Day After Christmas in Chile

It was hard to get in the holiday spirit in 90˚ Fahrenheit, etc. I never liked Christmas much anyway, especially since last year when I found out Santa Claus didn't exist. In Chile, the name for Santa is viejito pascuero, but I could care less. He's dead to me now.

Fortunately, etymological curiosity kicked in right before I could kick out the chair from under me. So I undid the noose and typed "Pascual" into Wikipedia because it seems a certain false Christmas idol whose name I won't mention decided to co-op the root word of the Spanish name of Easter (Pascual) for his own personal and white-bearded glorification. But I couldn't confirm my suspicions; my search yielded nothing. If it doesn't show up in wikipedia, then I, just like Google, am pretty much worthless.

But since I had nothing much better to do I figured I might as well get to the bottom of another linguistic dilemna. The "aus-" morpheme. It's been confusing me ever since all these names from the South of Chile started flaunting it: the prideful Carretera Austral, the mythical Kingdom of Araucania and so much more.

So when a word contains the "aus-" or "au-" morpheme, then it means "of the south", right? Like Australia. But then, Australia's rather Eastward, (like Easter?) No, like Austria, which comes right from the German "öst" meaning "East," (from Österreich, meaning Eastern Empire) hence the confusion, which luckily Wikipedia cleared in one fell swoop: Austria was simply a latinization of the öst- to the aust- which was apparently entirely accoustic and not in the least bit semantic, thus the word Austria, although deceptive, bears absolutely no southerly signficance whatsoever.

Good to know! Nice to get that cleared up! To celebrate, I created a fake account and proposed merging the Wikipedia article for Austria with the article for Australia. How's that for Latinization! (Fucking bastards, I'll give you something to Latinize).

Anyway, Christmas turned out to be lovely, precisely because I tricked it out Palm Springs Persian vacation status in which it was languishing in hot northern Santiago: at the last minute, we hopped down to hometown Osorno (about a 10 hour drive south), where it's cool and green and cloudy and pleasant like Oregon. It seems like Chileans tend to celebrate Christmas Eve with friends and family, feasting and drinking plenty. Christmas day is a late-starter. We walked around the town. Something I'm used to by now: the fierce non-stimulus, in other words total boredom that defines pretty much any and urban center in Chile. Dull gray cement buildings and dumb-looking children in ugly red sweaters and cheap stone-washed jeans kicking around a soccer ball in an overgrown plaza. There's just nothing to do. At all. It would make me angry, but anger implies a certain level of stimulus, which is hard to evoke in such urban centers.

We paid respects to abuela at the graveyard, in which I contemplated the boredom of cementary masonry, but also how graveyards are the antithesis to the tragedy of the disappeareds, which is important. I also thought how, as soon as I start to know more people in graveyards, that they'll get a lot more interesting to me. In that moment I believe I approached Empathy, a rare and quaint feeling for me that I usually reserve for special occasions.



It was an unexpected feeling. In Chile, I've gotten used to not expecting anything. Naturally, therefore, I ended up enjoying myself on the walk through Osorno. We went on to the abandoned train station and found an old abandoned train, the red and yellow caboose lit ablaze by intermittent sunshine, sun that also created a halow around the bell-like, rustling leaves of a cypress tree. The grass was tall and lush and the air was clean. Like Chile, it was totally understated: one of the more beautiful Christmases ever.