March 15. Mendoza.

Pablo went out early for work, and we left with him. Still sleepy, we walked along the grand avenue of Santiago searching for a please to sit down and have a coffee. Although the city center was full of people, we could hardly find a bakery like the ones I am used to in Berlin where you can have a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I got a bit mad. What were all those people doing here, with all the shops closed? Cultural difference should be something funny, something that makes you go ah-ha and rub your curious chin. Here it only struck me like a fallacy, a freak of culture. Please do open the shops at times we are used to, and THEN you may serve the most exotic cultural differences, THEN we will be interested.

We took a bus to Mendoza at daytime. Ate something in the station. The bus ride turned out to be a good decision because we crossed the Andes on a very rough terrain near its highest peak - the Aconcagua is nearly 7000 meters high. They would just have to put a small pinnacle of human vanity on top of it to actually exceed seven kilometers. Uphill, towards the pass tens of large trucks crawled up the dusty roads, reaching 3800m at the Argentinean border control. We had to wait only for about half an hour and could enjoy the view. The old dilapidated railroad tracks that curved the grey mountain slopes formed a fascinating remembrance of earlier attempts to conquer the harsh Andean ridge.

Mendoza is a neat colonial town. The center is structured around a two block square with four orbital squares; the south-eastern one called Plaza Espana is the best. Check out the mosaic of colonial madness and the little tiles of Spanish weapons on the floor. Mendoza is very green like most Argentinean cities built in times when space was plenty. A salad in a fancy bar. We spent the night in creaking bunk beds - the blue hostelling international sign had called us in. Wine, papas fritas and a good night's sleep.

Another reason for writing is conquering fear. Perhaps that's also what Franz Kafka did. What is fear, anyway? The sensation we have when something scary happens, like in that funny shower-scene in the Hitchcock movie? The confrontation with an unexpected intimidating fact, or rather with the confrontation a fact that we are able foresee much more than we would like to be able to foresee that fact, or rather the gruesome shivering we feel in our spines when power is exerted upon us in a hostile manner, or rather when we look our certain death in its ugly grinning face when some of the fundamental Angst peeps through the stratum of our worldly ventures. Our life is a peep-show of death looking at itself. Fear, who are you? You are, like everything else, a way of exerting power, not its opposite. But such an odd way of exerting power, because it is not organized around the self. It is organized around the decomposition of the self. Those remarks are just for consideration, please do never take them for granted.

March 14. A blue ball.

Santiago still. The museum at the Moneda, near the government seat has an interesting interior but the current exhibitions are not interesting enough to lure us inside. Instead, the swimming pool we saw the day before is much more attractive. The hot day makes me lazy and I played in the water with a small blue ball only for about half an hour before snoozing in the fresh grass. Take the fact for example that the ball is blue. Its diameter was about eight centimeter by the way. It could have been a red ball, or a green one. I could have left out the color altogether. With the color mentioned, and not the children that lend it to me, nor the curvature or the temperature of the pool, nor the fact that my towel was a bit dirty and in the middle of the pool was a rock formation, nor the English-speaking kid with a grandmother in Chicago that played with me - with the color mentioned I take a certain path. A small blue ball is reproduced in the corner of your eye; the swmimming-pool story is structured around that ball. You see? Now try to apply this to other concepts too, concepts that are more abstract than a blue ball, like knowledge, truth, beauty.

Pablo took us to a friend and then to another friend. We had good Caipirinhas in several Santiago homes. Most of Pablo's friends are tv-reporters or students of that subject, and most of them grew up in Punto Arenas, in the very south of Chile.

March 13. Providence.

Friday the thirteenth. I am in a café where the waiter has bloody eyes and under the glass plates of the tables are roasted and unroasted coffee beans. Santiago de Chili is a magnificent city, a metropole with many faces. I've been here for a couple of days now and moved about the center enough to get a first impression. A lively, colonial city, the people seemed a little bit more relaxed than in Argentina, though street vendors and shoe polishers were everywhere. A grand network of square blocks constitutes the heart of the city, the part where restaurants and shops await their visitors and most of the money flows. Walking on those streets makes a European feel like he never left home.

From the hill "Cerro San Cristobal" (you don't need to write that down, you won't miss it in Santiago) the view of the city is impressive. Its multifariousness is even more noticeable from here: under the thick cover of smog that cannot escape over the surrounding mountains we see the commercial district with its high-rise glass-facade buildings but also the wide cuadros of low colonial houses. Tourist instincts awoke as we walked up to the Maria statue. The Virgen is popular here. I could look up why but I only want to play. Taking a picture with the sun behind her head like a halo. On our way down we discovered two new functions in Silvia's camera: baby1 and baby2. The camera was able to keep track of the age of the baby when a picture was taken in baby1-mode. This could be done for more than one baby, too. That's where baby2 kicks in. Having more than two babies simultaneously is not advisable for technical reasons. I volunteered to be baby1 and baby1 was 30 years, two months and 1 day old. It's not very young for a baby.

The park was huge and included a botanical garden, some cultural centers, a cablecar, a beautiful swimming pool and many barbecue spots. We walked down through the botanical garden that displayed species from all over the 4200 km long country of Chile and then exited the park. We trodded down the hot Avenida Providencia where a trumpet player let us take a picture of him, pointing knowingly at the "Providencia" street sign.

The meat I bought and prepared that night was really bad. A writer should have an eye for details and this is not a detail.

March 12. El Café.

Good day, writing. The apartment didn't have an airconditioning but that didn't bother me. I wrote on this very experimental travel writing thing, associating freely words and thoughts I don't believe in. Where did this writing take place? I try to remember. It was a round table in a kitchenette, a glass table you can look through, and I did not write enough. I felt incomplete in the small room that gradually heated up as the sun reflected in the windows of the tall building that dominated the view from behind the half closed curtains. Inspiration becomes a little devil once you have some nihilism in your veins.

That night we moved on for reasons of tact. A gasstation functioned as a pick-up spot - couchsurfing in Santiago take two.
Pablo is the friendliest guy you can imagine. He picked us up at the gas station and started to proudly show us his city right away. On our way to his apartment we passed some crowded streets that reminded me of certain areas in Berlin during hot summers. People like going out in Santiago. After leaving our bags in his apartment and a quick refreshing shower, we went out to a bar called "el café". I was fascinated by the colorplay of its interior: the large mirror on the wall that reflected the tile floor and the oak tables. In fact, I was forced to take a series of pictures that made the waiters look curious because I stood on a chair and held the camera as high as I could.

Photography. Great minds have reflected on this subject. I feel a bit awkward now, like I don't have a clue. What can I say? Capturing life in a still image. Conservation of a drifting presence, reproduction of the continuum in dead images, holding up the inevitable in a photographical composition, capturing our desire in a reflection that goes beyond language, creating a body of shadow and light, transposing movement into the realm of the pure mind, blah blah. I advise myself, on behalf of you, to re-read some books about the subject.

March 11. Santiago sweet.

I decide to meet someone today I call that person Sara because that's what first comes to my mind. She was not on our overnight bus to Santiago de Chile, I didn't meet her on the streets of this five million metropole with the 02 area code, neither was it the woman that sold me a ticket at the musuem entrance. She just fell down from the sky, so to speak, almost like a fictitious person. Well I said doesn't that hurt, intentionally using the negative expression to show that I had presupposed it would hurt because falling from the sky normally does. In her case, it obviously didn't hurt but how could I know? Besides, when I would have known all about her being like a feather and all I would never have talked to her and she would never have known about my existence and a lot of beautiful interaction would never have occured. So I asked her if she was hurt and looked at her arm to see if there were bruises and scratches but she was immaculate. She just smiled and told me her name was Sara and I thought something new is happening here. Well Sara I said aren't you hot, knowing that up there in the sky the temperature is a lot lower (I've been on an airplane more than once). Again I supposed Sara would feel in the same way I do, and again I was wrong. But she obviously liked my wrongness, because she smiled once more. She wasn't hot at all, she said she was rather cold because where she came from they could heat each other with their souls. I looked at her and laughed, I told her listen I put you on hold because I just wanted to let her wait. She was really beautiful and I was attracted to her but here I felt I had some power and couldn't resist to exert it. Frankly, I wanted to blow the cold air of our human condition in her face, instead of being heated up by her superhuman prettiness. Just wait for me Sara, just wait indefinitely until I come back.

Words should be fresh when they are written down. But the freshness of words cannot be measured by their individual smell or structure like fruits. They are all connected and build up a giant web that can have a dusty or a fresh aura. And there is another particularity. One moldy word can increase the freshness of its neighbours.

In Santiago we spent a night with Ronald, a Dutch translator about my age who travels with his boyfriend and works in every city for a couple of weeks before moving on. He used the same computer model as I did and would probably have the same shoe size too. It was kind of funny, like meeting someone who actually is in your skin. "How do you do it?"
We walked around a bit to explore Santiago since we were all new to the city. Ended up with a meal from the micromarket consisting of paltas (avocados), bread, bad wine, lettuce, yoghurt, and cheese. The couch was tough to unfold but it worked out fine in the end, whining and cracking like the odd coincidence of our meeting. Reflections about this were due. At least I could say something about the meaning that sticks to almost everything like dripping honey. Every cracking sound, the position of the chairs, the purring of a cat, the smell of onions that you're supposed to cut, the height of the ceiling, the bubbles that rise to the surface of your tablewater, the spiral form of the light saving bulb, it all has some gigantic symbolic meaning, it's satisfied with meaning like dough is satisfied with eggs. Don't touch anything please, the meaning might squirt all over the place.