ILP

1/31/07 12:50 PM

Hi. Life is going pretty well here. I just cleaned my room today, and it feels a little cleaner, but not really. I guess probably just because it’s so small that it’s hard to make it feel clear. School started on Monday. We have 4 hours of Intesnive Spanish class Monday-Friday. There are five different classes and 3 levels; intermediate, intermediate-advanced, and advanced. I’m pretty stoked on being in the intermediate-advanced class, because the advanced class is all native speakers. Our teacher is named Andres and is the only male teacher in the program. I think he said his family is from Germany, and he has blondish-red hair, blue eyes, and a graying beard. He looks just as gringoey as any of us, so I’m trying to figure out what it is about him that makes him seem Chilean, and makes all the students seems so foreign. There are a lot of people here who dress and generally look like anyone back home, but there is something in their “forma de ser” (form of being) that makes them so apparently Chilean.

I have to finish my laundry, but later I want to write about

Big doll girl/strange art here

Extending and my plans for the year

Travel plans for summer?

Contact info

Oh, and I haven’t done my homework yet… and I leave for class in 30 minutes. Damn.

1/31/07 1:00 PM

Lago Rapel

1/28/07 11:17 PM

Hola. I’m watching TV for the first time since I got here. I kinda wanted to watch something American, cause I imagine that Chilean TV’s bad. But I also wanted to watch something in Spanish. So I’m watching Latin MTV. That one cartoon that’s really vulgar with the black chick in orange with fox ears on her hat, and the black and white Betty Boop looking girl and and a pig with a unibrow and a pikachu-lookin thing. I guess I’ll turn it off now that I’m typing, though. Ok, anyway, I just spent the last couple days with the kids from the program. We went to Lago Rapel for an orientation weekend. There are three really great women working in the UC EAP study center here who are going to be helping us with everything, so there’s a lot of support. They told us all about cultural differences with things like drugs and sex here (sex is the same. But if they catch you with any amount of pot or any illegal druge here, you go to jail, and for us we go to jail and then get deported). They also talked to us about the universities. I guess that La Chile, where I’m going to attend, frequently has student strikes that get rather violent and then the cops come in with tear gas, which is much stronger than American tear gas. My host mom told me that the protests are because before the Pinochet regime education was very socialistic, and everyone could go, but since the military dictatorship it hasn’t been so, and so the students are protesting so that more students can go to school. Or something like that. But if I don’t finish my credits and flunk out I can be deported, so I may actually have to cross a picket line, which sucks, cause I’m not particularly part of the politics. I guess.. But there is a student union or student coalition here that organizes the strikes, and so the director of the EAP program suggested that if a strike starts up (as it almost definitely will, at least once) then we should go to the student coalition and see if they have a special policy towards foreign students, etc, etc. Also, I got to look at the class listings and there are some pretty amazing looking classes that should count towards my major, like Rural and Urban Sociology, and a bunch of other that I don’t remember exactly right now. We spent a lot of time going over details and deadlines, but most of the weekend was spent just hanging out.

Everyone was pretty stoked on going to Lago Rapel (Lake Rapel) and brought their swimsuits and everything, and then when we got there the first people to jump in found out that the lake bottom is concrete, and the lake itself is only about 3 feet so it was possible to run through the water all the way to the middle of the lake. It is a big lake, though. Someone said 7 miles across, but that seems a little too much for me. The whole place was pretty nice with little cabins, and one really big, nice cabin that looked like it was out of storybook. There were boats on the lake, small motor boats, kayaks, rowboats, there was a pool, also a parrot house, a bunch of chickens and roosters and little chicks, a big doppley white horse that was discovered in the middle of the night wandering around the cabins, and a German Shephard who fetched bricks and chewed on them. The whole weekend was nice, and people got to know each other pretty well. Everyone’s very friendly and open, which is cool. There are a lot of Santa Cruz kids, more than any other campus I think, and most of us are from Merrill. Throughout the weekend I kept finding myself in small groups of UCSC people, not at all on purpose or because we knew each other but because it’s just the kind of people we all attract, I guess. This girl Christina from Merrill and I shared a room with 3 girls from UCLA, and the first thing we both did after we put our stuff down in our cabin was take off our shoes and run through the grass, and we were laughing about what a Santa Cruz thing that was to do, and then later I picked up a spider off of a girl sitting in front of me and took it outside and another SC kid shouted “yeah, Santa Cruz!” from behind me.
There are a lot of really interesting people on the program, though. I’ve had and listened to some really interesting conversations about alternative fuels, economics, sustainability (especially sustainability being adopted by corporations like McDonalds, Starbucks, and Wal Mart), fair trade, etc, etc. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know people but for some reason I’m keeping my distance, and haven’t really allowed myself to feel entirely comfortable with any person or group of people. We played a game of pool at the hotel-type place on Rapel, but I guess Chilean pool is different or something; the pockets are a lot smaller, barely bigger than the balls, and the corners around the pockets are a lot sharper. It took us over an hour to get down to the last 2 balls, and then we just gave up.
Unfortunately, yesterday we actually had someone have to go home. This girl named Alice got a call that her mom had been hit by a car and was in critical condition in Berkeley, so she had to go back to Santiago (a 3-4 hour drive) and catch a flight home. It was very scary and so I hope that everyone at home is staying safe.
What else? The food here’s not so amazing. A lot of people think it’s very bland, but I don’t mind it. Except today for Sunday lunch they served a masado (I think that’s how you say/spell it), which is a barbecue, but this one was a banquet, with all kinds of vegetables and breads and meats and desserts. Very tasty. Also, when I got home tonight Luki had made a very, very good soup that’s pretty Chilean out of white beans and cornmeal. Very good, also. Oh, and here avocado and strawberry are called palta and frutilla, instead of aguacate and fresa like they are everywhere else I’ve been. I’m sure that there’s a lot more to say because I was gone for a whole weekend, but I’m very tired. I think I’ll try to post all of these tomorrow, because my Intensive Language Program starts, but not until 2, and Luki said there’s a Ciber right around the corner.
Buenas noches,
Sophie

orientation

1/26/07 12:52 AM

Not TOO much to say today. First day with orientation. Met lots of people. Hard to connect, though, cause most don’t really use phones, or at least I don’t porque tengo miedo. I know where I live! Luki took me to the school today on the bus, and then walk for a few blocks, and then I got home on my own. It was very intimidating but I got it! And I live on Avenida .. oh shit, what’s it called? Avenida Pedro de Valdivia. The house is pretty far from the metro or anything, but it’s a main street so LOTs of buses go by. After I came home from the first orientation thing and took a nap and stuff I went out to explore a little. Salí a little tarde, so I didn’t get to go out for a long time, but I took the bus all on my very own to la comuna Providencia and walked around some. It’s really an incredible place with all kinds of everythings everywhere. Lots of very nice restaurants and little shops and parks. I said earlier that Santiago me parece Mexico, and it does in ciertas formas, but Providencia, a wealthy area reminded me of somewhat wealthy areas of the US. I’m not sure that I’ve been to any of those areas, but it had beautiful tree-lined streets, and nicer cars and big houses behind walls, also big condos or apartments behind walls. Very clean, very nice. Not overly fancy or anything, just nice. I guess you could also call that European. Sort of English-looking, maybe. Modern English. Also, today over melon I talked about many things with Luki and Ivan, including medications, medicinal herbs, religion, and many other cosas. Luki told me before that she is Catholic, but her daughters are Athiest. I didn’t want to tell her that my religion is, more or less, nature, and that so many things that other people see in god, I see in nature. I didn’t want to tell her this because I thought she might think I was some kind of crazy hippie American, but we were sitting there at the table over lunch, and she said that exact thing; she believes that god is nature, and vice-versa. I was blown away, but very excited, of course. Ivan is an atheist, but he very much respects the natural world. Also, today we learned that in the next month or two they are completely changing the bus system in Chile. Instead of crazy buses that run all over and just have a list of the streets they go in the windshield so that you have to try and read the list as it goes by, they’re going to have a color-coded system with a different color for each district, and one color for inter-district buses. And they’re going to have all new buses, cause some of the ones they have right now are old Mercedes Benz buses from the 60s or 70s. I’m looking forward to understanding how to get around, even though now that I know some main place names and have a map (thanks to the study center) I do feel a lot more comfortable. Okay, well I need to go to bed, but yesterday I forgot that I meant to write one little thing, and that is that Luki and Ivan are not married. They have been together for 40 years and have 2 children together, but they were never married. This is partly because of Luki’s feminist point of view (though she told me that in Chile women never take their husbands’ last names. They do in Argentina, and I think they do in Mexico, too, but not in Chile), but largely because in Chile divorce just became legal in 2004, and when Luki and Ivan met, he was legally married, though separated from his wife, and now 40 years later he’s still legally married to a woman who he hasn’t seen in some 45 years or so. Luki said Ivan still hasn’t gotten divorced because they don’t feel like they really need to bother, and besides that they haven’t seen the woman in so long. Okay, esta tarde y tengo que estudiar unas cositas, I have an oral exam tomorrow for placement in Spanish classes next week.

Buenas noches,

Sophie

1/26/07 1:10 AM

host family

1/24/07 11:29 PM

Day 2 in Santiago. Met my host family. Very nice. The wife, Lukí (short for Lucrecia), picked me up at La Pontificia Catholic U. I had a million things about them and my day to say a minute ago, but then I started listening to music and forgot it all. Well, their names are Lucrecia and Iván. They’re retired and I guess their in their sixties, though Luki I would never have guessed. If I didn’t know she had a 35 year old daughter I would assume she was in her 40s or so. Her face is lined, but she doesn’t look old. They lived in Switzerland for 14 years, doing some kind of business something that I didn’t understand (I understand about 60% or so of what I hear. Well, maybe more. I think I’m getting concepts pretty well but am losing lots of detalles. Yesterday Hebrew words kept popping into my head, but today I’m doing fine, though I think I’ve lost a lot of vocabulary and grammar in the last year and a half that I’ve gone without a Spanish class). They moved back to Chile about 12 years ago, but their youngest daughter married a Swiss man and lives there now. Their older daughter (hey have 2) studied abroad in Santa Monica, CA and met a Spaniard from the Canary Islands while she was there, and so she lives in the Canary Islands now. I am their 10^th exchange student. Luki says she was sort of lonely and bored after her daughters moved out, and her youngest suggested she start taking in exchange students, so she did and they love it. It sounds like they’ve had a lot of kids from Santa Cruz and had some funny stories about vegans and surfers and kids trying to ride bikes out here. They live in a condo in Ñuñoa, which is the one middle class district here (like in Mexico, there is a HUGE gap between the upper and lower class here in Chile, but the gap is slowly being filled by a growing middle class). The condo is small, but pretty comfortable. I think my room is almost exactly the size of a single dorm at Merrill, for those of you who know what that means. And I have my own bathroom, which is by the front door, across the apartment from my room. My window looks out on THE most beautiful scene! I took like 10 pictures but none of them seemed to capture it. Right below my window (we’re on the 3^rd floor) is a garden, and then next door is a kind of funky wooden house with an old-looking red tin roof. It’s yard is OVERFLOWING with grape vines and all kinds of fruit trees, so that I can’t see any of the houses next to it, and then they all have tree-ey yards, too, so that I can just see a roof here and there for about a block, and then jetting above the trees are these new big apartment buildings, then kind that have like 30 floors, with cranes working on them. They’re sort of peachy/orange colored and then behind those are the Andes, shrouded in smog that dissipated a little bit as the day went on. They’re so much more sudden than the Sierras. You can’t see the highest peaks of the Sierras because of the many different levels of foothills, but you can see straight to some pretty big mountains here. I guess there are some foothills winding up, but they don’t mask the really big parts of the mountains. I had written on my EAP family placement questionnaire that I really like a lot of natural light, and I’m really glad that I wrote that.

Ivan is a retired policeman and may be the friendliest man I’ve ever met. I guess most of the people who live in this building are retired policemen and their families. Apparently he’s pretty well-read and likes novels by Chileans. He also has 3 TV shows that he watches: 24, Prison Break, and Lost. I thought that was kind of cute. Luki is also a very, very friendly woman. She was telling me that she relates better to young people and children than anyone else. I was realizing over dinner that something about the very core of her reminds me of my mom’s friend Bonnie. Or maybe it was just her haircut. I’m not sure. And something about the quality of her laugh and her smile remind me of my friend Lara. Maybe it’s just a South American thing. She was saying that she doesn’t want to spend her retirement watching TV and sitting around the house, so she volunteers in a house for children with cancer. She is also a big fan of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s first and current female president. She said that she voted for her because “soy buena feminista.” They also eat fairly healthy which is great. The whole organic/sustainability thing hasn’t really hit here yet, but she said she always cooks fresh vegetables, they don’t eat much red meat, and they have whole grain bread (I was shocked!) and she started talking to me a little bit about climate change, and how important recycling is (they do recycle! At least in Ñuñoa…). She’s also very accommodating. Almost more than I’m comfortable with because I was expecting to have to adapt to their way of life, but she keeps telling me how adaptable she is.

It’s way too early to tell, but right now I don’t think that I’m going to stay here after the Intensive Language Program. The deal is that the UC study center down here assigns the UC students each to a family for the first 5 or so weeks we’re here, during which time we participate in the aforementioned ILP, but after that we have to find out own housing. If the family we live with for the ILP invites us back, we can stay with them for the full year or 6 months, or we can find another family, or rent an apartment with friends (gringos or chilenos) or live in a boarding house. The universities here do not have dorms because the vast majority of the students live with their families (40% of Chile’s population lives in Santiago so most students are from the city). I really like these guys (from the first day) but a) I’m not used to being waited on, and cooked for, and served. I like being a little more independent, and it is just the beginning, but I get the distinct feeling that Luki really wants to do some hardcore mothering. B) they don’t have internet in the house (which is supposed to be almost as common an amenity in Chile as in the US). C) I guess this is just a variation of A, but it’s so strange to live in a house with parent-like people. I don’t know if I can handle it. So like I said, I may be jumping the gun with this after just one day with these people, especially when I didn’t even have any classes today, but I’m just thinking.

What else? We went to the supermarket today to buy me soy milk. It was similar to home, with a million different brands and a deli and huge, etc, but like in Mexico, they store milk in cartons on an unrefrigerated shelf, and unlike in Mexico, they sell milk in bags; like pouches. Those are also on the shelf.

70% of the music here is American. 15% is Mexican. 10% is French and any other kind of South American. 5% is Shakira. I haven’t heard any Chilean bands yet.

Actually, the Shakira thing is just a rumor. I haven’t hear any Shakira yet. They listen to a radio station that mostly plays American 70s Music. Well, I guess ABBA isn’t American, but it’s in English.

It’s also nice to be in the heat again. I really need to learn Celsius. Ivan told me that it was 30 C today which he translated to being about 90 F. I love feeling the sun again, though they’ve got a pretty big hole in their ozone down here, so I guess I gotta start wearing sunscreen, but it’s nice being able to sleep with only sheets for blankets again. Okay, well I have an oral proficiency test in Spanish tomorrow at La Catolica, so I ought to go to bed. Buenas noches.

-Sophie 1/25/07 12:28 AM

P.S. mom, they loved the bowl and the book. Luki’s really into photography so the pictures were great.

new bloggity blog

Ok, Travel Blog confused me and didn't work on my computer, so I followed Jesse Lee's example and started this blog on here. I hope it will be better, and this way I can add photos to my letters home, and I can put up all of my writings in one place so that people can go back and read them, cause I guess I left a lot of people off of my letter list before. So here I go experimenting around with this new blog!