Yes, Qi Gong WILL Improve The Quality Of Your Lettuce Crop

Left to right: Making friends with a McDonalds cow (don't worry, we didn't eat there); Valdivia's fish market and big ass river
Since I'm not a very ordered person, I don't think it would be very fitting to write this in order, so I'll start from the end and work backwards. Last night was, well, quite a night. On Thursday, after whimsically deciding to saunter in the botanical gardens to feast on my mandarin orange instead of heading home, I met a couple girls who are planning a class about teaching alternative energy solutions in a rural area, and after I offered them a little bit of my mandarin orange, they invited me to take the class and help them plan it.

And so, on Friday night, armed with peanut butter (one of the girls in the group had never tried it...I told her I literally had pb and j for my packed lunch every single day of sophomore year) and crackers, I found myself locked inside an apartment building on Yunguy street, unable to leave. Let me back up. The original plan was to meet at this girl's apartment at 8:30, but it was changed to 10:30 p.m. later in the day, so that's when I showed up. After meeting a nice man who lives in the apartment building and lived in the U.S. for a couple years and wanted to practice his english (he spoke English while I spoke Spanish), the nice man let me into the building. But when I called the girl, she was at an insanely loud concert, and Spanish is hard enough to understand on the phone. Confused, I decided to go meet my gringo friends at a nearby cafe, but when I tried to leave, there was a big metal gate, and since I am technologically inept, I didn't find the buzzer button to let myself out. At least I know now that I would handle jail pretty well, cuz I stayed super calm throughout my imprisonment.

Anyway, I was eventually let out of captivity, and I eventually met up with the people in the group. Our class planning meeting turned into drink beer and wine night. My rigorous American side was saying, "but we have a class to plan" and my less rigorous Chilean side was saying, "Just drink beer and try not to eat all the crackers." I think you gotta love this about Chilean culture...maybe people don't always show up when or where they say they will, but my god, these are the friendliest people I have ever met. So good-natured, passionate but chill at the same time, not stressed. There's a lot for me to learn here, especially how to stay up until 4:30 in the morning discussing the merits of peanut butter vs. dulce de leche (like caramel). It surely was quite a cultural exchange last night...I convinced everyone to combine pb and dulce de leche, and while at first they thought I was crazy, eventually we were all crowded around the table, talking about how revolutionary indeed this North/South combination was.

Last night ended with a ride home from an agronomy major writing his thesis about how Qi Gong (a Chinese martial arts/spiritual exercise) improves the quality of cultivated lettuce.

Continuing to move backwards in time, Thursday I was invited to a meeting in the Agronomy building, and it turned out to be the formation of a new club interested in organic agriculture and being hippy. It seems like a much less formal version of the Sustainability Club I was involved with last year. We talked about planning a trip to Argentina to visit a permaculture farm, and overthrowing the entrenched capitalist regime and returning to horse pulled carriages (just kidding about the second one).

After the meeting I walked to the plaza with a couple people from the group, and we encountered a lady on the campus selling sopaipillas (imagine fried bread with God's blessing). She was tragically out of sopaipillas, but we talked to her for about 30 minutes, and it was awesome! She told us how she loved selling on campus, how she considered the students like her nephews, how our spirit animates her every day. It really was beautiful, this meeting, because I think that I often have this perception to "feel bad" for informal street vendors like this, imagining it's a tough job, that they don't earn very much money. And while these facts may very well be true, I think it's easy to forget that some of them have such an amazing attitude, that they can teach us a lot about life and living. The lady was really excited when she found out I was from California. I told her she should open up a sopaipilla stand since we don't have this Chilean treasure in California. She was extremely shocked we don't have sopaipillas in California, to say the least.

Last thing, I finally have my classes. I'm taking three, plus my internship. One is that pending class which was not planned on Friday night, but we're meeting Monday on campus to actually plan it (I'm assuming involving less beer this time). The other two are a class called "Ethnographic Documentaries" about the history of documentaries and how they follow social movements. The other is called "Health and Environment," an excellent combination of how the health of the environment affects the mental and physical health of people, and vice versa. We watched an incredibly sad but powerful movie called "The Invisibles" the first class...if you want to feel really bad, but really grateful for your life, I highly recommend it!

Alright peeps, send some word down south. Hope all is well in your toasty northern hemisphere....

Much love!

Ryan

"A lot of times, I think of what is the worst possible thing that could happen. It's usually not that
bad, so I do it." -Professor George Brimhall, from my environment class last year.