Hola from Santiago, Chile

After what was a long and interesting week, I am finally in Santiago, city of more than 50 people. I really enjoyed the last few days in the campo because I began to feel more at home there. I talked to my parents a lot after dinner, and my sister always was there to hang out with.

The last day we were there, we went up into the mountains to Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shadow) for the entire day. We got up at 6:30 a.m. and piled into a truck with our neighbors and slept until we got there. The place is like a camping ground resort, with a swimming pool, soccer field, and a place to ride horses. We played soccer, Chileans vs. Gringos, ate barbeque, went swimming, and pretty much just layed around. We said goodbye to our teachers that had been with us since the beginning, and at about 9:00 that night, we took the truck back home, singing songs and general merriment.

The actual leaving San Dionisio was like a scene from a movie. We all hugged and kissed and took pictures, and some people cried. We climbed aboard a huge bus that started rolling down the street, and all of our families stayed there and waved and shouted until we were gone.

And now we're all in Santiago, adjusting to a huge metropolitan city. My host mom is Eliana Sepulveda, a woman in her early to mid 60's who lives in a huge apartment complex with 26 floors. Her son Fidel lives in the building also, along with a friend of mine from the program. She has been extremely nice and generous, giving me a cell phone and bus/metro card when I first got there, and just generally being sweet. She and the apartment are the deifnition of high class. I have gone completely from one extreme to another, poor to rich. It is definitely a change, but I feel more at home in the city than the campo.

You know you´re in the Middle of Nowhere when...

- You have to drag a large orange tank down the street to take a warm shower. Imagine doing this every day. I doubt many people care about it in Chile, but as Americans its almost insane to take cold showers...we are so. spoiled. (but I have to say, I LOVE warm showers!)

- You only shower every few days.

- Hygene in general is just not important. No toothbrushes in the house, not a lot of deoderant.

- Your family eats chicken. They also eat the heads and feet of chicken.

- Also they had a live goat in the morning, have killed it while you are at school a goat and it became barbeque. (it was sooooo good, but I'm not sure I could have watched it. I would have been dead about a century ago.)

- Every morning you pick ants out of the suga for tea.

- The nearest town (comprising of one main street) is a 30 minute walk (and if you blink, you literally will miss it.)

- No one locks their doors. There aren't even locks on the doors.

- You don´t flush toilet paper down the toilet. Your family recently got indoor plumbing and there just isn't the type of suction power we are used to.

- Almost everyone can tell you are foreign. After that, everyone can tell you are American.



Basically that is San Dionisio, Chile where I am currently living with my host family, which consists of: my dad (Jorge), my mom (Alicia), my brother (Ariel) and my sister (Cecilia). The living here is simple and the pace is really relaxed. There is always food, and although its simple country food like corn, meat and tomatoes, it is always around.

My Chilean host dad races horses for a living, so we have two horses in our backyard. My host mom spends the day cooking and doing chores, thats it. The culture in the country is still very machismo even though it has a woman President, and sometimes my mom doesn´t even eat with us. There are a ton of chickens always, and people own dogs, but there are a ton of strays. My family right now is selling watermelons out of their front yard, and they go to a field somewhere to pick raspberries and sell them to a company down the street. They also make there own wine and have grape plants strung up in the front and backyards.

To go with the country theme, I have milked a cow for the first time ever yesterday at a friends house, which was hilarious. I´ve also learned how to make traditional Chilean dishes like humitas (corn meal wrapped in corn leaves and flavored with onions and tomatoes), and to prepare maté, traditional South American tea.

We also have had two charlas, or discussions, about the politics here and how they affect small-time Chilean farmers. The first man, Don Alejandro, lived through so much history; from when Chile was a Socialist country, to the time of the military coup and dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, when people (mostly poor) disappeared. The other man was an 80 year old American priest, who has been here since 1952, more than 50 years. He explained the role of the Catholic Church during all that time; how they helped farmers develop and grow, so that they could own their own land and make a decent living, how that all was crushed by the military coup, and how since 1990 they have been rebuilding everything.

They both had some really interesting opinions about their government, and about the U.S. as well, which was interesting to hear from an outsider´s perspective. Their stance is strongly against the Bush administration because they believe that Bush is pushing for U.S. interests at the cost of many other countries around the world. I can see why they would think that, being on the other side and all, and I´m not sure I completely agree with that statement because I think that is the goal of many leaders around the world. I do agree with them on some things, like that the Bush administration isn´t good and has made a complete mess of many things, but as a whole, every country is looking out for itself, no matter what ¨-ism¨ they are. Anyway, I can´t wait to see what my Chilean Politics class brings and I want to learn more about both sides of the picture.

Moving on from all the political arguments that could be made, the Spanish-speaking has become more difficult because there are so many Chilean idioms and slang that is hard to understand without living here for awhile. I can still understand it pretty well, but most of the time it is hard to communicate anything beyond simple sentences.

So in conclusion, I´m excited to get to Santiago and meet my family, but I am really enjoying this way of life. It´s much different that what I thought, but I am already planning to go back here to San Dionisio and visit my family, when I can actually communicate with them.

Mapas

In case you don´t know, or didn´t bother to look it up (Katie) here are some maps of South America. We´ve been right below Santiago and above Concepción. The geography of Chile varies from The driest spot on Earth in the Atacama Desert in the north, the temperate Central region, and Torres Del Paine in the south where there are glaciers and penguins and such.

The places I want to hit besides the north and south of Chile are Mácchu Pícchu in Peru, Buenos Aires and the Iguazu Falls in Argentina, Montevideo in Uruguay and maybe either Rio in Brazil or Easter Island.

Un poquito de Chile...

Here are a few pictures from someone else who actually rememberd her USB cord. More will come, at some point.

This is a shot of Rabones, the place we´ve been staying.

Constitución, where we just came back from today, (I climbed inside that huge rock.)

Two of the guys body getting slammed by the Pacific.

Hola Todos!!

So if you don´t know already, I´m in Chile! I´ve been here since last Monday (2/5), but I haven´t been able to communicate with anyone since the outside world because my callingcards haven´t worked, and this is the first time I´ve seen a computer in what feels like forever.

But anyway, this place has been so amazing since the beginning. After that disappointing Bears loss, (which I happened to catch the end of in the Atlanta airport...grr) I took a 10 hour flight to Santiago, Chile, which really is as long as it looks. I slept on and off, but when daylight finally broke, we were looking down at clouds and the Andes.

When the plane finally landed, the entire group of us met up at the luggage claim. Customs was a piece of cake, definitely not the nightmare I imagined.




So now we´re in Chile. The description of what we´ve been doing is this: the first 3 weeks are like Spanish boot camp. We are staying in Rabones, a small town in the diocese of Linares, which is south of Santiago. Its like summer camp; girls and guys in separate rooms, a few bathrooms with (sometimes hot) water, and a cafeteria in a building across from the dorms. It is definitely what I can only describe as the Country. Cows grazing in pastures, chickens in the road, rustic patched fences, farmers with goats, oxen, sheep, the whole nine yards. The weather here is supposedly Meditarranean climate, so its really hot during the day and it cools off in the night and morning. It is in the foothills of the Andes, so the scenry is breathtaking.

We eat all the time here, which as you all probably know, is heaven to me. The food is simple, but unbelievably fresh. We´ve had traditional Chilean dishes like empanadas, (a tamale with meat, cheese, eggs, olives, raisins & onions) humitas, and cazuela. Every kind of juice you can imagine is here, in every color, and the general statement is that they taste like liquid Starbursts - orange, papaya, pineapple, watermelon, honeydew.

There is a river in the forest a few houses down that we´ve swam in, and you can ride little waterfalls and rapids down like a waterslide. There is also a soccer field across from out retreat house that we use almost every day. Behind us is a trail that leads up into the mountains. We had a star-gazing night out there once, and Oh My God, it was so gorgeous. The southern sky just shines. Being the Country, there are absolutely no city lights, street lights, or anything. We saw a ring of the Milky Way with tons of stars, the entire Orion constellation, and the Southern Cross.

Our typical day is four sessions of Spanish class breaken up with breaks for lunch, and two breaks in between. I feel like I understand Spanish already alittle bit better, almost like when people speak, I don´t have to try as hard to understand them, so thats pretty amazing after only one week.



We are currently on our weekend trip to Constitución, a city on the coast south of Santiago and Rabones. There is black sand beaches here and huge Pacific waves, which we of course bodied surfed yesterday. So amazing. We ate dinner at a seafood restaurant, and I couldn´t believe how hard it was to read a freaking menu and order a meal. That is definitely something that I never thought of as hard work before. During the meal, we saw some guys dressed up as pirates, and we ended up walking outside and seeing a pirate festival of some sort on the beach. It was really random, but entertaining.

On the way here we stopped in Nirivilo, where an old friend of our director, Sam Stanton, lives. The friend is a carpenter named Alejandro Caceres, who makes sculptures out of wood. He gets the wood from the forest and doesn´t use the tree if it still has life. He gave us a tour of his workshop which has sculptures of horses, mermaids, faces of his family, holy figures, and many more. His house was the coolest part. It is made of adobe and is a perfect circle, with circular windows on every side. His whole house has wooden furniture that he made, but is very modern, (running water, electricity). The bedrooms are in rooms in the middle, so the windows which have no blinds, don´t interfere with sleeping. It was cool in the house, even though it was 85 degress and there was no air conditioning.



That anyway, is a rundown of everything that I´ve been doing since Monday. I will post pictures soon and hopefully that will give you a better idea of what I´ve been experiencing. It has been great. Thanks for all your support and encouragement. It really has helped me settle here the first week. Until next time! Hasta luego!