Curico Wine Festival

This past Saturday we took a trip to the Curico, a town about an hour north of Talca by bus.  They were holding their annual wine festival in their central plaza, a plaza that the Rough Guide to Chile calls the "most beautiful plaza in Chile."  Wine festival in the prettiest plaza in Chile?  It sounded like our kind of scene, so we caught the bus north on Saturday morning.

Talca has a very compact city center, and to get from the bus station to the plaza we simply walked half a dozen blocks.  In the plaza there were booths set up around the the plaza selling wine tastings and food(of which the most popular item was several hunks of pork on a stick).  Wine tastings were 500 chilean pesos, which amounts to a little less than a dollar.  A bunch of meat on a stick was 1000p, which I felt was a pretty good deal.  The wine?  Yeah, it was good.  Like we'd know if wasn't.  My favorite drinks were the strawberry and honeydew melon juices that I bought at the end of the day.

In one corner of the plaza was a large stage.  Upon this stage Miss Curico Wine Festival was weighed in front of thouisands of people.  She weighed 52 full wine bottles.  After Miss Curico Wine Festival left the stage, a Colombian folklorico band played, and then the main event came on.  There were five teams of five people, who for seven minutes, squashed as much grape juice as they could with their feet in wooden tubs.  Only two people could stand in the tub at a time, so another person shoveled in grapes, and the other two took small buckets of grape juice that came out of a spigot in the wooden bucket to a large plastic measuring bucket.  It was phenomenal.

Tomorrow, we leave for a weekend in Vina del Mar to celebrate another teaching assistant's birthday.  

First week of classes!

I teach the conversation classes. I´m supposed to have around 150-200 students spread out through different sections. This week is orientation week so half my classes were canceled, so I don´t even know what my full schedule will look like quite yet, but I´m a bit anxious. I pride myself on being able to remember people´s names and inane details about them, but I´m afraid I´m going to be a disaster. After awhile, one awkward shy student looks the same as the next. A lot of them are simply mortified to speak English and at times I feel like the evil imperialist with a bullwhip forcing them to adopt my language and culture. I remember loathing Spanish class and I feel a tidalwave of guilt everytime one of them cringes when I call on them. BUT there are also wonderful students who get excited when I correct their English and get all giddy when they finally get the correct pronunciation. There is a lot of English in advertising and on tv and of course the majority of the high paying jobs require English, so the importance of learning English is not lost on even my shyest students, which definitely makes my job easier.

Explanation of sorts...

So, I arrived in Santiago early last week for orientation. It was a lot of wining and dining and totally excellent until we got down to business and all the hosts from everybody's universities appeared ready to plan curriculums save for mine from my university in Temuco. This was my university's first year in the program and they apparently did not understand the seriousness of the program and thus neglected to prepare in any capacity, much less to send a representative to Santiago. Luckily for me, though, the director of the commission is a terrifying woman and was able to get my university in Temuco to send someone on the next overnight bus. The representative, however, had just started at the university that week and knew nothing about the program much less the university itself. In talking to her it became evident that my time in Temuco would not be productive. The director and I decided that another placement would be the best option for me and here I am at the Universidad de Talca in Talca...

Talca is three hours south of Santiago in the farming district. It was described to me as Chile's Napa Valley. I have never been to Napa Valley so I can neither confirm nor deny that analogy, but I'll go with it. It's a relatively small city of a little under 200,000 people and reasonably compact. There is excellent public transportation and a walkable downtown. Overall, I haven't seen much of it save for the university (which definitely has a Pomona feel minus the obsessive landscaping), but I am told there are hot springs and some fun national parks. It's still my first week so I have time...

Just Kidding

Before Sam's Arrival in Chile

Placement Organization: Hey Samantha! You are going to be in Temuco, Chile, for 10 months teaching English. It is 9 hours south of Santiago by bus. It'll be grrreat!
Sam: OK. That sounds fabulous. So fabulous, that on my trip through Argentina and Chile in the latter months of 2008, I'll go out of my way to travel through Temuco, check out the city for a few days, and even put down a deposit on an apartment.

After Sam's Arrival in Chile

Sam: Great! I'm here and ready to go to Temuco!
Placement Organization: Yeah...about that...
Sam: What?
Placement Organization: You're not actually going to Temuco for the next 10 month, but we found another city that starts with a T. Talca! It is only 3 hours south of Santiago by bus! You'll note that 3x3 is 9, the number of hours that it would have taken to travel to Temuco. So, its like, pretty much the same. You'll hardly even notice.