(*note: Luckily, since writing this entry, I have purchased a USB Key (and made friends with the two people that work in the little computer store near my house) and obtained a chair for my desk. I just didn’t feel like going back and rewriting, so you can mentally edit.
Well, despite the long break, I am alive and well in Viña del Mar, Chile, or Vineyard of the Sea. (How perfect, from one Vineyard to the next.) I am, however, quite without regular internet access, so I am trying to encounter a USB key so I can write at home, and then transport pictures, blog entries, and e-mails to the computers at school. If anyone knows how to say USB key in Spanish, it would be much appreciated, because that is one thing I will not be able to describe to a salesperson. Put that as number one on the list of things I wish I had brought with me to Chile.
Anyway, things are going very well here despite the lack of internet. My family is very nice and our apartment is becoming homey for me. I have my own room with a bed and a desk (but no chair, which I don’t fully understand). I live with a mother and three daughters, not too different from my family at home, which I suppose is somewhat comforting. On the first day, their aunt and uncle came with their cousin from Los Andes (a town, not the mountains, though it is located in the mountains), and we all went driving along the beach where I live. The dunes are like mountains, really, not like our Martha’s Vineyard two-foot tall ones, and the all the beaches are public, so you can go to the beach literally along the whole country. It’s one of the most beautiful things that I’ve seen here so far.
My Chilean family and me, on the beach
My orientation class has been going well so far. I get to the University via a bus called a micro, short for microbus. They are all old busses, usually Mercedes, that shake like an earthquake and cost all of about fifty cents. You can take them just about anywhere in Valparaíso or the surrounding area, but there is no central way of finding out which bus to take, let alone a website describing the routes, it is just general knowledge. I think I’ve finally learned the essentials of taking the micro to the necessary places – school and the mall (which, I have to say, isn’t a shabby place to shop at all).
Our orientation class has been several lectures, about half of them interesting, and “activities in the field”. The trip to Pablo Neruda’s house was one such activity, which we repeated for his Valparaíso house, as was a tour of the Valpo port on a boat. You can see from the picture I took the hills on which the city is built.
There are ascensors that travel up the hills. We took one to Pablo Neruda’s Valpo house. On top of the hills you can see a marvelous view, but you also get a first-hand glimpse at much of the poverty in Valpo - many of the poorest people I’ve ever seen live there. The word “house” is a charitable description of the less-than-shacks that many people on the hills live in. Many people near Neruda’s house gather to sell things to tourists for very cheap prices and try to make a living.
the view from the ascensor
Another activity in the field involved a trip to a tiny pueblito in the hills called Rabuco where a family invited all thirty-three of us into their home and fed us empanadas and some of the best bread you have ever tasted. There is one discoteca and one school in the next town over, and that’s pretty much what happens in Rabuco. And while I would never want to live there, the people are some of the nicest, most welcoming and inviting I’ve ever encountered.
The house our big group of gringos is about to squeeze into. And yes, that sign does say “There are cheeses”, though I really have no idea what it is supposed to indicate besides perhaps that the family sells cheese.
And the whole trip would have been much cooler if our hungry group, on the way to the empanadas and good bread, hadn’t been in the bus that broke down on the side of the Chilean highway…
…although, with I view like this, I suppose there could have been worse places to be stuck next to speeding cars.
Caitlin, Guster, and the Andes, all united in the Chilean countryside.
Besides the endless school orientation activities, I’ve been trying to live up my time in Chile by going out with friends when I can. Of course, all this is made more difficult by the fact that I’m a big dork and don’t like dancing until all hours of the night, and would much prefer spending one night at a pub talking and the next at home watching a movie and calling it a thrill of a weekend. Luckily, half of the students in my program seem to feel the same way (I knew there was a reason I was becoming such good friends with some of them), and all of the students are exhausted from our never-ending orientation activities combined with the drain of constantly trying to think in Spanish. Which means that after about two drinks, we’re all ready to go home and pass out. So much for fitting into the Chilean culture, which dictates that young people stay out dancing until 5 in the morning. At least that means we go out earlier and thus get happy hour prices.
Many nights, we’ve gone out with plans to start at a pub and then move on to the discotecas. As of yet, the latter hasn’t occurred, but we’ve still had our fair share of adventures. I will not bore anyone who has actually made it this far through my interminable entry with too many details, but one particularly and short story is that one night my friends and I found ourselves approached by a very drunk, very weird British man. Being that we stick out to just about anyone as rubios and gringos (blondes - which every one of us, including the brownest brunettes, get called – and foreigners), this Englishman could quickly identify us as non-Chileans and decided that we would be more sympathetic to an English speaker and would give him money for his long cab ride. Trying to ignore him and head back to Sara’s house, we found ourselves followed by the slightly belligerent bloke. Sara’s host sister’s thirty-two-year-old boyfriend had to walk each of us home, her family was so worried about us getting home safely! It probably doesn’t sound that amusing, but for those of us that had to deal with it, it’s become a pretty amusing Chilean adventure.
Ashley has also finally arrived and we’ve been keeping good company, even if that only means trips to knitting stores or watching TV over onces (which is a small snack in place of dinner, if I haven’t yet explained that) in my house. Many a knitting party and traveling adventure should ensue in short time! Ashley has also given me a new nickname: American Slut. Apparently the disappearance of some of my favorite underwear from the laundry sparked concern that I was too scandalous for my sweet Chilean mother and she had taken to throwing away some of my dearest possessions. Never fear, however, the underwear has all reappeared folded in my laundry a week later, and the temporary self-imposed moratorium on putting thongs in the laundry has been lifted! I still wish I could do my own laundry, but I suppose it’s not the worst thing to have to get used to in a foreign country, having someone look after you. See, Ashley, my family can handle me…as long as they stop making comments about my tank tops showing “too much chest” (a little translation for my non-Spanish-speaking friends). Oops.
And that pretty much brings me up to the current date. I’m leaving tonight for La Serena, a town 7 hours north on the coast, so hopefully it will be a little warmer. Wednesday I start classes and should get into a somewhat normal schedule, enabling more frequent posts. I’m planning on writing a little bit each night after I finish my homework and then posting it at least once a week at an internet café. Hopefully meaning no more marathon entries! Kudos to those who made it to the end of this one! I miss everyone a lot (and peanut butter, I really miss peanut butter :-p), but am truly having a great time here. Thanks for all the e-mails, keep them coming!
Jeff and I with a mule on the street in Valparaíso. Because where else would you expect to see a mule than in a major urban environment? I feel like this should be a post card home. “Missing you in Chile!”
