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.

Why Architects Really End Up Talking Like That

It's November, and it's getting hot. Yesterday I went down to our bodega (storeroom) to put away my winter sweaters and pirate hats and I came across a box of drawings from back in my first year of grad school.
            The drawing on top was a sort of vector diagram - done in footprints. Memories came rolling back. It had been a "assignment now - final product tomorrow!" all-nighter sort of project - in which we neophyte architects had been asked to go someplace where a lot of people came through and map the traffic patterns - putting all the four-dimensional traffic down on two-dimensional paper in an exciting and really neoteric fashion. (Neoteric: architecture-speak for 'an artistic vanguard that you imagined up right now all by yourself."
            And then we had to write about it. Obviously, the drawing would speak for itself, but in practical terms, a short museum-style blurb wouldn't go amiss.  (A good professor is way ahead of student neoterism as a matter of course.)
            The problem with being asked to describe a drawing project in a paragraph or two on short sleep and shorter notice is that you end up turning out some purely awful drivel.
            Because you weren’t thinking clearly. You weren't thinking at all - you were snoring between your words. And you were surrounded by people who'd gotten even less sleep that you had, and while you were confident that your own ideas were pretty darned great, to your sleep-deprived ears theirs approached towers of literary genius.
            There’s no color of jealously like sleepless green.

And I remembered that I'd written about it, afterwards, when I'd woken up. And pasted it to the back of my neoteric masterpiece so I wouldn't forget:

            One fellow held a degree in ancient literature.  He had mapped the smokers on their nicotine breaks in Dundas Square.
            “Since the Dawn of Time” he said solemnly, “Ancestral Man has been Drawn to Flame.”
            “That’s probably true” I agreed, grinding my teeth, and went off to ask editorial opinions on “The pulse, the tide, the ebb and flow of harried, feverish commuters at the Bloor-Yonge Subway station” from two students lying on the floor behind me and looking, respectively, vacuous and pained.
            One of them winced.
            "Isn't that a little…damp?"
            On cue, Mr. Ancient Literature walked past declaiming “And Now, a Tattered Subculture of Social Pariahs Clusters Around the Vestigial Memory of the Ancient Hearth Fire!”
            I, who belong to the extremely tattered Subculture that feels stoned rather than euphoric when we don’t sleep, turned back to my laptop, typed out ‘In my map I marked out a sour by fix goot frid” and ran spell-check twice.

Down in the bodega, I shut the box and sealed it up with tape, but I won't forget. I think I need a little ceremony.
            I'll unfurl the map.  I'll enter the pulsing commuter tide that hustle down my street at rush hour every evening. When the ebb and flow of shoulders and elbows have crumpled it beyond the reach of even the most accommodating professor, I will go home and make it an offering on the fires of my BBQ on my balcony.  Neoterically.

Doctor Strange

I've just seen Doctor Strange - the new Marvel movie starring the very British Screen God Benedict Cumberbatch. It was mildly jarring to watch a film about holy men studying the eternal verities so that they could learn how to kick someone's nose out through their earholes, but then things went boooom and i remembered that this was a Marvel movie - these fellows weren't holy men, they were doorkeepers!  And the fellows knocking on the door burned with manifest destiny and carried nuclear weapons. With the safety off.
            (I wonder if any of the 21st century Americans involved in the project picked up on the irony of that?)
            Mr Cumberbatch plays a bossy white guy who thought he knew everything, and then found out he didn't, and then he did, and then he saved the world.
            And there are three whole women in the cast! Really! And two of them even have speaking roles! One of them is a very nice white lady who was the Supreme Sorcerer, and she gets to say lots and lots of portentous wisdom things that clearly looked better on the cue cards than they sound being wrestled around a set of actual tonsils (portentous wisdoms are all right in their own time and place, but two or more characters standing gravely in a mostly-Tibetan-temple taking it in turns to drop fortune-cookie truth-bombs does not cinematographic conversation make) and the other is the love interest!
            She gets to say things too, whenever Doctor Strange needs an emotional reaction beat. She also gets to sigh, and be sad, and look worried, and look determined. She even gets to tear up!!
            The very best bit was learning just how the studio rationalized turning the Very Tibetan character of the Supreme Sorcerer into a white lady:
            "Well, the character is traditionally a Tibetan male, but Tibet won't play well in China, and we didn't want to make the Supreme Sorcerer a "26-year-old leather-clad fanboy dream girl" because we wanted diversity."
            True story.
            That somebody gave decision-makers of this caliber a whole movie's worth of budget to play with tells me a lot more about the pharmaceutical industry in Los Angeles than I ever wanted to know.

The wonderful Benedict Wong was stuck as the Ur-librarian with the original humorless biblio-funk, but Chiwetel Ejiofor did his very best Royal Shakespeare, and he and Cumberbatch between them have more charisma in their little toes than a whole summer's worth of blockbusters.
            It was boom-boom, popcorn, a little snark, with action sequences so deliriously kaleidoscopic that they must have needed heavy medication to even visualize - as for story-boarding them, possibly migraines and a rest-cure.
            It was pretty.  It was fun. And the climax of the whole fun-house upside-down mirror-ride was a privileged, 1-percent white guy flying into the heart of absolute evil, and standing nose to nose with the face of scorched-earth selfishness and telling it to GO AWAY.
            He died for it, of course. And then he got up to die again. He went down over and over and over, dying in a million terrible, painful ways, and every single time he got back up - doggedly, tirelessly, willingly-
            Until he wore down even the embodiment of ego and "I want," and then Doctor Strange took back the world. All of it.
            I'm almost certainly reading too much into this, but right now it's an image I need right now. I'll take it and I'll keep it. It was a good movie.

Everyone is Going to Have to Stand Up Now.

If you live in the Unites States and you're a woman, a person of color, trans-sexual, non-heterosexual, native American, a person who has suffered a sexual assault, a person with a disability or a chronic illness -
Maybe you're not a Christian.  Maybe you're not a citizen, or you are a citizen but your parents weren't citizens, or you've got a name that maybe doesn't sound like it started out in Western Europe way back when - 
Maybe you're related to or know someone like that -
This is starting to be an awfully large number of people, isn't it?

This sure is one extraordinary day.

I got nothing.  Except a song.  This is by Danette Beavers, a member of the Washoe tribe who writes and sings at The Good Elephant.

Memories Don't Keep You Warm Enough.

The neighborhood around the Los Leones Metro station in Providencia is full of second hand and vintage clothing shops. They bring stock down from North America and the neighborhood is  a godsend for those of us with rangy gringo builds that don't fit lines designed for the rather more petite Chilean figure.
            Right now, that's me.  I left my leather winter jacket in a taxi and I'm looking for a new one.
            There are a lot of really lovely leather jackets in Chile - but I'm tall, and broad across the shoulders, and if the jacket doesn't fit so tight across the back that I can't lift my arms, the waist doesn't drop below my bellybutton, and the zipper won't meet across my chest, and when I ask hopefully for a larger size, I'm already wearing XL and the line doesn't go any higher.
            Yesterday I went to Los Leones.  I started in a store called Vintage, just off of Calle Santa Magdalena, and deep in a rack of high-eighties leather (bat-wing sleeves, malignant shoulder pads, vented fronts, elasticated waists, studs, fringe, patchwork and brocade - and every benighted bit of it on each and every jacket) I hit the jackpot.  On my very first stop.
            You could practically hear bells ringing.  Because this was it.
            This was really it - a soft suede duster, with a flared collar, and a gentle drape to the long skirt and wide split cuffs that ran almost all the way up to my elbows.
            It was the sort of coat that Destiny's Child would have rocked if they'd dreamed that high.  My college-aged self would have given a half a point off of my GPA for a coat like this.  The Dixie Chicks would probably have thrown in a solid gold record.
            It didn't  fit me like a glove.  It fit like a memory, like a song, you know -  the one where you copied the lyrics into a notebook because they got you - got you in a way nothing else ever had before.  They laid it all out like it was, and told you who you were in a way you'd always almost known, but had never quite understood until you heard that song - 
            That's how that coat fit.
I stood in front of the mirror and admired, and I turned one way, and then I turned the other, and then I turned back the first way again  -
            and I suppose one day I will be grateful to the big burly fellow with the Harley Davidson beard who was put his hand on my shoulder and said, very gently, "No. This is not a winter coat. This is not 2003.  You are not buying that coat today."  


It could have been. It could have been 2003.  Because I have dreams.

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.)

Pumpkins

Way back in October, for a bit of family-rated Halloween fun, we had Kids # 1 #2 around to carve jack-o'lanterns. It was the first time carving for both of them. Halloween is a relatively new import to Chile. Children's costume parties and lots of candy are definitely a thing, but the less candy-conscious elements of the holiday haven't arrived yet. This year, however, for the two weeks before Halloween, the Jumbo Supermarket chain was selling big orange American pumpkins.
            Over in the candy section of the supermarket, hunting through Haribo mixed assortments for the ones with lots of licorice, I became aware of a sotto-voce conversation behind me.
            "You ask."
            "No, you ask."
            "Are you supposed to eat them?"
            "How would I know?"
            "Ask her, then."
            "You ask!"
            I turned around. Behind me, a family of four were bending over my cart prodding bemusedly at the pumpkins.
            "You want to know what the pumpkins are for?" (A dim reply, but one has to break into a conversation somehow.)
            "They're all over the supermarket!"
            I explained.  With a google-image search even, and they thought it was pretty neat.  They thought it might be better done in autumn, the way the north-Americans did it, but the candle part sounded lovely. Last I saw of them, they were making a straight line for a big stack of pumpkins in the fruit-and-veg department.

            I hope they have as much fun as we did.  Kid #1 is 9 now, and taking life very seriously indeed.  All afternoon, she diligently scraped and drew and carved, but it was Kid #2 (age 6)  who really grasped the possibilities.
            He put the top of the pumpkin on his head and wore it as a hat, and offered it to his sister who thought it was disgusting- "There-is-nobody-as-gross as-you-anywhere! On the whole planet."
            So he dipped his hands into the big bowl of orange pumpkin guts, he came up dripping. "Raaarrrggghhhh!"
            His sister scooted back from the table and yelled.
            "Get away from me! You get away from me right now!  Mom - make him go away! He are so disgusting, take it away!"
            Looking thoughtful, Kid #2 wiped the worst of it on the seat of his trousers, and with an air of innocence that would do credit to a baby rabbit, he turned to his sister and held out a hand.
          "Shake?"
            This time, she made it halfway across the room. "Make him stop make him stop I can't bear it make him go away why is he even here I can't work like this take it away take it away take it away!
           "Kid #2 lifted his face up to mine.  He was suffused with happiness - there was so much of it that it was almost too much. He kicked a chair leg to relieve his feelings and crawled under the table and sat there for a while, sighing deeply.

Stickiness and screaming aside, both Kids #1 and #2 reckoned that carving pumpkins was pretty good fun, but it was when we added candles that the afternoon reached it apotheosis.
            In the bedroom, we closed the door and drew the blackout curtains. I lit two tea lights and lowered them into the pumpkins - 
            and magic happened.
           A slow, quiet magic that rose up with the candles and spread out until the room was filled from ceiling to floor - 
            The children were enchanted.  It was their magic; magic they'd made themselves with their own hands. It's something you only see in children: the unquestioned acceptance of wonder.  There's no looking for the wires behind the illusion, just a simple, absolute yes, an utter absorption in the moment.  In the darkness, they sat and they watched, and they sat and they watched -
            That was magic too.

Popo de Elefante

At the end of October we invited a few friends around for a light spot of Halloween cheer.  We even had a theme - worst nightmares in food and dress.
            Unfortunately for us, my "agoraphobia" costume suffered a fatal structural failure half an hour before the party started (the damned pigeon fell off my head), and on a warm October night, Mr "Arachnophobia" Tabubil flatly refused to wear 6 inches of fiberfill around his chest. To show willing, he hot glued a few wads of stuffing and a couple of spiders to and old t-shirt.  He looked a nightmare all right - a nightmare of last-minute design, and he lost his temper along with his stuffing.
            That's sort of how the evening went. Our friend Sal - rather a man's man - had found the food something of a stretch.  He's not a natural cook, so I set him a simple quiche - eggs, cheese and icky food coloring in a pre-made bought pastry shell.  Half an hour before the party (right when I was wrestling pigeons) he  called from the supermarket in a panic - the recipe had been in imperial measurements and he'd converted everything to grams to eight decimal places, but he was having trouble figuring out what sort of eggs he should buy - vitamin fortified?  Omega 3?  Grade AA?  Grade A?  Did he need to buy a baking dish?
            He arrived at the party 45 minutes late, looking cross and flustered.  He handed me a bag of chips and a jar of salsa.
            "The whole afternoon's been a horror show." He said sourly.  "I hate supermarkets. Why didn't you tell me that a quiche has too cook for an hour? Believe me, the chips count."*

*Speaking of horror shows, you wouldn't believe what a little pulverized walnut does to the look of  guacamole.  It's unspeakable.  Five stars and two hearty thumbs up. I recommend it for all your holiday parties.

And then there was the dessert.  Mr Tabubil and I own a recipe for chocolate mousse.  I may have mentioned it once or twice before, in passing. To do it right, you soak raisins in rum for an entire week beforehand and you use rather a lot of heavy cream  - 
           A triple batch of it makes a rather nice bowl of popo de elephante (elephant poop.): a voluptuous tureen of turds, studded with oozing alcoholic raisins, the heavy smell of rum rising up like drunken heat in summer* from the swirl of well-set soup -

*I might have used two full cups of rum in the raisins, and I might have tipped what was left in the bottle into the bowl as I stirred. Waste is a terrible thing.

After a couple of hours staring at the guacamole, our guests ate lots of it. With a pleasantly buzzy fruit drink on the side.  The blood-red ice hand floating in the punch bowl was a nifty touch. They giggled. And drank some more.  And ate a second helpings of the mousse  -
            Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of our guests got pished.
            One young lady had three glasses before we caught her.  She giggled, climbed carefully onto the sofa and closed her eyes -  right next to Sal - who is Bermudan and treats his relationship with rum like a religion, but who was lying with his head on the back of his chair and his feet up on hers, sort of snoring, and cradling his third bowl of elephant poop.

Post-script:
We really had radically overestimated how much mousse we'd need for a party of 12, and the next morning we still had a couple of liters of the stuff.  
            We gave it to our neighbors. They brought the bowl back the very next day - licked clean.
            Looking at us sort of anxiously, "That was the best dessert" they said "that we have ever had in our lives - would you like a plant?" 
            And they thrust a potted fern at our chests.

It must have been some seriously good mousse.

On Love

In the wake of the terrible events in Paris, many voices saying words that have become all too predictable. The responsibility - in varying degrees of more or less - is placed on Europe's refugees. The trouble comes with them. We must be vigilant, we must we must resist these threats against our way of life - 

            I am reminded of a question that was recently posed to Germany's Chancellor Merkel:
            “You’re doing a lot to help the refugees,” a woman asked. “What are you doing to protect our Christian values?” 
            Over the last few months I have found myself meditating upon an answer that was given to this question by a thoughtful and considering man: 

            "It is a strange notion that “doing a lot to help the refugees” is distinct from the business, the practice, or the essence of Christianity. Helping refugees, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, aiding widows and orphans in their distress -
            These corporal and spiritual works of mercy and justice are not a nice little additional thing that it’s generally commendable to dabble in a bit…Without them, our 'Christian values" are devoid of content and substance, an ornate treasure chest with nothing inside. 

We can imagine this same woman standing to ask this same question at the end of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew’s Gospel:
            When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.
            Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
            Then the just will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?”
            And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
            Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from …”
            And they will interrupt, saying, “Lord, you’re doing a lot to help the refugees, but what are you doing to protect our Christian values?”
   
These "Christian values" are not unique. In many words and many turns of phrase, they are the foundation stones of every single culture and society on this earth. Look at the people of Paris right now - bringing strangers off the streets and into their homes to keep them safe. Restaurants are closing their shutters and turning off the lights with their patrons safe and silent inside.  For those who prefer particulars - I particularly recommend Mr. Bathily, who in January hid hostages in the freezer of his shop at a very real risk to his own life.
            Alongside him, I recommend the Greek fishermen whose economy might be in ruins, but instead of looking for scapegoats, go out every night to make sure strangers safely reach shore - 
            Split those hairs if you dare!

My grandparents were refugees: Poles who fought the Germans, then fled the Russians, and at the end of the second world war, made their way to Australia. 
            Australia let my grandparents in. In due course they had children, and later, grandchildren - doctors, microbiologists, painters, writers, teachers, architects, zoo-keepers, civil servants, network administrators, surveyors, businesswomen -
            Now there are great-grandchildren as well; boys and girls who act in plays and build model engines and help fold the laundry and carry groceries and laugh and speak kindly in the streets - 
            Is Australia sorry?  Are we regretted?  Regrettable?
            Can you imagine that we are not loved as we love in our turn?

It is not a good time for the vulnerable anywhere in the world right now.  For myself, I can only speak for the Christian culture of Western Europe, but I will say this:
           Over the next few weeks, much of Western Europe will celebrate a cultural origin story - a story of the greatest love the earliest Christians could conceive. How wonderful it would be if, instead of celebrating by rote and having the parties and singing the songs and paying postage on cards promising goodwill and fellowship and reflecting warmly on a season well done, we could think seriously about the values that we are celebrating?
            We are imperfect. We stumble. We fall. But always, and often at the same time, we rise up. Black balaclavas and guns are as much of a threat that we permit to be.  We are compassionate. We are kind. We possess mercy and charity and love - love for the citizens of Paris, and love for the thousands and thousands of people just like ourselves, who are right now fleeing horrors that black balaclavas have devised and placing themselves into the hands of strangers, hoping for charity in the names of our shared values and humanity. 
            These are frightening times. Reaching beyond our fears take strength and courage that are often difficult to find. To those voices anxious for their cultural values - I ask you to let your pride in those values raise you up. If you are afraid, let those who are not carry you until your strength returns.  In honor and love, out of culture and humanity, we cannot do less. Any day of our lives.

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.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone!  Best wishes to all on this totally non-sectarian day of chocolate, finger-paint and bunny ears!

This year, I celebrated by dying chicken eggs with a friend and her two small children.  Bunny ears in place, the kids parked themselves at the kitchen ledge mixing bowls of food-color and vinegar.  Danette and I had a slightly more haute-couture technique in mind. 
            It is very elegant and simple - you take a stack of thrifted silk ties with nice bright patterns, and you cut the fabric into squares, and you wrap and tie the silk tightly around the eggs, and you boil the eggs in water with vinegar for quite a long time, and when the eggs are cooled, you unwrap them and you find that the patterns on the silk have transferred artistically to the eggshells.  It's very simple and very elegant and very lovely.
            Danette and I leaned on the kitchen ledge and snipped and wrapped and tied, while a small child dunked boiled eggs in yellow food coloring and solemnly explained that we did this to honor the Easter Rabbit, who once a year pooped out chocolate eggs for all the good little children everywhere. 
            My eyes crossed.  "Are you sure that's not the Easter Chicken?  I thought the Easter Chicken laid the eggs, and the Easter Bunny gives them away in baskets." 
            "Nope."  The small child fished the egg out of the yellow and held it half-way in and half-way out of the red food coloring, making a sort of ombre effect. "The Rabbit poops, and we get them under our pillows."
            Who am I to argue? The Easter Bunny and the Easter Chicken haven't graced my house with the Big Hop in years - I'm old enough that I'm expected to go find my own eggs.

The kid's eggs turned out fantastic.  Kid #1  did a whole Jackson Pollock thing with dribbles and stripes drawn on with a wax candle, and Kid #2 wanted pure colors - 
            "Not even a stripe?  Or your name in wax?" 
            "No thank you." He said politely.  "I like mine just plain.  They're perfect."  
            And they were. Really.

Ours, on the other hand…
            Our haute-couture eggs didn't come out quite exactly like the ones in the internet tutorial.  We had wrapped the silk as tightly as possible, but somehow the patterns on the silk didn't adhere to very much of the eggshell, and where it did stick we mostly got lumpy streaks and smears, and one of the ties turned out to contain a very unstable dye that gave everything a base shade of purple. 
            Some test-dyes might have been advisable, in retrospect. I might have done quite a lot of preliminary research, because after-the-fact, the deeper I looked into things, the less simple the silk-dyed-egg technique apparently was - there is quite a lot of crosss-chatter on crafting sites trouble-shooting the elegantly simple instructions and suggesting where to get lots of fresh silk ties in a very big hurry. 
            And most of the eggs burst during boiling, and they hadn't been very nice eggs in the first place, so the blotchy swirls smelled unpleasantly sulpherous and not at all like anything an Easter Rabbit would want underneath her in her Easter nest. 
            They were not, in short, our best efforts.

Mr Tabubil was very severe when he came home. "Not a failure.  Don't use that word.  Did you have fun?"
            "Well - " 
            "You all enjoyed yourselves, didn't you?" 
            "I guess - " 
            "Then it wasn't a failure, was it?" 
            "I suppose not." 
            "Right." And then he spoiled it all by giggling. "It's exactly like one of those Pinterest Fails. The instructions look so simple and clear and go step by step so that absolutely anyone can do it - they just don't tell you that doing it correctly needs five years of art school or an apprenticeship with the Culinary Institute of America. The result at home is… less polished.  But you had fun, right? That's what counts."
            The swirls on our eggs were lovely, when you really looked at them, and didn't compare them to the perfect internet version. I went away and ate some chocolate rabbit poop. Non-sulpherously.

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.

Game-Day Buffet in the Physiotherapy Gym!

Half a minute after I took this photograph, a nurse arrived with five hundred thousand french fries, to go with all the pretty packets of mustard and ketchup scattered between the olive bowls and potato chip plates. The fries were exceedingly tempting, but the nurses and the physiotherapists and the orderlies beat me to it and I made it out of the scrum with one solitary french-fry in my hand. I wonder what all the cardiac patients thought?  All those middle-aged men with big bellies and scars down the middle of their chests and the daily lectures on healthy eating and do you want it to happen to you again?
            With the High-Noon Chile-Netherlands game playing in the middle of my session, physio today was a gas.  None of the 12:00 patients showed up, and the place was pleasantly empty and strung with bunting, and those of us who were left - with the audibly disappointed exception of those tied to beds by ultrasound or electrical equipment - decided simultaneously that we needed to do our cardio work right NOW, thank you, whether it was in our physio regimen or not - on account of how the bikes and walkers and elliptical trainers are all situated right underneath the big TVs.  And when we ran out of cardio we simply stayed. The physio staff didn't particularly notice. The game was on!
            The fellow who does hand rehabilitation was looking pretty twitchy. His setup is a semi-circular table - he sits inside it with a TV mounted over his head so he can monitor his charges while they load spindles with wooden buttons and tie shoelaces and watch TV while they work.  Fortunately for everyone in the gym, his last patient abandoned him at 12:07, and he could stop looking like a candidate for an imminent coronary, and come around to the other side of the table and watch.
            And then I left, because I had things to do and places to be and it almost killed me to go.  But I waited, listening for the city, but 1:30 came and -
            Nope.  Well, not exactly.  Not this time, anyway.
            And the city was silent as a tomb.
            And Mr Tabubil cleaned up scandalously in the office pool.  He's got to stop betting against Chile. Just for once.

Cleats at High Noon

Today Chile plays Holland in the Copa Mundial.  At noon sharp.  High noon - soccer cleats and a leather ball on main street.  
Mr Tabubil's office is bringing in the big screen - again, and because the game runs over lunch-time, the bosses have ordered empanadas.  I wonder if the empanadas will arrive, or, if they do, if the delivery person will go away again or simply crowd into the conference room with everyone else to watch the game?
The smog is back, and the government is begging everyone to not go off and have a futbol asado (BBQ) because the city can't stand the extra smoke.  I wonder if it'll stand the extra noise?  If we do pull off a hat-trick against the Dutch Juggernaut and win?  We can't shout louder than when we won last week against Spain and made it into the group of 16. 
Fútbol is a religion, and Chile worships at her altar.  When she won against Spain on Wednesday the sound went on for hours and hour and hours.  I woke at 3 in the morning to horns, and cars parp-parp-parp!-ing along the streets.
But the moment it started - ah. Listen to a city going beserk -

Santiago at Rush Hour... during a Fútbol Game.

The streets of Santiago get extra-busy when Chile is playing in the world cup!

That Darned Copa Mundial Keeps Happening

It's been a big day for the Tabubil Household! Australia played the Netherlands, and Chile played Spain. Mr Tabubil had 5000 pesos (USD $10) riding on Spain winning that one by two goals.
            "Two goals? Spain?"
            "Why not? They're coming off a ridiculously heavy loss to the Netherlands, so they've got the motivation.  And talking motivation - Chile and Spain have a rivalry going way back. It's going to be a grudge match.  And with the fire of past recent defeat burning in their bellies - "
            "Spain's also got the oldest squad in the cup, and Chile's having a real good season-"
            "-and after the way the guys in the office were swanking around after the Chile-Australia,  there's no way I wasn't going for Spain as hard as I could."
            "That explains the two goals, then."
            "One goal's only optimistic. Two's... ambiguous."
            "You're going to lose 5000 pesos."
            "Yep."
It's certainly the first time I've seen a betting strategy that rides entirely on generating irritation in the other members of the pool. Testosterone's a real bitch.

In other news, Australia acquitted herself nobly against the team that took down Spain 5-1, and although she didn’t quite squeak out a win, she didn't exactly roll over either. 3-2, thank you. That's respectable, that is.
            And Chile clobbered Spain. I didn't watch the game. I let the city tell me, and tracked the goals and penalties by the roaring in the streets. Waves of rising sound - honking and shouting and cheering and screaming and drums and trumpets. And even now, the streets are flooded with the blue and red and cars are barping and honking their way up and down.  All over town. 
            I'm no fan of FIFA, or the economic politics of the World Cup, but dear lord, do I love Chile in soccer season.

Birthday Billions

Mr Tabubil's office is running a pool for how many points Chile is going to win by in the Chile Australia game today. The posted options run from 6 to eleventy-billion.
            Mr Tabubil has thrown in in a wild-card vote for Australia to win by one goal.  There was much derision, but, he told me smugly, his strategy is sound. 
            "If a miracle happens" he said, "and Australia wins, I don't have to share the pot, and when Australia doesn't win*,  I  gets points for being a Real Sensitive Guy who's sticking by his wife's country no matter what." He paused for me to appreciate his brilliance."It's even better than roses, Tabubilgirl. Happy Birthday."
            I squawked, and he sighed. "I was going to take you out for dinner, but if we could even find a restaurant with a functioning kitchen tonight, anyone silly enough to eat food cooked while the game's on deserves exactly what they pay for.  I figured we'd stay in, put some smooth music on the stereo, open a box of chocolates, and listen to the reverberations of a whole nation screaming Goooooooooooooooool! 
          Eleventy-billion times."



*And if Australia does pull out a hat trick and win the game, I knew they had it in them, and I knew it all the time, and no-one, but No-one, is a bigger patriot than me.  Seriously, Australia, give it your all.  Or my birthday night is going to be less romance, and all sniggering.