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Photos from China (so far…)

The view from one of our 2 balconies. They’re both tiny, but still. 
Another view of the street outside our building.

The washing machine. Out on one balcony. We hang our laundry to dry: it’s so hot here it takes NO time.



The kitchen. No oven, but the burners are gas, which I love. 
My room.

  
The living room. 

The view out into the courtyard. 

The bathroom without a bath – shower only.

The emergency phone in the elevator.

Quick & dirty pre-mixed tea my predecessor left in the kitchen, bless him.

This is in the Hong Kong airport – a peanut and barley pillow I had while waiting for the ferry.

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LAST Photos from #Chile !!

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Photos from #Chile : Cementerio General

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Photos from #Chile : History, Memory, Facts

I learned the facts about the dictatorship of Chile in school. I was born exactly a year after the coup making Augusto Pinochet president of Chile, and his junta the government. The dictatorship only ended when I was 15, in grade 10.

I spent my first month in Santiago simply wandering around, getting used to the city. One day, very near my apartment, I happened upon a stunning area of 19th century houses, made of two streets named Paris and Londres–after Paris and London, of course. Most of the buildings are now offices, hotels, and high-end cafes. I stood in the middle of the street that day admiring one lovely hotel, then turned around to look at the house across the street…and my brain blanked out. I didn’t understand what I was looking at. I saw cobblestones with people’s names and ages inscribed on them. The beautiful house was completely covered in rough, sprayed-on writing, saying “tortura”, “muertos,” “memoria.” It finally, sort-of clicked that, in this gorgeous, genteel enclave I had genuinely stumbled upon a site from Pinochet’s campaign of fear.

I got home, got on the internet, and looked up the address: 38 Londres.

I didn’t go back there until two days ago, and I’m leaving Chile today. First, I went to El Museo de Memoria y Derecho Humanos — the Museum of Memory and Human Rights — dedicated to showing what happened the day in 1973 when Pinochet and Chile’s military forcibly took over the country, and then what happened in Chile (and to Chileans outside the country!) until the dictatorship finally ended in 1990. It’s one of the best, most extraordinary exhibits I’ve ever seen, very effective, and affecting. It contains a bit of everything — video of newsfeeds the day of the coup, voice recordings of the president of Chile telling everyone goodbye over the radio, of Pinochet’s first address, of people recounting how they’d been interrogated, jailed, and tortured. Hundreds of photos, of people being detained, protesting, sites where “disappeared” bodies had been uncovered. Torture devices, a bent metal cross of an unknown victim buried in “Patio 29” of the General Cemetary, and pictures drawn by the children of people who’d been murdered, with “¿Donde están?” written again and again, “Where are they?”

Most of the inside of the house at 38 Londres is still empty: it’s clean, but there are holes punched in walls, exposed pipes. Near the one tiny bathroom detainees were permitted to use, a video plays, showing how a forensics team took samples–evidence–from every surface. The toilet has since been removed–everything else in the house remains exactly as it was when DINA–the army’s secret service–shut up the house and tried to hide it by changing its number to 40. The map I received explained what every room in the house had been used for. The entire second floor was for interrogating people for being “left-wing,” and then tortured. Being in that house, knowing what happened in those near-empty rooms… I can’t truly describe it. Unsettling. Moving. Overwhelming.

Just yesterday, I finally visited the General Cemetery of Santiago. The parts I most wanted to see were Salvador Allende’s tomb — which is lovely — and “Patio 29.” “Patio” in this case means “section” : the cemetery contains over 150 patios, and maps of the cemetery are marked in patios, making it easier to find gravesites. Finding Patio 29 was a bit difficult though — like 38 Londres, it appears the whole cemetery was renumbered in the past, possibly in part to hide number 29, which is now at the far northern edge of the cemetery, beside 156! They’re essentially pauper’s graves, all marked with the same bare metal crosses screwed into concrete. It’s become the site of marches by people angry that the immunity Pinochet gave himself and his junta is still in effect.

I strenuously suggest everyone visit every corner of Chile, which is mind-blowingly beautiful…and see what a dictator did this beautiful country for 17 years. It’s very, very illuminating, NOW.

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Photos of #Chile : La Serena, El Norte Chico

I’m way behind in posting regarding my trip in October, and I return to Canada in 3 days. I lost over half my photos of La Serena, and all my photos of the Elqui Valley, and it took me ages to recover these. With a few exceptions, I’m just posting photos without captions.

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More of #Valparaiso #Chile

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The rain kills my “honeymoon” in #Satiago #Chile

7:51 pm, 17 June 2017, Santiago

It’s said that when you move to a new country, there’s a honeymoon phase. Everything in the new place is, to you, exciting, different, and often magical. This will, however, at some point, be followed by phase 2: Reality.

My honeymoon phase in Santiago is over.

It began raining here about 2 am on Thursday morning. Rain was slapping against my window so hard it woke me up — I’ve been sleeping fitfully anyway because it’s cold here, which is compounded by a lack of indoor heating except with space heaters. It continued raining for a straight 26 hours! Despite experiencing flooding in the past, and regular rain in their autumn and winter, Santiago’s drainage is very poor, so there’ve been streets flooded. It was also very windy last night, and there were broken branches landing on cars. A friend who lives near Salvador metro station had part of her building’s roof fly off.

Today, Saturday, I slept in and went to have a shower at 11 am. The water was off throughout our apartment. I had been warned this happens sometimes in Santiago during winter, because the sewage system gets overwhelmed. Buildings will be told to shut off water to keep from adding to the problem. If this had been a weekday and I had to work, I’d be going there looking and smelling like an angry cat.

The water’s come back on since, but now the power is off in all the common areas of our building. We still have electricity in our flat (thank God), but my flatmate had to rescue three wet loads of clothes from the common laundry room. She’s hanging laundry off the shower curtain rod, on broom handles laid across the tub, off the curtain rod in our living room, off the backs of the stools at our breakfast bar…!

All that, plus buses with plenty of room sometimes not stopping if they don’t feel like it. And transit fares having THREE rates depending on time of travel, rush hour being TWICE as much as off-peak (what’s called “normal” time is only a bit cheaper than rush). There’s the banks closing at 2 pm every day (including, of course, pay day). I find the drinking culture here is on par with Scotland — that is, more insane than France! Sure, you CAN say no if someone offers you another drink… it’s just not DONE.

Overall, I do still like it here. Except when it rains. And this is proving to be an unusually cold, especially RAINY, autumn.

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Photos from #Chile : #FOOD

tapas
At Fuente Oficial, Santiago. Most restaurants in Chile have Menu del Dia — which will come with an appetizer (or in this case, tapas!)…
main course
…a main course (I went for the menu pacifico, tuna AND salmon!)…
dessert
…a dessert and coffee!
cream
I mistakenly bought this — ONE LITRE of PRE-WHIPPED CREAM– in a tetra pack, instead of milk!
Churros
Churros. CHURROS.
Mote
When a friend handed this to me, I said “What is it?” It’s called mote con huessillos, a very traditional Chilean drink + snack. At the bottom is a husked, cooked wheat and whole peach (pit still in). You eat that with the spoon, while sipping the juice, which is made of honey, water, and cinnamon. REALLY nice!
Another Menu del Dia example, from a little village in the Andes. The starter was bruschetta, salad was sliced tomatoes and cucumber. Main course was Cazuela — HALF A CHICKEN, with rice, potato, corn on the cob, and squash, all in chicken broth. And dessert was…a banana!
You can get mussels in a tin, like tuna! This makes me weep with happiness.
This was my first asado, the Chilean barbecue. NO VEGETABLES ALLOWED.
Ketchup. In a pouch. Why do I find this weird? A bottle isn’t more natural. It’s…just what I’m used to.
Marraquetas, Chile’s version of sliced bread. Which is not sliced, is precisely baked to come in 4s, and is more like a bun. Perfect for chorizo at an asado, for example.
pie de limon
I admit to being confused by some Chilean words: in any other Spanish-speaking country, this would be torte de limon, but here, it’s pie!
I can’t explain how good these cookies are. I’ll let their placement in the supermarket do it: These cookies can’t be found in the cookie section…but in the chocolate section.
This. This is the glorious empanada, fast food of South America. But putting this into the same category as McDonalds doesn’t do the empanada justice. They can be filled with almost anything – cheese, chicken, beef, black olives, eggs, shrimp, mussels! – and they’re available everywhere. I’m busy so I eat take-out a lot here, but take-out is usually this, and there’s nothing here to complain about.

 

 

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Kabuki Theatre and Oiwa #theatre

I am a theatre junkie. Kabuki is at least as old as Shakespeare.  It’s one of THE drama traditions I heard about as soon as I decided theatre was my life. Going to a kabuki play was on my must-do list while I was in Tokyo, but it was also felt, for me, like going to a cathedral and I hadn’t been to confession.

The Kabuki-za Theatre in Ginzu, Tokyo, the largest in Japan.
The Kabuki-za Theatre in Ginzu, Tokyo, the largest in Japan.
Billboard for the show outside the theatre. Of course no photos were allowed during the show.
Billboard for the show outside the theatre. Of course no photos were allowed during the show.

It was utterly amazing. It was actually four short pieces I saw, which — with intervals when you could get full meals and beer to have at your seat! — was three and half hours long. The style of acting and the men playing women (I’ll need to post about that separately—because) took some getting used to, because it’s so utterly different from any show I’ve ever seen before, and that’s part of the reason it was enthralling.

One of MANY screens hiding the stage over the performance.
One of MANY screens hiding the stage over the performance.

Everything I felt seeing my first kabuki was wrapped up in what I’d felt earlier that day while trying to track down Oiwa…the main character in one of Japan’s creepiest ghost stories, most famous kabuki plays (I didn’t see that one, sadly), and many of the country’s successful horror films.

There are a few different versions of Oiwa’s story: here’s one of the shortest, yet best and scariest. Horror and/or Japanese film fans will recognise her likeness from the Ringu series.

I have presumed to put her into one of my stories…the short film I started work on in France over the summer, and the related feature-length screenplay I just drafted. They both concern domestic violence, culture clashes, racism, sexism, revenge, and guilt.

Theatre people are, put mildly, superstitious. We call it “The Scottish Play” or “McBoo”. We leave a “ghost light” on in the middle of the stage when the theatre is otherwise empty and dark. And in Japan, whenever an actor onstage, or an actress on film, takes the role of Oiwa, they go to her shrine in Tokyo and ask Oiwa’s permission to play her.

And that’s what I did too.

The shrine in Yotsuya, Tokyo.
The shrine in Yotsuya, Tokyo.

The trope of the Maiden Ghost, based on Oiwa, has appeared in so many incarnations now that she’s thrown the first pitch in a baseball game. Which sounds silly, but I find it actually shows that Japan takes her as seriously as kabuki; she is embedded in Japanese culture — everyone knows her, and everyone, in a strange way, loves her. She embodies something genuinely wrong — vengeance — but it’s something everyone understands and has, at some point, wanted against someone else. I’m frightened by and enthralled by her.

I hope it’s not cultural appropriation — Gore Verbinski’s remade Ringu, quite well, I thought. Yes, I went to visit Tokyo to see the city, yes I met up with an old friend who’s been in Japan 14 years. However…I also went to Tokyo specifically to visit Oiwa’s shrine and ask “is this okay?” I hope it is.

A closer look at one grave.
A closer look at one grave.
Cemetery behind the shrine.
Cemetery behind the shrine.