Blogamajig

On Chile...

2007-12-28T16:59:00.001-05:00

So, I've been home for almost a month now. It's very nice to be home, though I of course miss Chile. I found a couple of notes that I made with Javiera and some other Chilean friends of mine, and I thought I'd post them online, in case anyone was interested in funny Chilean sayings. Basically, this will save me from having to hold onto these loose papers. What else am I going to do with these? They're funny.

fomingo: from the very Chilean word "fome," meaning "really lame," and the Spanish word for Sunday (domingo). Nobody likes the weekend to end.

Santiasco: from the Spanish phrase "¡Que asco!" ("gross!"). Santiago is really smoggy, so it's a gross city.

Avenida Sucia: a street in Santiago, Avenida Suecia (Sweden Street), used to contain a hip night life district, but now most people agree that it's run-down and hollow and prefer to find bars and clubs elsewhere in the city, so now it's "Dirty Street."

"Las Cuicondes" and "Vitacuica": both from the Chilean term "cuico," meaning rich and snotty. Las Condes is the upscale neighborhood that I lived in, and Vitacura is the richest area in Santiago. Both are very cuico.

Ñoñoa: Ñuñoa is an area of Santiago that includes a lot of university students and a "ñoño" is a nerd. I don't know if there's anything to the idea that people from an entire region of the metropolitan area tend toward nerdiness, but I suspect it's just too obvious of a disparaging remark to dismiss it because of something as trivial as accuracy.

"prender vela (a ...)": literally, "to light a candle (for someone)". To hold someone in really high regard.

Back in the USSR

2007-12-11T01:53:00.001-05:00

Here I sit, at Chateau Wilson. Yes, Dear Reader. I am back in the USA, known to my Chilean friends as Gringolandia. The trip home was uneventful, but agonizingly prolonged. There are still some new photos, including my Patagonia album, part 1 and part 2. I don't know what wise observations to make, reflecting on the whole experience, so for now I'll content myself with my comfy bed, my family, and my welcome-home cherry pie.

The end of the semester as we know it

2007-12-08T10:56:00.001-05:00

Dear Readers,
Today is my penultimate day in Chile. Tomorrow evening (there's a word that Spanish lacks) I'll be leaving on a jet plane without knowing when I'll be back again. Though I do know that I will be back again, some day. Play your cards right, Dear Reader, and you might come with me.

Details (and photos) of my trip to Patagonia are coming soon. Right now, better-quality photos of my Machu Picchu trip are uploading and I'm off to the Estadio Español to play some fútbol. So many people to say goodbye to.

Puerto Natales

2007-11-30T18:17:00.000-05:00

Hello, Dear Reader. I find myself in a little town called Puerto Natales, in Región XII of Chile. Early yesterday morning, we landed in Punta Arenas, a surprisingly large city right in the middle of Chilean Patagonia. We went, fairly straightaway, to the penguin colony at Seno Otway. We communed with the penguins and took some photos, then came back to town to avoid the wind and rain. We ate at a very nice little restaurant where the chef himself took our order. I was excited to order lamb stew, but more than a little freaked out when it was mostly gizzards (lamb stomach). Personally, I was convinced it was brain at first, but Noah ate all of his. It was still mostly light out at 10 pm when we were out walking the streets, though we went to bed relatively early to get up the next morning.

Today, we caught a bus to Puerto Natales, the launching point to trips into Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. Though we at first had grand plans of trekking through the classic "W" route of the park, we realized that we were not at all equipped for that sort of thing and all the shelters along the way were full to capacity with backpackers who did things not by the seats of their pants. Instead, our plan is to do the major sites with day hikes. Tomorrow, we set out for the main Torres, which are the main centerpiece of the park, and the day after we're doing a hike to Glaciar Grey. There are agencies that actually take you trekking on the glacier itself, but expense may prohibit such adventuring.

In any case, after the park we're pressing on to Tierra del Fuego, the self-proclaimed end of the world. Cape Horn, ho!

Patagonia, ho!

2007-11-29T01:21:00.001-05:00

In a few hours I board a plane bound for Punta Arenas. When I arrive in Santiago again (next Friday) I'll have all sorts of pictures from the end of the world. I'm excited.

Media Picchu

2007-11-26T09:31:00.001-05:00

It didn't want to upload any of that stuff before, but now it's working better.

Photos from the Machu Picchu trip can be found here.

And here's some videos that I took. I needed a more panoramic view of the site.

Wednesday night fútbol

2007-11-24T14:38:00.001-05:00

I bought an unwanted ticket to the Chile-Paraguay game on Wednesday at the Estadio Nacional and, though Chile lost miserably, it was a lot of fun. I've never been to such a wild sporting event. At the beginning, they announced all the Paraguayan players, and every name was answered with a deafening, profane jeer by the stadium, all together. The Paraguayan section was barricaded off with chain link fences, then by a line of carabineros, then by big waist-high barriers. And the Chilean galleries were divided into sections by more fencing, so that the entire crowd couldn't charge the Paraguayans.

One of their favorite jeers was this little gem: "Él que no salte es un paraguayo maricón," while jumping around.

Anyway, the game should have gone a lot better for the Chileans. They had better ball possession, outmaneuvered the Paraguayan players, and were typically faster and slicker than their opponents. They had about two dozen shots on goal in the first thirty minutes of the game, but didn't make it once. The Paraguayans, on the other hand, had two shots on goal in the first half and both got in. Miserable. Watching the Chilean goalie fumble for the ball as it bounced around rivaled in frustration, but did not exceed, watching the Chilean offense charge up the field, only to forget how soccer worked once they got to the other side and were swarmed with Paraguayans.

My Chile teacher explained that the Chilean national selection used to lose miserably all the time, but they got a new coach recently from Argentina who decided to change the image of the team by recruiting really fast players who would play aggressively and could run up and down the field all day long. Great, but maybe you should focus on recruiting players who can play soccer, first.

Though the game ended in a 0-3 loss for Chile, it was still fun, and I can say that I've been to a Latin American fútbol game. Can you?

Machu Picchu

2007-11-24T14:12:00.001-05:00

Okay, so last Wednesday I left for Machu Picchu, in Perú on a "oh no, we only have a few weeks left in South America and we haven't seen Machu Picchu yet" trip with Kellie, Nicole, and Kate. If you don't know, besides being an absolutely amazing location to see in the South American jungle, it's the ruins of an Inca city that wasn't "found" by the international world until 1911, and was named a World Heritage Site in 1983. I could talk about the granite blocks carved out of the Vilcapampa Batholith, but no one really wants that.

So our flight out of Santiago left late Wednesday night and arrived in Arica, Chile early in the morning. We took a taxi from the airport, then a colectivo to the border, waited for it to open, then crossed over to Tacna, Perú. From there, we took a bus to Cusco, with a bus change in Puno. The bus was a scheduling disaster and wandered through the backroads of the Peruvian lowlands for 21 hours. Our only company for Thursday was a Spanish-language Pursuit of Happyness, some Korean cowboy movie, some ridiculous half-animated action movie, and our own growing hallucinations, fueled by lack of REM sleep. From Cusco, we took another colectivo to Ollantaytambo, then took an overpriced train to Aguas Calientes.

Along the way we met Jessica, who professionally travels as a manager for business trips for rich pharmaceutical executives. It may be an extravagant thing to do as a job, but man does it sound fun.

Anyway, all of the exhausting and infuriating trip to Aguas Calientes was worth it because of Machu Picchu. The place was so amazing that we had to stop and take new pictures every five minutes. The trouble was that every volley of photos made all the preceding photos obsolete, so we eventually just gave up and only took a picture when we got to the top of something. Kellie and I climbed Waynapicchu. I don't mean to brag, but we did the climb in half the estimated time. We're studs like that. The Temple of the Moon at the top may be one of the most amazing places I've been to on the face of the Earth.

Then we started in on our trip back. It was your standard trip from Aguas Calientes to Ollantaytambo by train. Then to Urubamba by taxi, then to Cusco by colectivo, then to Tacna via Arequipa by bus, then to Arica by horrifically-delayed-at-the-border-crossing taxi, then waiting around in Arica, then back to Santiago.

Then I had to write a lengthy explanation in Spanish of "What is Chile?" for my final paper in my Chile: Historia, Cultura, e Identidad class.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-24T11:59:00.001-05:00

Thanksgiving went well, though the Chileans have a different name for it. They call it "Thursday," you see, and it's not quite as big a celebration. Still, the Tufts group had a big, huge, enormous dinner with turkey (and stuffing from America!). I'm going to miss Chile. But that's all the better for my dear ones at home, because you can easily convince me to take you traveling through South America in the years to come.

Machu Picchu

2007-11-13T21:28:00.001-05:00

Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You'd better run, you'd better take cover.
~excerpt from the collective wisdom of Men at Work

I leave on a plane-bus-llama roadtrip to Machu Picchu round about midnight tomorrow. I'll be out there until Monday night, when I come back way, way late. Such is the life of the young vagabonds of this continent. I'm putting together a playlist, and you'd better bet that classic we know as "Land Down Under" made the cut.

Photo Catch-up

2007-11-11T17:47:00.001-05:00

I don't think I'll ever post photos I a more timely fashion than this. These photos date back to merely the first weekend of November, when I went to Mendoza. But I gotta get everything up-to-date because coming soon, to a blogamajig near you, will be photos from this week's incipient journey to Machu Picchu.

Eating is a Lifestyle, a photographic journey through the Andes mountains to reach a wonderful town of food. I mean, we did other stuff, too, and it's a nice town for other reasons, but we were so excited about the mythical buffets of Mendoza that draw so many Santiago residents every long weekend that we would have gone just for that.

Springtime for Chile, a bunch of photos that I took in Santiago this month. There are a couple pictures of the museum, some buildings, and other stuff.

Colchagua, the last Tufts field trip of the semester. Mostly pictures of patios at the El Huique hacienda. It's got the style of colonial architecture that exemplified the residences of the landed gentry of Chile during the 19th century. This was the property of the Echeñique Errazuriz family until the agrarian reform would have taken the land out of their hands and redistributed it to the peasant farmers, so the family gave it to the conservative military leaders to turn into a museum in order to keep that from happening. Also, we went to the Colchagua Museum, which had pre-Columbian artifacts, fossils, colonial pieces, and cars. And other stuff.

Gala del Folklórico

2007-11-09T23:58:00.001-05:00

The Teatro Municipal about two weeks ago hosted the annual Gala del Folklórico, this time devoted to Violeta Parra. There were a bunch of different musicians who came out and did tributes or just their own acts. I guess it was really exciting for some Chileans, kind of interesting for gringos. But there was a lot of cueca at the end, which made for some video-taking and some off-kilter-beats-get-stuck-in-my-head.

I've uploaded photos of the thing here.

Videos should be coming, but they don't seem to want to upload.

Last field trip

2007-11-09T19:40:00.001-05:00

There's just one last Tufts-in-Chile field trip (at least for us one-semesterers). It's tomorrow, to Colchagua. There'll be some museums, and lots of mountains. And then after that, photos. Speaking of which, I'm going to add more photos now.

Over-Regularization

2007-11-09T13:27:00.001-05:00

Here's some linguistics I learned back at Tufts. Over-regularization is when a child, while learning language, makes a mistake of the "the mouses runned away from the wolfes" sort. These errors are things that the child has never heard someone else say. Since the child is obviously not repeating things that people say, it's evidence for the systematic acquisition of a rules system. They take a rule that holds for regular nouns or regular verbs and apply it to irregular ones.

Renato does this, from what I can tell. To form a command in Spanish, you conjugate the word based on the subject. For example:
Juega: play (you, familiar singular)
Juegue: play (you, formal)
Jueguen: play (you, plural)
Juguemos: let's play (us)

But Renato, on the many occasions that he tells me to go play "digging in the garden" with him, tells me "tú juegue en el jardín," (mixing up the familiar subject pronoun with the formal conjugation) or sometimes "tú juegues" (which isn't any kind of command conjugation). He repeats himself over and over again until his potential play-buddy relents, so he's definitely consistent about it. Which would indicate that it's his systematic understanding of how it ought to be said. I guess it's not the textbook definition of over-regularization, since "jugar" actually gets conjugated regularly, but it's still an example of a partially-acquired bit of syntax. He follows this same kind of pattern with all his commands (he's a bossy little kid, as all two year-olds are): "pase" (incorrectly, "give me (familiar)"), though he correctly says "come" ("eat (familiar)"), probably because he hears this one all the time,
directed at him.

Amusingly, he actually gets his irregular commands right all the time. He never distinguishes between formal and informal speech, so he calls everyone tú. Spanish has a set of words that get conjugated irregularly in this form. Some of them are:
Salir (to leave, etc.): sal. Renato says "sale", which is correct in Chile, though incorrect everywhere else.
Venir (to come): ven. Renato gets this right.

Non-Facebook readers

2007-11-05T10:03:00.001-05:00

Good news. I fixed the links from my Valle del Elqui trip, so that now they correctly route you to a photo album that doesn't require being logged into a Facebook account. That should have been how it was all along, but I did it wrong. The link menu on the right-hand side of the screen and the post that announced the new albums should all be valid now.

Mendoza

2007-11-04T22:17:00.001-05:00

Yep, I went to Mendoza this past weekend with Mie and Amanda. We caught an afternoon bus from Santiago and settled in for the 7-hour bus ride into the Andes. Just how Andean is Mendoza, you ask? So very extremely Andean that they filmed Seven Years in Tibet there. We rolled into town, bought a return bus ticket, and then looked for a hostel. The one recommended by my travel guide was full, so we went to another one (which turned out to be kind of weird and full of funky hikers). The next morning, after tracking down some Argentinian pesos, we went off to explore the town.

Mendoza is a pretty big city, but it feels small, especially since the downtown area is so pedestrian and spacious. The streets are very wide and lined with trees. Good thing, too, because without the trees the heat would be unbearable. We were lucky enough to stay right on the main Plaza de la Independencia both nights, which is centrally located, relaxingly atmospheric, and home to a bunch of artesanal vendors. We went to the parks and the plazas and wandered the streets.

That night, we went to Las Tinajas, an awesome and huge tenedor libre (buffet) where we ate a whole lot of food. Honestly, the legends of Mendozan buffets were a pretty big part of our incentive for going in the first place. This was dinner of epic proportions, to the extent that we had to set some ground rules ahead of time. No giving up too early, no complaining later, no sneezing in line, etc. After dinner we went wandering around the streets again and then went back to our new hostel (free of weird roommates). Crazily enough, I met a couple of international students who are in my Chile class with me and it turns out we were all in the same room at the hostel.

The next day Mie, Amanda, and I trekked out to the enormous Parque General San Martín, where we climbed the Cerro de la Gloria, named in honor of San Martín's Army of the Andes. We came back, read in the Plaza de la Independencia for a while, shopped around, and then made for the bus depot. After a long night of bussing back through the Andes, we made it back to Santiago around 5 am, Sunday.

All in all, it was a nice way to spend the weekend. I can see why it's so popular among Chileans as a relaxing weekend spot.

My Thursday

2007-11-04T21:36:00.001-05:00

"[...] And their Asian cousins are even more raucous, regularly killing people and destroying homes in drunken stampedes."

That's a strange quote. Think about that meaning, because it totally changes when you add in the two sentences that preceded it. Maybe even more funny, but definitely different:

"Elephants have long been notorious for their passion for alcohol. African elephants can become extremely excitable and aggressive when they eat the fermenting fruit of several types of palm tree. And their Asian cousins are even more raucous, regularly killing people and destroying homes in drunken stampedes."

That little tidbit comes from page 58 of the December 2003 issue of New Scientist magazine. Reading its article about animals that intoxicate themselves is the most productive thing I did for most of my time on Thursday (contrary to popular belief, koalas are slow because eucalyptus is a poor source of nutrition, not because they're actually affected y the exotic narcotics that it actually is full of). It was All-Saints' Day, so everyone in town was off at the cemetery on their days off from school and such. Eventually, people came by the museum, but there were no school groups coming in, so it was quite quiet on the scientific front.

However, my Thursday got a lot more exciting because--given the long weekend--I went on a completely impulsive weekend trip to Mendoza, Argentina with Mie and Amanda, where we ate a lot of food. I just up and caught a bus Thursday afternoon, despite having woken up that morning pretty determined that I wasn't going to go anywhere this past weekend. So, yes, I was remiss in my blogamajigging duties, such as getting more camera videos uploaded. But it all worked out in the end, because Mendoza makes for more interesting blogamajigging. Plus, Thursday was a bad day for tedious internetting, because I had been out with Chileans until roughly 5 am the night before.

Connectivity issues delay update

2007-10-31T09:55:00.001-04:00

I had planned to write something last night and upload another camera video, but there was an issue with the internet connection. I'll get that done sometime today. Sorry, Mom.

New Photos

2007-10-30T03:15:00.001-04:00

(Two) new batches of photos are up. They're the overdue photos from my La Serena and Valle del Elqui trip.

Valle del Elqui, parte 1.
Valle del Elqui, parte 2.

That's it for now. I've got photos of the Gala del Folklore that I went to on Sunday, but you've gotta wait for those. Mostly a lot of cueca, anyway.

A Revolution in Blogging!

2007-10-29T01:17:00.000-04:00

Yes, that's right, dear Reader. I can upload videos to this thing. Now I can show things like this video that I took on my camera while I was at Iguazú. To explain, I couldn't get enough of the waterfall in photos, so I decided to do a video so you could get a better view of the waterfalls and how enormous they are. It's a good one to start with, I suppose. I've got more of these, but I was stupid when I took some of them and took them with the camera turned to the side because I wanted something taller and narrower. Unfortunately, it's not as easy to rotate a video as it is to rotate a picture, so I'm working on editing those.

A Linguistic Note

2007-10-28T03:23:00.001-04:00

Okay, so as a primer to this entry, here's a little thing I'll bet you didn't (want to) know about phonetics.
[b] is a voiced bilabial plosive, and it's the first sound you make in the word "bed."
[v] is a voiced labiodental fricative, and it's the first sound you make in the word "van."
[β] is a voiced bilabial fricative, and you don't have it in English. You could kind of make it by blowing air through your nearly-closed lips and phonating.

To a speaker of English, [b] and [v] are distinct, because the use of one or the other can change a word. There's what's called a minimal pair (e.g., "very" and "berry"). The English speaker, however, doesn't recognize the [β] because it does not appear in the language. A Chilean, however, does not distinguish between any of those three sounds. No word in Spanish, as far as I know, will sound like another word if you use the wrong one, and so in a situation that calls for a "b-ish" sound, a Chilean--and a Spanish speaker of every country, as far as I know--will use any of them.

That is to say, an English speaker pronounces "b" as the sound [b] and "v" as the sound [v]. A Spanish speaker looks at "b" or "v" and they are exactly the same sound, which is pronounced as [b], [v], or [β]. They might as well be choosing randomly. Actually, I'm sure there's a pretty consistent pattern, based on your exact dialect and the position of the phoneme within the word, such that at least a given speaker will pronounce the same word consistently.

Wikipedia has this to say on the subject:

[b] appears initially (in some accents) and after nasals (bomba, envidia), [β̞] elsewhere (nube, la bodega). In rapid speech, [β̞] can replace [b] in the initial position. After /l/, there is variation among speakers (el burro can be either [elˈburo] or [elˈβ̞uro]).

But that doesn't really do justice to how confusing it is to me.

[b] and [β] seem a lot more common, and I have trouble telling which one of them someone has actually said, so it's lucky that it doesn't matter at all. It seems like "v" gets pronounced as any of the three. It seems pretty unusual for someone to pronounce "b" as [v], but I definitely have heard people talk about reading some /'livros/

They even go so far as to call [b] a "long b" and [v] a "short b." Actually, they have to, since if you based the names of the letter on the sounds they make in English or other languages, or the sounds the IPA associates with them, a Chilean couldn't distinguish between the two. Again, I say "Chilean" here, but I think it applies across the board in Spanish. I just don't wanna get it wrong if it's a local idiosyncrasy.

I wasn't sure if it was a sociolinguistic thing. Maybe people with higher levels of education are trained to distinguish the two and consistently pronounce "v" as [v] and "b" as [b]. Maybe people from different parts of the country, or different countries, have preferences on the matter. I was hoping that if I asked, someone would say, "Ah, yes. If you say that letter with that sound, it means that you're...." or "it means that you're from..." But no. Everyone I ask just stares blankly at me, utterly confused. It's actually impossible to carry on a conversation about it, because they'll assume that you're confused and change the subject: "Oh, do you mean to ask why some people don't speak well?" This is baffling to me.

La Serena and El Valle del Elqui

2007-10-24T13:05:00.001-04:00

This past weekend was an overnight trip with the Tufts kids. We gathered on a warm Friday morning and met up with Carmen Gloria and Raquel (everyone's favorite Chilean grandmother-figure). We left Friday morning and drove north in a filled-to-capacity tour van. There was some nice scenery on the way up to La Serena, one of the first European towns in Chile. We had lunch there and played on the playground before moving on the Parque Nacional Fray Jorge. The oceanic wind brings moist air over the mountains, where it suddenly condenses into low-hanging clouds. The first effect of this is a tripling in the otherwise-arid annual rainfall, allowing for a little arboreal oasis in the semi-desert. The second effect is that banks of clouds come rolling over the slopes constantly, and make for some really impressive photos.

Friday night we stayed in some cabañas near the beach. We went to a restaurant for a large-group dinner, where I the waiter tried very hard to convince me to eat the mariscos soup. I was pretty iffy about it, though, since it was more like coarsely-chopped bits of clam, mussel, squid, oyster, octopus, razor clam, and who-knows-what-else. Thanks a lot, Humboldt Current. You're once again cramping my landlubber style. Anyway, I'm sure it was delicious, and everyone around me seemed to have fun guessing at what they were eating and gritting their teeth on bits of sand. Surprisingly, that's not really my cup of tea/fish.

We went back to the cabañas and an infamous dance party went down. I braved the night air to try and find the beach with Mie, and nearly died posing upside-down for a picture when the soccer goal I was hanging on fell over. The next morning, we packed our stuff and piled into the bus for more traveling. We went to the Mistral pisco distillery in the aptly-named town of Pisco Elqui. Some of the group had partaken too heavily of the Kuntsman mini-keg the previous night and lived in terror of the smell of pisco, but for the rest of us it was a pretty cool tour. The day was pretty hot, but that's what artesanal ice cream is for.

Along the way we visited some Gabriela Mistral museums (Mistral being the other beloved, Nobel-winning, pseudonym-sporting, Chilean poet, along with Neruda). The museum and childhood home didn't so much grab my interest, but she did certainly have a crazily long name: Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. Wouldn't you use a pseudonym, too?

Saturday night was, for me, the coolest part of the trip. The Mamalluca Observatory (see awesome website in Spanish) has one of the best vantages in the world, thanks to its dry, sub-Atacama atmosphere. The Atacama to the north is 100 times drier than Death Valley and its soil has been compared to Mars. That's dry. So it's probably the clearest sky I'll ever see in my life. I suspect that the Southern hole in the ozone layer helps, too. I saw the Southern Cross (and, by extension, the Southern Celestial Pole), its neighbor Centaurus (including a telescopic view of the Alpha Centauri binary system, the planet Jupiter (and three of its moons), the Moon through a telescope (way more impressive than it sounds), and more (parentheses included to preserve consistency). I've gotta find a way to see the Aurora Australis. Apparently it's visible in some parts of Chile.

Sunday was more driving. It included a beach stop where we ate lunch, some historical visits, and plenty of photo ops. I took pretty heavy advantage of the photo ops, and I think I got some nice landscape shots, as well as some additions to the growing collection of cheesy Simon and Garfunkel pictures. We arrived back in Santiago Sunday night, and I walked home from the Escuela Militar station while listening to "America" and, serendipitously, my path took me on streets called "Cruz del Sur" and "La Serena."

But, despite my host brothers' warnings, I didn't see any UFOs in the valley.

Some links on the area:
Chile's Elqui Valley
Valle del Elqui

No museum for me today

2007-10-24T11:48:00.001-04:00

Dear Reader,
I'm sick. Not really sure what I've got. Am I resfriado or do I have something more like el gripe? Last night I had a fever, though I'm feeling better this morning. Anyway, I'm not going in to my museum internship today, but if I feel better this afternoon I'll probably try to get in to Spanish class because I have to see a movie to write about it and have to get to the big Ñ (Ñuñoa--yes, that's a real neighborhood) to see a play with the class. Also to write about. And I've gotta write about my "second impressions" of Chile for my culture class. Good thing I'm in bed right now, because that makes for a lot of writing.

How'd I get so sick? Tell me how much this sounds exactly like me:

On the bus this weekend, to Mie one seat forward
Me: Hey, can I have a sip of that water?
Mie: Yeah, but you might not want to. I think I might have something.
Me: Pssh. Whatever. I can handle it.

I guess I learned my lesson.

Field trip tomorrow

2007-10-19T01:35:00.001-04:00

I'm leaving tomorrow morning to go off to La Serena. As I've since learned, apparently the area, in addition to all the stuff I described before, is known in Chile for weird New Age stuff. People come from all over to experience its "energy," I've been told, and my host brothers have teased me about seeing UFOs. Truly, this is indeed the dawning of Aquarius.

Día de la Raza

2007-10-17T17:47:00.001-04:00

So, I was asked before if Chile celebrated Columbus Day. The answer is no. Instead, like in much of Latin America, they celebrate "Día de la Raza," ("day of the race"). Now, I can't be entirely sure what they're exactly alluding to when they name a national holiday after a "race," but I'm betting it's not a celebration of (the encounter of two mutually respected) races (and the historic opportunities for them to share cultural richness).

In fact, the above-linked Wikipedia page had this to say:

An estimated 85 percent of the Native American population was wiped out within 150 years of Columbus's arrival in America, due largely to diseases such as smallpox, that spread among Native American populations. Additionally, war and the seizing of land and material wealth by European colonists also contributed to the decline of the indigenous populations in America.

As a result, Native Americans down here started the International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People (not as roll-off-the-tongue friendly for weekend sales on used cars) and Venzuela holds the even more interesting "Day of Indigenous Resistance."

The more you know.

cei̥ˈʝelo: the act of not being able to buy fútbol tickets

2007-10-16T23:32:00.001-04:00

Man, that Phonolgy test was hard. It'd have been hard in English, but the fact that it was in Spanish just made it even more intense. I didn't realize that it was going to involve the physiology of speech so much, so I was a little bit taken off-guard when it asked a lot about stuff from the beginning of the semester. I guess I was relieved when we did some transcription, but I will still never forgive the word /cei̥ˈʝelo/. Never.

Anyway, after that I went to my "Chile" class, which has chronically low attendance. Probably because you don't, strictly speaking, have to take copious notes on the history of the Chilean state to do the work for the class. But it's really the point, isn't it?

After that, I went to the nearest Paris store to look for any tickets left for gallery seating at tomorrow's Chile-Peru game. There were none left. Sadness overwhelmed me. It would have been nice to go to a game where Chile was, according to someone's host brother, supposed to win 5-0, rather than lose 2-0, like it did against Argentina (a great result, against Argentina).

Coming Attractions

2007-10-14T21:46:00.001-04:00

I've got another field trip coming up. I really like the Tufts field trips because they make me get out and see stuff, and because Carmen Gloria figures out the logistics.

Anyway, this is a big one, because it's a multi-day affair.

We're going to the Elqui Valley and La Serena, about five hours out of Santiago. While we're there we'll be going to a beach, a museum of Gabriela Mistral, the Mamalluca Observatory, the Coquimbo fort. I'm psyched. The schedule seems to indicate good eating. I don't even know why I'm thinking about eating, since I've done so much of that today.

Also, I have new photos of the trip to the mine. I'm working on getting those videos up, too.

Weekend

2007-10-14T21:10:00.001-04:00

Most of this weekend was spent hanging out with Carter. We went around Santiago, as young gringos are wont to do. And, as I am wont to do, we got lost following my directions and ended up wandering more than was necessary and walking lengthy distances.

Today (Sunday) was the birthday for my host mom's mom. I'm resisting the strange logic that would call her my host grandma. She doesn't host me and she's certainly not my grandma, so the very long title is the most fitting. I gave her some flowers when we went over for a lunch at her house and I was fed nearly to hospitalization. Things got a little too exciting at one point, and here "exciting" is being used in the sense of "mortifying." I was pushing Renato around in his little car when he turned to look back at Juan Sebastian, who was running after us. As a two year-old Chilean is unlikely to understand, when he leaned over his shoulder he turned the steering wheel and flipped himself off the car and onto the ground. When I scooped him up he was crying and I was terrified that I had knocked out his little Chilean teeth. Turns out he split his lip and nothing more. But, being two years old, he certainly cried enough to make me feel terrible the rest of the day. But then I talked to Mary online and felt better about stuff.

My bathroom window is a popular hangout spot for fruit flies. Judgment Day approaches for them. Repent, fruit flies, for the stern Kleenex of Armageddon cometh.

A whole week without writing? Get back to work!

2007-10-12T13:00:00.000-04:00

Right. The weird thing about this blogamajig is that, when I really do have an event happen that's big enough to write about, I end up feeling like there's a lot of pressure to write something great for it, which actually makes me write less. So now I'm going to write about the El Teniente copper mine (how are you supposed to write a sentence that uses a the word "the" to refer to an object whose own name begins with a definite article?), a concert I went to, and other such week things.

Anyway, on Saturday the Tufts kids piled into a bus to go drive out to la Valle Rancagua, where the largest underground mine in the world is located. Now, when you think about how many mines there are in the world, and what a big deal they can be, it's probably not surprising to you that the biggest one of all is pretty huge. It's so huge that the copper company houses all the miners and their families. The old mining town of Sewell is on-site, and we walked through there as well. On the tour, we had a walk through the mine (it's got great, big roads going through it to drive trucks or, in this case, buses), made up mine songs (Axl Rose voice: welcome to the mina, we got fun and games), used big robo-arms to push copper ore into a shaft, and saw a (in my opinion) really cool chamber that was full of the biggest crystals I've ever seen (huge pieces of calcite and a twenty-meter quartz spar). Okay, that's it. I'm prying the parentheses buttons off the keyboard. When I got home, my host mom didn't ask me how the mine was, but she did ask me what I ate for lunch. Which to me seems like emphasizing a relatively minor part of the experience, but that's Chile for you.

The next day, Amanda and I went to la Persa Bío-Bío, a flea market in Santiago that really reminds you that you're in Latin America. If anyone wants a Chilean present that is used, bootlegged, or stolen, let me know because I found the perfect place to search for it.

Monday we went to a concert of the band Incubus (Kate Fortin, please feel free to die of jealousy). For those of you who think I've gotten into the hardcore metal scene or something, the band is a lot more chill than the medieval name would suggest. Though I can tell you that, if you're looking to get into the hardcore metal scene but never knew of a city where you could try it, look no further than Santiago. Anyway, the concert was cool because we got tickets for cheap since the band's less popular here than in the U.S. We were on the floor of the biggest venue in the city, and it was about what you'd expect for a rock concert, with loud noises and flashing lights. Though I do wish that they might have played a longer set.

Yesterday I went with Carter, Javiera, and some of her friends to a free outdoor jazz (well, German jazz/electronic) concert in the Plaza de la Constitución, in front of La Moneda. It was weird but cool, featuring four guys who played trumpet, drums, electric stand-up bass, and turntables, respectively.

Writing about the crystal chamber in the mine reminded me that I have more pictures to upload. Needless to say, I'll mention it here when I do that.

Friday

2007-10-05T11:16:00.000-04:00

Think about American accents. They tend to distinguish themselves by their vowels. I like to put tomato /sɔs/ on my spaghetti, while someone from Long Island might inexplicably prefer a condiment by the whose name I'm going to try and approximate as /sɒɔs/. The Jets hate it when the Sharks step on their /̱tʊif/. In Spanish, however, different countries distinguish their accents by vowels. Peruvians use [z] when almost no one else does. Argentinians use [∫] in place of [j] (which is the phoneme "y" and not "j"). Spaniards have their [θ]. But the vowels are pretty universally the same five: [a], [e], [i], [o], and [u]. No one touches that.

Just sharing some of my Phonology class.

A note on Chilean hygiene

2007-10-04T17:58:00.001-04:00

Chilean food service workers tend to wear masks over their mouths, as do people who have a cold as they walk down the street. I suppose it should be comforting that they're keeping their germs to themselves. And logically, it would be, as well as being troubling that we don't do that in the U.S. How many bacteria and viruses do we spread every day like that? However, it's not comforting. It's creepy.

They look like they're the nurses from some Civil War field hospital, about to amputate limbs with a bone saw. Or like they just leaped out of a hazmat truck. Culture shock, indeed.

How I Spent my Spring Vacation

2007-10-02T22:11:00.001-04:00

So, Chile has its fiestas patrias in mid-September when, between the anniversary of the military coup and the national independence, nobody feels like doing anything. This is when the universities have their spring breaks. Some of us Tufts kids decided to go to Buenos Aires, Argentina for our vacation, and go there we did. LAN is the national airline of Chile, and our mode of transportation to Latin America's mini-Europe. We stayed in the Palermo Viejo region of the city, which is full of trendy restaurants and cafés. We spent our days slowly getting everyone up, showered, and agreed on what activities to try (it was nearly impossible to split up since our cellphones didn't work outside of Chile). At first, it was a lot of walking and looking at stuff, since we were all pretty disorganized and I knew that I would have the subsequent weekend to check out the city, too. For that reason, I wasn't really pressuring myself to get things checked off my "to-tour" list. We did, however, see some tango dancing in the street, eat a lot of beef, and go wandering through street fairs (mostly antiques). I also managed to meet up with Mina, who's studying in Argentina for the semester, and we compared our rival countries.

So I walked, took some pictures, then boarded a bus to ride for hours and hours to Puerto Iguazú, the Argentine town near the waterfalls. When we finally went to las cataratas, it was one of the most incredible places I had ever seen. Since I can't really describe the power of all that water rushing over the precipice into empty space, I'll try and let my photos do the talking, in a one-to-one-thousand ratio of pictures to words. It's formed by el Río Iguazú flowing over the edge of a large basalt plateau, and is the second-largest in the world. Technically, Victoria Falls is larger, but it's so big that you can't see the whole thing, so according to the criteria that I just invented to define the best view in the world, I had the best view in the world. Other categories in which Iguazú surpasses Victoria Falls include "being in a James Bond movie" (Moonraker). Also of note is that I had the greatest ravioli of my life in Puerto Iguazú.

We also went to the Wanda amethyst mine, where I subjected people to impromptu lessons about silicate crystallization and occurrences in basalts. They were, one and all, thrilled. The bus ride back back to Buenos Aires managed to top the ride out, featuring White Chicks. Back in Buenos Aires, I did a solo trip through the Catedral de Buenos Aires, the Cementerio de la Recoleta, and the Palacio del Congreso. You can see my photos of those, too. Some of us also went to an opera whose name escapes me. It was fun, being my first opera of not-many to come, and we had the advantage that it was written in French, so we got to read off the subtitles (supertitles? they were above the stage). Our last night, we went to a tango restaurant, where they had a dinner show alternating between a pair of tango dancers, a singer, and a guy who introduced the others and sometimes told stories.

Overall, Argentina was nice, and Buenos Aires is a really pretty city, but I don't think it's all as awesome as its cocky attitude would have you believe. Maybe that's just my Chilean loyalty coming through, but I don't think Chile should worry as much as it does.

P.S. Click that link of the fiestas patrias and read about Chile's law mandating that everyone hang a flag outside their homes. I mentioned it in my post about the 18th.

Photos!

2007-10-02T00:42:00.001-04:00

Okay, so I'm probably caught up with my online photo-sharing for the first time since before arriving in Chile. Here are the links:

Chile Orientation
Exploring Chile
Valparaíso
Argentina
Iguazú
Viaje a la Nieve

The first couple might be old news to you, but apparently I can link Facebook photo albums to other sites, so I'll just save some time and keep them all there. As I add more albums, I'll just post the links one at a time. They're posted in chronological order, starting with my arrival in Chile.

You astute readers might also notice that there's a panel on the side directing you to these same albums. That'll be updated, too.

Birthday CD

2007-10-01T21:44:00.001-04:00

I just made Juan Pablo, my host dad, a CD for his birthday. Let's see how it turned out.

1. Toto - Africa
2. Kansas - Carry On Wayward Son
3. Boston - More Than a Feeling
4. Foreigner - I Want to Know What Love Is
5. Tom Petty - Learning to Fly
6. Foreigner - Hot Blooded
7. KC and the Sunshine Band - Boogie Shoes
8. Huey Lewis and the News - Power of Love
9. Stevie Wonder - Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours
10. The Beatles - Drive My Car
11. David Bowie - Starman
12. Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl
13. Paul Simon - Me And Julio Down By the Schoolyard
14. The Police - Roxanne
15. Toto - Hold the Line
16. Queen - Killer Queen
17. The Police - Message in a Bottle
18. Supertramp - Give A Little Bit
19. The Beatles - Help!
20. Queen - I Want to Break Free
21. Europe - The Final Countdown

Most of this is ridiculous eighties nonsense and music from the game "Guitar Hero." The two things he loves most. Man, Chile is a weird place, populated by weird people with weird taste in music. I mean, I have a pretty weird taste in music, too. Most of this stuff was in my personal music collection when I arrived in the country. But mostly as a joke. But definitely not Queen. That's never a joke. That's just great.

Chileans and Homework

2007-10-01T00:05:00.001-04:00

Anyone else with a host family and elementary school-age siblings might be familiar with this phenomenon, but I quite frequently find myself helping Juan Sebastián or José Ignacio with their homework, but then I realize that when they asked me for help, they really just wanted me to do the whole thing for them. Like when Juan Sebastián wanted help with geometry, or when José Ignacio wanted me to "help" him read his twenty pages of easy-reader illustrated mini-novel in English. The problem, certainly, comes from their mom, who does their homework for them on a regular basis. She does their English homework for them all the time, summarizes their notes when they have tests coming up, and it seems that they only are expected to do work when she remembers to tell them to do it. For example, Juan Sebastián has about ten chapters of his own English book to read by tomorrow, and doesn't seem to think it's a big deal. It'll be a big deal for me, however, when he wants me to read it with him but has waited until tomorrow night when I have something better to be doing.

I'm not sure if it's related, but Chileans also don't really read very much. Books are really expensive. None are as expensive, however, as imported books, which get importation taxes piled on top of the already-hefty book publication taxes. So, an English translation of Neruda's Veinte poemas de amor... might run you a cold fifty bucks. That's not a long book. And it's definitely not a fifty-dollar book. So, when Chileans have to read, they read photocopies (which benefit from a complete, national apathy toward copyright laws), and when they don't have to read, they don't read.

A note on Renato

2007-09-29T22:21:00.000-04:00

Renato, my irrepressibly cute two year-old host brother, has a few really weird games that he loves. First, like most kids it seems, he loves pretending that other people can't see him or don't know where he went. But his spin on the game is that he likes to hide behind the sofa cushions and make you sit down, then pretend to be surprised that the couch started talking. He also likes to get into his little car and drive around. He'll say he's going to one of two places: the grocery store (either Jumbo or Líder) or the U.S. ("Usa"). It seems that these are the only two locations he can think of that aren't in the house.

Fun with Phonology

2007-09-28T00:13:00.000-04:00

Today in Fonología Española, we all had to write our names on the board using IPA symbols, for practice. Mine kinda stood out, since it included symbols I had to look up and which we had never covered, seeing as how they're sounds completely lacking in Spanish. As I was up there trying to copy this stuff, I had a language lab full of Chileans muttering "Patrick" to themselves, trying to practice the English pronunciation. It felt like something that ought to be in a weird dream.

For reference, here it is:
Standard American English

/ˈpæt̠ɹ̝̥ɪk̚ ʃɒn wɪlsən̠ /

Chilean Spanish

/ˈpat̪ɾik̚ tʃan ˈɣwilson̪ /

or, sometimes,

/ˈpat̪ɾitʃ /

The Case of the Colgate Total

2007-09-25T02:22:00.001-04:00

I always squeeze my toothpaste tubes from the back and work forward. It's the only sane way to live. Tonight, I found it all messed up. Someone used my toothpaste. Who would use my toothpaste? I find this upsetting.

Trying New Stuff

2007-09-24T12:33:00.001-04:00

So, I got stood-up online yesterday by Mary, who apparently is under the impression that being bed-ridden with some medical term in Latin that I can barely pronounce is a legitimate excuse to not call me on Skype from the bar across the street. Come on, right? Maybe you should have thought of that before you ate raw oysters. Which brings me to my actual point: eating stuff in foreign countries.

I'm something of a picky eater. I like to think of it as a discerning palate, but take it as you will. It's really that I tend to not enjoy trying new things. Some people love tasting unknown foods, but I think I just have a different attitude about such things. If, for the rest of my life from now on, I were limited to only eating things I had tasted before, I don't think I'd mind. But here in Chile, their normal food is often enough something I haven't tasted before. If I didn't live with a host family, I'm sure I would try new stuff, but not as much. See, my aversion to trying new foods isn't as strong as my meek efforts at non-offensiveness, so I'd rather eat something I hated than say that I didn't like dinner.

When we got to Chile, Peter Winn brought us to a couple of nice local restaurants to make sure that we all had a chance to sample classically Chilean foods. Cazuela (a brothy soup with an entire quartered chicken and lots of oil), pastel de choclo (corn pot pie, more or less), and empanadas (the most delicious thing ever). Here in my house, though, I've liked the stuff I try less. Everyone else in the program is psyched to eat so much palta (avocado, which I could do without), artichoke (my family loves it, but I don't), and legumes (I'm okay with them, I just don't like 'em).

Anyone can like a food, but it takes a rare, brave soul like me to stand up to weird stuff and not like it. That's what I do, and it's a thankless job. Maybe eventually I'll talk about new stuff I've tried here that went really well.

Wiffleball

2007-09-24T11:51:00.001-04:00

Let's get one thing straight: I'm terrible at wiffleball. It's only because I can't throw a ball, so I'm really only better at wiffleball than I would be at baseball. My throw is that awful, limp-wristed girly kind of throw. I use the term "girly" only as a standard gym-class derision, and not to imply that girls can't play sports, because I know plenty of girls who would be much better at wiffleball than I am.

Anyway, wiffleball has turned into something of a regular pastime for the norteamericanos here in Santiago, mostly because some of them need a baseball fix. We play in a park by the Metro stop, and it's quite the spectacle for the locals, who always stare as they walk by. You'd think they'd have seen a ridiculous game of mini-baseball before. After wiffleball tonight, Noah and Marcelo were complaining that they can watch NFL games on ESPN in Santiago, Chile ("ESPÑOL," they call it), but they can't do so in their Tufts dorm. I win in that regard, because I never cared about any sport enough to miss not seeing games of it on TV. In fact, have I ever watched an entire sports game on TV in my life? Even a superbowl when I'm at a party for such? I don't think so. It's way too easy to not pay attention when you're not at a live game.

Saturdays are for sleeping in

2007-09-22T19:44:00.001-04:00

Today I slept in until round about 1:30. For some of you, that seems repellently slothful. Others of you might not have woken up by the time I post this. The point is, I'm sleeping, and no matter how adorable little Renato might be, when he comes running into my room because he wants to play bol, it's not fun. Sleeping in is one of the greatest joys in life, but I feel so conspicuous doing it here because everyone else is up and doing stuff.

Anyway, so right now I'm sitting out on the patio, which is a great place to be on afternoon. There's quite a lot to be said for solitude, so I'm grateful for some time to relax while the resident chilenos are napping (haciendo tuto, as they say), studying, or otherwise not around.

Chilean music you never knew was Chilean

2007-09-22T16:29:00.001-04:00

I discovered this a week or so ago when I was browsing through my music. Suddenly, the name "Valparaíso" meant something to me, even though it's the sort of thing I must have overlooked a lot. Here's what I've currently logged away in a playlist called "Chile" where I'm collecting whatever music I find to be particularly Chilean.

Sting - Valparaiso. So, it's mostly just another Sting song about life at sea and being lonely, but it makes references to Cape Horn and, obviously, Valparaíso, the biggest port city in Chile. He Americanizes the name, though.
Sting - They Dance Alone / Cueca Sola. Not satisfied with "Valparaiso" (just kidding, I don't know which one came first), he wrote this one. Like I said in a previous post, cueca is the national dance of Chile. The song's all about the desaparecidos, who were abducted off the street or from their homes in the days following the 1973 coup. Some emerged later after having gone through extensive torture, but others have never been found and there are protests and riots about it to this day by the widows and families.
Sixpence None the Richer - Puedo Escribir. This one was sitting in my music library for years. It's basically lines from Pablo Neruda's poem set to music. The poem is a good one, though it doesn't have a title. "Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche" ("Tonight I can write the saddest lines") is the first line, so Google that.
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean. This one is only Chilean in the sense that Chileans, like all countries that follow American pop culture but several years behind, love Michael. This song is on all the time.
Burt Bacharach - South American Getaway. I'm not in Bolivia, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a cool movie, and I wish I could be a train-robbing bandit.

Skype

2007-09-20T19:23:00.001-04:00

I probably should have said this by now, but I recently got Skype and I think I can figure it out, so you're all welcome to Skype me (name is patrick.sean.wilson). I can also use this to call home, family, so once I figure it out I can put some money on it in order to place computer-to-phone calls instead of the free computer-to-computer calls.

Chilean Independence Day

2007-09-20T18:59:00.000-04:00

So, when I arrived back from my Argentinian spring break (Yes, that's right, it's spring here and we just got spring break), Chile was in the midst of it's fiestas patrias. That's their week of national holidays. September 18th is their day in remembrance of their independence from Spain, and it falls just a week after September 11th, which is the anniversary of the 1973 military coup d'état. So it's a busy time to be in Chile. Or, to be returning to Chile after a week in Argentina. Anyway, Chileans like to have barbecues (asados) for their Independence Day celebrations. Who doesn't?

During my family's asado, someone threw on a cassette of cueca music (cueca being the national folk-dance). "Gee," I thought, "Who's that dapper-looking caballero whose military digs grace the cover of this 'Homage a un Gran General'?" A Pinochet-praising cueca album is pretty ironic enough, considering how much the dance is associated with the leftist lower classes, but the fact that the guy still has postmortem support in the country is somewhat baffling to the gringos here.

Anyway, Chile loves its grilled meat, and at this barbecue we had steak, chicken, sausage (chorizo), salad, and Chilean wine and chicha. Apparently, also, it's mandated by law that houses post the Chilean flag during these celebrations. It made me wonder if that could happen in America or if our sense of civil liberty would get the better of it and, if we did object to such a law, would we overcome our political apathy enough to oppose it?

That night, Juan Sebastián and I went to a fonda, a Chilean fair where they celebrate the 18th. It was a pretty tame version of what fondas look like deeper in the city and of what they look like in the countryside, but a touristy and commercialized cultural event is the risk of living in the upper side of town. All things considered, I'd probably just as soon not get mugged, so the less authentic fonda is alright by me for my first Chilean Independence Day.

Santiago

2007-09-20T18:26:00.000-04:00

A little bit about the city itself, perhaps?

Santiago's the capital of the country, so a lot goes on here. It's divided into different communes (comunas, one of which is confusingly also named Santiago) and is more or less sociographically stratified according to geography. What that means is that the city gets more affluent as you go toward the Eastern foothills of the Andes. It's pretty much situated around the central street of Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins. Given that name, you can pretty easily tell why they just call it "Alameda." But, if that wasn't enough naming changes for you, it gets better. Once you keep going out of the city center and toward my house, it changes to Avenida Providencia and then again to Avenida Apoquindo. And they're all the same street. Good thing they're at least an important street. There could be more names, but I've only encountered those so far.

The view is pretty impressive here in Santiago. Not because of the elevation (though for an East-Coaster, I guess 1,700 ft. is respectable), but rather because of the mountains. They're everywhere. And they're huge. You see them all the time, and I just can't ever get used to it, as awesome as it is. Unfortunately, Santiago itself is located within a smog-trapping basin. I'm sure by the time I go home I'll have a bad case of the black lung. And the Chilean propensity for chain-smoking is not helping that at all.

I get to class by means of the Santiago Metro and the buses (micros). The latter are noisy, crowded, and uncomfortable, and it can be a pretty big hassle to wave one down before it plows on ahead. Riding a micro can be such a wild ride, the way the drivers handle the road, that it's probably a tight race whether you're at more risk on-board or on the street where you have to dodge them. However, everything that's wrong with the TranSantiago bus system is more than made up for by the Metro. How I love the Metro. They are what every subway system in the world should be. Clean, fast, efficient, and spacious. You hardly feel underground at all, and you never have to wait more than two minutes or so for the next train. The whole thing has enough connections to keep travel times down to a minimum, which I actually consider a shame since I love it so much. Having spent only five days or so in Argentina, I can tell you right now that their disgrace of a Subte not only pales in comparison, but represents a serious blow to their national sense of superiority to the rest of Latin America. Metro, I salute you.

Host Family

2007-09-20T18:04:00.000-04:00

Since I'm not self-reliant enough to line up my own living arrangements in a completely foreign country, I was only too happy to accept accommodations with a Chilean family in their house. So I'm boarding in the Las Condes neighborhood of Santiago, in a little two-story yellow house with a family. There's Carmen Teresa, my host mom, Juan Pablo, my host dad, and three host brothers: Renato (2), José Ignacio (12), and Juan Sebastián (14). They're definitely younger than most of the other Tuftsies' host siblings, but that's sorta by design. When Carmen Gloria (the Resident Director of the Tufts-in-Chile program) asked me what I'd like my family to be like and would I like little kids, I said "Sure, I like kids." That's true, but there's also something to be said for having a host sibling of your own age to hang out with and show you around. Of course, in that situation you've also got to deal with the fact that you're a slow-talking foreigner who doesn't know anything about anything and so no self-respecting Chilean of my age would want to hang out with me (exaggeration, of course; I'm actually awesome). With younger siblings, you have more talking time with them, so you practice more Spanish that way. So, isn't it wonderful to have a tiny two year-old constantly wanting to play with me? I'll let the pictures of his cuteness speak to that.

My host family lives in Las Condes, and very near to Providencia, both of which are solidly the ritzier side of town (so no need to worry about my safety, Mom). But more about the city to come next.

Logistics

2007-09-20T17:31:00.000-04:00

This blogamajig is probably going to start out with old news for a bunch of you, but for the sake of thoroughness and catching you newcomers up, I'll try to cover as much as I can.

I'm here through Tufts University, my college back home. So, since the program is Tufts-in-Chile, I have the happy advantage of automatically being able to count any of my classes here as Tufts courses and know that they will be worth credit. So I don't run the risk of having a phantom semester abroad that does nothing to further my hectic pursuit of that lofty goal, the diploma.

And what a course selection it is! I'm taking Spanish 121-equivalent Programa de Español para Extranjeros at the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile. Then we have two courses through the Universidad de Chile, which are Chile: Historia, Identidad, y Cultura and Fonología Española. The first one is all about Chile, obviously, which makes it a good course to take while abroad in the country, I should think. We learn about how Chile came to be as it is, and how it has interacted in world history. The idea is to better modern Chile and the Chileans, since it'd be a darn shame to come back to the U.S. and have people ask me what Chile's all about without having a good answer. The second class there is a linguistics one, though the English cognates probably don't make obvious the subject matter. Phonology, if you don't know (and if you're a well-adjusted human being you probably don't), is the study of sound systems in a language. I really like this class, which is why I go to such lengths as inserting HTML links and other such fanciness into this paragraph. In my class, being a class on Spanish phonology, we study the sounds of Chilean Spanish, and some of the sounds of other languages. Right now, we're learning to write these sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Really, the subject is pretty freakin' interesting if you're as nerdy as I am (which, Colin, you are), and it has gotten me to start paying a lot more attention to the individual things that people say. Hopefully it'll help me to improve my Spanish accent, 'cause I can make a [ɾ], but not an [r], for example. [ɹ] is standard for English, and [R] is French. A little bit of a primer on pulmonic approximants and flaps.

For my fourth class, I'm interning for course credit at the Museo de Ciencias y Tecnología. There, I support the regular staff during the week while they do presentations (charlas) and then leap into action once the chil'ns are set loose in the halls. I'm around to show them that, yes, the exhibits do work if you pay attention to what it does for more than three seconds before giving up and running away.

If none of that sounds impressive to you, remember that everything I do, I do in Spanish. If that's still not impressive, remember that Chilean Spanish is loco and full of local slang. More so than other countries, to the point that Chile is notorious in Latin America for being incomprehensible. If all of that is still unimpressive, I give up. What do you want from me?

Haven't you been in Chile for, like, ever?

2007-09-20T17:23:00.000-04:00

That's a valid question. Why, indeed, am I just writing this blogamajig now? What about all those adventures I've had since arriving in this strange and supremely isolated country on July 7th (7/7/07, actually)? The answer, dear reader, is two-fold.

1) Shut yer yap and quit complaining. Some people I know have just gotten to their semesters abroad in Europe or wherever else or are just getting there now. There's still plenty of time to join me on a whirlwind semester at the self-described end of the world. I'm here 'til December. Chile just happened to have started this semester at a to-me weird time because it's their spring semester and their calendar is all funky-like. Someone tried to explain it to me one time, but as soon as they got to that stuff about the Earth being round, my eyes glazed over.

2) I had some computing issues earlier, and so it would've been tough to start something like this up. I don't think it would've stopped me from maintaining one, but getting it off the ground was tougher. But that's okay now, because all is well.

Hence, we arrive today at the start of my blogamajig, well after having arrived in the country which is the entire purpose of it. Let's just assume that this allows me to write with greater wisdom and perspective and leave it at that. I'll make it up to you by writing a bunch right now.

A Long-Expected Weblog

2007-09-20T17:15:00.000-04:00

So, it's definitely been far too long that I've put off starting this. Here are the pertinent facts: I'm on a semester abroad from Tufts University. Santiago, Chile is a long, long way off from Medford, Massachusetts, but you get used to it. Sort of. It's always a surreal experience to walk down the street and have everything be in a foreign language (though, hopefully, growing less foreign with time). It's so normal in my American experience that foreign languages be seen nowhere except as obvious outsiders, included here and there as a convenience for non-natives. Thus, it's really strange to live somewhere where it's my language that is the outsider.

So, my weblog here. I don't mean for this to be my grand entry into blogging culture, which I honestly find kind of weird, but hopefully this will keep everyone on the gringo side of life informed of what I'm up to way down here. So, my idea is to keep the entries short, sweet, and plentiful. Let's get to it.