First days: Canadians, Aftershocks, Chasing Rodents, etc.

11 March 2010

Today is my first journal entry during my trip here in Chile, so I guess I'll start from my first couple of days. I don't know yet if I'm going to post this online to some form of blog, or if I'm just going to keep it private. If I do end up posting it I've already decided that it will remain unedited (except for spell check, of course) and have no objective of entertainment, so if this is online and you're reading it and already bored, you should probably click on to another blog. If you're reading this and you're not online, stop it! Get off of my computer. Anyways, I arrived in the morning at around 10am local time, and had to sit in the airplane for about 30 minutes before disembarking directly onto the tarmac. This didn't bother me too much, since I had a pretty cool seatmate in the window seat next to me. I think her name was Sarah, she's a Canadian, and kind of seemed like she was getting ready to go camping or something along those lines. She was pretty cool, and we made jokes about South Park and various other things. I shared my goldfish with her as well during the flight. At any rate, we parted ways when we finally disembarked from the plane.

Our luggage was sitting on the runway waiting, and we pretty much had to just look around until we found it. After that, we joined a double-overlapping line outside of a big tent to wait to go through Customs. It only took about 10 minutes to get inside of the tent, but once inside it became obvious that we still had a huge wait ahead of us. It wasn't too bad waiting, however, because I got to enjoy a few laughs with a Chilean couple making fun of an American tourist, who, to save time, decided that it would be easier to not move up very much in line, and that when there was space she would duck under the rope (luggage and all) instead of taking a few steps. Well, at least I think the Chilean couple was laughing at her, I certainly was. Eventually, I got through customs without issue and began pretty much just following the crowd out of the airport. After a certain distance a passed the security point and a huge swarm of taxi drivers descended upon me holding up signs for their respective taxi companies simply saying “Taxi? Taxi?” It reminded me of the South Park episode that featured homeless people saying “chaaaaange.” I was so overwhelmed that I actually responded to them instead of just ignoring their incessant chanting. I just told them I was looking for Rodrigo, and to my surprise they actually responded. After a brief exchange of words, several of them pointed to my right and said “Si, Roberto, te espera.” I continued walking in this manner towards another tent, where there was an even larger crowd than the customs crowd. These were all of the people waiting to pick people up from the airport, plus a lot more taxi drivers.

Fortunately, Rodrigo was holding a sign with my name on it pretty high in the air, so I saw him right away and made my way over to him. Immediately thoughts began flitting through my mind of how likely it is that the real Rodrigo was stuffed in the trunk of his own car somewhere and that this imposter Rodrigo was going to steal and sell my organs. You know, the usual O'Brien mentality. Everything went well, however, he even carried my bags (to my complaint), and after a relatively painless and brief car ride we arrived at my host family's house, complete with one of the best views of the sea I've ever seen.

My host family came outside to greet us (except for Francesca), my host mom Cecilia greeting me with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, which is customary in Chile, and with Alberto my host dad giving me a firm handshake. They welcomed me inside with a swarm of Spanish and general hospitality, offering me food, drink, etc. They also introduced me to their awesome dogs who waited happily wagging their tails on the porch. Cecilia and Alberto showed me to my room, Alberto carrying my bags (again against my complaints). Once inside, I hastily unpacked a few things, because Carlos (my adviser) had called saying that if I could I should come to an orientation at 3pm (by then it was around 2) and my family wanted to feed me lunch before I left.

We had some delicious avocado topped with tuna served atop a bed of lettuce. It was really tasty, and was then followed by mashed potatoes soaked in the juice of slow-cooked chicken, both of which were delicious! I was already bursting at the seams when Cecilia brought out some freshly cut melon and banana in a bowl for dessert, which I ate without complaint. After finally working through all of this food I was ready to go to school. Oh, and before lunch I also actually met Francesca and Chris. Francesca is my host family's only daughter (that I know of) and Chris is a student from Arizona. I hadn't known that there would be another American here, but I welcomed it as a nice thing and something to worry about at the same time. Thankfully, Chris is a smart guy and immediately addressed my concern before I even had a chance to mention it, which was that we could speak in Spanish around the house all of the time if I prefer (after spending a few days here though, it is quite nice to have someone to throw a little bit of English at just because it's less of a mental workout).

Alberto accompanied me down the block to the bus stop, where we waited with a few other international students for the bus to the more distant Rodilillo branch of the Vina campus here. It took a while for the bus to arrive, but pretty much the moment I sat down a man was standing in front of me with hand outstretched saying “Kevin?” The man is Carlos, my adviser, whom I had never met before in person, but he introduced himself immediately. He then explained everything that was going on and had happened so far that I'd missed, in a combination of Spanish and English. Once we got to the university, I once again followed the crowd to a room where we were going to get an orientation talk. This part of the university is VERY new, as was evidenced by the new paint smell and the still visible insulation on the ceiling (it hadn't been tiled yet in the room we were in). I pretty much missed everything that was said during the orientation because I was so dead tired already from having such a long flight (on which I got NO sleep) and because of my crippling illness that causes me to sleep in every classroom environment. Seriously, put me at a desk and it's better than a NASA-made bed for me to sleep in. After the presentations were done (one of which was by a student of the university advertising a party that he and a compatriot were having between the two universities here in town for the new international students),

I woke up a little bit when three other students (two from the US and one from Canada) and I had to stay behind for an extra conversation about our host family agreements. I was still only semi-conscious for this, but from what I can tell from that (and later events), the Canadian girl is the unluckiest person here. She made it sound like her host family barely even had any food in the house, let alone any to offer to her like the delicious spread I had enjoyed at lunch that day. After the meeting I had to go with Carlos to el centro to get a few photos taken for a Student ID and for a national ID card, so I waited outside of the classroom for a little while. While waiting outside, a girl approached me and said “you're Kevin, right?” with her hand outstretched, which utterly confused me. I said yes and asked for her name, which is Juliana. I asked her how she new my name, and she said that she heard the woman in the orientation about host families say, rather matter-of-factly. I felt stupid, but whatever, I hadn't slept since Sunday night. At any rate, I went with Carlos to the city and took a few photos. My host mom and sister were already in el centro as well, shopping, so instead of sending me home he dropped me off with them. They were grocery shopping, so we went and did that, which was good. We also stopped and rented a movie, and a laughed in the Blockbuster at all of the movies with different titles like: “Que ocurre ayer?” and others with titles that were completely unrelated to the movie, like the movie “Push” was instead titles “Heroes.” I'm still really not too sure how that one works, you'd understand if you've seen the movie. For the last stop, we went to the ATM to get me some Chilean money, which I had a little bit of trouble with at first because I hadn't realized that I needed to select the “foreign card” option. We went home, at some dinner, and I promptly passed out to sleep.
So that was the first day.

The next day, I had to get up really early (8am) in order to make it to the other campus here in town which is about a 15 minute walk from our house. Cecilia walked me over there, although we were actually there before Carlos. I guess that in Chile I'm actually prompt and on time, whereas in the US I'm always late, yes! Once everyone else arrived, we went into town to find a bus to go to the police to register our presence there. This is where I began to think that the Canadian girl is terribly unlucky, because she had a problem with her Student Visa where the people in the consulate who prepared it for her had done it incorrectly, because they had left off the number of days she would be staying in Chile. She just had to go home, and I still don't know if she's been able to fix it or not. We had to sit and wait for a while, and I spent most of the time talking to Juliana. It seems that everyone else in the group at Vina with student visas is French, and I can't understand them at all. I can't tell if they are speaking in Spanish with a French accent or just in French, but it's okay, because Juliana is fun to talk to anyways. After spending about an hour at the police station, we took another bus into Valparaiso to go to an office where we could apply for our national ID cards. The wait there was even longer, but it wasn't too terrible of an experience. Juliana and I spent the time making fun of various people and things, including Mohawks, which inexplicably appeared on the only TV there at the same time as we were talking about them. Juliana also spent part of the time trying to find a bathroom with running water (which I imagine was tough for her since she doesn't speak any Spanish at all). She didn't have any success in her search, which by the way was happening because she was hell-bent on washing her hair. She actually had brought a bottle of travel-sized shampoo in case we did run into running water. I found this hilarious and mocked her for it, but she just responded by mocking me, so all was cool. We finished applying for our ID cards and rode a bus back to Vina, where we parted with the French students. Carlos, Juliana, and I walked back towards the campus, where I had to take a Spanish proficiency test. Juliana left for home once we reached campus, then Carlos and I went inside. After a brief wait, I got to take the test.

The test started out with basically and interview in Spanish, which seemed to go relatively well for me, except for when I said that the murder rate in Chile is very very cheap... (I said barato, I meant to say bajo) The written test didn't go as well, I don't think. I'm relatively confident that I made up a bunch of words, and I may have even thrown in some English. It's been so long since I've taken an actual grammar class in Spanish that I just didn't remember how to do anything. After the test, I walked home, had some late lunch, (which was also delicious, it's always delicious), and then started getting ready to go with Cecilia to an appointment she had, and then to the mall to buy me a pay-as-you-go cell phone. Walking around the mall was pretty fun, and as my roommate here Chris has pointed out, the layout of the department stores doesn't seem to make any sense. In his words “Hey, where can I find the cell phones?” “Cell phones? Well, obviously, they're next to the couches and dried milk, you know, right next to the makeup section?” (Seriously, that's how it feels). Eventually, we found a phone for me which is actually a little bit nicer than my current phone, and only cost 20 dollars and comes with some minutes already.

After buying the phone, we continued wandering around the mall (we had met up with Francesca by this time) searching for a new blouse for Francesca for a ceremony she had to attend in school. Eventually we left and took a bus back to the house.

---Random side note: on a bus with our group looking for ID cards, I was standing next to the door, holding my backpack between my legs when a particularly violent jolt of the bus (they're all stick shift, so it's not a terribly smooth ride) caused my water bottle to be knocked out of its pocket and to start rolling out of the bus. Rather than jump down and grab it before it rolled out with my ninja-like reflexes, I just kind of watched it roll with a sad look on my face as people left the bus, then asked a guy to hand it to me. It was at that moment that I realized that I probably don't have secret Jason Bourne-like abilities. Sad days.----

Anyways, we got back to the house and I had yet another delicious meal cooked by Cecilia, like usual using all-natural ingredients. I've actually taken to eating raw, freshly sliced tomatoes with a little bit of salt on top. The tomatoes are so good here, I'm actually going to go ahead and blame supermarkets for why I don't like tomatoes that much, because these fresh tomatoes are so delicious and juicy, oh man. After eating, I went up to my room and sat around for a while on the internet, basically just watching boring videos and the such, trying to just chill out after a long day. At around 11 Chris came out of his room and asked me if I wanted to go with him to a bar in a little while. Contrary to popular expectation, I said sure and started getting ready.

We left at around 11:45ish to start walking to the bar. On the way, we talked about various things about Chile, mostly in English, which I didn't terribly mind. We pretty much just compared thoughts on a lot of things in Chile (which we generally agreed on, like how awesome the weather is and how great our host family is), and eventually we got to the bar. We pulled out our ID's for the bouncer there, but I'm pretty sure he barely even looked at them. We went upstairs in the bar and to the outside area, which was an open-air portion of the bar sandwiched in between the bar and another building. It was a really chill atmosphere. We then met up with a few of the other people from Chris' university (he said there are around 12 of them here) and started having a few drinks. We started with two Coronas, which came out as rum and cokes, but we just drank them anyways. After talking with Chris' friends for a while , he suggested that we go get another drink in the downstairs portion of the bar. We ended up talking to a few other students from Vina and the other university here. I actually had a really good time, again, against popular expectation, and came home just the right amount of buzzed. We took a cooperativa for half of the ride home, and both went to bed pretty quickly.

So finally I've made it to today, Thursday. Not too much happened today I didn't even leave the house. I got up around 11, I think, and pretty much just shuffled around all morning. Cecilia made some lunch when she got home at about 1, which again, was delicious. I continued to chill around the house, sitting at my laptop talking to people back home and playing some games, passing the time for when I was supposed to be on campus at 4. While I was sitting upstairs (I actually don't remember if this was before or after lunch, on second though, I think it was before lunch), there was a pretty big aftershock from last week's earthquake. At first, I though “oh cool, an aftershock.” It lasted for a really long time though, so I started to wonder if I should do anything, but, keeping to my usual form, didn't move at all. It seemed to last for about 30 seconds, maybe longer, and it didn't damage anything at all here, just rattled a few things about. Wait, yeah, this was definitely before lunch, oh well. Alberto came to my room to ask if I felt the aftershock, and he seemed very calm so I wasn't worried. He said there was a tsunami alert, so people were supposed to be ready to move to higher ground. This is why I remember now that we hadn't eaten yet, because Cecilia and Francesca came home all flustered, because they had been in el centro, so when the aftershock hit and the tsunami warning popped up, people had started to run towards the higher ground in the city. I think there's something wrong with me, because things like this just don't bother me at all, I was actually surprised to see that I was less nervous than my host mother or sister. They calmed down pretty quickly, but I suppose being in the middle of the chaos is a lot different than sitting in your room watching videos of cats wearing silly hats.

In the middle of the day, we finally got running water, which we haven't had since I've been here. I joked with my family that now I don't have an excuse to not shower, which I think has been my most successful joke so far, yes! If I can be funny in Spanish, then I'll be satisfied with my level of fluency. Our meeting got canceled today because of the aftershock (which I think was a 7.2 Richter scale) and the tsunami alert. I spent the extra time doing what I always do with extra time, playing video games. I busted out my DS and started playing one of the games that I brought with me, but when my battery started to run low and I tried to plug it into my converter, it wouldn't charge. This is strange, because my laptop charger works just fine in the converter, but not my DS charger. Most would take this a sign that they shouldn't play game boy, me, I'm going to try to buy another converter. With a dearth of technology, I was forced to instead start reading, what a shame. I ended up reading for a while then taking a nap until dinner, which was, again, delicious. They have a snack here that looks a lot like nutella, but it tastes much sweeter. It basically consists of milk, sweetened, then browned a little bit, but it is in spreadable paste form. They eat it on tortillas with powdered sugar on top. Amazingly enough, it was a little bit too sweet for me.

After dinner, I came back upstairs to fool around on my laptop, but I was shortly interrupted by panicked yelling downstairs from Cecilia. I hopped up and started heading downstairs, catching garbled phrases about dogs or something, and passing Francesca who had turned away, looked really upset like she didn't want to see or something and was covering her ears. It was probably the most frightened I've been so far, my imagination ran wild with ideas of seeing someone in the street being attacked by a pack of wild dogs, but I instead came downstairs to see Alberto chasing one of their dogs outside from the kitchen. I just kind of kept walking towards the glass door and looked at Cecilia who was talking really rapidly, then looked down and saw Francesca's little pet gerbil (rat, hamster, mouse?) running on the hardwood floor. I snatched him up, realizing that the trauma was that one of the dogs had attacked his cage, so he was getting chased around the couch by the dog. I safely delivered the rodent to a relieved Francesca, feeling somewhat heroic, then came back up here. Well, that's it for today and the summary of the past two days. Man, this is ridiculously long, methinks I'll go into less detail for my next entries... Oh, and the weather has been about 70 degrees and sunny, starting out cloudy in the morning then having the sun come out... for reference.