The First Days

So. Here I am back in Taltal looking out at a wide expanse of liesure time made available by a nationwide strike of Chilean teachers...which means I´ve got some time to finally write a little about all that has been going on up till this point.

The Great Chilean Enterprise began about two and a half weeks ago with the arrival in Santiago of myself and a little less than 40 other volunteers for the Chile Ingles Abre Puertas (English Opens Doors) program. My own arrival was pretty spectacular. We had gotten an e-mail a few days before departure telling us there would be some filming of the arrival and that a few of the volunteers (not me) would be interviewed. When I came through the airport though, I was a little surprised to see a press of reporters and film crews all really excited at the opening of the sliding doors. Jessica Holt--one of the organizers--flagged me down and explained that I happened to come through right before Selección 23--the Chilean national under-23 soccer team--who had just returned from winning some sort of cup in France or some like business. So we fought the news crowd to the curb with a single, short Ministry of Education camera man manuevering around us the whole time with his single camera.

Thus the Enterprise begun. It continued from Saturday the 31st, the day myself and about half the others got in, until the following Friday, when we celebrated the end of orientation with the Chilean equivalent of a barbeque called an Asado. But I´m skipping over too much!! The week was pretty great. The weather for most of the time was pretty miserable, but that only led to us all becoming closer faster. It was pretty amazing actually, the way all 40 of us formed friendships so quickly. The only thing I have experienced to compare it to is 4 days of orientation when I went to Ave Maria about 5 years ago...Only this time we had the added help of really, really inexpensive alcohol to help the friendship vibes flow.

There was one night when a handful of us discovered a botelleria ("-eria" at the end of anything, by the way, is the Spanish equivalent of "place where whatever came before ´eria´ is sold: thus "tortilleria," where they sell tortillas; "relojeria" where they sell relojes, or watches; and of course, you get your "bottles" at the botelleria) so we discovered this botelleria and everyone bought their own bottle of wine for 1,500-3,000 chilean pesos ($3-$6) and brought it back to the hostel to drink.

I don´t think I´ve laughed that hard, or that much since the first time I saw the Red Green Show. It was pretty excellent. In fact, it was so excellent that the kid running the front desk had to tell us to be quiet 3 times, and eventually had to kick us out to the patio in the back. I´m glad he did though, because that´s where I discovered that one of my roommates--whom I had pegged as a UGA party-hardy frat type--was actually a seriously well-read philosophy major who has also read all stuff on the literature side that I should have read by now as a supposed lit. nerd.

And the roommates were half the fun. Nick, Andrew, Jeremy, Mike and I. It felt like my dorm at Ave again. Some nights I would wake them up shouting in a dream and we would all fall out laughing in our beds once they realized there wasn´t a fire, and I realized I hadn´t been involved in a plane crash (contrary to my dream); another night we all 5 broke out in uncontrollable laughter. In trying to remember what the giggling was all about, the best we can come up with is that at some point we were talking about girls, and at some point I referred to the cute Spanish teacher as "neat."

We did a lot more than just laugh and drink wine, though (we also drank a lot of beer). No seriously, the orientation classes themselves--while sometimes laced with laughter--also provided some great preparation for what we would be encountering as volunteer English teachers working alongside full-time Chilean English teachers. We got great teaching and classroom management strategies--elements which I especially appreciated since I have yet to set foot in a classroom on the other side of the desk. And, as much of a mistake as it was to put the Spanish classes at the very end of the very very long days of orientation, I also felt like these prepared me to jump into the world of Chilean spanish, which differs in certain distinct ways from the standard academic/Spanish Spanish, and the Mexican Spanish I am more accustomed to.

To give you a taste, here are a few "Chilenismos" that we found entertaining...I might put a special column up for humorous Chilean phrases later:

~"cumpleaños de mono" = monkey´s birthday = a big mess, debacle

~"están cayendo patos asados" = roast ducks are falling from the sky = it´s really flippin´hot outside

~"bruja" = witch = wife

~"nada más" = nothing more = say this at the end of just about any sentence if you want to sound Chilean

And many more I can´t remember right now.

So orientation was phenomenal. It was fun. It was hard. It was helpful. And I made some really great friends (whom you can see in the pics. in the earlier post). And it ended with a race to the Cerro San Crístobal on the last day as Liz, Max, Brian and I made a valiant and successful dash for the subway station, through the streets of downtown Santiago, and into the "Fernicular" (a kind of hill-climbing cable car) to see the city from its highest point--this scraggly green hump jutting out of the smog , steel and stone of Santiago. We were dashing because Max and I had only about and hour and a half round trip time to get up the hill, sacar some fotos and zip back in time to catch our bus to Antofagasta along with the other 15 folks who were being shipped to our region. So we got to the top with time to be throughly amazed and resolve to come back and spend more time at the end of the program, before Max and I had to jump back in the cable car and head down, parting oh-so-sadly from Liz and Brian, who were to take the Gondola down the other side of the hill.

Yes. They have Gondola´s to take you down the hills in Chile. My other buddy Mike said he had so much fun taking the Gondola that he did it three times. Ask me some time to tell you other funny stories about Mike--they also involve spontaneous bouts of uncontrolled laughter...and completos. I will explain completos later, but suffice it to say that they are Chilean, they are food, and they are amazing.

Well, Max and I made it back in time--we even had a few minutes for him to buy some lapis lazuli jewelry from a street market for his host mother and sisters. And then? And then Billy decided he had to get off the computer because he had been there so long and his host cousin is politely not saying anything--though he suspects she really wants to be on the Internet.

But there you have a seemingly-long-winded, but actually terribly insufficient account of Billy´s first week in Chile. The next installment should detail our departure for our region, arrival in Taltal, teacher strikes, pisco, laughing schoolgirls and much much more. In the meantime, I send my love and hope all who read this are well. Hit me with an e-mail if you want to catch up personally (though I´m not promising super-rapid correspondance!)

Peace!

~Billy

Taltal: First Glimpses of My New Home

Photobucket Album

Welcome

Greetings! So here I am. A blog, finally. Plenty to say, but nothing written yet.

Don´t worry though I will (should) have plenty of interesting and terribly profound things to say real soon...

The plan is to keep a somewhat running record of my adventures here for the present so folks who, for whatever reason, are interested can follow along.

We´ll see how it works out. For now I just want to say welcome to you all, and wish you all ¡buen día!

Peace,
Billy