Get Ready, get set, POSE!

I recently had the opportunity to attend a yoga championship. I know! Isn't that an oxymoron? So, being the curious creature that I am, I felt I had to be there to better understand what a yoga competition is.

So here's the breakdown of the rules:

• They have to complete a set of seven poses (five standard and two optional) in under three minutes.
• They are judged on a scale of 0-10 per posture.
• They can't fall out of the posture or they get marked down.
• They must try to get as close as possible to the standard posture.

In response to many queries about why one would even have a competition for an activity that is considered spiritual and internal, a woman talked about the fact that this competition was more of a challenge to the self. They are all not "really" competing against one another (though there is a winner). Really, they are competing against their limits. Testing how far they can go.

Below are the photos of the coolest frickin' postures I have ever seen in my life! These are the poses I practice when I go to Yoga class but I never look this good doing them.

Finger stand

Hands to Feet Pose

Toe Stand Pose (incidentally, i actually did this pose in class--I know, I find it hard to believe as well)

Bow Pose

Standing Head to Knee Pose

Half Moon Pose



Standing Bow Pulling Pose

Spine Twisting Pose

I believe this is a variation on the standing bow pulling pose.

Camel Pose

Bow Pose

So there you have it! People contorting their bodies in an effort to...contort their bodies. Simply fascinating. I stayed for three hours but eventually even this got boring and left before they announced the winners. But these were my favorite of the contestants. I hope one of them won.

Maybe in a few years I'll compete too.

Que te vaya bien!

C in C

Summer Christmas Eve

Well, here it is, Christmas Eve in Chile. While the Chileans are outside frantically searching for those last-minute gifts—or trying to close up their register before another frantic shopper comes racing up to their lane—I am here in my house writing this blog. In three or four hours, I will be heading to Kanke’s parents house to spend a very weird Christmas Eve swimming in their pool, drinking wine and trying my best not to zone out when I don’t understand their conversations.

The Chilean tradition consists of a dinner and then opening presents at midnight to correspond with Jesus’s birthday. I asked my professor where Santa came into this tradition, and he said his dad would sneak out after dinner, pull all the presents onto the front porch, ring the doorbell and run.

I have been avoiding the whole thing like a plague. Summer Christmas isn’t any fun!

As much as I’m happy that I’ve survived four months here, I feel like this last week has been just hard. And it’s not that I haven’t been going out and meeting with friends—on the contrary, I’ve been out every night of the week until one or two in the morning. It’s just that I realized recently that I’m a visitor here. And these people are really not my people. As much as we try to bridge the cultural gaps between us, as much as I enjoy spending time with my Chilean friends, as much as I love learning new things, I am American, with American ideas and American culture, and I wish I could have been home for American Christmas. There’s nothing like living abroad to make you love your own country and your own traditions.

The silver lining to this week has been a long phone call with my best friend who did a very good job of reminding me of who I am, what I want, and why I’m here (Thanks J!) and several packages from my parents, including a long letter from my mom. The tiniest connection to my friends and family has felt like a weight lifted from my shoulders—that I am not alone…just really far away.

The other silver lining is all the fun I’ve managed to have in between moping sessions.
The last five days, I’ve been out and about, meeting with friends who are on their college breaks, practicing my Spanish, and attending a Carabineros (policemen) ball.

Below are some photos from the Ball. It was in a beautiful location on La Reina hill with a gorgeous view of the city. The men were dressed in their special uniforms, the women wore dresses ranging from cocktail dresses to full ball gowns. I managed to have an okay time.

Here I am with my date, Carlos. And below, it's me and Carlos again!

My roommate Caitlin acting crazy with her crazy date Claudio.

Our dinner table of Carabineros, the ladies in front and our dates behind us. I told everyone to act really crazy. I guess for carabineros, this is as crazy as you get.

Tomorrow, I head to Peru for a Christmas adventure. It will be my first time flying on Christmas Day. Should be super fun!

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I've got a really great post for you coming up in the new year about the yoga championship I went to but it'll take a while to put together which is why it isn't written yet.

Enjoy your holidays! Cuidate mucho!

Que te vaya bien,

C in C

Rapa Nui Dancing and the Mavi

With all the Christmas weirdness here (wilty plastic wreaths, no smells of pine in the air, the sun shining a perfect 75 degrees) and with my roommate now headed home for Christmas instead of south with me, I've decided that a fair bit of denial about Christmas is in order. Instead, I will show you photos!

My Rapa Nui dance class ended last week, and I managed to get some photos due to J's cousin who visited class one day. Thanks J's cousin!

Nunu is the girl in red--our teacher. She's a native pasquence (native to Easter Island or what they call Rapa Nui). And behind her is of course me.

Here I am with J! She's headed to Rapa Nui this Christmas...I'm jealous.

I just thought this was a super cool pic!

The gals doing the circulo (circling their hips).

Another group shot...

Then, on Sunday, as I was wandering around Lastarria, I found an museum hidden in the back of a beautiful courtyard. Even better was that since it was Sunday I could get in for FREE! I spent an hour or more wandering around four floors of really interesting art. I snuck a few photos in for your viewing pleasure.

This art piece was part of the youth recycled art collection. This one is a beautiful landscape scene made entirely more interesting painted on a canvas made of cardboard layers glued together.

This one was a photo by a Columbian photographer (I think--sorry about being vague on the details, I was just so excited to take the photo without being yelled at). I just love this photo. What a contrast between the type of woman advertisers are trying to sell (a woman who buys a lot of their clothes and make up) and the real woman standing in front of the ad. I think the real woman is beautiful.

And just for fun...me as a model for Kanke's dresses. Me in polka dots...I never thought it would happen!

This one was my favorite of the dresses, really a good fit for my body.

I also went to a Yoga competition which was so darn fascinating that I'm saving it so that I can dedicate an entire post to it...so stay tuned!

Que te vaya bien (did you know I can finally say this without stuttering? I know, it's so cool!)

C in C

Four Months is All it Takes

On December 12, I will have been in Santiago for four months. Four months. A quarter of a year. A solid chunk of time.

As I walked to the corner store to stock up on honey and fruits, I considered my four months here. And it came to me that four months is my mark. I now know that four months is the amount of time it takes for me to move from my home country to a foreign country and feel like the foreign country is home.

I know this by a few important indications. These indications might be something that applies to everyone who makes an attempt to live elsewhere, but since I don’t know everyone, I’m claiming these ones as mine:

Indication #1: I’m dreaming of something other than Chile.
The thing about living out one’s dream is that suddenly there’s space for new ones. Currently I’m dreaming of becoming Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat, Pray, Love—basically someone who writes their personal stories and gets paid for it! I feel like I have trained my whole life for this career as I have something like fifteen to twenty journals chronicling my dull years of 13 through now. This dream of course means that I will be needing a second career to earn a living until I become like Liz.

Since this idea has come to me, I’ve spent many evening hours trying to research magazines where I could write personal essays. So far, I have found one magazine offering $35 per essay…if they accept it. Being like Elizabeth Gilbert will be slightly more difficult than I originally thought. But I am not deterred.

Every night when I stay up till 1am writing and have trouble sleeping because I’m so excited about it is another day that seals the deal for me. There’s nothing else, besides friends and a good solid dance party, that keeps me up that late.

Indication # 2. I feel lonely.
I feel lonely but it’s a different kind of lonely these days. Not nagging homesickness, but a familiar loneliness. The kind I felt when I had my own editing business and spent many hours wandering the small hall of my apartment, trying to get through 400 pages of a mediocre manuscript. Freelancer loneliness has found me. This has strangely buoyed my spirits. It means that instead of the feelings associated with travel (survival thoughts of food, clothing, shelter and transportation), the feelings associated with living have come to call.

Indication # 3. I’ve yet again decided I need to exercise more.
I love to exercise. I’m either walking or running or dancing or yoga-ing at least four out of seven days. But my mental health depends on all seven days occupied with exercise. I know this. So this thought of exercising is like a slightly annoying yet dear friend coming to stay—comforting, sure, but you kinda wish she’d leave. (I might have to exercise more to get rid of her).

Indication # 4. I don’t pay attention to metro maps and signs anymore.
This one is funny. I’m so absentminded these days on the metro, that sometimes I get on the wrong side of the tracks and head in the completely opposite direction of where I want to go. Or other times, I’ll be so excited to continue my day, to get home, to be somewhere, that as soon as the doors open, I step off the train. It’s only when the doors close behind me that I realize I have exited two stops early. When I first got here, I was so worried about going the wrong direction, but now I know how easily fixable such a mistake is. In fact, it’s so easily fixable it doesn’t really seem like a mistake at all but rather a pleasant detour on my daily journey through Santiago.


And so, after four months, I am here. All of me, including all the worries and familiar thoughts that have consistently followed me here, like invisible balloons permanently tethered to my head.

In some way, I kind of wish I left some it at home. But I guess we don’t just bring our good parts with us when we travel, do we?

Where ever we go, there we are.

Cool.



Que te vaya bien,
C in C

Museums and Dinner Parties and Modeling

I thought I would take a detour from all these deep revelations and just show you some photos of what I've been doing lately.

Below is this really ostentatious church that rises from the modern streets like a magnificent piece of cake.

Then there is the terribly ugly Christmas tree in front of La Moneda. The red balls on the tree all have the Coca Cola logo on them.

This is the great La Moneda, the center of the governement.


Below La Moneda is a museum which is where I went to see the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition:

Frida Kahlo in my opinion was much more twisted than Diego's work. This one below is Frida with a mask over her face.

This one was a portrait of Luther-something. Note the the roots connected to the body in the ground. Weird!

In contrast, Diego was much more of a "realist" though he did like to change the size of things. These flowers are actually really much smaller than the woman in real life--there was a drawing of his original intentions with this painting. I've seen as a print but it was only standing right in front of it that I saw he had made the flowers enormous.

He also exaggerated women's eyes in his portraits. An example of this is below. Note the banner above her head--both Frida and Diego did this in their work. It has the title of the work on it.

I also thought it was interesting to see that Frida had many drawings of Diego but on the Diego side, we were shown many portraits of women (who weren't Frida). I wondered whether this was a reflection of a dynamic in their relationship.

I've been trying to get the perfect shot of the parrots (parakeets?) that live in the park. Below is finally a shot that shows how green its feathers are.

Then, for Thanksgiving, I decided to have a small dinner party. I've been learning to cook, so I made veggie sushi rolls, guacamole and veggie lasagna.

Here I am with my first veggie lasagna.

A close up of the veggie rolls.

Kanke, my house mate, is a clothing designer and designs clothes out of recycled materials and sells them in her clothing store. She asked me to model some of her creations. Here's me in a really fun dress.

She's made cowells to sell in San Pedro (the Atacama desert) where they often where this style. I had a hard time figuring out how to wear them but this was also lots of fun.

So, I guess that's it for now. I stayed up late last night hanging with friends as today was a religious holiday here in Chile so my ability to write anything more interesting is at a zero.

Hopefully I'll be more inspired--and awake--tomorrow.

Que te vaya bien!

C in Cs

The Blunders of an Overachiever/Perfectionist...and Then Forgiveness

Trying to be perfect sucks. It’s taken me thirty years to admit this. I’ve had plenty of time to try to be perfect, and of course, I’ve failed miserably (as all overachiever/perfectionists eventually do).

My overachiever/perfectionism started in early childhood. When I was four or five, I was learning to make my bed. I dreaded it with a passion because, unbeknownst to my parents, I was spending toddler-hours making sure the sheets were perfectly smooth. I had tried to smooth them with my tiny hands over and over, but wrinkles remained. Can you imagine a five-year-old trying to make sure the sheets had no wrinkles in them!

I remember the relief I felt when Dad showed me a trick: you could put the sheets together with the blankets and pull everything over the bed at the same time. And—get this!—wrinkles were okay. If I had learned to accept wrinkles in all areas of my life, perhaps this story would be different. But it’s taken me a long time.

My attempts to be more “wrinkly” with world began about a year ago, coinciding with a realization that my life was no fun and filled with too many chores/work/responsibility. With the help of some of my more wacky friends, I attempted to cast off my normal mode of being consumed by details, to reject the responsibility I normally embraced. I am sure this will be my lifelong project because I have slipped many times into super organizer mode since then.

Recently I felt I had a breakthrough coinciding with my blog entry about the wild dogs that attacked me. You can imagine the conversation I had with my parents afterwards which stopped just short of “Get your ass on a plane, young lady! You’re grounded until you're fifty!” All parents must wish for the ability ground their children well into adulthood.

So, my breakthrough was that, for the first time, I actually admitted that I had made a huge mistake to myself and to them. What a relief to be able to say to my parents and to myself, “Hey, I’m human. I messed up.” Perhaps the dogs scared me into humility, perhaps church has made me aware of the beauty of asking for forgiveness, but suddenly, I found it easier to say “I’m sorry” and mean it. I found it easier to forgive myself for mistakes, and conversely, forgive others theirs.

This newfound power to apologize and forgive has helped forge a new friendship with A that I would not have attempted at any other time in my life. Perhaps you could say I was a fool for accepting his apology, but there is something magical in the act of forgiveness, in the power to forgive, in the healing of being forgiven. This concept has made me reevaluate my judgments regarding the choices my friends have made, especially in the areas of love. Perhaps forgiveness is an important part of love that I have overlooked. Perhaps it is the most precious of gifts—after all, it can be the hardest thing to ask for and the hardest thing to give.

I recently found out that the girlfriend of my Chilean friend, C, had cheated on him. The cheating had happened three months ago, but I could see it still hurt him, that forgiving is not the same as forgetting. Of course, his friends and family were not happy that he returned to her. Though he had forgiven her, his friends and family were not so willing. C is a relatively new friend of mine, but I felt the same way, a reticence to forgive this woman who had hurt this incredibly kind man. I had a heavy heart that day. At the same time, I was very proud of him too, for his ability to love and forgive in the face of betrayal. Maybe some might call him a fool, but we could learn from him too. His act of forgiveness might strengthen their love. But if that love breaks, he can walk away knowing what he's made of, knowing his own inner strength.

Well, that's all I got for now...please forgive the amateur philosophy. I hope you enjoy and find it in your heart to forgive a little today too.

Que te vaya bien,
C in C