July 30th

I have moved in with my host family and they're wonderful. I have a mom (Daly), a dad (Nandy), a sister (Sofia Maria, 19), a brother (Javier, 22), a grandma (name and age unknown), and a dog (Apolo). I have a tiny but lovely room with the most comfortable bed in the world.

Bonus religious iconography.

On Sunday I went to a birthday party of somebody related to my host family. I'm not sure how she was related but she turned 90! The party was at a restaurant and lunch lasted for more than four and a half hours. I ate maybe half as much as everybody else and I was still unbearably full. It was just like a birthday party in the states but with a lot more relatives and more singing and probably the same amount of alcohol.

Everybody that I've met here has been really nice and patient with my inability to understand about 60% of what I hear. I'm definitely getting better and am quickly filling a notebook with words I'm learning. It's difficult to tell which words are chilenismos and which are words I just never learned but they all go in the book.

We're headed to Buenos Aires tomorrow and we'll get back Sunday. It's a six hour bus ride to Mendoza where we'll stop for dinner, then a thirteen hour ride overnight to Buenos Aires. We changed some money today and man, the money down here is weird. Before we leave tomorrow we still need to pick up our IDs, add money to our cell phones, and I need to attempt to register for classes. No doubt I will enjoy it all very much. 

I doubt I'll post again until I get back from Buenos Aires. I'm not bringing my computer but I'll try to check email a couple times while I'm there. Ciao!

July 28th

In less than an hour I meet my host family. I know nothing about them but I'm embracing the power of positive thinking. This also means that orientation is over, which is both sad and wonderful at the same time.

Goodbye hostel breakfasts and bad coffee.

Goodbye inexplicable fluorescent hallways.

 Goodbye "writing" on the board.

Goodbye classroom of many lectures.

Goodbye late night soccer games.

Goodbye long bus rides.

I'll only have a couple days with my host family before we go to Buenos Aires but they will be awesome days and my family will be awesome and everything will be awesome and by the way, what does a panic attack feel like?

July 26th

So...I got a really bad cold and spent the last couple of days hibernating from the world and not getting very much better in this COMPLETELY UNHEATED hostel (no, actually, Chileans don't have central heat) with NO HOT WATER and apparently no belief in wool blankets. Whatever. Aside from that hiccup Chile is wonderful, here let me share some of it:

Our first facebook-official Chilean friend. She was extremely disappointed that America doesn't have a national dance.

Man, we got mountains.

A woman who sang for us and talked about running a community kitchen during the occupation. Very sweet lady.

La cueca: national dance of Chile

Una chicheria. Chicha=kind of like a hard cider but made of grapes and super sweet.

For the last few days we've mostly been listening to lectures about Chilean politics, economics, feminism, workers issues, history, etc. But today we actually went on a field trip! We went to La Legua which is a población, a poor neighborhood, that has a terrible reputation for violence and drug trafficking. But we went in the middle of the afternoon and visited a soccer fútbol club and a church and an elementary school (that was nicer than my elementary school, by the way) and a radio station and they were all very nice and not dangerous at all. 

The radio station was by far my favorite though. The guy who spoke to us had the the best hair I've ever seen. It was super curly, like a clown wig, and really thick. I wish I had a picture but sadly I left my camera at the hostel (poor planning). For the most part I can understand what people say here but I could not understand this guy at all. All I got was "radio...radio...Satan....democracy" which was confusing. After he talked for a long time we got cookies (yay!) and he asked us where we were all from. He must study American maps or something because his knowledge of American geography was unbelievable. When I said I was from Washington state he asked if I was from Seattle and I said yes. Then he asked if I was actually from Seattle (clearly I can't avoid this question even when I leave the continent) or one of the suburbs like Bellevue or Everett which totally blew my mind because, seriously, who's ever heard of Bellevue?? Small world. 

July 21st

The theme of this post is small victories. This morning I had my first hot shower since arriving here. It was divine. Yesterday the day before yesterday I finally acquired a Chilean cell phone so I can text all the other Tufts kids who I spend all my time with. We spent yesterday afternoon at a vineyard and had a wonderful lunch and did a wine-tasting afterwards (yay study-abroad!).

Our lunch had a soup course.

mmmm vegetables and rice cooked in wine.

fancy passion fruit dessert 

We seem to end up in really pretty places at sunset

I taste...dirt? What?

Earlier in the day we also went to a memorial for those who disappeared in during the Pinochet era in the town of Paine. Out of 2000 people, 70 people disappeared which is the highest percentage in Chile. Two women, one who lost a husband and one who lost her father, spoke to us about the experience and why they helped create the memorial.

Our guide shows us the mosaic her family designed to commemorate her father

Mosaics were grouped by family. One family lost three brothers.

July 19th

Attempts at meaningful content have ended. I have exactly no time to think of clever things so there will be mostly photos for a while. Yesterday we went to Valparaíso:

La Casa de Pablo Neruda: very cool

View of the harbor from the restaurant

Fancy pants lunch with very good fish and also good vegetable lasagna

Congreso Nacional. They're big into squares here.

Sitting in on a congressional session

Brave swimmers in the Humboldt current

A lovely sunset after a lovely day. Sadly there are no pictures of the unbelievably good ice cream we ate shortly after this.

July 17th

Part of the orientation process is learning about the history of Chile. And there's a lot of it. Without even mentioning pre-European history, there are a good 400 years or so to cover. In a nutshell: there are a lot of wars and generals and earthquakes. What's really confusing though is the political history. Most people have probably heard of Allende and Pinochet (both subjects to avoid in Chile, generally speaking, which makes understanding it much more difficult) but that's only knowing about Nixon and Kennedy, if Nixon had violently overthrown JFK and ruled as a dictator for 18 years.

The Presidential Palace (la Moneda)

For example, right now there are six major political parties that are all represented in Parliament. SIX. We listened to a right-wing historian and a left-wing historian, who happen to be friends and both thoroughly derided the other one's work. I'm mostly very confused and newly aware of how extremely little I know. One historian said Chilean history has been mostly non-violent, the other said it's been full of uprisings and military interventions. A third historian spoke entirely in Spanish and I'm not entirely sure what she was talking about. 

Luckily we're going to Valparaiso tomorrow to learn more history so I have yet another chance to feel completely overwhelmed.

July 16th

I feel like the inaugural post on this shiny new blog should be really impressive and interesting and make you want to read more but that seems a little too intimidating so instead I'm just going to ramble about a lot of random things that have happened in the last three days or so.

So far I've slept a lot. I'm averaging two naps a day. I'm only averaging .5 showers a day because the water in this hostel is either boiling hot or ice cold, occasionally straying into tepid if you're lucky.

This is what the Happy House Hostel looks like.

On Sundays Chileans eat a long lunch with their mothers. No mothers were present at our lunch but it was definitely long, lasting about three hours. The best part was the vino navegado, a Chilean version of mulled wine that is excellent and greatly increases the likelihood of a food coma.

This is what the end of a three-hour lunch looks like.

After lunch we took a bus up to the top of San Cristobal, a big hill in the middle of the city. After nearly killing apparently have the pedestrian population of Santiago, we climbed the last little bit on foot, up to the statue of  la Virgen.

I'M KING OF THE WORLD

We've been slowly venturing out into the city at night, expect more on that topic in the next post. For now, adios.

Intro

Hola, this is Ellie. I'll be in Chile in less than a week. Real posts start after I get there.