While I was in South America, somehow all the memories I had of sitting on the classroom at P.S. 183 in 1987 came flooding back to me. That year, fifth grade, we learned the geography of the whole world, including the Andes Mountains in South America, where I knew as a ten year old, I would one day visit.

So a week ago, the plane I was flying in lowered down from the darkness, down to the sunset and I saw the Andes. I was looking out of window of the airplane and I thought “OMG, those are the Andes.”

THOSE ARE THE ANDES!!!

A lot of kids sat through history and social studies class in elementary school and high school and thought “why do I have to learn this? I’ll never go to these places.”

I was never one of these kids.

I remember learning about South America and the history of it, colonization, post-colonization, governments, upheaval, change economic and social and thinking that one day I would go there. One day I would see all of that.

On my trip to Chile, I went to see La Moneda, the government house of Chile. Not only did I get to visit, but the friend who I went to see in Chile actually works in La Moneda so I got to meet some people who work there as well.

The building was originally a colonial mint and was later transformed into the government house through additions and renovations. Interestingly, the president of Chile does not have an official residence, so La Moneda is like the Old Executive Office building combined with the White House, minus the residence.

Walking through, I had this feeling of being among this colonial splendor but also this history. The tour guide was very careful to tell us about the history of the building and we stood in the are where Salvadore Allende, the president of Chile before the takeover of the country by Augusto Pinochet in 1973 had committed suicide. From the tour guides face and from everything I saw in the building, this was still a chapter of history that every Chilean seems to be truly sorry for and in some way the people are still processing.

So, here I stand in my fifth grade history book. Also, again combined with the feeling of being in a movie about South America, rather than actual South America:

Somehow going to South America caused me to experience and examine a full range of emotions I have not examined nor ever experienced before. It also caused me reexamine things I had seen and experienced before. Most of all, it all kind of felt like a movie going to Chile.

A couple of days ago, I got to visit the Pablo Neruda House in Santiago. Pablo Neruda was a Chilean diplomat who also wrote poems. These days he is better known as a poet than he was as a diplomat. Pablo Neruda was also a pseudonym that he wrote under because he didn’t want his family to know he was a poet.

A long time ago, I watched a movie called “Il Postino” about a postman who wooed a woman by getting advice from Pablo Neruda — who just happened to be living nearby. It was kind of a fantasy because Pablo Neruda wasn’t this guy’s neighbor and the movie took place in Italy, a place Neruda never really spent any time.

Visiting the Neruda house in Santiago brought back the memories of that movie and the feelings I had watching it and a lot of other movies that took place in the same region. There was always a feeling of ease and an unhurried life going on. There were drinks to be had, food to be eaten. The day would be sunny and there was nothing to worry about. That’s kind of how I felt when I went to the Neruda house. The place was so well preserved and it felt like someone had actually lived there. I love the mansions in Newport, but it always feels like nobody ever lived there. Those people lived in such splendor, but in the Neruda house, it felt like a person had actually lived there.

Don’t worry. Pablo just stepped out for a second. He’ll be right back. Let’s just have a look around his house while he’s gone:

Other titles I was thinking of for this entry:
Don’t Cry for Me Argentina. Actually Chile.
Andes Candies.

Well, my blog reading public, the title is a slight lie. My life, as with all lives, has been turbulent of late, but I haven’t totally decided to head south in the metaphorical sense. I have headed south in literal sense. Yes. I’m in South America, Chile to be specific.

About a year ago, I met two Chileans. One of them was my student and the other was his soon to be wife. The three of us started a wonderful friendship and I decided right away that I would do everything I could to go to their wedding, which was of course going to take place in Chile. I spent close to a year planning for this short trip south.

Now I’ve visited the North of the world and experienced cold (people and climates) but the furthest south I had traveled up until a couple of days ago was to the Cayman Islands. I was filled with trepidation when I left for Chile. What was this place even going to be like? More importantly, would my phone work? Would I be able to get around? Would I be able to find anything?

Well, my two good friends have shown me around and along with the other gringos(!!!) who are here for the wedding, we’ve had a splendid time.

I think Santiago, Chile might be my new favorite city in the world. I guess you could describe Santiago as Europe with palm trees and mountains but that would be a vast oversimplification. Santiago is this massive city seemingly carved into the middle of a mountain range. You can see the mountains from many vantage points in the city. After so long in Boston and New York, it is weird for me to be in a city without water anywhere. Santiago is this city full of modern architecture, mixed with colonial, mixed with 1920s architecture. The amazing part of this place is that all of the buildings are harmonious with each other and the mountains. It all combined into this modern metropolis among this cinnamon colored mountains. I asked a local if she ever gets sick of looking at the mountain, but she said no.

Anyway, as this is mainly a picture blog, here are some initial photos I took of this amazing city. More entries with more detailed information about this city to follow:

I’ll admit. Its been a tough two weeks for me. I keep thinking about Pepi and how much I still wanted to tell him about how his ideas had extended to every aspect of my life.

I considered even shutting the blog down after the entry about Pepi. Its gotten so many comments and I felt like the people who read it would think that if a funny entry were to push it down toward the bottom of the blog, that it would somehow be disrespectful towards Pepi.

I watched part of the episode of Saturday Night Live after September 11. They didn’t know how to be funny again after something so tragic.

So I think we can be funny again up here. Or hey, you know. Why start now?

Well, I’m going to try. Here are some photos I took at the clink, the slammer, JAIL. No, I wasn’t arrested. I was a permanent resident for many years and my dad told me that if I committed any crime, I’d get sent right back to Poland.

A couple of days ago, I visited a clink that had been reformed into a hotel. The Liberty Hotel and this was one good looking clink. Let’s have a look see at this clink:

Yesterday I was on the train coming home from an activity with my students in Providence and I decided to listen to the Paul Simon song “An American Tune.” While I was on the train, I saw yet another message from one of Pepi Leistyna’s friends on my blog. The whole thing brought tears to my eyes, the third time in so many days that has happened.

Since I wrote the first blog entry about Pepi, I’ve gotten so many messages from his friends, former students and family over the years. I was just writing about my feelings about the man. I actually thought I was writing about him with all of his flaws included, but it all seemed to touch a nerve with everyone. For me, I just needed to say how I felt about him and this is my forum to do that. I appreciate all the messages I have gotten and they remind me of what an impact he made on so many people. It also reminds me of what a tragic loss this really is.

A day after Pepi died, I went to the Applied Linguistics department at the University of Massachusetts. It is advising time, so I went to speak with my advisor to see what I would be taking next semester. Her office is next to Pepi’s office and the place was completely quiet. I have never seen a sadder group of people in my life.

That same night I had class with a professor who had known Pepi for over 20 years. He looked utterly heartbroken over the loss of Pepi and told some really funny stories about him, including the time they went to a conference together and Pepi pretty much drafted a man he met into being his chauffeur. That was Pepi, my professor said with this sad smile. He also told a story about how his son had run up to Pepi and gave him a hug when he came into the office. That was when I broke down in tears.

My professor is from the Midwest and by his own admission not an effusive or emotive person. That night we waited for the Red Line together, not even saying a word to each other. I looked over at him and he at me and we didn’t say a word to each other. He looked utterly devastated.

It wasn’t until Pepi died (I still can’t even believe I am saying those words) that I actually realized what I had with that Masters program and how great it had all turned out considering how little interest I had in actually attending. It will be over in six months. I’m sad for the people who will come after me and never get to meet Pepi and be taught by him and hear his crazy stories and generally have their lives changed by him. I hope the department is able to recover after this loss.

In the coming weeks, there will be a service for Pepi and multiple ceremonies and celebrations for him. I will be happy that more people will be celebrating his life, but at the same time it was make it all very real that he is actually gone.

Pepi loved photography and was a fine photographer himself, so I am attaching a few kind of darkly moody photos I’ve taken over the past few days. Photography captures feelings a lot of time and the melancholy I feel about Pepi:

I rarely write on this blog about my real, actual life. Regular readers probably think all I do is take photos of beautiful places and upload them with some kind of pithy commentary. I don’t really write about my actual life of being a teacher in Boston who also studies Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Today I am going to write about my real, actual life because of a tragic loss I experienced. I found out that a man who had been my professor at the university died yesterday. His name was Pepi Leistyna and I’m going to use this blog to pay tribute this unique and interesting individual who I was privileged to have known.

In 2013, I returned to school to do as I called it “graduate school II.” I reluctantly returned to school, as graduate school one was a trying experience that I sought not to repeat. I thought graduate school II was going to absolutely ruin my life. I was set with my life and I didn’t want to add school on top of it.

So off I went to the school and went into a classroom and saw a man wearing pants that had a rope as a belt, a shirt that looked like it had been washed about 800 times and running shoes. As soon as I entered the classroom, he started talking about Pickles, George and Susan. Pickles and George were his cats and Susan I would soon find out was his wife who had died very suddenly and tragically about two years before I entered the program. He also uttered the words that I used as the blog title.

The class was called Theories and Practices of Language Teaching. Having been to graduate school before, I dutifully did the readings week in and week out until one day I came in and realized that Pepi hadn’t gone over them and was probably not going to go over them. Every week Pepi regaled us with stories about Susan. Susan was the center of his universe and she had died suddenly and rather tragically of an untreatable form of pancreatic cancer. Pepi was obviously still in mourning over her death.

In the midst of all of this, Pepi told us “write your paper.” WRITE YOUR PAPER. IF YOU START WRITING YOUR PAPER LATE, YOU WILL FAIL. He asked us to connect a theory to a teaching method and I had done a short paper on that topic. He hadn’t liked it and hadn’t graded it either. He just offered some random comments. It was supposed to be a section of the paper and he hadn’t liked it.

I went to his office hours and a completely different guy emerged. He had all sorts of music memorabilia in his office and pictures of the Grateful Dead. I happen to love the Dead, so we started talking about that. We got around to the paper and I asked him what to do. He told me write about the school I work in. In all of the years I had been in school, nobody had ever for one minute asked to write about anything that had anything to do with my life. In graduate school one, it was all of this stuff that was related to briefing your undersecretary of state. Suddenly, here was a forum where I could write about my own experiences and connect those with theories. I started reading the theories in the materials he had given us and it all started coming together. I wrote and wrote and wrote. There were moments when I hated the guy for making us write that much, but I did it. The paper ended up being 120 pages long with almost that amount of footnotes. I got an A on it too.

A year ago I took a class with Pepi called Cross Cultural Perspectives and I learned more in that class than I ever learned in any class with anyone. He continued to tell us stories about Susan. We heard about her engagement ring, grade point average, love of gummy bears and how she got starstruck meeting Ed Asner.

Pepi also provided some premium content in that class. A couple of quotes from that class:

1. What if I came in here wearing a dress?

2. There goes Pepi, that raving Marxist!!!

3. So what if I like to wear deodorant that smells that flowers.

4. If you came here to listen to my clothes, you have the wrong guy.

Again, there was another long, frustrating paper to write, seemingly thousands of pages to read. I sent Pepi a draft, which he rejected and said it was too descriptive and not at all analytical. I cried, I yelled. I went back to hating Pepi.

But as I worked on the paper, as I created the examples, my way of seeing the world changed. I saw order in chaos and reconsidered my views on just about everything. I realized how as a white person, I have a privilege in this world and also how our world is ruled by social class and most of all money. I started to look at representation in the world and who gets to say what about what. Most of all I started to see the world in a way that made a lot more sense than it had before. I accepted my own privilege in the world, but I could also, in turn recognize it in others and see how it affected my perception. In short, my view on the world changed.

I wrote a second paper for Pepi, received a second A.

In November I went to a party in the applied linguistics department at UMass. I saw Pepi for the first time after he had been my professor and he gave me a hug. We talked about Harvard football, skiing, the Providence Bruins and I realized I really wanted to build a friendship with this man after my schooling was over. Maybe I had found another mentor that could guide my career. It was a fun and engaging evening that I hoped to repeat again. We even took a cheesy selfie together.

Sadly, that turned out to be the final time I would see Pepi. An hour before I found out that he had died, I was trying to (unsuccessfully) convince my boss of an idea that Pepi had advocated. When I found out he had died, I was utterly shocked. I was in the middle of Downtown Crossing surrounded by police and fire trucks. It felt like something out of a movie. I was trying to call somebody, anybody to tell them what had happened. I spent the afternoon reeling from this piece of news.

Somehow (and I don’t know how this happened) today was the day that I volunteer in the soup kitchen. Pepi taught us to treat other people with dignity and frequently spoke about the people that society had forgotten about. I thought a lot about that tonight working at the soup kitchen. I guess it was fitting, almost poignant that this was the evening I was to do that. Maybe it was just a coincidence or maybe it was fate, but somehow I felt like I was doing something for Pepi, something he would be proud of.

Rest in peace, Pepi Leistyna. For a man who always felt left out and unloved, you left a legacy of admirers and people who will never forget about your ideas and passions in life.

A night at the soup kitchen. For Pepi:

This was an amazing ski season. It made up for the ski season in 2014, which featured three rain filled ski trips and one ski trip where the snow felt more like sand.

This ski season was out of control great. I fell down six times in 14 ski trips and those six falls only happened in one ski trip featuring my arch nemesis, THE HELL — moguls. And those moguls were skied at Killington, a mountain with which I actually share as personal of a relationship as one can share with a prehistoric rock formation.

In this ski season, I also skied down a black trail in a straight line with minimal turns and skied a double black trail. Truth be told, the double black was similar to other blacks I have skied at other resorts. But my god, was that thing ever steep.

I realized today that I ski for a lot of different reasons and none of them have anything to do with thrill seeking. I aim to ski well, meaning with good form. I try to always keep my skis parallel. I also ski to clear my mind because sometimes it is full of useless thought that run around in my mind for much too long. I also ski to have a feeling of accomplishment. Getting to the bottom of that double black trail left me with a huge sense of accomplishment, that I’ve been able to do in a sport that I took up four years ago. Four years ago, I thought I would be skiing greens forever and then maybe a blue. Skiing a black seemed impossible, double black for crazy people. But somehow here we are.

These photos are from a wonderful resort called Sugarbush. A couple of them are from an area called Heaven’s Gate, which is my favorite place to ski anywhere. I guess once I visit some fancy European ski area, my opinion will change, but right now, that is my favorite.

Also, when I ski, I still can’t get over the beauty of the area. The mountain in Vermont, even though I’ve been going there to ski for a couple of years are absolutely breathtaking. I always think “this is just nature’s work. All nature’s work.”

Anyway, enough talk. Let’s see some photos from today:

I mean not for my ice skating, unless you see some kind of artistry in moving forward on the skates in a slow, almost gumby-like motion around the frog pond. No, I am of course talking (again) about the MAGNIFICENT skating show I saw on Saturday night. I took over 600 photos, of which about 15 percent were completely out of focus but the rest were kind of all right. OK. They were great. Even I can pat myself on the back for those.

I threw the initial set up on my Flickr page (to get a huge amount of hits of course) and also up here. Tonight I looked through the photos again and saw that there was still tons of good stuff from Saturday night and that, maybe, just maybe I could turn it into something a little more artistic. Yeah, some of these are black and white, but I wanted them to be artistic and dynamic at the same time. Did I achieve it? Did all of my hard work watching 1980s gymnastics competitions on YouTube to figure out how to photograph motion pay off? Well, let’s see the photos and judge for ourselves:

I mean come on, who would cry when they saw figure skating?

Who? Well, the person writing this blog entry. As I’ve probably mentioned on this blog before, I am out of control obsessed with the Olympics, summer more so than winter, but winter equally. I mean summer features gymnastics, a sport that never stops thrilling me and swimming that features a man-fish named Michael Phelps.

Not that the Winter Olympics lacks for drama. There is skiing and of course figure skating. Figure skating during the time of the Cold War was the stage where the socialist system was to be proven to be the correct system. And they had some spectacular skaters, male and female. I’ve been watching figure skating since Scott Hamilton won the gold medal in Sarajevo. I watched the dueling Brians in Calgary. And Tonya and Nancy. I remember where I was when I saw the news about that. I was in 11th grade, home sick with the flu.

OK, enough about the my particular obsessions. Last night I went to Stars on Ice at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Given my long standing obsession with figure skating, it would be a natural thing for me to watch of course. But the show was absolutely out of this world.

It started with the skaters doing an entire number to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which is in my opinion one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. Watching it and the following numbers, I slowly noticed that I had a tear in my eye. I looked over at my friends. Almost everyone else was crying. I thought I would go there to see the grace and style of the skaters, but I never thought their performances would carry so much emotion with them.

It was wonderful to watch skaters I have seen on television for years, including the AMAZING Evan Lysacek but the absolute stars of the night were Meryl Davis and Charlie White. I remembered them from the Olympics and how sweet they seemed with their moms watching their performances. There were tons of teenage girls in the audience, in love with both of them. By the end, whenever Charlie came on, the women I was with yelled out “marry me Charlie” whenever finished skating. I would never do something so juvenile. No, I’m totally kidding. I did it too.

I walked out of there thinking “I want to go to one of these shows everyday for the rest of my life.”

Let’s see some pictures from last night. Of course there are a ton, but who can really resist Charlie White? Nobody. I dare you to. Even if you can resist him, check out the photos anyway: