Chronicle of my first two weeks.

Hola to everyone! Welcome to my blog and a little taste of my new life here in Valpo and Viña—that’s Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, Chile…they’re just like Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Since I have pretty limited Internet access I thought it might be easier to post updates about my trip on a blog for anyone and everyone to read, rather than sending out hundreds of emails and not knowing who’s interested and who’s not. Please just keep in mind that I don’t have a whole of Internet access or capabilities, so the blog will be updated as often as possible (which may not be very often) but you’ll have to be patient and bear with me.

Okay, so here I am in Chile. Wow, sometimes I really wonder what I’m doing here. It’s been an awesome two weeks here, but I’m telling you that Latin America is totally and absolutely CRAZY. It’s so different, you can’t even imagine. It’s no United States, that’s for sure, and I’m living in the most developed country in South America. Well, to begin, the flight and all the airport jazz went very well—I met a girl from my program in the terminal in Atlanta and then ended up sitting next to another girl from this program on the plane. Luckily we got through customs, immigration, etc. without a problem and made it to the pick-up on time. We spent two days touring Santiago, the capital, and doing orientation—the highlights were eating a four-course dinner in this super fancy restaurant that has a revolving top floor (like the Space Needle) and looking out over the whole city at night and also getting to tour one of Pablo Neruda’s (Nobel winning poet and one of Chile’s most adored people) houses, which was built like the inside of a ship and decorated soooo incredibly cool. Then we spent a day in the country at some type of resort to relax and do more orientation and then our host families came for us. My family consists of Juan and Mary and their 16 year-old daughter Macarena, or Maca for short, plus the cockerspaniel Duke and our nana (maid) Señora Ruby, who is the sweetest little old woman I’ve ever seen. We live in Viña del Mar, unfortunately about as far from the water as possible. Since then, we’ve been in Viña doing more orientation yet, living with our families, preparing for our classes, and attempting to get accustomed to and to survive this crazy place.

Last Thursday we drove way out in the countryside to this rural agricultural community called Rabuco. It was INCREDIBLE…we toured a vineyard and got to see the entire process of growing grapes and then exporting them, learned the process for the cultivation of flowers (the kind you would sell to florists or something—definitely the most gorgeous flowers I have ever seen) from seed to finished product, got to pet a bunch of strange animals, played soccer on a field right at the base of the mountains, and learned to dance the cueca (the national dance). Also, last Sunday my host sister took me to Festival, which is this week-long concert series that is the biggest event of the year in Chile and one of the biggest concerts in all of South America. Chileans are OBSESSED with Festival, when they’re not playing it on TV, they’re talking about the previous night’s concert and re-playing clips…it’s been over for a week and they’re still talking about it constantly. I got to see Bryan Adams (no kidding) and this really popular Chilean rock band called Lucy Bell. It was pretty funny to hear thousands of Chileans singing along in broken English to Summer of ’69, Heaven, Everything I Do, etc. The concert was pretty awesome, and it’s cool that I got to go and be a part of something that is so important to this country.

This weekend two of my friends and I decided to be adventurous and went up the coast about and hour and a half out of the city to the this little beach town called Maitencillo. We just grabbed a backpack with a change of clothes, a swimsuit, and some potato chips for sustenance and hopped on a bus heading out of Viña. We arrived in Maitencillo, found ourselves a cabaña (like a little apartment) to rent for the night, checked out the artesanias (the arts fairs with local merchants), and proceeded to take a nap on the beach. Unfortunately it was pretty cold and cloudy this weekend, but we still a fair amount of time on the beach and had an amazing view of the ocean. We even cooked ourselves dinner in our cabaña this weekend, how grown-up are we?! The next day we had lunch right next to the beach and watched a bunch of guys surf for a couple of hours. It was such an amazing weekend, SO relaxing, and the scenery was incredible, not to mention a LOT of good times were had with my two wonderful companions, Abigail and Sarah.

Here is what I know of Chile after two weeks:
--MICROS. The transportation system here is absolutely wild. They use these small little buses called micros, and there are thousands of them. They stuff them full of people no matter how little space there is left—I was actually hanging out of the open door one morning. The driving is insane, it’s enough to make me sick sometimes, and they also often times have a guy hanging out the window who works with the driver to convince people to get on his micro in order to have more passengers and therefore make more money. He’s always yelling out the window at people on the street or sometimes he jumps out to try and persuade passers-by to get on his micro…problem: sometimes he lies about where his micro actually goes and you get lost.
--MILITARY TIME AND PESOS. Using military time is weird and trying to calculate what thousands of pesos would equal in US $ has been hard to get used to.
--SLANG. Chilean slang is so ridiculous: guagua has to be my favorite word, guagua = baby
Some more good ones: sí po, qué fome, ¿cachai?
--REGGAETON. As my friend Abigail says, I think it plays out of the walls here.
--AVOCADO. It’s on everything, I swear. My main food groups now consist of bread, manjar (mmmmmmm, dulce de leche), salads covered in balsamic vinegar, empanadas stuffed with anything you can think of, and more fresh fruits and vegetables than I’ve eaten in the rest of my life previous.
--HEATING. Or lack of. No central heat, it’s always the same temperature inside as it is outside…winter is going to be horrible. If I want warm water for my shower I have to go to the kitchen and light the pilot in the calefont.
--TOILET PAPER. Or lack of, again. Always come prepared because the bathroom isn’t going to have any. And you can never ever flush it in the toilet because the septic systems can’t handle it…it’s so gross and it’s getting really old.
--STRAY DOGS. They are everywhere, no joke. I guess Catholic nations don’t believe in birth control for their pets either. I’ve been told that a couple times a year they actually round up all the strays and have a massacre to get rid of them. How horrible, right?
--PIROPOS. Piropos is the name for what men do when they honk or whistle at you in the street, make comments about your body or how pretty you are or tell you they love you as you pass them on the sidewalk, etc. It gets really old to not be able to walk anywhere without being gawked at and commented upon by gross men. It’s a machismo culture, and it’s really hard to deal with sometimes because the kind of stuff that I have to allow to happen here would NEVER fly with me in the United States.
--PISCO SOUR. It is THE drink here. The alcohol is super strong here, we’ve been warned many times in orientation. The other night I think I took my pisco a little too fast at dinner because I just about tipped out of my chair.
--SUN. The sun is mad strong here, I think I have a new sunburn everyday.
--PLAYA. There are beaches everywhere and everyone is at them constantly. What an awesome change from Minnesota winter. I’m never going to get sick of looking at the ocean every day while I’m living in this beautiful place.

As I always tend to attract a fair amount of bad luck and crazy situations, I thought I would share a few of these odd stories from two weeks in Chile. My friend Sarah and I have been lost several times on the micros, and one time we ended up WAY up in the mountains about an hour outside of the city in an actual shanty-town with dirt roads and people riding horses…it was very scary. But we made it home safely, which is really all that matters. Beyond the micros, I was mildly attacked by a stray dog last week on my walk home. He was seriously trying to bite me and I actually had to yell for help, but thankfully he finally relented and I was able to get away without any sort of injury. And aside from all that, Sarah and I have encountered a group of drag queen prostitutes TWICE in one week on our walks home at night. There are more crazy stories, but I don’t think I’ll share them here, and I’m sure there are plenty more to come.

As I said before, sometimes I wonder what the heck I’m doing here, what kind of place this is that I’m living in for the next five months. For example, when I’m on a bumpy bus ride home from Maitencillo through the countryside of Chile with little kids screaming in Spanish and music from the Village People blasting in the bus. Or when my host-mom gets into a fight with the security guard in the parking lot of Jumbo (Chile’s Walmart, but SO much bigger) or flips off soccer fans as they cross the street in front our car as we fly down the streets of Viña in our Hyundai listening to Celine Dion. Or when I see a woman peeing in the plaza right in front of my university. Or when my friends and I can’t order lunch in a restaurant because it won’t be open for another ten minutes…apparently it opens at 1:20 p.m. on Sundays (?). Or when I walk past a small restaurant and see cages with live chickens in the kitchen. Or when there are filthy stray animals hanging out on top of open crates of fresh fruits and vegetables in the market and the vendors are smoking over their products. Or when I’m told that stray dogs run in large packs in Valpo and are known to attack humans so I should be really careful, and also that I should never ever eat anything made by a vendor in the street because I’ll be in the bathroom for the next three days sick with “Chilenitis.” Or when I see poor people break-dancing or fire-eating in intersections to earn money from passing cars. Or when I’m riding a PACKED micro that has blue fur trim around the rear-view mirror, lots of strange bumper stickers plastered on the walls, and is bumping reggaeton super loud out of the speakers on my journey to school in the morning, as I hang on for dear life and look out the window at the gorgeous ocean the whole time. It’s moments like these that I just have to laugh inside and wonder what I got myself into…but as hard and frustrating and scary and weird as it’s been in the past two weeks, it’s also been totally incredible and it’s so surreal to me that I get to stay here for another 4 ½ months.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. I hope you’ve enjoyed this chronicle of my wild experience here, and I will post more when I have the chance and after more silly things happen. Every day is an adventure, and I am so lucky to be here living this fun, crazy, beautiful experience. So, I guess that’s all for now, I’m out! Hasta luego.