Getting around

As the last couple days have been very beautiful, I´ve been able to get a few decent shots of the mountains. The first few are taken very close to my home.

Little children´s gardens are to be found on practically every block. I believe they are just daycare centers, but perhaps they function as kindergartens as well.

This next photo was taken from the little park right in front of my house.

Now we come to my university, La Católica as we say, in particular Campus San Joaquín, where I believe all my classes will be housed.

This is a view of the economics and administrative sciences building.

This is perhaps a more realistic/pessimistic view of the same building. Beauty is in the eye of the photographer, I think.

A tractor driving down one of the university streets.

And here am I, reading The World Is Flat, quite happily sitting in the warm sun after leisurely touring the campus and drinking an 80 cent soft drink. Foodstuffs here tend to be a bit cheaper than in the U.S.

Here is the park in front of my house, where I can update my blog using my home´s wireless internet, or attempt to juggle without getting waylaid by the cute little neighborhood kids, such as Nicolás. ¿Me la aprestas una?

Of course, one has to get to know the neighborhood dogs a bit too. The tiny white one is a bit blurry because it couldn´t stay still. When it tried to kiss Nicolás, he was sure he´d been bitten. ¡Me mordió! he said in tears. Oh, niños.

Chile, American style

Octopus & ósculos santos

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I will let my words be few this time. A lot has happened in the past several days. Although I wish that I could document all of it, trying to do so would leave all of you bored and me agotado. Plus, I have to give everyone a reason to talk to me on Skype every now and again. First is a view of a silver shrine in La Catedral de Santiago. Drinking a leisurely coffee (un cortado) with Rodrigo and María Inés outside in the Plaza de Armas was grand as well.

Next we have a picture of my house, along with the view out of my bedroom window.

At the large grocery store one can buy whole octopi, as well as fish that look like the pescado of the Learnables. Unfortunately, I think that unlike what that prestigious curriculum would have young impressionable gringos to believe, Chileans remove the meat before cooking it. :D

I´m quite impressed by how many family members I´ve already met in my 5 days of being here. Last night we had a wonderful barbeque (asado) at the house of one of Rodrigo´s sisters. The meat was tasty, the chat was lively--even if I understood only a minute fraction of it--and the hosts were as friendly as can be. Perhaps the most annoying part of the evening was trying to find non-alcoholic beverages with which to slake my thirst. Welcome to a fiesta a la chilena, I suppose. Here are my Chilean parents looking good, as well as Rodrigo and I wearing Demócrata Cristiana pins. That humored him a good deal, perhaps mostly to set of María Inés, who is of a different political party. I won´t even start to bore you with a description of all the political conversation that I´ve had in the last several days. "¿Te gusta Obama?" ¡Oy!

The cat was proof that meat did indeed make an appearance.




This evening Rodrigo and I visited a wonderful little artesans´ market. There was an amazing amount of artistic talent present. I especially enjoyed the fact that you could watch the artists as work as they hewed away at a chunk of wood, transforming it into an object of great beauty and worth. Clay in the potter´s hands...



Last night at this time I didn´t yet know where I would go to church. I spent a good while searching online for a good church nearby, and by God´s providence I found la Iglesia Bíblica Bautista, which is less than a kilometer from where I live. I made it in time for Sunday School, which was on family matters as discussed in 1 Tesalonicenses. I met many friendly Chileans, and even got invited to go ice skating with some of the young people this Saturday. Interestingly enough, one of the pastors is a gringo from Wisconsin, who came to Chile 30-some years ago to do mission work here. He was very pleasant, and we chatted it up a bit in English. Also, I believe this was the first time I really obeyed the biblical injunction to greet the brethren with a holy kiss (un ósculo santo as the version read at the church would have it. That made me smile a bit inside.). I will say that the friendliness of Latino greetings makes one wish that Americans weren´t so, shall we say, fríos.


It was a good day. So much for the few words.

Conociéndo a los muchachos de la Casa Payaso

¡Hola! ¿Cómo están ustedes? No he llevado mucho tiempo acá, pero creo que ya voy aprendiéndo mucho. I´m typing this all up on my keyboard set to Spanish, so some things are changed up a bit. Oh well, I´ll do my best anyway (ha--as I started to type that, I began typing "I{ll...."). It´s getting a bit late here, and I do need to get up early in order to try to arrange some of my student visa things, but I wanted to give just a bit of a taste on my experience in Chile so far.

First off, I will say that the country--specifically la cordillera de los Andes, as they say--is marvelous. Flying in, I was like a little kid, pressing my face against the airplane window, gawking at the beauty of these majestic mountains. The snowy peaks stretch as far as the eye can see, and the Rockies that I have seen pale in comparison to these. In addition, spectacular views of the cordillera abound. This picture certainly doesn´t do justice to the view, but here is a snapshot of what I see all the time.


This picture, in fact, was taken in front of Casa de Payaso, where the son (Gonzalo) of my Chilean dad Don Rodrigo works heading up a clown/juggling/circus troupe. Rodrigo showed me around the place last night. It is an old, old house with high ceilings and colorful walls. One room is filled with clown garb, another houses all sorts of miscellaneous equipment, including a bunch of juggling clubs, unicycles, contraptions like bouncy stilts--the list goes on. Today I was invited to go with the troupe to a private event as part of the tech team. Good one, right? Anyway, I went along, and had a grand old time doing so. First, I hung out with the guys at Casa de Payaso. We chatted it up, I juggled with one of the guys, and we played a little foosball (they called it taki taki or something--there´s a lot of vocab I´m trying to keep up with!).

The show (pronounced "cho" :D) that they were putting on tonight was a percussion performance--like NU´s Boomshaka. These guys are crazy. One guy did some fantastic sound effects and beatboxing, while the other guys onstage used ladders, buckets, barrels, a wire mesh, and some sticks to put on a tremendous performance. I will give you a bit of the backstage video so that you can see for yourself. Technically, I was helping to hand things to the performers and then take them back when they were done. Basically, I did nothing, but I got to wear a dark suit that was way to small for me, and hang out backstage. That´s all for now folks! Enjoy the talent.

¡Chau!

Since blogging is now the rage...

I am creating my own blog. My family has a blog, David & Kelsea have a blog, Ruth & Adam have a blog, Sharayah has a blog--why can't I have my own blog? I demand my rights! Just kidding... I think that I have better reasons than that for having my own little publishing space. It is interesting, though, to see how true it is that everyone wants to upload his own content these days (The World Is Flat, anyone?). My reasons for jumping heartily on the bandwagon are as follows:

1) I like writing. Blogging is an easy way to write things that people might actually read.

2) I am going to Chile! I will try to upload pictures and stories of my adventures in the Southern Hemisphere, instead of trying to remember it all in chronological order when I return.

3) etc. :)

These past several weeks have been great at home, as I've enjoyed Sharayah's visit (including bowling with the fam and Meredith),

going to my brothers' baseball games,

and playing tennis with Eric, among other enjoyable activities.

It was a ridiculously short summer, that much is true, but I am excited. In less than two days I will be living in a Chilean home, speaking Spanish with my new family, and layering up to survive the not-so-arctic Chilean winter.

And now off to declare an economics minor before flying halfway across the world.

¡Hasta la vista!