First things first- I returned to class and had my first full week of school two weeks ago. The viceroy/principal of the school ordered the professors to hold class regardless if students were attending. Since at this point my parents were starting to worry that they paid a semester’s tuition for no class, I’m glad classes got started again. However, the Chilean students were striking, so my classes were populated by the international students and few Chileans not taking part in the strike. The next week, the humanities students voted to temporarily suspend the strike- So in the month and a half I’ve been here my I’ve gone from 50 students in each class to 2.5 weeks of no class to 15 students back to 50.
Unrelated photo of the Bank of Chile workers striking:
I held off on posting another entry for about a week waiting until I had something interesting to write about- then three days in a row, boom! Blog topics galore!
Part 1: Prueba
Monday I had my first Chilean test- I hope I effectively compared and contrasted the Atacama and Patagonia regions, described the rise and fall of salitre mining in the north and sheep herding in the south, and enumerated the failures of the Bourbon reformation in the Aisen region. Can you?
Part 2: Performance night
Monday afternoon I returned home to find the power was out- my host dad forgot to pay the bill! Anticipating an internet-less evening, I took out my host sister Cami’s guitar, strummed one cord and snap went the D string. I asked Cami when the last time she had restrung it and if she knew how for her particular guitar. Answers: never, no idea. I spent the next two hours restringing all the strings(yes two hours, it was my second time) with the last twenty minutes spent sitting on the curb under the street light.
The lack of electricity led to one of the best nights I’ve had with my host family. Instead of going to bed early, we decided it was performance night. Cami and I swapped the keyboard and guitar back and forth while the 9 and 10 year olds just made silly noises from the couch. She loves Justin Beiber and Avril Lavigne while the 10 year old cannot get enough of Linkin Park and Greenday. Regardless of my opinion concerning their musical preferences, all of their songs are really easy to follow on guitar and piano (Greenday uses the same 4 chords in all of their songs. All of them.). Thirty minutes into the terribly off-key singing and minimal bleeding from the ears, the phone beeped, announcing the return of electricity- sending the boys to the tv, Cami to her room to belt out Hannah Montana, mom to her room for her telenovela and me to mine to catch the end of monday night football.
Before I get into part 3, here is a photo from the day hike I took on Saturday with Samantha and new guy Seth:
Seth and I on the mountain- with the lovely smog of Santiago behind us. We like to pretend it is mist
The aforementioned third installment: The prospective pickpocket
On my bus ride home on Tuesday a young guy sits next to me on a relatively empty bus (plenty of free seats other places). After about three minutes he asked me if the bus was going to the mall- it was and I told him as much. He asked me if I was Chilean, to which I responded, does it look like it? I’m wearing shorts? (It was 78 degrees outside and all the Chileans were still in pants and sweaters). The rest of our conversation went a little like this:
Exchange pleasantries- where are you from, what are you doing here, how old are you sort of things…. He claimed he was 25- he didn’t look a day over 19- and that he robbed people for a living. He then points to his belt buckle-area and grabs what looks like a rectangular cell phone-shaped object and tells me it’s his gun. At this point I’m thinking, ok, this could be an interesting bus ride.
He takes out a wallet he “just stole,” that just happened to have his ID in it already. He asks to see my wallet, so I take mine out, show him how empty and cruddy it is. He looks at it for a second and agrees.
Aside: Chileans are hard to understand. Chilean young people are tremendously hard to understand, even for someone as well versed in lazy spanish as me. There are moments during this conversation where I don’t really catch what he is trying to say.
We continue to shoot the breeze back and forth about life and he scoots closer to me on the two-person seat, sees my camera in my pocket and asks to see it. I say no, he asks why- well, there it is mine and there is nothing to take a photo of. He then says he is leaving with my camera- pointing to his crotch again, now covered by his jacket. He slips his hand under his jacket and motions to me to give him the camera. I ask him if he is going to shoot me on the bus in front of 15 people, and reach my hand under his coat and touch his gun-less hand.
He gets off at the next stop.
Paul- 1, Wannabe Chilean robber- 0
Also there was an 5.5 earthquake on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning- when I woke up on Wednesday morning I thought I had dreamt it- felt like mild turbulence. My first earthquake experience- Take that east coast!
Thats all for now- tomorrow I am going to the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert then up to Valparaiso for three days to celebrate Fiestas Patrias- Chilean Independence weekend!
Smile more,
Paul
