American's do not play well with others

i have discovered a trend with Americans that goes beyond our political relationships with other countries to a much more individual level. Group projects, group papers, group presentations, group discussions, group group group. That is the weapon of choice here at least within the universities. in nearly every single one of my classes i have had to do at least one group paper, most of which determine at least half of my grade for the class.

now, this wouldn't be a problem,save for the fact that i hate group projects. And it's not just me, all of my fellow gringos feel the same. There's the organizational factor, who's going to do what, and when will we meet, who's emailing, printing, spellchecker, it's a disaster.


When a group gets a project, the gringos in the group usually try to figure out "ok whats the best way to divide up the work so its as individual as possible" Maybe this has to do with staunch individualism and self-reliance, but I'm beginning to see it more as a refusal to relay on other people and a desire for praise for doing something all alone and doing it well.

it goes beyond school work though. The level of grassroots organizing for a common goal is amazing. From students protesting education legislation or a community protesting housing, the ability of Chileans to organize and remain a coherent force is truly admirable. There have been a number of protests over the past 5 months, and almost every time, i think "this would never work in the US" mostly because people are very concerned about taking care of themselves and their family, we lack the ability to see ourselves as part of a greater social fabric.

is this outlook better or worse? i have no idea. i still dislike group papers, but at the very least, maybe i've learned a little about sharing, cooperation, taking one for the team, and speaking up to lead a group.

bus rides, vocanoes, and brothers

The past two weeks have been a blur of travel and changes in my house. Last weekend i went to Coquimbo and La Serena with some friends. These are two smallish towns about 6 hours north of Santiago. it was a lovely trip, we went to the beach, a gigantic cement cross on a hill, a fish market, and just wandered around. it was slightly more hectic than i had anticipated as we crammed more and more things into our long weekend, but still nice.
We came home early Sunday (Easter) which was surprisingly low key at my house. My sisters and i ate McDonalds for lunch, then we ate chocolate eggs my host dad had gotten us, then had hot dogs for dinner (side note: hot dogs in Chile are eaten with avocado, tomato, and mayonnaise. Delicious).
Monday brought the real excitement, the return of Sergio, my long lost host brother. it's all my host mom has been able to talk about for the past few weeks. When they came back from the airport at 9 am, i was dragged out of bed, pjs and all to meet my new hermano. He is 24, a chef who spends half of the year abroad, half in Chile (most recently he was working in Andorra). He is also a musician and is constantly playing, singing, or whistling something. He is also quite the chatter box which is great for me, i can use all the practice i can get. He is the polar opposite of my sister Vale (who just moved out into her new apartment). Sergio likes the country side, nature, controversial books and crazy music, while Vale likes the beach, going to dance clubs, shopping and regeton. it was an abrupt change from Vale to Sergio, but i think we will get along swimmingly.
Then this past weekend i had a trip with the program to Pucon, a delightful town 9/10 hours south. This was such a nice trip, mostly because i didn't need to plan anything, it was a real vacation. Some of the highlights were the natural hot springs (termas), the waterfalls, and rafting. But the big excursion was up Villarica, the active volcano next to the quaint little town. Now, i love a good hike as much as the next person, but i had no idea what i was getting myself into. We were outfitted with boots, helmets, wind proof pants and jackets, ice picks, and crampons (spiky things to put on our boots for the ice part of the journey) for the 8 hour trek. it was incredibly difficult with steep climbs, part of a glacier to get past, and razor sharp volcanic rocks. But the peek, or rather the crater at the top was phenomenal. There was smoke and suferic gasses coming out of the crater that burned our eyes and throats as we relished out accomplishments until we realized we had to climb back down. However, the climb down was made even cooler by the fact that we got to slide down part of the glacier on our butts with our ice picks in our hands. it was spectacular.
After all that adventure, the afternoon of our last day in Pucon i decided to embrace some personal time and wandered around the town by myself. i sat by the lake, ate a huge ice cream from a Swiss sweets shop, and spent a good deal of time talking with an artisan in the town who makes flowers out of wood. He sent me off with far more wooden flowers than anyone could ever need, but i plan on giving them to my host mom for mothers day.

Everyday Adventures

So I have been somewhat lax in my blogging, but this is because I have been having so many adventures. It was hard to decided which one to write about; wine tasting at Santa Carolina, hiking to a glacier in the Andes, eating chorillana (fries with egg, onion, and meat) in Valparaiso, or the numerous futbol games? But when I think of my Chilean adventures the past few weeks it is the tiny everyday challenges that I recall, and the small accomplishments I am most proud of. So without further adue I give a typcal daily adventure in Santiago...

8:00 Wake up and go into the kitchen where most days my breakfast is set up for me on a little tray. This consists of one or two fruits, ceareal with yogurt, or a grilled cheese sandwhich with a steaming cup of instant Nescafe coffee.

9:00 leave the house to catch the micro (city bus) one block from my house. Take the micro to the metro, throw self onto the metro because there are a millon other people on the platform, change lines. Try not to pass out in the sweltering heat of the metro. Read massive amounts of Mapuche history on public transportation.

9:30/9:40/10:00/Arive at the University depending on traffic and mysterious metro forces. Class. My classes are: Arte, Cultura, Estetica Mapuche (Mapuche are the indgenous people of Chile), Spanish, Cultural Urban Lanscape of Santiago, Cultural Diversity of Chile: Reality or Utopia?, Chilean Identity through the Media, Portugese. The fun part of these classes are that they are all in spanish (well, except Portugese), also Chileans LOVE group projects.

1:00-3:00 Go home via micro/metro for lunch, siesta, homework. Eat lunch outside, play with dogs, talk with Violet (the maid/house keeper person) who talks really fast and calls me mi hijta.

4:30 Back for more classes, runnng earands before going to the post office, puttng more money on my Bip (bus pass) figuring out weird University protocol/looking for offices.

6:00/7:00/8:00 Out to a movie, futbol game, shopping, ice cream with friends before the metro/micro ride home

8:00 Dinner with the family ethier outside or in my parents bedroom if its "cold" (70 counts as cold). We talk about our days, the news, cheese, and how Sergio is (my host brother who is in Spain, but coming home soon).

9:00/12:00 Homework, emails, CNN chile, and bed.

I figure everyday I make it out of my house then back home agian is a success. I love it here, I'm confused a lot of the time, but thats fun to! Just being in the hussle and bussle of the city, watching people on the metro, listening to the musicians who play on the buses, debating wether or not to get an empanada as a snack after class, talking with classmates in my broken (but improving) spanish, is an adventure in and of itself.

Colo-Colo

So much has been going on in the past two weeks, it's hard to pick just one thing to write about. Classes have started and I'm still trying to figure out my schedule, with two universities, each with multiple campuses, and sub-par organizational systems it's been insane trying to find class rooms and figuring out a schedule within the two week add-drop period. Right now, I'm taking a class called arte, cultura, estetica Mapuche which is basically a art history class focusing on Chile's indigenous people the Mapuche, then there's advanced Spanish grammar, Sociologia de la Cultura which I really like, and then a to be determined art/cinema class.
But among the craziness of academics this week there has been plenty of recreation as well. Going to a discoteca with some friends where we danced the night away to regeton and backstreet boys, going shopping in el centro, bowling with my host brother, and going out to dinner with my family where I ate some of the most delicious pizza of my life (very different from what we think pizza is but so good). But the best activity of my week was the Colo-Colo futbol game.
Futbol/soccer is huge here, and I mean HUGE. There are a few teams in Santiago and there are distinct and strong lines of loyalty to the teams. They're what you would call fanatics. So of course this was one cultural event I could not pass up. Myself and a few friends went with our friend Rachel and her host brother to a Colo-Colo game last night and it was an event. Everyone had a colo-colo shirt on, there were banners and flags all black and white. There were also songs and chats that we attempted to pick up as the game went on. The best of these was one which involves everyone in the stadium doing this unbelievable loud and shrill whistle in time with a drum beat. Where is the drum? La Garra Blanca, the most fanatical of the fanatics (about 1/3 of the fans which sat in a special section), they cheered, sang, or jumped the entire game. There were trumpets, huge base drums, streamers, roadside flares, and fireworks. It was tons of fun, plus we won, 3-0 against a team from Ecuador. Youhave not experienced excitement until you've seen Colo-Colo score a gol.

Chiloé

Within the program there was a little gap between when our orientation ended and when classes at the universities began, so a few of us decided to go on a trip. The few eventually grew to 10, but that was fine, the more the merrier albeit slightly more stressful. We left for Chiloé, an island off the southern coast of Chile Tuesday night and arrived Wednesday, after a twelve/thirteen hour bus, then a ferry, then another 4 hour bus. But it was definitely worth it.
Chiloé is really unique in that it is somewhat isolated from Chile and has its own unique culture which includes a lot of interesting folklore about brujas, gost ships, and el traunco (a forest gnome known for seducing young virgins giving then impure dreams and sometimes magically impregnating them). We stayed in Castro, one of the larger towms on the island (which is really more of an archipeligo/chain of islands). We went to mass (it was ash wednesday), an artisan fair, and dinner in Castro the first day.
The second day, we more or less split into two groups, which ended up being a really good thing seeing as coordinating 4 or 6 people is significantly easier than a group of 10. Myself and 3 others, Marissa, Annie, and Arjun, went to the Parque National de Chiloe on the opposite side of the main island. On the way there we stopped at two small towns mostly to look at the famous wooden churches there, they were beautiful churches with everything wood, pillars, arched ceilings, and all. We were with a tour group that stopped for lunch at a tiny rural place near the park. After eating an locos (abalone) stew and some sort of fish we went exploring outside. Arjun and I climbed over a fence into a grazing area with animals (not my idea, but Arjun called me a wimp so I quickly followed suite) we pet some horses, chased some vulcher, and tried to pet a sheep but they would have none of our nonsense. We left here for the Park where we walked through he forest with our guide telling us about the trees, the culture of the island, and folklore. We ended at the beach on the western side of the island which was breath taking. The sand stretched on and on in every direction it was more like a desert than a beach. But this was contrasted with a huge lake and rolling green hills near by. We stuck our feet in the water and found some cows eating seaweed, ate some empanadas at a tiny stand in the middle of nowhere and went back to Castro.
The next day we set out for Achao a smaller island to the east. there was another beach, not quite so beautiful, but the view of the other even smaller islands off the shore was nothing to scoff at. We had a picnic on the huge concrete steps leading to the beach, and walked around a little, when a man in a red and white checkered shirt approached Annie and asked if she wanted to go on a boat ride, at first we were just polite asking when, to where, how much, but the second he left I was so so excited because I love boats that I was like "we have to go on this boat ride". We convinced Arjun and Marissa and off we went on this little rinkidink boat to what we understood, was a big rock followed by a little island. Little did we know that there were about 20 lobos marinos (sea lions) on that big rock. That was really neat to see then in the wild. The little island that followed Isla Llingua, was just a little rural village on an island, but we hiked up a big hill and found a bunch of wild black berries that we feasted on after convincing everyone that we weren't going to die if we ate then.
The final day I went on a juorney to find penguins, which required the three of us going to get up early to get on a bus to the northern part of the island, where we were to meet the friend of the woman who ran our hostel in Castro, who proceeded to call her friend, who came in a van to pick us up and drive us down a little dirt road obstructed by cows and horses and carts at times then straight onto the beach. From here we were outfitted with lifevests and ponchos, placed in a little boat and set out to a cluster of tiny island inhabited by penguin colonies. It was raining and misty out, but this only added to the effect. We did this all with perfect timing to catch our bus to Puerto Montt on the main land where we met up with the rest of the group to take the 13 hour bus ride back to Santiago. Overall, a fantastic trip.

So much information

Class at U. Chile and La Universidad Catolica start in a little over a week, but all this week we have been taking a class called Contemporary Chile. With 8 hours of class every day it has been a lot of information about history, politics, music, art you name it in a short amount of time. I'm learning so much (partly because I really didn't know anything about Chile before I came here). This country is fasinating politically with a dictatorship, marxists, a coup, so many political parties, and a return to democratic rule all within the last 30 years. And when you ask anyone about it, most say "Pinochet? that was so long ago! Why do you want to know about that?"
Chile also has a very unique social stucture regarding the family particularly women. Divorce was legalized two years ago, which make for interesting families. The single mother is incredibly prevalant, but she still has a husband, who she talks to frequently and amicably because familial ties here are increadably strong. (my host mother is very concerned about the fact that I don't live with my parents at such a young age)
On a different note, this week we went on trips to El Museo De Bellas Artes, Pablo Nerudas' house (one of his three), and the Cultural Center of Santiago (which is underneith La Moneda, the Chlean White House). At the Cultural Center there was a Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition which was AMAZING! There were a bunch of Frida's famous paintings as well as her clothes, but my favorite thing was Rivera's Vendadora de Flores, which was replicated all over Guatemala when Lauren and I went in May, and I saw it in real life today...so cool.
I am getting along great with my family, even the dogs. I actually took the dogs for a walk this evening with my papa and mama. They're really growing on me even though Gala has eaten two pens, taken a bracelet, my pillow, my phone, my socks, and (I can't prove it but I have a sneeking suspicion) my hair brush.

La Primera Semana

I have only been in Chile since Wednesday, but it feels like I've been here much longer. We had three days of orientation in Providencia (a section of Santiago). It consisted mostly of meetings and logistics and food, Chilenos eat like you wouldn't believe. We then moved in with our host families. Mine lives in Las Condes, a lovely section of Santiago. My family consists of my mama, Maria who is so kind and funny, she just keeps feeding me and trying to make me feel so welcome. She doesn't know how to cook and she says everything nice and slow for me. My papa, Marco, Maria's second husband who maybe my favorite member of the family. I had this idea in my head that my host father would be reserved and not terribly involved with my stay, but boy was I wrong. He and I talk a great deal. Here are some facts about Marco, he loves MAD Magazine, he hates cats, and he works with some sort of french cheese export company. There is so much cheese in this house its nuts. I have two sisters Valeria and Natalia. Vale is 27 and engaged to Tomas. I like her a lot, she's very friendly and knows a little English which she practices with me sometimes. Nati is 18 and is starting her senior year of high school next week. She is so funny and tells her mama to calm down while she attemps to feed me into a coma. There is also a son, Sergio but he is in Andora, Spain working as an international Chef. Marco also has 3 kids who I am yet to meet because they live with their mother most of the time. Oh, and the most important members of the family, Dali and Gala, the two begals who run the house. They are crazy, especially Gala who keeps stealing my socks, my note book, my phone, nothing is safe. Overall I really like my family and I feel very comfortable here. Oh I almost forgot, I also have a pool at my house which is very cool.