Chile is a beautiful country. It’s ridiculously long and has a variety of different climates – in the north is the Atacama Desert, a.k.a. the driest desert in the world, then the middle region has pretty good farm lands, so all of the wineries are around there, further south you have the lake region, then Patagonia, then Tierra del Fuego (which is made up of islands). The geography is impressive going east to west as well. Bordering Argentina are the massive Andes, then valleys, then more mountains, and then the coast. Somehow, all of this is able to fit into a span of (on average) 110 miles across, so while traveling I have never been disappointed by the view out the bus window.
However, Chile has a major flaw that still has me on edge: it’s earthquake-prone. It is actually amazing to me because a lot of Chile’s history has been shaped by the famed “terremotos”. Presidents are judged on how they handle the clean up, and federal funds are used to rebuild cities. This, however, is not what I want to tell you about. Since arriving here, there haven’t been any earthquakes, just tremors. It’s funny because usually I don’t even know that anything happened and then I will check my facebook and see all of the Americans that I have met here will have changed their status to “TEMBLOOOR!” or something similar and I, inevitably, end up feeling slightly left out because I’ve never actually felt a tremor before.
That was not what happened on Wednesday. At 8:30 a.m., I was taking a literature exam (in a class made up entirely of Chileans). While I was trying how to best describe the “naturalistic tendencies of Martin Fierro,” the class room started to sway back and forth. I looked up frantically, trying to figure out whether I was going crazy or whether this is what it felt like to sit through a tremor, and everyone else was just scribbling away, apparently not realizing or not caring that Valparaiso was shaking. And so I pretended to be Chilean, fought off the desire to run out of the room yelling “the sky is falling! the sky is falling!” and just kept writing.
It’s the little things that I do correctly here that make me proud: maneuvering the Chilean bus system to get myself to the airport, being able to tell my Chilean classmates what the professor said, understanding what the street vendors are yelling, etc. Now I’m happy to add “keeping my cool during a tremor” to that list. Small? Yes. But, hey, it’s something!
