Coca-Cola

I've now been in Santiago, Chile for two weeks (almost). It's quite something to live in a 3^rd world country (albeit a fairly developed one). Have you ever seen the movie Lost in Translation? At one level, it's about the disorientation that Bill Murray's character feels when traveling to Tokyo. He sees a society that has adopted Western culture without necessarily knowing why. The movie portrays Tokyo as un poco soulless, and perhaps unjustly so. I can see the same thing here – everyone wants to be Western but they don't know why. Also, the food is terrible. Not poorly cooked, just extremely bland. It's strange to me that a country that provides food to nations of the Northern Hemisphere during the winter months has such flavorless food itself.

Perhaps I should not have opened with the things that are negative about Chile. It's amazing in many ways. I'm seeing a side of life that is really incredible here – I'm witnessing a nation develop from the vantage point of the center of it. The nightlife is fun. I'm meeting new students at the Stanford program, which is excellent. My host mother is incredibly sweet. I'm also realizing that my studies in economics and business have made me a touch more conservative than my peers. The countryside here is beautiful. I've been out to the coast these past two weekends, and it's truly amazing. The place I went to on Friday, Isla Negra, reminded me so distinctly of the Washington coast (with slightly different sand). Once I stepped off of the pavement of the street onto the dirt path leading down to the site that I was visiting, I had the strongest sense of déjà vu. The pine trees and the ground and the air near the ocean put me squarely in the middle of a park in Washington. As I approached the beach, my sense of home only increased. The granite rocks, the kelp, the salt, the tide pools, it all SCREAMED Washington to me. It was a good feeling. I wouldn't say that it made me homesick, for I didn't have a desire to travel home immediately. I did have a desire to plan a barbeque for when I return in June. And I did, however, worry about my future.

This summer, I will be in Zurich. It will mark the first year in which I will not spend a significant amount of my time living in my house in Mukilteo. It portends the future, for my career path traverses the distant streets of New York City. My anxiety stems from the connection that I feel to Western Washington – the sprawl, the green, the weather, the Puget Sound and the ocean, the rain. The adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine that form my DNA double-helixes encode not only my thin, brown hair and broad shoulders, they also express the rainstorms and seaweed-encrusted rocky beaches and immense expanses of salt water and encircling verdance of my home. I will come back. I do not know how at this point, but I will come back. I feel the pull even from here.

In other thoughts, Paris is often described as the city of love or romance. Supposedly there are couples everywhere and their love and affection is endearing in some fashion. I have not found that to be the case here. Upon arrival, my friends and I noticed how many couples there were everywhere we went. Couples can be found on the subway, in restaurants, on the streets, and on the beaches. The obnoxious part is that at any given time, two-thirds of said couples in your presence feel the need to visually and audibly demonstrate their tongues' needs to reconnect with one another. Get a god damn room! Seriously. It stems from the living accommodations of people between their adolescence and marriage here. At home, teenagers feel the need to relieve themselves of their parents' abode sometime between the ages of 18 and 22. They get jobs, they get degrees, they earn money, and they move out. Most want the independence and the privacy. Here, people apparently do not move out until they get married. This means all the young couples need to find a place to canoodle and feel that doing so within the vicinity of their parents is not kosher. Thus, they take their canoodling out on the streets. I encounter it in the seats next to me on the airplane from Buenos Aires to Santiago, on the bench outside the convenience store, and at the table behind me at Starbucks (loudly and with great span of time, in the latter case). Granted, most of the reason why this occurs is because wages for young people, especially those without degrees, are quite poor ($1-$2 an hour, although this $1-$2 can purchase slightly more than it can back home), and thus they live at home. It just seems like this is not a satisfactory solution – soundproof the rooms or find empty parking lots or something. Being a city of romance is not all that it is cracked up to be.

Finally, I am reading fiction for the first time in a while. Number9Dream by David Mitchell. Nikk got it for me as a gift because we both enjoyed another work of Mitchell's, Cloud Atlas. I get on the bus here, start reading, and 10 minutes later realize that I am in danger of missing my stop because I am so engrossed in the book that I have forgotten about the world around me. The nonfiction that constitutes my studies and academic interests, however interesting I may find it, is still not nearly as involving as a good novel. It's good to be back.