New Apartment, Iloca and Pichilemu: A Visual Tour

Pictures of the New Apartment (4 photos, starting from the top and working down): Guestroom, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen/dining room






































































Iloca (2 photos): Coastal beach town.
We took a day trip with some professors from the university.
































Pichilemu: Famous Surf town. We stayed in a boat shaped hostal on the coast, ate yummy Mexican food, went surfing (no pictures), and horse back-riding.

The Fital and Our New Apartment

This weekend we went to the Fital, Talca's version of a state fair. It is advertised as an international fair, but the international elements seemed to be rather limited. Talca's agriculture side played a starring role. As soon as you walked in you found yourself in a lot of tractors and other farming equipment such as seed spreaders and pesticide applicators. There were rides of questionable working order. They all seemed a bit rusty and in varying levels of disrepair. Stray dogs chased the roller coasters and food stands dotted the perimeter selling beer, candy apples and cotton candy. They also had a Cumbia band and a Mexican Ranchero band which brought a large following from the countryside. You could see a lot of people walking around with their cowboy hats and boots. A cowboy in Chile is called a huaso, but the term is apparently somewhat derogatory and not appropriate for foreigners to throw around in the way Chileans seem to do. All of Talca and the surrounding cities seemed to be at the fair. I've never seen such large crowds in this city.

We spent the rest of our weekend scouring furniture and home goods stores to find all the necessities for our new apartment. We couldn't be more excited for the move. We are currently renting a room in a house, but this weekend we will finally be moving into our new apartment. It's in a new sector of the city, so we'll have to re-learn the bus and colectivo system, but it's still close to the university. The apartment is basically a guest house, semi-attached to a family home. It has two bedrooms (or a bedroom and an office) and a pretty basic kitchen and bathroom. It has the majority of the furniture, but we will have to do some shopping to stock the kitchen and fill in whatever gaps.

The best feature of the apartment is probably the fact that the calefont is outside. The calefont is a hot-water heater and anytime you want hot water you have to grab a match and light it. It terrifies me. Before leaving for Chile, I was told multiple stories about people who didn't know how to use them and consequently died. If you don't light it, but keep the gas running, your house will fill up with gas and basically suffocate you. Chilean regulations say the calefont must be outside for safety reasons, but for convenience's sake most are installed within the house so you don't have to go out in the rain with a set of matches everytime you want hot water. Lucas is slightly peeved that our calefont is outside, but I will personally sleep more soundly at night knowing that my calefont is less likely to kill me.

And below is a picture from orientation of me throwing a pot with some local potters outside of Santiago:

Valparaiso

This last weekend we spent Friday and Saturday nights in Valparaiso, which is due west of Santiago. As Wikipedia says, "built upon dozens of steep hillsides overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Valparaiso boasts a labyrinth of streets and cobblestone alleyways, embodying a rich architectural and cultural legacy." Enter Figure 1a. This image demonstrates the Pacific Ocean, a bit of the steep hillsides and a small degree of rich architectural legacy.

Figure 1a: A few of the hills of Valparaiso

There are a few less than 20 distinct hills of Valparaiso, all of which are situated around a flat area next to the ocean. The lower area is the commercial centre, and houses are stacked willy-nilly upon the hills. Our hostel for the weekend was in Cerro Concepcion. Cerro Concepcion was considered some years ago to be a good example of the "real" Valparaiso. This means it became attractive to classes of citizens with increasing amounts of wealth, turning "real" Valparaiso into what it is today: a pleasant, safe semi-bohemian area with some slick fusion restaurants. The hostel was quiet and rad, for it had three nice cats. These cats, while fully grown, were a bit small compared to what I'm used to. The cat that currently resides at home in California generally pushes the scale at somewhere in the 20lb range. And he's not fat, just big-boned. These cats couldn't have been more than 5lbs.

Many people talk about the bohemian nature of Valparaiso, but the only evidence I could see of that was some pretty street art. Figures 1b, 1c, and 1d were all on our walk up on down Cerro Concepcion. The cat in the window in figure 1b is a skinny doppelganger of the 20lb cat discussed above, by the way.

Figure 1b: Note the cat.

Figure 1c

Figure 1d

On Saturday we visited La Sebastiana, one of Pablo Neruda's three houses that are restored and administered as museums. The other two are in Santiago and Isla Negra, about 45 minutes south of Valparaiso. His houses are collections of the strange items that he gathered in a lifetime spent traveling around the world. Like a stuffed penguin he kept on his bar. Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside the house, so we can't show you the awesomeness. But it was awesome.

The best thing to do in Valparaiso as a tourist, though, is to simply wander around and marvel at the brightly colored houses built on the hillsides. It is tiring to walk up and down streets and stairs, but thankfully the city built a set of funicular elevators to help citizens up and down the steepest hills. Called ascensores in Spanish, some of them are over a 100 years old, and all of them look like rickety death traps. They are fragile wooden boxes that are pulled upwards by steel cables at an angle between 20 and 70 degrees. Figure 1e shows the view looking up from Ascensor Espiritu Santo.

Figure 1e: Looking upwards from the window of Ascensor Espiritu Santo

Here are a few other images from the weekend. Figure 1f shows the five of us from Talca enjoying a stately boat ride around the Valparaiso harbor.

Figure 1f: Me, Stefanie, Sam, Kerry, Marianne

Figure 1g shows a fuzzy dog and his fuzzy sweater we found on the way to La Sebastiana. Clearly a stray, he still looked pretty comfy both days we saw him.

Figure 1g: Fuzzywuzzy wuz his name

Figure 1h is the of a plate of chorrillana. It is some red meat, stacked on a layer of fried eggs and onions, stacked on some french fries. We had it a couple times, including at a restaurant that only served chorrillana. Mmmboy!

Figure 1h: Matt, Chorrillana, me

I'll finish this post by mentioning that we did get to the beach. It was the first time I've been in the water south of the equator, and the Pacific seemed pretty much the same as home. Cold, clear, and there were the same little crabs burrowed in the sand at water's edge that we see in Carpinteria. Just like home.

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.