Thursday, 3 April 2008

When we checked our bags in the Auckland airport, something that seems so routine these days, Benji said, “We haven’t been on a plane in a really long time!” And he was right, it’s been 18 days since we last traveled on a plane. We’ve only been on two flights so far that resulted in jet lag, this would be the third. Our plane left Auckland on Thursday, April 3 at 6:45pm, and we arrived in Santiago, Chile at 1:45pm on Thursday, April 3. We arrived in Santiago before we ever left Auckland, we traveled back in time, our kids have been looking forward to this day for quite some time. It turns out time travel isn’t that exciting.

Our flight path took us really close to Antarctica, and it was dark outside the windows for most of the trip. After they served us dinner, they turned out all the lights and theoretically we were all supposed to sleep for the next six or seven hours. My seat didn’t recline, neither did Benji’s, there were at least four infants in our section of the plane, and the man next to me had his headphones on full blast to opera, I could hear it loud and clear. Maybe it was meant to drown out the sound of crying babies.

Benji slept for two hours before popping up his head at midnight (Auckland time, which was what made sense to our bodies) and saying, “I slept really good, is it time to wake up now?” He drifted in and out of my lap for the next two hours, and by 2am I told him, “Yes, you can turn on your DS.” I dozed and drowsed for another two hours while Benji happily blipped away, by 4am Nate was up and we all started watching a movie. Somehow it was bright and sunny outside, even though our bodies felt like it was early morning time. We had traveled across time and space and it was now afternoon, of the same day.

We arrived in Santiago, did all the passport stamps and entrance fees, picked up our luggage and met our guide, Claudia. She was beautiful in her polka-dotted sundress, hat, and high-heeled shoes, but I stood tall in my new red shirt that I’d bought in the Auckland airport. My shirt was made of merino wool, and any good New Zealand tourist who knows their sheep knows merino wool is the best. We followed Claudia to the car, and peered out the windows as we drove into the city.

Santiago is a big city, the mountains surrounding the city are hidden in a brown haze of pollution. After checking into the hotel and arranging to meet Claudia in the morning, Clay and I decided we needed to get everyone out to do something or we would all fall asleep. We took a long walk to a park, then rode a cable car up a mountain to see a huge statue of the Virgin Mary at the top. The cable car was rickety and old, the cables and metal towers supporting it were rusty, and tall, untrimmed trees scraped the bottom of our car as we ascended. I was worried we’d get knocked off the wire, but we made it to the top unscathed. We passed several sleeping dogs, strays, as we made our way to the statue. Mary was carved from white stone and her arms were open and welcoming to the city, from her point high on the hill. Several couples lounged by her feet, their backs to Mary and their faces peering through the pollution to the city below.

Just as beautiful as the statue was a nearby wall, covered in plaques and letters and pictures to Mary. Most said “Gracias Maria”, I assumed they were written in gratitude for answered prayers. Some were dated as far back as 1987, some were written on tiles or marble plaques and glued to the walls, while others were hastily written, torn from a notebook and duct-taped to the stones. Some were rolled very tiny and shoved into the cracks of the stone wall, they reminded me of May’s “wailing wall” in my book, The Secret Life of Bees. In the book she writes her worries on little bits of paper and sticks them in a wall she’s built behind her house. I think I would like to have a wall like that, a place to go and lay my burdens down.

We decided to take the cable car just half way back down the hill, then look for a playground we’d passed on the way up. We made our way to the play structure, where we found a see-saw that you stood up on. We learned a little physics as we tried to balance it perfectly in the middle, shifting our weight forward and backward to get it just right. The kids climbed on things and jumped off things and ran around, until we started noticing that it was getting dark. Clay and I weren’t sure about walking back to the hotel after dark, we didn’t know this city that well, yet. We dragged the kids off the playscape and hurried back down the hill, then walked back to the hotel before the sun went down.

We were hungry, realizing the last time we’d eaten was on the plane. It had been a fairly meager breakfast, our stomachs were growling by the time we got back. Claudia had warned us that most restaurants would close at 4, and then open again at 8, reminding us of Spain, where the locals ate dinner really late. She said most people had “tea” around 5, a sandwich and milk, and then dinner much later. It was 5:30, and we weren’t waiting until 8. Three doors down from our hotel, we found a restaurant that was open, and rejoiced. We sat at a table outside, next to the sidewalk, and watched Santiago walk by while Clay and I sipped some Chilean wine. A new kind for us, red and smooth, called Carmenere. It was delicious.

For dinner I had some of the best guacamole I have ever had in my whole life. Alayna and I split a platter of chicken quesadillas, and I slurped down a bowl of cream of pumpkin soup. Oh, it was so good. I was so hungry. I am going to like the food in Chile a lot, kind of like good Mexican food back home. After dinner we stumbled three doors down to our hotel, and hurried upstairs to get in our pajamas. I was so ready for bed, after eating all that good food and staying awake like a good girl all day long, to avoid jet lag.

We got the kids in bed by 8:30, and I followed soon after. I slept hard until midnight, when both of the boys appeared at the door. The kids were in a room at the other end of the hall. Nate said, “What time is it? Because my watch says just “0:40”. Can we play legos?” Thus ensued a night of not so great sleep. We sent the boys back to bed, but after tossing for about a half hour, we decided Clay should go down to the kids’ room and put Nate in the room with me, to make sure they went to sleep. Sure enough, when he got down there all three kids were wide awake. We made the switch, I turned out the lights, and Nate and I settled in to listen to each other breathe and turn over and over in bed. Neither one of us could get to sleep.

Suddenly, an idea came to me. A story idea, a picture book, I’d call it “The Sure-Cure for the ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Blues”. I began writing it in my head, but I was worried I’d forget it so I got out of bed, found my journal, and sat down in the bathroom to write it all out. Of course Nate appeared at the door and wanted to know what I was doing, I told him to go to bed and I’d read him my story idea when I was done. Five minutes later I read him my story. My glorious story. I was sure it was the most brilliant thing I’d ever written. Just to prove it, Nate fell asleep right after I read it to him. But not I, no, not I. The one who had just written the perfect go-to-sleep picture book could not fall asleep. I cannot tell you what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but it was late, or should I say early. Early in the morning, Santiago time. Oh well, at least I hadn’t wasted my time. I had been brilliant.

Friday, 4 April 2008

Clay came knocking on our door at 8am, I was dead asleep. So was Nate, and everyone in Clay’s room, too. I stumbled around and got myself in the shower, and that’s when I remembered my masterpiece. And the reason I stayed up half the night. I remembered that Clay and I had split a whole bottle of wine during dinner last night, maybe that was what had possessed me to stay up half the night with delusions of grandeur. I cracked open my journal and read what I had written the night before. It was not horrible, no, but it was not brilliant genius. It will give me something to work on, something to edit and refine.

We ate our breakfast on tiny tables meant for two, we squeezed three of us at one. While our hotel breakfast was “free” (I’m sure we paid for it somewhere along the line), I don’t think the hotel was originally set up to serve breakfast. It was good, nonetheless, and we filled up before taking off for our half day city tour with Claudia. She showed up in a faded penguin t-shirt and travel pants, and I was glad she wouldn’t be wearing her pretty sundresses and heels each day with us.

The kids were less than thrilled about getting in a car and driving around the city looking at buildings and statues, or whatever a city tour entailed. We did, indeed, see buildings and statues, which Claudia told us about as enthusiastically as possible. She was worried about the kids being bored, she tried to spice up her museum talk on pre-Columbian art with stories about women with cone heads and mummies and Chilean pyramids older than the Egyptian ones. We can now tell the difference between a Mayan pot and a Nasca pot.

Armed with that knowledge, we continued to the hills, where we got a beautiful view of the city and the mansions built along the slopes. At least, it would have been beautiful without all that smog. It’s really too bad, and you begin to realize that that brown, smoggy haze you’re looking at across the way is also all around you, seeping into your pores and funneling down your nose and into your lungs. Claudia said it got so bad during a few days last year, parents were instructed to keep children under the age of two indoors. The reason it happens is due to Santiago’s location, surrounded by mountains that trap the city’s pollution. A consultant from Japan came to address the problem, and concluded that the only way to remedy the situation was to cut one of the mountains down. For now, the smog stays.

We noticed dogs everywhere, Claudia lamented that the dogs have more rights than the people in the city. The city had considered killing all dogs without owners, but the animal rights people stepped in and forbid it. You now find four or five dogs on every street corner, lying around or going through the trash. They seem very self-sufficient, they know to only cross at cross walks when the people cross. They never seem aggressive, and they must find plenty of trash to eat, because none of them were starving.

We were dropped off at the hotel, to spend the afternoon as we pleased. Claudia had suggested visiting Fantasilandia with the kids, an amusement park. There was the zoo in the park we’d visited the night before. Neither of these sounded very appealing to Clay and me, I checked out our guide book pages and discovered a hands on kids’ science museum. It promised robotics and computers, the kids were sold. We figured out the subways and found the right line, heading out of town, thirteen stops down the way. Parts of the subway were aboveground, and we got views of the different parts of the city. I always like riding on public transportation, it gives me a feel for a city that no guide can do. We noticed several  couples in subway stations, “snogging”, our new English word for major kissing. It was as if each of them were saying long goodbyes, certain they wouldn’t see each other for years, even though one was boarding a subway train to go across town. Subway snogging in Santiago, the kids were really grossed out.

We got to our stop and oriented ourselves. After deciding we needed to head into the setting sun, we set off in search of the MIM, Museo Interactivo Mirador. We walked through a residential neighborhood, most homes were surrounded by solid walls, a locked gate at the entrance. Most homes also had a guard dog, we passed a hair salon with an enormous German Shepherd standing guard. We passed kids on scooters walking with their parents, smelled dinners cooking, passed students in uniforms on their way home from school. It was fun to walk through this different slice of life, but it was a long walk. We walked, and walked, and walked, and when we finally reached the museum, we felt like we had stepped into the parking lot of Wally World. We had flashbacks to Faunia, the uninhabited theme park we visited in Spain. We walked past the booth where cars would get parking permits, found the ticket office, and found the bathrooms.

The museum was great, even though the robotics section was closed for an after school program. The kids ran from display to display, pushing buttons and staring into mirrors to see illusions and constructing a building with magnets and then letting an earthquake destroy it. Chile is racked with earthquakes, it accounts for the lack of original architecture in the city, most buildings have been rebuilt many times. Claudia told us the biggest Tsunami ever recorded hit the Chilean coast in the ‘60’s. Clay and I strapped ourselves into a gyroscope, I felt like I had stepped into a da Vinci drawing of that man with his arms and legs out, a circle drawn around him. We flipped and spun, the kids weren’t allowed to ride it, not even Alayna, they weren’t tall enough.

One room was devoted entirely to music. You could duck under a booth and listen to your choice of music, I was totally taken when Mozart’s Requiem came ringing all around me, what an incredible piece of music. I was in a kids’ museum in Santiago, Chile, hearing one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Then I moved to the room with motion sensors. When I kicked my foot a drum sounded, when I moved my arm a chicken clucked, lots of fun. Clay and I enjoyed it all just as much as the kids, we stayed until it closed at 6:30. As we walked through the vacant parking lot towards the subway station, we admired the sunset. When the setting sun shines through all that pollution, it makes a gorgeous rosy hue that reflected off the mountains, they looked like they’d been baked at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, tasty as a Toll House chocolate chip cookie.

As we walked, we noticed a man standing in front of two lanes of stopped traffic, at a red light. He was juggling fire, and he was really talented. He entertained the waiting traffic for a couple minutes, then walked down the lane with a bucket, collecting tips before the light turned green. I wondered how long it took him to learn how to juggle like that, and how much money he made in a night, performing for his captive audiences. I wondered if kids lived around that intersection, if they watched out their windows in the evening, catching a free show. I wondered if he ever mis-threw a flame and hit a car.

We arrived back after dark, got some pizza and pasta for dinner, then crawled into bed. Time to try this sleeping thing again. We tucked the kids in and came back to our room, where it sounded like the party was just getting started. Just beneath our hotel window is a dance club, and they were jamming. I worked on the computer a while, handed it over to Clay, and tried to fall asleep. It literally sounded like our bed was on the dance floor. I borrowed Clay’s ear plugs, but they didn’t help much. Nate showed up at the door around 11, saying he couldn’t sleep. I told Clay I’d join the boys for a while in their bed, it was much quieter. We just can’t seem to get this sleeping thing down . . .

Saturday, 5 April 2008

I squashed myself between the boys in their double bed, Benji asked if I could scoot over, I was taking too much space. At least it was quiet, we couldn’t hear the dance music at all from their room on the other side of the building. I woke up several times, and removed children’s body parts from my body. Nate’s arm was slung across my neck, Benji’s fingers tickled my back, and a knee found its way to my stomach. It was hot, the air was off, I was sweating. Finally, at 5am, I slid out of bed and came back to my own bed, where I fell asleep for three more hours. We were up at 8, still feeling jet lagged on day three. Clay said the music didn’t stop until 2am, but he got a lot of work done on the computer.

This morning we met Claudia after breakfast and drove to Valparaiso, a small sea side town. We drove through a tunnel five kilometers long, and passed fields where grapes, avocado trees, and almond trees grew. Claudia told us that each field had a tree in it, for birds to roost and to hold on to the soil with its roots. The birds helped keep the bug population down. She said they also plant rose bushes along the sides of the fields. If bugs come, they attack the roses first. When the farmers see their roses dying, they know to protect their crops from incoming bugs. We drove along a beach, where a school band was practicing, all standing in a square in the sand, banging on their drums and blowing on their instruments with the sea at their back. What a cool band hall they had.

Our first stop was at a small little museum with a Moia head from Easter Island out front. Claudia explained that to get the giant heads to the shores of the island, the inhabitants cut all the trees down, I guess to use as ramps. This was a big mistake, there were no more birds when the trees disappeared and the soil eroded away. The inhabitants were weakened, and eventually eaten by cannibals. The first floor of the museum had artifacts and information from Easter Island. The Moia head out front, taller than Clay, was actually small compared to some of the giant heads buried in the sand along the shores of the island.

We headed upstairs, where we found an amazing display of Lepidoptera, butterflies, as well as insects. We talked a little about the classification of bugs and insects, how they each belong to families, and that is broken down still further. There were butterflies with giant blue iridescent wings, bright green and black, pink, yellow, all so amazing. I can see why someone would begin to collect butterflies, they are beautiful. Also upstairs were specimens of carpet spiders, a really deadly spider, displayed with pictures of people who had been bit, with their skin eaten off. Quite disturbing. Nauseating, really. I made a mental note to check all corners in our hotels for spiders.

Next to this was a room displaying three shrunken heads, there was a tribe in Chile who did this. It explained in great detail, with illustrations, exactly how this took place. The skin was cut and the skull removed, then the head filled with a mixture of salt and other things, and stitched back up. The creepiest part to me, other than the fact I was looking at someone’s real black and shriveled head, were the lips. They were stitched together, and for some reason I found this horrifying. I’m sure the kids will have some sort of shrunken head nightmare in the near future. Before leaving we noticed a poster with a giant eye, it was a picture of a sperm whale’s eye, to scale. Its eye was a big as Benji’s head. What a cool little gem of a museum, with butterflies and sperm whale eyes and giant stone heads, and even shrunken heads.

We drove around the city a bit, I loved the way the houses were painted bright colors, green and red and blue and pink. They staggered up the hills of the city, Claudia said she thought the fisherman painted their houses bright so they could see them from the water. The roads were skinny and cobblestone, Claudia said the women who live in the city have good legs from all the climbing they do.  We stopped at another eccentric museum, walking along the narrow streets to reach the entrance. We passed lots of stray dogs along the way, they seem to be everywhere in Chile so far, and one gave us a scare, running at the wheels of a car. It somehow managed to avoid being run over, and pranced back to the sidewalk all proud and cocky, its tongue hanging out. Lucky dog.

The museum was once a home once belonging to Pedro Neruda. While I can’t say I admire the man (he had three different wives, didn’t give his wife child support even though they had a nine-year old that died from a medical condition, etc), and I know nothing of his poetry, he had a pretty cool house. He was a strange man and collected all sorts of interesting things, from a stuffed penguin to a really old map of the Americas that had California pictured as an island, since it hadn’t been thoroughly explored yet.

We enjoyed wandering around and seeing all his quirky things, but the kids enjoyed painting even more. When we arrived we noticed there were tables set up with painting supplies in the front yard, kids everywhere, and paintings hanging to dry on a clothesline. While we looked around the house, Claudia checked into it and we found her waiting for us with three paintbrushes and some paper. The kids painted in a sunny spot, of course Benji painted dinosaurs. Nate painted a sea scene, and Alayna painted a big dust ball with giant cartoon eyes. It was a fun surprise that we hadn’t planned for, some of the best things are never planned.

We passed a flea market, consisting of blankets laid out down a median in the center of the road, and selling everything under the sun. As we drove to a place for lunch (it was now 2:30 in the afternoon and we were pretty hungry), we noticed all the murals painted on walls. Some was merely graffiti, but some was art to be admired. Our lunch took forever, but it was really good. Sea bass with artichokes, by the time it arrived at 3:30 we scarfed it down. We made a quick trip to a small museum next door before heading out of town. It was devoted to a famous Chilean cartoonist, we walked around looking at his cartoons while Claudia translated them for us. I felt like a little kid who has to have all the jokes explained to her. Claudia would chuckle and then read them to us. Sometimes we got them, and sometimes we didn’t. We just kind of fake laughed and moved on.

The hour and half drive back was uneventful. When we walked in, the very kind manager called us over to the check-in desk to inform us that our tour company in Chile had told the hotel, weeks ago, that we’d be leaving that day. He even had a copy of the email that was sent. Since we were gone all day, we had no idea, but the hotel had been fully booked and had to find alternatives for the people who would have been occupying our rooms tonight. He wasn’t upset, said he knew it wasn’t our fault, he just needed the number of our tour company.

By the time we came through the doors to our rooms, tired and out of sorts from lack of sleep and strange eating habits, we were in need of some comfort TV, and what could be more comforting than Gidget? Clay went out and picked up some stuff at a market, nobody was very hungry. The people at the front desk had contacted our travel agency here in Chile, we’ll be checking out in the morning and moving to a different hotel for our last night in Santiago. While we munched on apples and nuts and cream cheese sandwiches, we watched Gidget and her crazy escapades. Then we threw the kids in the shower. I gathered legos that had been spread to all corners of the boys’ room, fished shoes out from under beds, and got things in order for the morning pack. Let’s hope bedtime is a little more successful tonight.

Sunday, 6 April 2008

Everyone stayed in their own bed last night, but it took awhile for Clay and me to fall asleep, I was working on a story and he was reading, I can’t imagine why we were so restless after our sleepless nights, but we eventually drifted off around midnight. We met Claudia and switched hotels after breakfast this morning. Our new hotel is really nice, on a wide shady street, our travel agency did a good job of making good on their mistake. After dropping off all the baggage, we headed out for another day trip, this time to parts unknown, at least to me. Clay and I have been pretty good about keeping up with the plans we made last August, and our awesome travel agent in the States, Jesse, has sent us all detailed itineraries, but I just didn’t check them before setting out. I was like one of the kids, being herded into a car to do something, I wasn’t sure what.

Of course Clay had Precious, his phone, and I was able to read it on the way and catch up on what we’d be doing. We drove a long, long time, eventually popping out on the coast and driving along the ocean. We passed through a few seaside towns and ended up at another Pablo Neruda museum, also a previous house, and also very eccentric. It was fun to walk through, even for the kids, because he had such amazing collections. He collected giant figureheads from ships, and then hung them all around his living room that looked out to the ocean. He collected colored glasses, he said wine tasted better from colored glass. He collected pipes and masks and hats and stirrups. His house was designed to look like a ship, with low doorways and skinny staircases, and most rooms had sweeping views of the ocean below. The water crashed on black rocks, and in the waves the ocean turned a brilliant blue. The crashing waves were mesmerizing, I couldn’t take my eyes off them, waiting to see how big the next splash would be. The last room we entered was full of Neruda’s shell collection, big, beautiful shells, that made the shells Alayna and I have collected along the way look puny and insignificant. I have never come across a shell as magnificent, as intact, as the shells he displayed.

From the museum we drove another hour to a different city for lunch, Pomaire. It was 2:30 by the time got there, and we were once again starving. This restaurant was very different from the elegant affair we had the day before. This was a huge tented area with dirt floors and chickens scratching around underneath the tables. Some men came out and sang and played guitars while a woman danced and sang, I felt a little like I was in San Antonio! The food was once again plentiful and good, we ate while we swayed to the guitar music and took pictures of the chickens.

The thing we’ll remember about this day, more than the museum or the chickens, is that Claudia taught Alayna to crochet. She was very sweet, she planted Clay in the front seat and called him the substitute tour guide, then sat in the back with Alayna, handed her a crochet hook and several balls of string, and taught her how to make different stitches. Alayna got a bee in her bonnet a few weeks ago, she wanted to learn how to knit, something more than the endless ropes her finger weaving produced. I could do nothing to help, but wished I could. Alayna was thrilled when Claudia said she could teach her. When she woke up this morning, the first drowsy words she said were, “I’m going to learn to crochet today!”

And she did learn. She learned to stitch a long line, then drop down to the next line, and make stitches in the shape of a square. From the backseat, I heard Claudia say things like, “Excellent, beautiful, that’s okay, we can fix that. We can always fix it.” What comforting words to hear, “we can always fix it.” It is a good thing to learn, a craft that can never go wrong, that can always be fixed, even if it means unraveling the whole thing and starting over again. Claudia even gave Alayna the crochet needle and yarn, I’m sure it will keep her busy for weeks. When we got back to the hotel that evening, Claudia made a copy of a page from her magazine with patterns in it, and Alayna set out to make a rose design on a rectangle shape about 3 inches by 5 inches. Thousands of stitches.

Alayna was disappointed, as soon as we got upstairs she wanted to begin, but she couldn’t remember how to get started. It was the first thing Claudia taught her, earlier this morning, and it was driving her crazy that she couldn’t get started on her big project. I promised her Claudia would help in the morning. At 4:20am, when we would be picked up and transferred to the airport for our flight to the Atacama Desert. That’s right, 4:20AM. We finally get ourselves to sleep through the night, and we go and mess it up again! Clay and I were determined to get ourselves, and the kids, to bed early. We each got a workout, and I ran to McDonald’s to get the kids something to eat before they went to bed.

After putting the kids to bed around 8, Clay and I packed and researched where we were going and what we’d be doing the next few days. Alayna appeared in our room around 10pm, she couldn’t sleep. She was still thinking about that darn stitch I think. We told her to go back to bed, and I read her my “Sure Cure for the ‘I Can’t Sleep Blues’” book, which is now called The Gatherer. “That was pretty good,” she commented when I finished reading. She was lying on our bed with her eyes closed. “But . . .” and she proceeded to challenge several imaginative images in the book. I told her to go to bed.

I checked on her again at 10:30, she was still awake but getting closer to dream land. Clay and I tossed and turned a bit, dreading out early morning wake up call, knowing we needed to be asleep right that minute. Falling asleep on demand, being pressured into falling asleep, rarely works, as we parents of three children know. But what could we do? We eventually let our brains slow down enough to drift in and out.