One Month In: Observations and Ruminations

Today is the one-month mark for my trip in Chile. In some ways it's hard to believe it's only been a month. It feels like forever ago that I was getting off the plane, making my way through customs with a ludicrous amount of luggage. So much has happened since then. In some ways I'm still getting adjusted, and I probably will be for a long time. But given today's significance I thought that now would be a good time to share some general thoughts, observations and impressions of my first month in Chile.

-They don't speak Spanish here. They speak Chileno. If you think you can make it here with just Spanish, think again. As if the Chilean accent itself weren't hard enough to understand, Chileans also pepper their speech with modismos and vocabulary that are unique to Chile. For example, avocado is not aguacate, it's palta. Babies are not bebes, they're guaguas. Thankfully my co-teacher Carolina gave me a book called "How to Survive in the Chilean Jungle" for my birthday. It's full of Chilean slang and alternate vocabulary, and it's been a big help so far. So if you're planning a trip to Chile you might want to consider getting a copy yourself. ¿Cachái?

-Don't like something? Protest. And I don't mean express an objection against what someone has said or done. I mean gather hundreds of people with banners and flags and parade them through the streets, chanting and vandalizing until your demands are met. I've already witnessed three separate protests since I've been in Puerto Montt, and as I write there are people protesting to the North in Santiago and to the South in Aysen. Forget Occupy Wall Street, Chileans are the protest pros!

- Chilean drivers are absolutely insane but somehow it works. The Chilean road is like a jungle. There are no stoplights, no street signs, no traffic cops, nothing but cars and people. It's every man for himself. Not only that, but Chilean drivers have got to be the most reckless people I've ever seen. Cut off an oncoming bus? Sure. Pass someone on a blind curve? Why not. Speed up as a pedestrian starts to cross the street? I'm sure he'll pick up the pace. And yet I haven't seen a single wreck. I haven't even seen anything close to a wreck. Somehow the chaos moves like clockwork and despite the risky habits of Chilean drivers, I haven't once felt endangered while riding in a car here.

- Light switches are on the outside of the room. I suppose it makes sense, so you don't have to fumble around in a dark room to find the light switch, but it was seriously confusing at first. In fact I spent my first three days at my house taking showers in the dark because I couldn't find the light switch. When I finally asked my host mom how you turn the lights on in the bathroom she kindly pointed me to the light switch...out in the hallway. Of course.

-Everybody loves bread but nobody tries to keep it fresh. I really don't get this one. The thing is, everyone eats bread, all the time. Breakfast is usually bread with jam. You have a sandwich for a midday snack. Lunch is served with bread and once is tea with bread and palta. A typical Chilean may eat bread three or four times a day. And yet it is always stale. They just leave the bread out in the open, they don't even try to seal it up or anything. Have they never heard of breadboxes? And when the bread does go stale, their solution is just to toast it a little bit. What? Why?

- Getting around is cheap and convenient. Unless you own a car, you're probably going to be reliant on four forms of transportation in Chile: buses, micros, colectivos and taxis. Buses are for long distance trips and are really pretty nice. You have plenty of room in your seat and the prices are very reasonable, although it does take a while (my bus ride from Santiago to Puerto Montt was about 15 hours I think). Micros are smaller buses used to travel shorter distances. They're generally pretty cheap, although the driver will pack people in like sardines. And just because there are 15 people standing on the bus doesn't mean he's going to drive any more carefully. If you're standing on a micro expect a hell of an arm workout as you grasp the bar for dear life. Colectivos are like taxis, but they run a fixed route and you share the cab with 3 other people who are headed in your direction. They're a bit more expensive than the micros but they're all over the place and run at all times of day so sometimes it's worth it. And if you don't feel like relying on a micro or colectivo you can always take a taxi, but those are pretty expensive. I feel like we could really use micros and colectivos in the States. They're so cheap and convenient it would probably cut down on traffic and air pollution!

- The wine is top notch but the beer leaves something to be desired.  No offense to any Chilean brew masters out there, but I've just been a little disappointed with the beer. Escudo, Becker and Cristal are OK for what they are (you can get a liter for about $2.50) but the craft beers just aren't that impressive. I'm looking at you, Kuntsman. You'd think that all that German heritage would pay off in some good beers, but really Kross is the only one I've been impressed by thus far. Maybe I need to take a road trip up to Valdivia and try my luck there.

- The Chilean people are very warm. One of the first things I noticed in Chile was the gratuitous amount of PDA. People greet each other with kisses on the street, couples lounge (and often make out) together in the parks, mothers fawn over their children, even when they're 20 years old. At first it all seemed kind of silly (it sometimes still does), but it's actually really nice. People here aren't bashful about their feelings and they greet strangers like close friends. Why are people in the States so scared to touch each other? Why are we so obsessed with personal space? Why does it take so much for us to say "I love you"?

- Los Bunkers are a great band. Seriously though. I'm still exploring Chilean music and I'm not exactly sure how popular Los Bunkers are here (I think they're pretty popular) but I like them a lot. They're sort of like the Chilean Guster. Here are some songs I've been listening to a lot lately:

 The first song I heard. It's actually a cover of a Silvio Rodriguez song, but still very good.

Los Bunkers channeling their inner Beatles. 

My first month here has been great. Chile is such a unique and wonderful country full of gorgeous sights and great people. I can't wait to see what's in store for me in the next eight months!

Frutillar, Birthdays, and more!

 Well! Once again I feel like a ton has happened since the last time I posted. I've been keeping pretty busy with getting settled into my school and trying to aprovechar (take advantage of) my free time. Two weekends ago a couple volunteers and I took a trip to a little village on Lago Llanquihue called Frutillar to visit another volunteer who is working there. Frutillar is a charming, tidy, neat little town on the shore of Lago Llanquihue that really flaunts its German heritage. Most of the houses (hauses?) and shops feature traditional German architecture, and many of the city’s inhabitants have fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes. Frutillar is a gem of a town not only because of its unique history, culture, and architecture but also because of its setting. Frutillar is nestled on the coast of Lago Llanquihue directly opposite of Volcan Osorno. And even though the lake is immense (in many of my pictures it looks like an ocean) Volcan Osorno still seemed to tower over everything. We spent our first afternoon there swimming in the lake. Even though the water was freezing, it was about 70 outside and it was totally worth it just to swim in the lake. The water was so incredibly clear. After an hour or two of swimming we went to a local shop to get some kuchen (a German-style cake) and we ate it on the shore of the lake, watching the sunset. After we finished our cake we went grocery shopping so we could prepare dinner for ourselves and the teacher who was hosting us. We ate a good steak and salmon dinner and then spent the rest of the night washing it down with a few beers and piscos. It was a great day! After breakfast the next morning, two of the volunteers (including the one with the car) had to go back Puerto Montt. I decided to stay a little longer and take the bus back later that evening so I could enjoy Frutillar a little longer. Carolyn (the volunteer working in Frutillar) and I decided to take a walk down the gravel road that surrounds Lago Llanquihue and connects Frutillar to other small towns such as Ensenada and Puerto Octay. We had no destination in mind and as the road continued and the scenery got more and more spectacular, we had a hard time stopping. Carolyn's host father would tell us later that we walked about 12 kilometers in all, but it was absolutely worth it to see some of the Chilean campo and to get some good pictures. When we returned to Frutillar Carolyn's host family invited me to have once with them and I couldn't resist. We had kuchen, pork, and of course lots of bread, palta, and Nescafe*. After once I took the bus back to Puerto Montt and went straight to sleep, exhausted from a great weekend. Here are some pictures from Frutillar:

The German Heritage Museum and Gardens

A bed and breakfast

We stayed in the house on the right-a cozy cabin with a view of the lake!

Once

 After resting up some it was back to work on Monday, and in all the excitement I had nearly forgotten my birthday was on Tuesday! The secret got out, thanks to my host mom who also works at the school, and on Tuesday morning I was greeted with a ¡feliz cumpleaños! from just about every teacher and student I crossed. Not only that, but my students sang to me in just about all my classes (I think my co-teacher tipped them off) and I got a surprise slice of cake at lunch! And to make sure I really enjoyed it, the teachers did me a huge favor and shoved my face into it! I guess they were just hazing the rookie. Later that night my host family prepared a special once for me with a particularly delicious berry cake called merengue. All in all it was a great birthday, and even though I wish I could have spent it with my friends and family, the people in Chile made me feel right at home.
And I wasn't the only one with a birthday last week! On Friday night the other volunteers and I got invited to the birthday party of one of our regional coordinators. The party was at his apartment, and basically involved eating choripan (kind of like a Chilean bratwurst), drinking beer, and dancing. We had a great time but after an eventful week and a long Friday night, I decided to rest up the rest of the weekend. 
On Monday I started a new teaching schedule. Some of my classes are 45 minutes long, and the others are an hour and a half long. I work with four different English teachers in 12 different classes which include everything from 6th to 12th grade. It's nice to have such a broad range of ages, and to be able to learn from the teaching styles of four different teachers, but it can also be hard remembering the names of all those kids. Generally, half of my classes are a manageable size of about 20 students or so, but the other half of my classes have more than 40 kids each. That's a lot of potential discipline problems. But right now I'm still in the shadowing phase in the classroom. My co-teachers and I have been planning lessons together and working with each other in the classroom. But now my teachers are giving me more responsibility, playing more of a supportive role as I lead the classes. In most of my classes we'll soon start using the "flexible model". This means that in a class that lasts an hour and a half we will split the students into two groups, teaching one group for 45 minutes and then switching. I'm looking forward to teaching by myself in my own classroom! And as for my classes that only last 45 minutes, I'll still be working with my co-teachers in the same room, so I'll be able to learn from them all year, even as I'm teaching independently. More on that to come later!

Orientation and First Days Teaching!

Well it's been another crazy week! On Tuesday I had a full day of orientation with the other volunteers in my region. The regional coordinators for EOD met us at a hotel downtown and introduced us to our co-teachers. My co-teacher Carolina is great. She's young, enthusiastic, and (thank God) knows a lot of English. Her English is much better than my Spanish. After being told time and time again that our co-teachers may not even speak much English, this was a huge relief. We spent the first half of the day getting to know our teachers while playing icebreaker games and working on mock lesson plans. After a super fancy lunch of salmon (delicious! And I don't even like seafood), we got on a bus for the part of orientation I was really looking forward to: a short hike in Petrohue, at the foot of Volcan Osorno. The hour long bus ride was gorgeous. It's hard to put a finger on the scenery in Chile. At times it reminds me of the American west, at times it reminds me of Honduras, at times it reminds me of pictures of the Alps, and sometimes it even reminds me of North Carolina! But I suppose it make sense; with the driest desert in the world to the North, Antartica to the South, and everything else in between, Chile is a chimera of a country. Even still, as we approached Volcan Osorno I realized I had never seen anything like it before. From the base next to Lago Llanquihue, it's a steep 2652 meters to the snow-capped peak, which seems perpetually shrouded in clouds. When we finally arrived at the park I could hardly contain myself! I wanted to run around like a kid but I managed to calm myself down and have the patience to take some pictures. We were blessed with a beautiful day, but even still I don't think the cerulean blue of the river comes through in the pictures. It was just incredible!

                                                         Approaching Osorno in the bus

 Google Volcan Osorno and you'll see photos taken from this exact spot!

 Reppin App State of course!

 This was just unreal. I spent a good ten minutes watching trout rise to feed in this pool. If only I had a rod....

 Pretty intense rapids. And they do rafting on this river! Maybe later in the year...

 As we were leaving the park the clouds started to part. Not the best timing, but it afforded me this shot

Just as I was starting to consider moving to a cabin on Lago Llanquihue I remembered I'm actually here to teach English! I had to get up at 6:00 Wednesday morning (earliest I've been up in a long time) to get ready and head to the school with my host mom, who is an English teacher there. The school, Antuquenu, is actually in a town called Alerce situated halfway between Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas, but it's only about 10 or 15 minutes away by bus from our house. The school is comprised of two separate school buildings and a gymnasium on a small campus. One building is for basica, which is Kindergarten through 8th grade. The other building is the media or high school. When we arrived the school was a whirlwind of students, teachers, administrators and staff running to and fro. I would learn later that this is the norm. As soon as I set foot on the property I was being introduced to teacher after teacher in a non-stop barrage of handshakes and kisses on the cheek (how men and women greet each other here), ever conscious of the gawking of hundreds of students passing by. But when the chaos subsided and everyone went to their classrooms, my day had just begun! I spent the first half hour or so going from classroom to classroom with Carolina to introduce myself to the students. For the rest of the day I shadowed Carolina in her classes. We reviewed some basics, played a few games, and the students asked me some questions. My favorites: "Do you like the Chilean womans?", "Do you know Obama?", "Do you live in Miami?" and "Do you know Justin Bieber?". Overall the first day was overwhelming, but fun. Over Thursday and today I've started to get more comfortable with being in front of a class, and the kids are slowly becoming less shy. Today we taught in my classroom for the first time and I gave a presentation on the United States and myself to one of the high school classes. They asked lots of questions, seemed genuinely interested, and Carolina said she was very pleased with the students' response. Maybe I can do this after all! Planning a trip to Frutillar tomorrow, more on that next time!

¡Fotos!

Alright since I have some free time and I haven't uploaded any of my photos yet, I figured I'd post a few! Enjoy!

The government plaza in Santiago

Santa Lucia park

During our driving "tour" of Santiago

Coming into Puerto Varas

A park square in Puerto Montt

The bay in Puerto Montt

¡Hola de Chile!

Sorry for the delay! I've already been in Chile for a week and I'm just now posting in the blog. I've just been so busy! Well I made it to Chile safe and sound. After some tough goodbyes at the airport and some nail-biting delays I finally made it to Santiago around 10:00 AM local time Saturday morning. And as an added bonus my luggage made it too! What a relief...
There were four other volunteers from my program on my flight from Atlanta to Santiago, so I got to know them before boarding and while going through customs. During my drive from the airport to the hostel I got my first real impressions of the Santiago area and Chile in general. The landscape around the city reminds me of somewhere out west. The ground is generally flat, brown, and dry looking, and stretches out in a pretty uninteresting way right to the feet of some impressively massive peaks. As we drove down the highway I found myself comparing the sights to Honduras since Honduras is the only other Latin American country I've visited. The highways are better maintained and much more attractive than those in Honduras and the cars were newer and nicer too, but the good looks do nothing to curb insane driving habits. Luckily I was used to the bobbing and weaving and sudden stops so I focused more on my surroundings. In places, Santiago looks typically Latin American. There are lots of colorful buildings, high fences and barred windows, but in other places it has a distinctive European and colonial vibe. Downtown Santiago is completely modern and metropolitan, and while the tallest skyscrapers are nowhere near as tall as those in New York or other cities, it definitely has the same big city feel.
Our Hostel is located in Barrio Brasil, 15 or 20 minutes from downtown. After getting my bearings and taking a shower at the hostel I decided to go do a little exploring Saturday afternoon. I took a 14 block hike to a stunning park called Cerro Santa Lucia. The park is a labyrinth of terraced gardens and plazas built on top of a colonial military fort, which was built on top of a quarry (I think). Anyway, it was an awesome park which reminded me of some parks in San Francisco. And even though it was pretty steep the view from the top was well worth it. Throughout the day more and more volunteers poured into the hostel until nearly all forty of us had arrived. Some of the volunteers had already been in Chile for a month because of an extended program, but the majority of the volunteers didn't know each other. We spent a good part of the evening getting to know each other and later that night we went to a bar not far from the hostel to see a band that one of the volunteers was familiar with. The bar was cool and the band was awesome, sort of like a Spanish language Red Hot Chili Peppers.
We had orientation sessions all week, usually from 9 to 4:30 or 5. In addition to the crash course in teaching ESL there were classes covering everything from the Chilean educational system to health and safety and Chilean culture. Still, we found plenty of time to try local restaurants and bars, hang out at the hostel, and do A LOT of walking around the city. But one of the highlights was definitely the "private tour" that a couple of us got on Wednesday. One of the volunteers sat next to a Chilean man on the plane and he had offered to show her around Santiago one day whenever she was free. She asked a couple of us to go with her and as sketchy as it sounds I'm glad I went because the guy was genuinely nice and it was an awesome experience. He drove us through a gorgeous part of Santiago called Providencia, then out of town through Las Condes and into the mountains about 25 minutes from town. The views were gorgeous and I'm afraid that the pictures I took from the back seat of his car do it justice. We then had dinner at an awesome downtown restaurant where I tried my first pisco sour, which could be described as the national drink of Chile. It's a cocktail made with pisco, which is sort of like a brandy, and what tasted like sweet and sour mix. And they probably throw in some other alcohol too because those things are strong.
So after spending most of the week in classes, walking around Santiago, and hanging out at the hostel, I finally got on a bus Friday night to head to my new home in Puerto Montt! The bus ride was long (about 12 hours) but surprisingly comfortable. In fact, it was way better than my Delta flight from Atlanta to Santiago. There are typically two types of buses here: cama (which means "bed"), and semicama. A semicama seat will lean back some and maybe have a footrest but a cama pretty much lives up to its name. The seats were pretty big, with plenty of room to lean back and with large footrests. There was also a screen that played a few movies ("Year One" and "Transformers 3" both dubbed in Spanish) and breakfast in the morning. Not bad at all! I slept off and on throughout most of the night and by morning we were in Los Rios region, just north of Los Lagos region. The scenery was spectacular. The country side is very bucolic and incredibly green. As we got further south the mountains in the distance got bigger and bigger until finally we pulled into Puerto Varas and saw lake Llanquihue and Volcano Osorno. The scenery here is incredible. From Puerto Varas it was only another 15 minutes or so until we arrived in Puerto Montt. Although the weather is very gray it's still a beautiful city. My host parents picked me up from the bus station and after a quick tour of the downtown we headed to the house. My family lives in a 3 bed 2 bath house in a neighborhood called Valle Volcán (Volcano Valley) in northeast Puerto Montt. The location is great and I have plenty of room in their guest bedroom. The family consists of Claudia, an English teacher at the same school where I'll be volunteering, Oscar, who teaches and also does social services work in Puerto Montt, and Jorge or Coke who is about my age and is studying at an institute in Puerto Montt. I like my host family a lot. They're funny,  generous, accommodating, and very patient with my Spanish. For the most part we've all been able to hang out and have a conversation, but they have to talk pretty slowly and they pepper their Spanish with some English. There have been a few times (like earlier today when a family friend came to visit) when I had absolutely no idea what was going on though. Chilean Spanish is very, very difficult. They talk fast, their pronunciation is unique, they mumble, and they use words and phrases that no other Spanish speakers use. Aside from that it's pretty easy to cachar.
Sorry if this first post seems a little rushed. A lot has happened in the past week and it's pretty hard to condense it all. Hopefully in the future I'll have time to blog more regularly and I can go into more detail. Pictures to come!