more earthquakes & more other things

1. Okay, I was chatting away / half-heartedly researching Chilean bloggs on president-elect Sebastian Piñera's inauguration today, when there was a pretty prominent tremblor, so prominent in fact that I was mentioning it to my friend, followed by an even stronger one shortly thereafter - the second one was worse because it got worse (and that's when you freak out) so I cried for R. (since he was here... just to give him the opportunity to make up for last time) But compared to the other time it wasn't that bad so I didn't freak until we saw crowds of people streaming up the streets uphill: Tsunami warning. My roommate got a waxen face and left instantly; R and I packed few things and rushed after. (In retrospect, I'm quite proud of my cool calculation, my hands were quivering but I didn't take idiotic things, but the computer, passport, proof of my visa process, money, camera, my notebooks).

It really seems kind of silly now. Like sheep we were waiting with all these office people (who work in el plan, the flat area) uphill, driving each other crazy. And absolutely nothing was happening, apart from constant quivers and random sign reading: Aren't the birds behaving strangely? Is this wind normal? What does it MEAN what the military boats out there and the helicopter is doing? Seemed that the authorities who failed so lethally last time were trying to be absolutely certain this time. I think I would have waited longer than the hour that we waited but I had to go pee. And I was thirsty and hungry. And somehow, the whole thing wasn't happening. I decided to go down to our house so I won't pee in the water when I'd die cause we all know that is disgusting. At our house, there were a lot of people waiting at only that altitude, so I realized that we could as well wait at the house.

so, totally underwhelming in retrospect, but I was really really really scared!

2. Chileans showed some of their adorable qualities by mentioning all over facebook, twitter et alter that in precisely the moment when "the Antichrist" was swearing to guard and lead Chile according to his best capacities (or something like that), the earth groaned and moved in protest.

3. I've so far neglected to mention the three-legged dog. There is more than one, in a city with so many dogs (think New Zealand - but with dogs), but one that sort of belongs to "our" neighborhood. It holds itself up fine against other higher-legged versions. Gives you a real example.

all those office people...

office people in front of our house

me being afraid

IV

R is back (and we promptly got into a fight. priorities!). Valparaíso is back as well, going about more or less business as usual, apart from people still clearing out the supermarkets, and half the town being cordoned off with white and yellow "danger!" bands : danger of collapse. I just realized how lucky the town was to be so far away from the epicenter: Had it been a bit stronger, or a bit closer, Valpo would definitely be in shambles, seeing that the buildings are quite old - i.e. built before Chile enacted its severe building laws -, often randomly put somewhere, and made of adobe or wood. or corrugated aluminium. Or un-corrugated aluminium, I haven't checked the difference yet.

so I'm watching the devastation mostly online and on tv, just like you. R's brother went to a town at the beach south of Cúrico, and came back to tell terrible stories on bad organization (I told you so...). Example: A heap of clothes at the entrance of some town, and the mayor saying, the villagers will come to get them. But those villagers are scared to leave their houses, which are some 10 kilometres away from said heap. They don't even know that stuff is there. And they said to Francisco (R's brother), yes, that's what we need, clothes, it's cold here and ours are wet (or eaten by the sea). the clothes will come to us when they are there. That town was comparatively lucky - people were not dead - so there were few helpers around, and probably no cars, and in any case, nobody who said: You load up these clothes and drive them into town. Which is not really a tricky solution, but I'm probably oversimplifying.

It's just distressing to hear these stories. I'm looking into opportunities to volunteer right now, but I don't want to be in the way either, blocking roads, resources etc. I'll let you know.

e. update III

death toll, according to BBC: 700. They also say that

"About 90% of the historic centre of the town of Curico was destroyed. Many roads and bridges across the affected area were damaged or destroyed."

Troops are being deployed in the hardest hit regions: Chile is divided in 15 regions. Valparaíso the town lies the 5th region - aptly named Valparaíso -, Cúrico is part of the 7th, which is called Maule, and Concepción the 8th, named Bío-Bío.

The Maule and Bío-Bío (another Mapuche double sound) are hardest hit. They have a curfew and the army as "support", apparently mostly against looting. There are videos of a guy carrying out a brand new refrigerator out of the store. But also of people just grabbing bread and water - if they are not helped in time, who can blame them for taking the stuff that is just lying around in those supermarket's storage centers.

The Tsunami hit the Juan Fernandez islands, where warnings were not issued in time, and killed 16 people.

R is determined to come back today, but information on the possibility of transportation is running sparse. Roommate M claimed they will cut the water today "for a couple of days, like 3 or 4" - excuse me? There are worse things, I know but I still hope it's just another fake alarm. I have no clue how to hoard water for toilet-related needs in sufficient quantity, for four days.

will continue updating; it's hard to concentrate on other things.

earthquake update II

R says in the Cúrico region the death toll is now 500 people. Santiago had 16 I think, and this is the range of the other regions as well.

Valparaíso suffered at least one loss, a person who died from cardiac arrest when s/he heard that fuckhead announcing a tsunami. He was taken into custody (the fuckhead).

Now the rumor goes that the false alarm was set off so people would leave their houses to be robbed. nice. I personally think he might have just been crazy (but then I watched "incident at loch ness" recently).

There is this town further south - another one that begins with "C" - where they cleaned out the entire supermarket - and I mean sparkling clean. And that was the only supermarket in town! So I'm not talking those "looters" who take what they need and are not given - but total pieces of shit who take everything and leave others such a mess, in such a mess. (I'm certainly not feeling bad for Líder - the evilness of this chain would valid a post in itself.) Strangely, the attitude I encountered in response to this supermarket incidence, was: El Chileno es así - Chileans are like that. This is not the first time I heard this.

Here the supermarkets are cleaned out the regular way: lines till the back, atmosphere of panic and confusion (times ten of the usual). There is heavy policing. Somehow this does not make me feel so safe. The atmosphere is still of paranoia, but all goes relatively orderly.

It's just ridiculous. Polemics on bloggs still talk the language of "shoot the Communist bastards/dogs/scum/vemrin", "Allende equals anarchy", the military will sort it out "as usual" etc. I don't get it. There is "we are like that", there is the "viva chile" for God-knows-what (mostly said without any context/supportive evidence), then there is this image of Chileans as friendly and cariñoso, as I mentioned in another post, and also as showing solidarity. Which I find the most ridiculous, given the extreme inequality of this society, the extremely clasist structures, permeated by racist reasoning (more "Indian" looking vs "Spanish" looking/last names etc).

The explanation for this solidarity myth, according to R, is the teleton, the one charity event, which collects money for disabled kids. And the companies supporting that event, such as Lider, do not give an actual peso, they just raise prices on their products, tell consumers if they buy those they do a good deed, and thus have an enormous free advertising and public relations campaign.

Okay, that did not have anything to do with the quake. I just needed to express my confusion.

Earthquake update

Information comes in dribbles, and information policy is a puzzle, to put it friendly.

Information from R: Cúrico is now with water, still without electricity. Central Cúrico looks like a war zone, many collapsed buildings. Cúrico is in the Maule region, close to Talca (40 minutes) which was hit really badly. The villages around are most affected, and people are without water; hospitals are affected. The family went somewhere to help out with a 50-200 litre (maternal and paternal reports differed) water tank (something everyone should have handy).

The Santiago Times said the aftershocks, which continued night and day, went something as high up as 6 points. More than 200 prisoners escape a prison in nearby Chillan. Kleist's "Earthquake in Chili" anyone?

Cúrico Radio reports people selling bread for $2000 (instead of the usual $750-$1000). Nothing like an earthquake to make some extra cash it seems. Also long lines in front of gas stations. Cúrico Radioalso denied the existence of a tsunami (you know, the one which hit Juan Fernandez and Hawai).

Today there has been a fake tsunami alarm for Valparaíso.

I freaked a bit today because it was raining (well, drizzling), for about the first time in three months (which is totally normal for the region). So I'm standing there, having dared to go outside, thinking: What, rain? Here? Now? Why? What does this Mean??

I guess I wasn't alone; maybe that's why the fake tsunami alarm worked so well.

Supermarkets opened today and people were buying like crazy: back home, I would say "for the next world war," here it's probably rather "for the next military coup." the guy in front of me bought 6 bottles of regular cooking oil. But they might be right in hoarding sugar, flour and other stuff that is produced far away. Parts of the roads are damaged, and most things are transported in trucks (which also makes the truck union extremely powerful, but that's for another post).

Earthquake!

okay, it's 3.36 in the morning and I'm waking up to a shaking house. It does not stop shaking for what seems like five minutes, or five hours (official numbers: about a minute and a half)

maybe given to the fact that I had been sleeping, my thoughts were very coherent and they went like this: NOOOO! MAKE IT STOP! STOP! NOOOO! I felt like 6-year-old, I swear.

And then at one point my adult self joined the party in my head and threw up previously collected information so I went to stand under the frame of the door. Safest place, I have been told.

And then it stopped. There is a sound to an earthquake; I didn't know before. The sound is something like the roaring of a dragon or hell's ovens exploding. And afterwards there was silence. and then more quakes, more or less little. Sirens. the sound of a group of people in the streets, of crashing glass and general mayhem. Electricity died, internet connection died. I was alone - R was in Cúrico with his family, my new roommate Montserrat at her boyfriend's place.

(aside: yes that is a name, not just a monk place in Spain, and the appropriate affectionate nickname is "Montse". Which to me sounds like Beyoncé in Berlinerisch, with the final "se" like the ending of a certain F-ord. Or was it a V-word?)

There are more little shakes. the feeling is somewhat like this: throwing up seasick in a tempest. At the same time I have never experienced an earthquake so my brain is searching frantically to classify it, and mostly seems to return messages to me like: this is not happening. you are dreaming. you are imagining this. We don't know this, therefore it isn't.

The whole morning was eerily silent. I went out for 15 minutes in the morning, against Rs admonishions. I did not go very far; I feel really safe in this house. Things - like strutting parts of houses or convoluted electricity lines - have crashed here before, all without quaking, I don't need to try my luck. In the small radius I saw, there were a lot of looted shops, broken glass, broken facades. Almost all shops closed of course, and very empty. But mostly the flat downtown area seemed okay. In the hills, I've heard and read, it's worse. From my tour guide walks I remember many houses perched precariously on hillsides, made of flimsy material. the damage there must be bad.

by now the phone and, thankfully! the internet connection is working. R calls me hourly to check and report from Cúrico. The 7th region, where he is stuck (tunnels and bridges have to be checked before half of vacationing Chile can safely be sent home; some collapsed), appears much worse off: no electricity, no water, lots of after-quakes, and heavy damage zone.

thanks to the internet I know now it was a 8.8 earthquake, epicentre further south, close to Concepción, Chile's second largest city, from which there do not seem to come many consistent news. It must have been less strong here then. Outside is nobody. It just feels a bit strange to be alone in this.

Update: still afterquakes, some quite long too. I went outside another time and realized how shaky my legs are. the quake here was "only" 6+ strong.

it's so strange to not be able to do anything. everybody seems dazed, and all you can do is wait.

The Wedding Rant

I’ve been holding back since so many people are getting married now, and also to calm my rant.

But then... why? This is a funny story and material for a good rant. So there:

Recetly, R and I went to a wedding. A wedding “en el campo”.

Which proved a number a things:

a. I can be in friendly engagement with a horse (!)

and I can prove it (fine it's not the same horse. But it's a horse!)

b. Rustic is overrated. Read story below. Still, the pictures came out nice:

c. It takes half an hour for the remainders of a 70+ wedding congregation to get together to take the one picture where everybody’s on it (why you might ask? Because there is always two or three who walk past the waiting crowd in posture, in order to reshuffle some things on the table, or to do private washing… the more amazing thing is: nobody says anything. Everybody waits patiently. If patience is a cardinal virtue, heaven is full of Chileans)

Okay, there could be more sarcastic-bloggy listings, but here’s the story. R’s friend Cesar wanted to get married to his long-term girlfriend (a friendly gal who called everybody, me included, “my daughter (son)” or “my love” which I have so far only experienced from older shopkeepers). Cesar tells R the date. Everybody’s happy. A couple of weeks later he says, oh and it’s in “el campo”, which I naively associated with cows and pasture. And then some days later he said apparently, we have to sleep in tents (I think R did not tell me that straight away). Then, before we went to his parents' home, I asked R whether he was absolutely sure that the tent was there. Yes, totally, and I should stop nagging. We got there: no tent. Big fuss. Lots of agitation. Lots of repeated disbelief from R, lots of following-through-the-rooms and strange advice from his mother. It felt sort of Italian. In the end we went with the grand family tent (gained with heavy second-son-bargaining from reluctant parents), which fits six people and R did not know how to build it. We managed just fine in the end (I wasn’t too worried, it’s the same basic construction with every tent, but I was worried about daylight, since it took us ages to get to the places over cobblier and cobblier roads.) Good thing too, because – as was mentioned in the Cesar’s last and unfairly timed informational call – it was going to rain. Which it did. Which let another girl’s tent shipwreck, so she and her daughter slept in our tent.

A bit of rain you say? Well, this was “pre-Cordillera.” Translated: friggin cold. We were 20 kilometres away from civilization, and civilization meant a nest that I usually wouldn't call a town. Also, to get to the actual place, some family heirloom, you had to descend. Descend along serpentine mud roads into the forest. And then there was sort of pasture for the tents. Then descend some more into the forest until there is the house and a bit of space around, but not much, and a river.

Sounds charming? Claustrophobic is more like it. The only open space was the sky. Also, guess what happens to the mud road after the rain, which started more punctual than the ceremony, at five o'clock on wedding day and continued during the whole night? Yes, right. So the next day, the big guys spent 6 HOURS to push up 6 cars. Among those guys was a friend of R who had offered to take us home in his VW bus (VERY nostalgic feelings at this point). No communication about this point: I was basically waiting and repeatedly asking people What is happening, and Where is Christian and Shouldn't we go help? Around five or six in the evening, the others' apathy slowly started to wear off (daylight), but not to real arousal. I think it took another three hours to take off: Just to get everyone to pack and leave (it's not like we've been waiting for this THE WHOLE DAY!), and then how to get all the people and all the stuff in the bus, and somebody wants a banana, and wow, we need water? Why did nobody tell me that? and WhoofWhoof! (at least that's how it started to feel to me, I had a very passive-aggressive internal breakdown) We were 12 people in that bus, among them a constantly talking woman, 7 months pregnant with twins and throwing up, and a mother with her 4-year old. So I was definitely not the one worst off.

This is the 4 year old: He named us (the duly waiting females) his horse, waggon, and in my case, first Bambi (!) and then some fabled animal, like a unicorn if I got that. Not too bad right?

still. I had wanted to leave asap. Apart from the claustrophic feeling, the uncomfortable atmosphere stemmed from the fact that the bride and groom's family were treating every friend-guest like an intruder on the scrounge, regardless of the fact that it took us two days and quite some money to get there, and that I helped the whole day peeling and cutting and cleaning, mostly for food which I would not see at all, while R was making a video for the happy couple, and other guests brought a whole band equipment with them!

You got there from your tent and there's nothing. If you go in the house (where the family slept, admittedly including some elders and kids), there was an immediate "Que necessitas?", translated: Get out! (I know "Qué necessitas" only from the most unfriendly shop vendors). You take a bit of bread under stern looks and shuffle out. Or you get in line for the (one) bathroom. The food was dreadful, I had no more cigarettes, and the friendliest conversation was with a sixteen-year old - he was genuinely interested in German-Chilean differences. The others got drunk and told me a) I should smile more, relax, dance, drink, do stupid things, etc (which annoyed me immensely because I saw a couple of guys never cracking a single smile and no-one told them to be more accomodating) and/or b) clarified cultural differences for me. Which goes like this: Me not saying or asking anything to the topic; They tell me that "Europeans" are cold and work all day, whereas here, people were friendly warm, and fun-loving. At this point I had finished drinking (so as to not be rude) and could excuse myself to get more booze. Which was easier said than done, because apart from the disgusting mix drinks (terremoto: cheap white wine with pineapple ice cream) and "country wine" which in this case was pure acid, there was little to be had.

Yeah yeah, good intentions. I can't stand any more Chilean unwantedly telling me about "Europeans" without ever having set foot in a single European country, without having me said ANYTHING AT ALL about their country or any other Latin American country either, and then they tell me CRAP! There was a guy on the streets of Valparaíso who robbed a woman's purse. She cried for help, and people swarmed in from everywhere to BEAT the guy - just leave your business, get in a couple of swings at the head, and go back to business. Warm, friendly, welcoming? You're kidding. What is this, self-hypnosis: You are no longer a cat, you are a doughnut! Against Europe, this is Rio during Carnival, these guys seem to think. (and don't care for any of what I say either)

Of course, there were good things, too. It was amazing to see how all the friends and family worked together to pull through what was simply an organizational nightmare. There were two toilets for the 70+ people (about 100 were invited, I'm thankful to those who did not come), and one shower, which was not working, and when it did, about one hour before the ceremony, there was of course a preferential treatment for family - including 20 minute non-use of the shower while one of those went to collect his things in all tranquility (Once again:It's not like we've been waiting for this since 10am...).

So, no shower, no cigarettes, and food reduced to bread and lamb. Not nice lamb, fatty dry pungent-tasting lamb. Every day. And me, being expected to be excited about everything of course, so as not to wound the national soul. Which did not stop some random guy who I hadn't even talked to, say "Chao, gringa" in the end, which is pretty insulting. An adventure, yes. Does it look more glamorous now, and on the pictures? definitely. to be repeated? No way!

end of rant. I promise something lighter as the next post...

(ps: sorry... earthquake got in the way of upbeat post)