Bienvenido a

The first day I met my Chilean family, my host dad told me, “if you ever get lost just ask for Plaza Egaña and walk towards the mountains, you’ll find our home”.  Now, every morning I wake up to the mountains and every night I return home to them.  It’s amazing…thanks to Chile’s geographical wonder and the Andes, hacia la cordillera, towards the mountain range, is actually a direction. Walking around the city makes me feel like an explorer of old; instead of looking to the North Star, I can use the Andes to navigate myself.

Santiago has been great so far. I am here with thirty-something other students (4 other Georgetown kids!) from different schools in the US with a program called CIEE, a study-abroad organization that will act as a resource for of us while we’re here. The first two weeks we took a Contemporary Chilean Culture class with the program, listening to lectures on politics, indigenous groups, and human rights by morning and visiting important historical sites and landmarks in the afternoon. These past two weeks have been the Chilean system’s second-semester add-drop period, so we’ve been busy shuttling around to different campuses across the city to vitrinear, or window-shop. Through CIEE, we can take classes at Universidad de Chile and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, which are two well-known universities in Chile, one public and one private.

CIEE was also in charge of matching us with host families. Since we didn’t receive any information about our families until after we arrived here, we were all excited and understandably nervous to see who we’d be living with for the next semester. I’ll admit, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of home stay horror stories until my host mom picked me up from the program with a big hug and an enthusiastic “Mi Wendy!!”, just as if I were her own daughter. My host family has been absolutely wonderful – my host parents are such warm people, as are their daughter and grandson who finally managed to come home a few days ago, after being stuck in Germany for an extra-long vacation due to a flight ticket mishap. The program has done a great job finding us families, and aside from having to make minor adjustments to the lifestyle here, almost everyone I’ve talked to has been very content with their family.

These are some of the places that are part of my family’s routine:

Barrio Meiggs is a small neighborhood that sells almost every product imaginable wholesale. You want dozens of packets of tissues? Done. Green tea from China? No problem. Tins of baba de caracol, snail slime? Sure, no big deal (apparently it helps against scars and wrinkles).   My family goes to Meiggs to buy natural health products like seeds and roots of plants native to Chile and Peru. You can get these at the many supplement shops around Meiggs, and they basically all have the same set-up: one wall of the store is split into cubbies, each spilling over with bundles of dried leaves and other plant parts packaged in transparent plastic. The other walls are lined with colorful boxes that have photos of overly tan women in bikinis and tacky-looking men in tropical backgrounds. The boxes supposedly also contain supplements in different forms like powered, etc., but the little part of me that judges books by their covers can’t help but doubt the quality of supplements from companies that seem like they just ripped sketchy ads for a Hawaiian vacation from the internet. Nonetheless, it was impressive how many people went to Mieggs for these products and how they all seemed to know the difference between every single type – from what I’ve seen, Chileans are a lot more in touch with natural products and locally-produced food items than we are in the US.

Every Thursday and Sunday, my family goes to a market close to our home to buy produce. There are lots of these ferias around the city and a huge variety: some sell clothes and household products, others, handicrafts. This particular feria is partly a farmers’ market and partly cachureos, an assortment of old or used items. I’d never seen anything like the cachureos market before – it wasn’t just an antique fair, because in addition to selling standard antiques and stacks of clothing, some vendors laid out what looked like random things they just happened to have around, like old leftover pills in a mostly-empty pad. Some interesting things I saw in the farmers’ market side were giant celery 3x the size of normal celery, human-size bags of popcorn, and tubes of olives in a row. At about 2 US cents p/olive, the point is that you can conveniently start eating them as you walk around shopping. Also, the vendors strung bananas and pineapples above the walkway so as we shopped, fruit swung overhead with the Andes in the background. Beats the old Safeway any day.

The biggest surface differences for me so far have probably been the language and the heating systems here. Every Chilean loves to joke that they don’t speak Spanish – in Chile, they speak “Chileno”. This means they don’t pronounce “s” at the end of words, pretend letters like “d” are silent, have a different colloquial vocabulary set of chilenismos, and speak very, very quickly. Chileans are notorious for the way they speak, evidenced by the 2 Most Popular Facts About Chile that people would tell me once they knew I was coming here. #1: Chileans speak weirdly and #2. Chile is beautiful (or vice versa, depending on whether the person was or wasn’t Latin American). Other than that, the vast majority of buildings and homes in Chile don’t have central heating. It’s simply too expensive to maintain, and most apartments and houses aren’t built with it. What they do have are the calefont (it sounds like some type of fancy fondue, I know, but it’s actually a water heating system where you have to turn on and light the gas every time you want hot water) and clever inventions. The estufa is a portable heater that runs on gas, and the guatero is an amazing hot water bottle that people sleep with. The guatero might not sound appealing but if you are ever in Chile without indoor heating during winter, it will change your life. You can also cover it in a fluffy or stuffed animal cover so you’ll forget you’re holding a hot rubber pouch; there was one especially cold week when I carried a stuffed-lion guatero around everywhere. The interesting thing is that it’s really not even that cold in Santiago – it’s milder than winter in DC since it never even snows here – but it’s a shock to not have heating after taking it for granted my entire life (paradoxically, it’s also usually colder to be inside than out). I find myself thinking about heating-related issues in ways I never had to consider before. Did I turn off the calefont so we don’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning? Did I turn off the estufa so we don’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning? Did I close the guatero filled with near-boiling water tightly enough so I don’t get a nasty surprise in the middle of the night? Lesson: if you are planning on coming to Santiago in the winter, pack well! The OIP isn’t being dramatic when it tells you to bring sweatpants and sweatshirts to sleep in – I wear my winter boots and thickest coat whenever I’m inside. You’ll have a great trip, but don’t come expecting to brave winter with your normal PJs and warm-weather clothes.

Many other first impressions about Santiago also stood out to me…the challenge is remembering them all. First off, Chilean time and the way it’s spent is pretty different. If a Chilean says they are going to do something al tiro, their closest equivalent of “right now”, it can mean they’re either going to do it in 20 minutes or maybe in 2 hours. We joke about how misleading al tiro is, but people really do take their time (AKA slow) – people show up to class 10, 20, 30+ minutes late and bureaucratic procedures are a nightmare. It seems like people spend more time enjoying themselves and with their family instead of thinking about efficiency. Other observations are that Santiago is based around public transportation, there are stray dogs everywhere, and I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere else where poetry has such a big presence and influence as it does here. Unofficial and small businesses are a big part of life here – people sell candy bars like the typical Superocho everywhere in the streets, and vendors board buses to reach more people and sometimes put on acts to get people’s attention. I went to my Chilean mom’s volleyball game, and even there, her friend from volleyball took advantage of time before the game to sell clothes to spectators. This culture of unofficial businesses could be interpreted as the hard work and will of people struggling against the challenges of inequality and living in a developing country, or it could reflect the legal system, and it’s something I’d like to go into more later. Also, the constant threat of earthquakes makes life obviously more complicated. There are instructions of what to do in case of earthquakes (go somewhere where nothing can collapse on you – if you’re indoors, under a doorframe; outdoors go as far as you can from falling power lines) posted outside of every office in the universities. Buildings are designed to sway in the event of an earthquake, and just today my Chilean dad told me that the reason they keep the pool full even in winter is so that the cement pool doesn’t crack during an earthquake.

Just over a month ago I was still in Shanghai, and so far more than anything, finding myself all of a sudden in Chile after a summer across the world has made for an interesting adjustment. I was finally used to Chinese public behavior and interaction with strangers when I left in July, and at first it was surprising and kind of unsettling to ask a stranger for directions here and not be met with instant suspicion. Instead of pretending not to hear me or immediately backing away, people went out of their way to point me in the right direction. One lady even patted my arm, and students kissed me goodbye. Once when my family and I were returning home from the feria, we passed a couple holding their baby, and my mom cooed over the baby (I think she even kissed it) and chatted with the parents. Cooed! Over a stranger’s baby! I took this difference to mean that there’s a high level of trust between Chileans while the opposite is true in China. What surprised me was later hearing a professor say that Chileans don’t trust each other. I asked my dad about his perspective, and he agreed that there isn’t a high level of trust between Chileans, and especially not in comparison with public sentiment a few decades ago. I thought I’d quickly understood the culture of public interaction, but really, I was only seeing it in relation to my own experiences. To me, that’s the difficult part about understanding a culture. Will you ever really understand? Can you? I’m interested in the role context plays and learning more about how Chileans actually see themselves. It’s the same process I went through in China – I thought I was open, I thought I was aware, and then even the smallest things would surprise me. Actually, the smallest things surprised me the most. They seemed so basic and innate to me that I didn’t think of the possibility that not only could someone else see a particular concept differently, but a whole society could see it differently.

As you can see, the people that I’ve met so far have been really amable. It’s taking me a little longer to fall in love with the city, but I’m sure that is something that will quickly change, especially as I meet more Chileans who can show me what it means to them. I’ve now been here for a month now – although it hasn’t been very difficult for me to accept that this is now my home for the next few months, at the same time I still can’t believe I’m actually here.

In terms of language ability, I feel like I’m existing in a weird mushy part of my brain where everything is starting to blend together – there are a lot of Spanish words and phrases that I can barely remember right I want to use them, even though I know that I know them. Still weirder is the fact that even though I mostly still think in English, there are times when I find myself using structures like “blah blah blah, no?” when talking with other foreigners and questioning myself if the word “reinforce” is actually a real word in English. We all signed a pledge with CIEE saying that we’d only speak in Spanish amongst ourselves, but it’s definitely become harder and harder to maintain it with friends from the program. I thought I’d be better at avoiding English, but after being in classes all day with professors who slur their words together and trying to make friends with Chileans who all seem to magically know each other (rationally, I know it’s because their college experience is strictly split by schools, where they not only take their major but also their electives), sometimes the last thing I want to do is go through the process of structuring my thoughts in Spanish. Still, it’s something that must be done – after all, it’s part of the reason I came here – and I promise I’ll get better at it. Meanwhile, check back for more blogging in the future, including on social divisions, indigenous groups, and some of my host mom’s amazing recipes for authentic Chilean food back in DC or anywhere.

Let me end by recommending Machuca.  It’s a moving and well-done Chilean film that examines social integration and tension during Allende’s presidency through the friendship of two boys, one from a working-class family and the other from the upper class. Read more here.

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July 13th, 2010

My unusually anticlimactic pre-departure thoughts:

Tomorrow at this time I’ll be in Santiago, a little bleary-eyed from too much continuous switching-off between sleeping and in-flight entertainment, a little tired from battling with my luggage (all my experience packing light won’t help now), and very excited to finally be in Chile.

Right now I probably should be thinking about what these next 5 months will mean – a cultural experience in a new country, a wonderful opportunity to improve my Spanish and grow as a person, etc. I should be more stressed, and I should be more nervous. After all, studying abroad is something I’ve wanted to do as part of my academic life as far back as I can remember ever considering these things, and the Georgetown information session fact that more than 50% of Georgetown students study abroad impressed my high-school self so much because I thought it was a sure sign of Georgetown’s interest in a globally-focused education. Emotions are funny. I am actually going to study abroad now, and instead of having particularly deep thoughts or realizations, all I can think about is making sure I don’t lose my passport (extremely precious as it took more than 50 phone calls to the local Chilean consulate to obtain a student visa!).

I’m excited for what these next few months will bring. Now I just have to make it there. See y’all in Chile!