I’ve been in Santiago three days now, and it’s going pretty well. The flight on Sunday was quite nice – we were on a DreamLiner with a pretty good entertainment selection (I watched McFarland, I’m a sucker for inspirational sports movies) and a neat window I’d never seen before – instead of a physical shade, you could press a button to make the window darker or clear. It meant that they didn’t have to ask people to raise or lower them, too! Despite the flights having been late every day that week, our flight actually landed about 40 minutes early, and I got my pre-arranged shuttle to my host family’s house. They’re in a pretty central area, Providencia – a very nice residential area, 15 minutes walk from the school my Spanish classes are at. Maria, my age, speaks English well (she worked in New Zealand for several months last year and her brother is now off on a round the world trip going the other direction to me!) but her mother doesn’t, so there’s some positive pressure to speak Spanish in the house which will be good for me. It’s very relaxing having a proper house to stay in, although I do get pretty tense being a houseguest, especially with the language barrier! I get breakfast and dinner at the house each day, which works well because I can go for lunch with other students during the day or just grab a sandwich. They’re very nice and have taken me grocery shopping and we’ve been eating dinner together. I’ve been eating a fairly sugary cereal called estrellitas, or little stars – I thought it was going to be like corn flakes but it’s way more processed and has a sticky sugary taste. Saying that makes me want Nutri-grain!
I had my first lesson Monday morning, placed in the beginner class with three others – I’m in the middle of the range. It was quite a bit of effort doing Spanish for four hours first thing, but I think it’ll be a solid learning experience. I think I was ready for some more structured time, and this will work pretty well with school in the mornings and afternoons off. I walked around a bit the last few afternoons and the city is quite hazy, it feels like there’s dust in the air, but nothing like Beijing. The tall building in this photo is maybe six-ten blocks away?
The haze is much worse in the afternoons – as I walk to school in the morning I can see a mountain quite clearly (turns out it’s one of the Andes!) and in the late afternoon it’s almost invisible. Despite this, there are tons of bike commuters – the city seems very flat, and there are separated bike lanes along the street, which both help. Traffic is pretty terrible too, walking along at ~6pm there are just cars sitting still for minutes at a time. There’s an Israeli woman in my class who moved to Santiago to live with her Chilean boyfriend, on the outskirts of the city somewhere, and it takes her one-two hours to drive in to school in the mornings, depending on traffic!
I’ve been taking a mini thermos of instant coffee to school every morning (thanks Mum!) A couple people have complained that the coffee in Chile is terrible, and it’s true that the instant stuff at the school is horrific. I went with Rona (the Israeli woman) to a cafe across the street from the school today and tried an espresso, it was ok but (sigh) not as good as the ones Pat makes. Later, after the visit to Pablo Neruda’s house, we stopped at Starbucks, and again I had a drinkable but not great espresso – then in the evening I went out to a cafe with my hosts and had a coffee with a mix of chocolate, condensed milk and something else I didn’t recognize (maizan? manzar?). Nice but turned out too sweet for me! I’m not really a coffee connoisseur, as most people would probably agree – I’m generally happy to just put enough sugar and milk in to cover up any flaws, so it seems fine to me. Some other students mentioned how all the milk here is UHT and they hate it, but I hadn’t even noticed – of course, I have been buying UHT milk for a couple years now in a fairly hopeless attempt to stop it going sour in my fridge before I finish the carton.
The classes I am taking go from 9am-1pm every day – although this week it’s 9am-2pm and none on Thursday, because it’s a national holiday commemorating a war. Most of the students are actually my age or older, which is great – I feel like some of them could still stand to put more effort into speaking Spanish instead of English, but that’s mostly their problem and I’ll just avoid them outside class, basically. The classes are very small, only three of us usually, which is pretty good. Amusingly enough the English guy in my class wishes we did more grammar and less conversation practice, which wouldn’t suit me at all – but of course I have a huge advantage in already speaking French and knowing all the grammatical concepts like reflexive verbs, different tenses, etc. I like the teachers, and I think I’m understanding the pronunciation rules (they’re very straightforward, just different to English and so take a bit of remembering). I keep reaching for French words when I don’t know the Spanish, which works just often enough to encourage me! I should be doing more practice outside of class, but I think after two weeks even without extra practice I’ll be able to get by for the rest of my trip. This week we are only using present tense, I think next week we’ll learn past tense.
Today (on an organized trip with the school) I visited Pablo Neruda’s house – or at least, the one in Santiago. It was really cool – reminded me of some Gaudi architecture in Barcelona. There was a short movie about him at the house, and I had no idea he was such a prominent politician as well as a poet – I might really have to pick up some of his stuff. On Saturday the school has organized a trip out of the city to his two other houses, in Valparaiso and Isla Negre. My host family both said separately that the Isla Negra house is their favourite – I’m looking forward to it! We weren’t allowed to take photos inside the house, but here’s some of the outside (it’s really three houses connected by stairways and terraces).
Tomorrow for the holiday, Maria is going to show me around a little, check out the Metro and nearby shopping center, etc. I’ll also try going for a run – I want to go in the morning because it gets much hazier later in the day, but I’m not planning to be up early enough to go before classes at 9am!