth spurt. If I hadn't know them I could still have tracked their progress through the streets of Santiago following a chain of Chilean matrons giving them the stink-eye because it was cool enough for a cotton cardigan and when Laurie sat in his stroller his pants rucked up there was an inch of leg visible between the top of his sock and the bottom of his trousers.   
            Dearie me.

The Park

Tonight I am wandering. Mr Tabubil is stuck at work in a late meeting and I am out wandering in the early winter twilight - down our street, through the tunnel of platano orientale, still shedding its awfulleftover summer fluff, past a collection of tall and modern apartment buildings with the apartments all laid out in rows like shoeboxes - and into a park.  
            On the paths in the park there are kids on bicycles, on the lawns there are grown-ups on blankets, and in the sunken rose garden there are dogs greeting other dogs and running in happy circles when they meet. At the other there is an enormous  playground, and it is always full of children.
            There are lots of parks and squares in Santiago, but as play-places go, they can be pretty sterile.  Children play separately, on their own recognizance, while their grown-ups sit on the sidelines, nodding guardedly to other grown-ups and encouraging their charges not to play with les autres. In our park, matters are different. Around the edges of the playground, parents sit in companionable knots and chat while their children run and shout and inflict social justice upon each other, and always, the children are playing with the other children. When Mr Tabubil and I first began to come here, the grown-ups and the children would look us up and down and smile and nod - decisive nods. Welcome to the neighborhood. Our neighborhood.

Tonight a man and a woman have a slackline stretched between two trees. They are winching. Climbing up, taking a step – or two – balancing, checking tension, dropping down to the grass, and winching again. A small girl stands with her skirts pressed against her fathers legs. Her eyes are as big as the moon. The man with the slackline lifts her up, and he and the woman - one on each side of her - walk her slowly all the way up and down the line.
            There is a public recycling station in our park.  That is why i wandered this way. Aimless winter happiness feels too foolish and ephemeral for virtue. I need utility, please, thank you, but either Thursday is the official neighborhood recycling night, or everyone else has felt the same urge- the row of recycling bins overflows into sacks - and stacks - of plastic jugs and aluminium cans. Piles of  milk bottles. Pyramids of glass bottles. There's no city-wide recycling program in Santiago, so those who choose to recycle must make these little pilgrimages to the neighborhood stations. It's heartening that so many in Providencia want to, but there clearly isn't capacity to meet the demand.
            Lamps are coming on between the trees. There is a dandy sitting on a park bench. He has mutton-chop whiskers on his cheeks, and an electric-yellow unicycle leans nonchalantly against the bench beside him. The dandy is reading in the dark; a kindle on his lap, and his brow furrowed in concentration as he poses with a book of which he cannot possibly be reading a word. I salute him, gravely, in the night.  He cannot see me either.
            In a pool of light on the lawn, a little golden spaniel and a beagle dog are running in circles, faster and faster and wider and wider - and stopping, every few passes to stand nose to nose, breathing deeply and smiling. A man is trying to photograph speeding dogs and unicycles (the man with the book has stopped pretending to read and is wobbling sideways and hither along the path) and snorting with frustration when the dogs come out as blurs the unicycle lurches out of frame.
            It is too dark to see my hands now. The man and woman on the slackline are a pale smear of white between the trees, winching it down. At the top of the park i turn left, past the local catholic church. It is the hour of evening service. The church is full, and there is a crowd in the courtyard. Yellow light spills out the church doors, and the service, loud on loudspeakers and megaphones, comes out into the night.
            And I go home in the winter dark.