The Devils You Know

Speaking of earthquakes - it's an interesting thing, watching the mental processes by which humans process risk.

            Over the last two weeks, I've received some lovely letters from family members, telling me how much fun the earthquakes didn't sound - and wanting to know when are we coming home, back to Australia, where things like this don't happen and the country is safe.  Soon, they hope?

            My Auntie Dee wrote to me from Queensland.  She didn't ask me to come home, but she expressed elegantly and forcefully how completely she is not a fan of natural disasters such as ours  -

            Dee and her husband are farmers in Queensland's red soil belt.  In any given year, they are up to their elbows in floods, droughts and bushfire watches.  It's hardly worth noting the ordinary, everyday, scarcely to be mentioned Aussie annoyances of venomous snakes and spiders in the downstairs lavatory.  During 2011's epic floods, they spent the better part of a week in their farmhouse shut off from the rest of Queensland while water lapped around the margins of their garden path, and later that year, when man-made disasters appeared on the horizon, my uncle was instrumental in defying a particularly bloody-minded government-sponsored attempt to seize the local farming land for strip-mining.

Auntie A  lives in the same part of Victoria that, three years ago, was blasted by horrendous bushfires that killed almost 200 people and left more than 7000 homeless.  Two days after the 7.1 quake, she wrote to me to say that Mr Tabubil and I ought to come home now, please. Soonish. Her own daily concerns are scarcely less considerable, and her own risk calculations deserve full presentation here:

            "I thought my little episode with the Tiger Snake in the lounge room last week was unsettling, but it was nothing compared to your earthquake. I had been ironing in the lounge room for a couple of hours.  I went into the bedroom to put on my shoes, and I think at this stage I may have disturbed the snake. I glanced down at the floor as I walked back into the lounge and there it was.  My brain did a double take as I swung back for a second look, quickly called your Uncle A (who works on the property where they live)who jumped up from his office chair in a hurry and banged his knee (he is now limping) flew home and caught the snake, which was hiding at the back of the couch.  Of course, we turned the bed upside down to see if there were any of his family left.  Still can't work out how it got in as I always am checking the doors to make sure that they  are closed fully.  Anyway, so far we have survived its visit."

            Four days ago, I had another letter from her - her young grandson had been bitten by a tiger snake in her backyard, next to her lemon tree.  He spent 7 hours under observation in the local hospital with his leg wrapped in bandages from his ankle to his hip.  Ultimately, he was let go with no more than a good fright- the snake had struck his ankle-bone and recoiled for a second strike without depositing any venom, in which moment the boy had been able to run and get away -

            "It was a good outcome." Auntie A wrote to me, far more casually than I could have sounded under similar circumstances.  

It's all about perspective, isn't it?  The devils that you know.  Known devils can become almost routine, and if not exactly tolerable, then bearable, and if not actually reasonable, then able to be reasoned against.

            The quakes that we are having here in Santiago are reckoned to be part of the tectonic reverb after the great big 8.8 quake in 2010's 8.8.  The first aftershock of that one rung bells at 8.2, and after a few days of 7-point-somethings every hour or so, the tectonic activity  has been trending more-or-less reasonably downward, ever since.

            Earthquakes become familiar.  As each new one builds, it brings to Santiaguenos what has become a familiar terror, until it peaks and then, then fear settles into calculation - "Well, we got through the big one, and this one feels less than that, so we'll get through this -  so no worries, no worries at all -"

            There's a night spent outside on high ground if you live on the coast, but you're through, and it has settled in the ground and inside your head, until next time -

            Would Chileans take the floods, which drowned so many in Queensland,  or Victoria's fires, which left nothing but scorched bones on scorched earth, or even the daily Australian caution against snake and spider?  Or up in Darwin, beaches that are salted with crocodiles, sea-snakes, box-jellyfish and the immortal blue-ringed octopus?  Or we could be up in Texas this month, praying for a storm cellar as we listen to the roof come off -

            The devils you know are the ones we can live with.  Strange dangers are terrors.  The danger we know are calculable, considerable and endurable.

            So we all endure.

6.7 this time

Last night  Santiago was hit by another very nice earthquake.  

The epicenter was only 150 km away, give or take a few, right next to the town of Maintencillo on the coast, and around hereabouts it felt a LOT larger than the 7.1 we were hit with two weeks ago, and it certainly seemed to have it lasted longer, which says interesting things about subjective time dilation under stress, because it official lasted about the same as last time.

The  strength is officially 6.7 now, which is nothing to sneeze at, and it being so close,  No WONDER we shook and bumped! It could have been worse -  we have friends down in Maitencillo whose house is about 1.5 kilometers from the epicenter, give or take a few inches.  They are feeling somewhat shaken up, right now, thank you.  And possess rather fewer breakables than last night.

The earthquake hit just on midnight .  I still wasn't quite asleep.  I felt SOMETHING, a mild jouncing, and half asleep, thought 'Ohh....  I'll wait and see.'  

Mr Tabubil started shouting "Get UP! GET UP! GET UP! NOW!!!!" - and by the time I was on my feet the room was shaking and heaving underneath and all around us.  We got to our pre-selected solid corner and I swear that damn apartment tried to rattle itself loose around our ears. Every single wall and bit of floor was fighting on a different axis. Our drawers rattled open in the kitchen and I began to imagine that I could hear our glassware resonating in the cupboard - but the sound grew and I realized that the quake had set off all the car alarms outside in the street.  And the quake built and built and went on and on, and I was purely terrified. 

Far lot more than I had been last time.

When that 7.1 earthquake  hit on the 25th of March, I flipped right into a frame of mind where there was "NO time to be scared, NO time to be SCARED - What are our evacuation routes?  How will I find shoes if this place is covered in glass?  etc? ETC, Tabubilgirl, ETCETERA?"  Afterwards I was frightened, but not nearly as frightened as I could have been had I not used up all my adrenaline on emergency planning.

THIS time, my forward planning was done and dusted and there wasn't anything to do except sit back and appreciate the roller coaster!!  Mr Tabubil and I had our arms wrapped around each other as we braced in our little corner in the stark dark and I could feel his heart beating like a hammer right underneath my own.

After it was all over i just lay in bed and shook.  I spent hours trying to get back to sleep. Outside in the street, half of Santiago was milling around and talking, their voices all high pitched and  thoroughly freaked out.  We were deeply gratified to learn that everyone who had been through the 8.8 quake in 2010 was as comprehensively terrified as we were this time around as well.

My Mum and Dad are here in Santiago this week, and they did NOT have a nice time of it.  Their room was on the 10th floor of their hotel.  One of the only things I could think during the quake was "Oh god, they're on a higher floor.  Oh god, they're on a higher floor."  At their height  the quake was less of a rattle and more of a roll - their building was swaying from side to side  with a noticeable pitch.  As it began they rolled to opposite sides of their bed and dropped off into the safety triangle, and just lay there, getting seasick and praying that they wouldn't get brained by a falling bedside lamp!

 I have a friend from Columbia whose mother hasn't quite grasped that there's about 150 km  of desert and a whole range of mountains between Santiago and the coast, and calls her and tells her to RUN FOR THE HILLS! Every time! 

And again, we are all okay.  And thanking goodness that we didn't have to up and leave and really head for the hills for a tsunami worry, like all those down on the coast last night.

Spanish Cold Turkey

I was dropped into the whole Spanish thing more or less cold turkey. We arrived around midday, sailed through customs and immigration with perfect fluency, and in the early afternoon, Mis Suegros took us out into the city to find some lunch.  We started off with a hiccup – in the cafe, the lady at the cash register launched a flurry of Chilean accented Spanish in my direction, and was completely unintelligible. I’d been feeling pretty good after my success in the airport, and now my self-esteem was plummeting into my boots. I revealed my secret identity – a bewildered and ignorant gringa, and she vanished into the back. She returned with a roll of paper, and in graphic pantomime explained that the roll of paper that prints out the receipts in the cash register had become jammed – and here she was, fixing it, wasn’t that nice – so she’d had to go into the back storeroom and look for a new one so that she could give me, as was my due as a nice customer, the correct change.

Now HOW was I supposed to have gotten all that?  It's been seven years since I lived here last!

Over the next few days things improved fast.  My Spanish isn't actually terrible - less non-existent than mostly rusty.  My vocabulary needs work, my subjunctive is atrocious and my use of indirect articles isn’t all that it could be, and I tear around the city dropping indefinite articles on the sidewalk and tying taxi drivers up in inappropriate verb tenses, but despite the frustrating refusal of the patriotic Chilean to comprehend ANY Spanish spoken by a gringo (regardless of how pure the accent - and I learned mine in a Chilean high school, valley girl slang and all.  My spanish teacher has an issue with that.  'You've GOT to drop the slangy sing-song intonation!  You're an ADULT now!!!" )  I'm getting along swimmingly, and only stop for cascading confusions of "Que?" "QUE?" "Le prugunte YO!"*  two or three times a week!

("What?"

"WHAT?"

"I asked YOU!")

Santiago

Mr Tabubil's parents (hereafter to be known as my  Suegro and Suegra, or mis Suegros, collectively) are also living here in Santiago.  They left Chile and came here a year and a half before us, and knowing that they are here is one of the things that made moving very easy - knowing that we'd be so close to them again!

Until we found somewhere of our own to live, they very kindly turned their spare bedrooms over to us (second bedroom) and our enormous number of suitcases and our airfreight shipment when it arrived.  (Four suitcases, three backpacks and eight boxes.  Third bedroom.)

On the afternoon of our arrival, Mis Suegros took us to Cerro San Cristobal, a hill in the center of the city with a giant white statue of Our Lady at the top.

 The whole mountain is a park, with a zoo and a huge summer swimming pool.  There are walking trails and an access road, but the nicest way to get to the top is to take the funicular railway from a small stone castle at the foot of the mountain, all the way to the top and watch the city  spread out at your feet as you rise up.  The funicular stops just below the statue.  You climb up a flight of stone stairs and just below her skirts is a big open amphitheater that is used as an out door church.  Gregorian Chants play thru loudspeakers all day.  In winter and summer both,  it's a lovely place to sit and look out over the city with the Andes all around your ears.

Flying into Santiago

How do you describe infinity? Enormity? Endlessness? The end of everything?  I don’t know how to say it. But I do know that I saw it. We crossed the coastline at  25 000 feet and through the window,  I saw a line of clouds – giant king clouds strung out all along the horizon. After a minute of watching, we were close enough that I could see that they were not clouds, but mountains.

            I have seen maps and I have spun globes, and I know for a solid academic fact that the Andes cordillera stretches all along the coast of the Americas, from Canada to the Horn. But these mountains stood as tall as clouds as a solid, unyielding, unambiguous, unequivocal WALL,  as far as the world went to the north and as far as the world went to the south, so that it was everything in the whole world, until there was no more world in any direction you looked. I could worship mountains like these, but they would not be worshiped, I think. They would not notice me.

            Flying in to the airport, we passed very low over the first rank of these giants – they were bare and crumpled winter earth, rising from thick green  valleys and zagged by crazy switchback roads that seemed to come from no particular place and end for no particular reason in tumbles of loose scree. The mountains were capped with snow, and we passed so close that I felt I should be able to lean sideways and brush the ice with my fingertips.  
            These mountains make a cauldron of Santiago. The Cordillera lies to her east, and spurs of the Andes reach out around the city, which bubbles and seethes in a pot of smog and steam and mist in their laps.  They are so large. We are so small, we shouldn’t signify – but there, reaching almost to the snowline was a grotty gray and brown smear of tar on the sky. It was an obscenity. A sky-size graffiti, spelling out in letters a thousand feet high the careless and ugly and wanton side of the human condition.

Bah.

Art Classes

A jump-up to the present:

On Wednesday I went to the Oriente Campus of the Pointificia Universidad Catolica de Chile to register for the art class that want to take there this semester.

It was the second time I'd been there to register.  The previous week I'd gone to there to do it and the lovely gentleman at Desk in Charge of Extension Courses had said, and I quote directly:

 "JUST because we have that class on our website and just because we said it starts on April 23 2012 doesn't actually mean we're offering it this year. Sheesh. foreigners."

So I went away and spent a full week and several phone calls working out exactly what IS being offered this year.  Officially. 

Sigh. 

But golly, word seems to have got around.  On my second visit to the university, to register for the almost-the-same-but-technically-entirely-different-class on offer, the gentleman in charge of Extension Courses greeted me with a warm kiss on each cheek and handed me off with all possible extraneous gallantry to the head secretary of the art department to  have me registered in the official listed version of "Life Drawing: Light and Shadow" - and didn't it take the poor woman a terribly long time to do what turned out to be the impossible- because the only life drawing class she could find in her computer data base was the one that  her boss had decided didn't officially exist any more!

It wasn't all she found.  She found me in there too.  Name, RUT (national ID number) and all, dating back to the last time I'd taken classes at la Catolica -almost 9 years ago, when the art campus was in an ancient adobe hacienda along the river.  Gosh.  After that I wasn't quite such a foreigner after all, and I'm pretty sure that if I turn up on the 24th of April at 6:30 in the evening, there'll be some sort of drawing going on, and I'm almost certain that my name will be on the student list.

After we'd battled the registration computer to an even draw, I asked the dear lady if the art department could recommend a good art store as I needed to stock up on drawing paper.  Ooh,  more gosh.  The secretary didn't know.  The professor of the class would probably have a recommendation.  On the other hand, yes, it's true that by the time I arrived at the class it might be a good idea to have paper in my hands.   Maybe Lapiz Lopez? (a very generic chain of stationers.) They might sell art materials.  Of some sort.  Watercolor paints maybe?  She was terribly sorry, she just had No Idea.  Maybe I should just troll Santiago's stationery shops and find whatever I could to get me through my first class and wait for the professor to recommend somewhere better?  There wasn't anywhere local that sold art supplies.

So I said thank you, very politely, and left (gallantly bowed and kissed to the door on the way out by the Desk in Charge of Extension Courses) and when I exited the office of the art department and turned left, do you know what I found right next door?

Three guesses.

I found a fully stocked, university-funded art supply store.  Right on campus, next door down from art department office.

This semester has the potential to be highly entertaining!

As I left the art store with a roll of brown paper in my hands, I heard music.  It was Semana Santa (Holy Week) and a troupe of students and professors were walking stations of the cross, and singing as they walked, and it was beautiful.  Because the arcades were built for singing.  Quite literally, I suspect. 

The new campus is housed in a turn-of-the-century monastery:  a square quartered into a cross of double-story building blocks that wrap around 4 enormous courtyards.  At the front of the block the courtyards are quite busy, with students sitting at little wrought iron cafe tables and doing huge experimental things on giant canvases.  At the back of the block the courtyards are filled with almost-overgrown gardens that sound like music because the music school is housed there.  In the centre of the cross there is a small, narrow courtyard that is something straight out of an Italian palazzo and it is literally dripping with greenery.  From the windows of the second story balcony.  And it is grassed and fountain-ed and it is so pretty - the whole place is deeply serenely elegant and pretty that I found myself terribly envious of the students and the faculty that get to live with it every day.

Traveling to Chile

Mr Tabubil's new company sent us across to Chile up at the front of the airplane.  It's an awfully nice way to travel.  The 180 degree beds are heaven and the air crew are charming instead of vague and faintly worried about where in the dinner service the hot chicken plate is going to run out.

            (To be perfectly frank, the food up front is just as uninspiring as the hot chicken plate down the back- the only discernible difference between up business and economy was the linen napkins, but that's Air Canada for you.  They do their best with the requisite cheese platters and the side salads, but when that cheese arrived, I picked up the wedge of brie by one corner and tapped it on the plate and my whole sleeper-class pod rattled. 

            You can't imagine what they try and push on you for breakfast.)

            The only faintly awkward part about traveling up front is that there is only one entrance to the plane, and while you're sitting up there, enthroned in splendor and trying out all the buttons on your personal sleeper pod, all the poor souls riding in economy class trudge right past you, clutching babies and carry bags, and you become intensely interested in reading that complimentary newspaper. 

Only I figured that this was doing it wrong.  After the first leg of our trip, I nipped into an airport newsagent and bought myself a Vogue and a Vanity Fair.  If you're going to look like you're part of the jet-set, you've got to do it right.