Thanksgiving!

So even though it's pretty much always sunny with highs in the seventies, Thanksgiving was last week. The Southern Hemisphere continues to confuse me. To celebrate I cooked the traditional meal for pretty much everyone I know here. I was expecting seven and ended up with ten (eleven for dessert). I also feel an overwhelming sense of accomplishment at having done it all by myself. The hardest part was tracking down all the necessary components. For example, although there are Chilean cranberry farms, there are virtually no cranberry products for sale. Also, fresh herbs (besides parsley) apparently won't be available until around Christmas time. Needless to say finding a whole turkey was not possible. But! I documented the whole process and, at the risk of boring all of you, this is how I did it:



I was going to need chicken broth for the stuffing and the gravy. The grocery store had condensed cans of Campbell's soup and cubes of mono-sodium-ized bullion. So I had to make my own stock. The kitchen is not equipped with many storage containers so I ended up pouring the stock into an empty bottle that once held a grapefruit flavored seltzer drink. I think the twinge of citrus the broth leeched from the plastic really added to the complexity of flavor.



So after searching high and low, I was only able to find dried cranberries and a bottle of the most expensive cranberry juice cocktail of all time. I decided to cook these down with frozen raspberries, some red wine and apple chunks. In the end I added quite a bit of orange zest to accomplish tartness. It wasn't cranberry sauce. But it was pretty tasty.



I have been so spoiled having a Cuisinart for the last two years. Cutting together pie dough by hand is tedious and tiring. I was glad that shortening is readily available here though. And it's made with animal fat rather than just vegetable oil so it's extra delicious.



I did a sort of loose conversion of my mother's ratios for crust into metric. And then I realized that I don't even have metric measuring cups and eye-balled the whole thing. I might have skimped on the flour a little, but ultimately it's hard to complain about a crust being too buttery.



I guess I've made more gorgeous pies. I'll have to practice more.



So it's a chicken, not a turkey. And I trussed it with dental floss (for a hint of mint). But there wasn't a single bit left. So I must have done something right.



We didn't have knives for people to cut the meat. Wine was mostly drunk from mugs. We even had to improvise a seat with the propane tank from the stove and a board... But it fits nicely with the spirit of the holiday to have people from six different countries come together over a meal.

Film Festival Fail

So I led you all on. I told you there would be theater and film reviews all week and all I gave you was silence. I'm so sorry. But, in my defense, I have had some pretty bad luck with the Film Festival. Infrastructure seems to be an issue for festival facilities as well. Every single thing I have tried to see has been thwarted in some way. There have been bad tapes, bad projections, cancellation due to electricity issues (that would be the container festival) and tonight just a lame, unspecific explanation that they didn't have the film. The gentleman who explained the film's absence (at length without saying anything exactly) kindly showed his own film instead. I do not exaggerate when I say that it was the worst film of all time. Aesthetically on par with films from the Fast Forward Teen Program I was in during tenth grade. The sound of each fork scraping a plate rang out like a bell, but the dialogue might as well have been delivered through a pillow. And the plot. Well it was about a family and business and probably lots of things. But mostly the director seemed interested in the incest aspects of the story. The plot line seemed to surface without any particular explanation and was so graphically depicted that I think it would be more accurate to just call it sister fucking. Pardon. We stayed for about thirty minutes and then just had to leave. In an effort to make sure that the director knew how awful his work was, my friend tried to make as much noise leaving as possible.

Theater and Film Week!

So I totally missed writing yesterday. Sigh. I guess I won't win the chocolate covered MacBook, or whatever they were giving as a prize (a chocolate covered MacBook, for those in the generous mood this gift-giving season, would be sublime).

But as an update of sorts, yesterday was the first day of the Festival Theatro de Containers. My roommates and I went to see a Catalonian aerial dance troupe perform in the middle of the largest square in the city on four giant shipping containers stacked one on top of the other. It was pretty rad. Unfortunately the non-aerial aspect of the performance was a half-hearted clowning gestault. As a caveat, I am completely unable to see theatrical performances without being incredibly critical (this also applies to movies, fashion and architecture, improbably).

In addition to the Container Festival, there is also an international film festival in Viña del Mar this weekend (Viña is Valparaíso's sister city). So I am going try to see at least (!) one performance or film every day. I have several willing accomplices in this effort, so I think it shouldn't be hard. And! You lucky readers will get to hear all of my very strong opinions! Think of it as an early Christmas gift.

I am not really sure if this counts as not forgetting to blog. Since it is technically Saturday now. It's sort of a weird arbitrary thing. Dates start at midnight. Years too. A minute and you're a year older. I feel sort of attached to dates. I sometimes test my memory and try to remember really specific details of what I was doing on a certain date in years past. What I was wearing or what I ate. Usually I can only remember specific days. If I'm playing the memory game with March 3, for instance, I will probably do better because that's my very first best friend's birthday. And the date still tends to protrude a bit even though I haven't seen her in years. And of course some days stick out so much that they sort of loom in the distance beforehand. And sometimes one significant date is replaced by another thing that happens on that day.

I've been thinking a lot about this time a year ago lately. And how much it changed the direction in which I was headed. I feel certain that I made the right decisions, took the signs to mean the right things. But I often wonder what if things had happened differently. Right now I would probably be in Law School, thinking about things in past Novembers like going to the Cloisters with Ryan and Alex or that time I accidentally burnt a mouse in the toaster oven. And I'd probably read some friend's blog about moving to a completely different place and feel jealous and maybe a little trapped. It's strange to have moments where you can see your decisions stacked up behind you. Piled around the giant, immobile facts of events beyond your control.

Complaints: Plumbing Infrastructure

All things considered I am feeling pretty good about where I am so far with this crazy project. I am learning tons of Spanish. I have an apartment. I'm making friends. There are some things that just drive me insane about life here. Plumbing is very high on that list.

1) It is unheard of, as far as I can tell, to have hot water in bathroom sinks. Public restrooms and private homes alike. Not to be a typical American germophobe, but they do serve a purpose. My wasteful expectations of boundless hot water aside, it seems a fairly simple pleasure: splashing warm water on one's face, rinsing off the grime of the city. In terms of hand washing, I rely much more on soap, which is drying out my skin. Because I'm a pampered princess, basically.

2) The hot water that is available in my apartment (in the kitchen and the shower) is extremely limited. If I were the kind of person who used Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs as measuring units for her life, I would say that the Lord Chancellor would not reach the description of his dream in the duration of a hot shower here. 90 seconds. Max. It's deeply demoralizing.

3) This is going to come as a shock to all of you, but you are cannot flush toilet paper here. At all. There are small wastebaskets next to each toilet for used tissues. For the first week it was distressing and vaguely mortifying. I am mostly used to it now, but each time the basket is full and I have to bring it down to the street I experience a wave of physical revulsion. It adds dimension of desperation to the sanitation worker's strike which has been ongoing for the last two weeks.

4) My toilet might be older than my father. The age of the plumbing is apparently responsible for the above mentioned general infrastructure problem, but my particular device is truly a relic. Water never completely stops running into the tank. In order to avoid exorbitant water bills and quite a bit of noise I have to turn the water on and off waiting for the tank to fill each time I want to flush. It's really only a problem when I need to be somewhere and can't take the two minutes. I often find myself using the bathroom immediately upon arriving at places.

Lost and Found

I have been reading this book since I left the States. It's a series of essays with a heavy emphasis on memoir and art and cultural history, all about the concept of being lost. I have found it almost viscerally poignant to my current experience at times. I haven't picked it up in over a week now. Partially because I find it difficult to read in English when I am concentrating on learning Spanish so much. Partially because I hate the sadness of finishing books I really like.

Today I used an ATM on my way to the grocery store and thought that the cash that I withdrew fell out of my pocket somewhere on my way home. I looked in every pocket, the bathroom, my shopping bags. I was so annoyed/frustrated/upset about what amounted to carelessness on my part. But then my roommate found the cash on the kitchen floor. The relief of finding something I though was lost was such a wonderful sensation. Even something unemotional like money (an amount that will have very little long term consequence, anyway). It was like a really nice surprise. There may even be something about the feeling that's similar to falling in love. Or at least a fraction of it. Finding something that really belongs to you that you had been living without.

I constructed an inventory of things I have lost over the years that I really miss. About seventy-five percent of them are winter outerwear (that blue hat from tenth grade, a pair of my grandmother's gloves, the perfect street-pashmina, etc) and the rest are single earrings. None of them is worth nearly as much as the cash I misplaced today. Probably not even all of them collectively. But if, through some strange tidal flow of the universe, any of those things were to come back to me the elation I'd feel would be exponentially greater. I even have a box full of mate-less, former favorite earrings awaiting that unlikely turn of events.

Maybe the lesson here is that I care far too much about material things. That objects shouldn't hold such emotional worth for me. Everything should be dispensable. But it could also mean that, despite all evidence to the contrary, I might want to fall in love again.

Night at the Cinema

This evening Nike and I went to a film club screening. The movie, The Grin Without a Cat, was in French and the subtitles were in Spanish so I spent much of the time confused. Especially since we both thought we were going to see this visually rich, surrealist Czech film (which I had already seen, but thought would be fun to see again). Anyway, besides an extended exercise in comprehension, it was a sort of fascinating look at a subculture here. Well, subculture might be to strong a word for six middle-aged, leftist film buffs. Since I understood approximately every seventh word, I was relying heavily on audience reaction, gesture and tone to follow the post film chat. But I was definitely picking up some, "Oh no he didn't say that about Chris Marker!" kind of facial expressions. The film itself (which I have since learned is something of a classic, in the scope of documentaries dealing with the failures of the left in the late sixties) relied more on voice over than a non-fluent viewer would hope. But I really enjoyed the spectacle of the event itself: in a basement screening room of a university building, the strange blend of men with graying hair and film students, the guy sitting next to me with a Che Guevara pin and a paperback copy of a Balzac book... It was familiar but completely different.