A la Playa!!!

A big item on my to-do list was the beach in Viña del Mar. On Sunday it was 85 degrees and perfect beach weather. Diego gave me a beach recommendation and Katy and I decided to go for it. We took the bus from Santiago to Viña del Mar and then a micro to Reñaca. We stopped at a typical greasy Chilean restaurant for lunch and chowed down on a completo gigante and a churrasco with fries. The completo was much bigger than my hand but somehow we managed to finish everything. Once we felt sufficiently disgusting we headed to the beach and took in the sunshine. After an hour we could already see sunburn lines so we lathered ourselves with sunscreen but it was too late; the hole in the southern ozone took advantage of our reflecting white skin. The beach was fantastic and I loved soaking up the sun while thinking about the cold weather in Boston.

Midnight Sushi

At 7:30 Meera, Katy, and I decided that we would spend another hour working and then eat sushi in an all you can eat restaurant that we have been wanting to try. We called Maca and invited her and met up with her at 9. She and Rodrigo didn't like the place that we suggested so we were flexible and decided to go to a different place. We arrived at Meera's suggestion at 10:45 but it was too expensive so we walked to Rodrigo's suggestion at 11. We sat down and got ready to order and then the waiter told us that they were out of avocado. Several people were really unhappy about that so we decided to leave. It was 11:30 and we still didn't have any sushi.. Maca, Rodrigo, Katy, and I went and got their car and called in an order to a place in Plaza Nunoa. We waited until 12:15 for it to be ready and then drove to Becca's apartment. We were starving and devoured 110 pieces of sushi among 7 of us..

Time is Ticking

On Tuesday I realized that there are only 2 weeks of classes left. After classes end I will be heading to Patagonia and to Buenos Aires and will only have a few days in Santiago. Where has time gone?? I am not ready to be done in Santiago!! With that in mind I made a list of everything I still wanted to do and got down to business.

Tuesday after dance I walked from downtown to Bellavista with several friends. We ate at a wacky Peruvian themed restaurant and then explored the neighborhood before touring Pablo Neruda's house. I am very familiar with Bellavista at night- it is the clubbing district of Santiago. But by day it is a tranquil, tree-lined neighborhood full of restaurants, cafes, and boutiques. There is a lot of street art and it is easy to imagine why Santiago's small number of poets and artists live here.

Pablo Neruda's Santiago house (he had 3 houses) is on a hill in Bellavista. The house is built in several sections on the side of the hill and has great views of the city framed by the Andes. The house is not as eclectic as his house in Isla Negra because a large section of the house and several of his collections were burned during the coup in 1973 but it is still full of unique and thought-provoking items.

La Serena

The last Tufts trip of the semester took us 8 hours north to La Serena. On Friday we took the bus, stopped in a small beach town for lunch, and then bused another 4 hours to reach La Serena. We had free time to hang out on the beach but it was a little cold so not very many people went swimming.

Saturday we had to visit the routine small plaza, church, and cemetery. Seriously, every Tufts trip has included these 3 boring visits. We also visited an artist, a solar oven based restaurant, and a dam before arriving at lunch (always the highlight!) at Pisco Elqui. We ate a great lunch on a patio at the pisco distillery and then toured the facilities. Pisco is distilled from wine and mostly used for Pisco Sours. The best part of the tour was drinking Pisco Sours and watching and extremely cheesy film about a grape's life as it was turned into Pisco. Afterwards we visited Mistral's tomb (another necessary part of a Tufts trip: dead poets) and then drove to another small town. At night we went up to an observatory on top of a hill because the night sky in La Serena is the clearest in the whole world. We got to look through top-notch telescopes and were able to see Jupiter with 2 rings and 3 moons as well as stars that appeared to be single stars but were really 100s of stars in a cluster. The observatory was like elementary school science class on steroids!

We spent most of Sunday on the bus but we stopped in a beach town for lunch. We had shrimp empanadas, fish, rice, ice cream, and fruit juices, which would have been great except for the 9 people that ended up with food poisoning. I would like to thank my stomach for not succumbing!!

Wednesday, November 4

I decided that Wednesday was the kind of day that you always see in admissions catalogues. "A Typical day in Santiago" or "A Study Abroad Student's Daily Life". And you never believe that it all is on the same day.
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9:30 -wake up and go for a jog in Las Condes- I don't particularly love jogging but I do like getting some exercise after all of the greasy food that I eat here. And jogging is a great way to see different neighborhoods and people watch.
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11:30- meet 2 other students to do research for Foro de Salud- The health classes that I was going to teach fell through because of recruitment and scheduling issues. I am using my English teaching position as my internship for credit but I am still trying to stay involved with the Foro organization. Today I met 2 other girls and we worked on their research on the morning after pill. We went around to pharmacies in one district and asked if they had the pill, if you needed a prescription, and how much it cost and then recorded observations. I was surprised about how available the pill was even though the cost varied a lot between pharmacies.
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4:30 -Spanish Quiz- We had quiz number 4 in my Spanish class at U Catolica today. The quiz was on vocabulary, subjunctive triggers, and direct and indirect articles. The class has really helped me cement my grammar skills and nicely compliments my experiences with spanish outside the class.
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7:30- Maca's Birthday- We celebrated Maca's 22nd birthday with her, her family, her university friends, and some of Rodrigo's friends. It was an interesting mix of people because the ages and life stages were very spread out. There was lots of food and great cake!
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12:30- Miercoles Po- We helped clean up after Maca's party and hung out with her until it was an acceptable time to head to Miercoles Po. This week's theme was Mardi Gras and it was held at the ex-fabrica, an old factory that has been turned into a great disco. Within 30 seconds of arriving we ran into Diego and several of his friends..surprise! It was a really fun party with great music and lots of dancing.

Asado with my Students

Last Monday when I went to my high school to teach English some of my students invited me to their class asado (Chilean bbq). Apparently it is acceptable to skip a whole day of school to have an afternoon bbq at the English teacher's house. I decided that it would be really interesting to see how the kids act outside of school and of course, there would be delicious food.
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I immediately found the house because of the loud reggaeton music that was flooding the street. The kids let me into the teacher's house and told me that she had gone to the store. Interesting choice to let 15 wild kids stay in her house alone. I was a little disgusted by the way the raw meat was being cut without cutting boards and without washing the knives but I pretended not to notice. I washed the strawberries that I brought but everyone told me that I had to cut of the stems and let them sit in sugar before they would eat them. Again, I went with it. We ate steak, choripan (sausage in bread), salad, potatoes, and berries and drank fanchop (beer and orange soda).

After eating the English teacher closed all the blinds and turned the music up and told the kids to start dancing. There was some chanting and eventually the English teacher and I had to dance for everyone's entertainment. All the couples starting dancing and I was surprised how much they considered to be appropriate in front of a teacher. I was given regaetton dance lessons before the whole show was over. It was a very entertaining experience and one that gave me a window into "flaite" (gangster-esque) youth culture.

Halloweekend

Happy Halloween!

Our celebration of this non-Chilean holiday started early-Tuesday afternoon. Katy and I baked delicious chocolate cupcakes and frosted them with brown, white, orange, and green Halloween designs. There was a ghost, a spider, a bat, a witch hat, 2 monsters, a black cat, etc. We gave them to Diego for his birthday. Giving them to him was a little bit of a scene because we showed up to his apartment in bunny and zebra costumes on our way to a Halloween party. The Halloween party was thrown by Miercoles Po', the organization that has parties at different clubs every Wednesday night for foreigners and Chileans. This week's party was aptly themed Halloween Po'. (Po is a word that Chileans say at the end of every thought: "Si po, huevon, vamanos a Miercoles Po).

On Friday Katy and I went to Patronato- a funky fashion neighborhood reminiscent of Harajuku- and found costumes. The best part about our costumes is that we bought them at normal stores and the people there would not consider them costumes. After costume hunting we met up with Giorgette, a girl from our dance class, and went to an Arabic restaurant with her. After lunch I met up with Javiera, my tandem partner, and we went to ice cream and sat outside to enjoy the sun.

Friday was also Aaron's birthday so we celebrated. It was a fun mix of Americans, Chileans, Australians, and Europeans. We all met at a hostel and after awhile walked to a club in Bellavista. It was another succesful night of dancing! We ended the night Chilean style by eating chorillana at 4:30am.

Saturday was Halloween so of course we had to dress up and go out! I was a zebra, Katy a leopard, Becca Cleopatra, Emily Lady Gaga, and Meera ??? (maybe a drag queen). We got ready together and then split ways because we were going to different parties. It was a fun night even though we didn't end up dancing. Highlight of the night: getting asked out by a Chilean cop. Not professional behavior!