Palegoldenrod

Hola chicos y chicas.

Well this week I am not taking Spanish classes, so I am left to my own devices and able to wander the streets of Santiago terrorising innocent people with my terrible Spanish. Muahahahah!

Last week my German friends from my first week of classes left - Burkhard went home, Beatrize started her internship and Simone took some private language lessons and spent the week making friends with Chileans and exploring.

We had our fiesta on Thursday night with our awesome teacher Luis DJing for the evening. It was a good night and I made some new friends, both foreigners and locals.

Everything caught up with me this week and I have been incredibly tired. I somehow managed to find energy to go to dinner with some of Simone’s Chilean friends. It was a homecooked meal of shellfish (pippis I think?), a traditional Chilean fish and an awesome homemade desert with fresh raspberries. Yorm - it was a great meal and good company - the girls were very friendly.

Saturday was Simone’s last day in Chile so we wandered around and had a bit of a quiet day, then went out for dinner and to a club. This time we ran into another German girl staying at the hostel with Simone, so we went with her and her friend Francisco to a rock club. They had a few live Chilean bands and then put on a video screen and some American/UK pop from the 80s and 90s. Retro, wot. Oh, and OMG - everyone here can dance salsa. It is so awesome to watch, but those of you who know me will already be laughing because you know how badly I dance. Oh well, luckily some of the people I know aren’t keen dancers either

On Sunday I went solo to Franklin Market, on the other side of the city. It is a huge market filling sidewalk and buildings on both sides of the street for five or so blocks, and starts right near a metro station. I bought my cousin a wireless router and had a look at a few other things. Some computer parts (e.g. hard drives, RAM) seem a bit more expensive than in Australian markets, even given the good exchange rate and the fact I was looking in markets. Maybe the computer markets we get at Newcastle have more direct access to Taiwanese and Chinese suppliers, and shorter transport distances to keep the cost down. Hmm.

In the afternoon Dane and I went up to Cerro San Cristobel (Saint Christopher Hill) which has a giant statue of Mary (not St Christopher) just like those photos you see of Rio with Jesus standing over the city. The only difference is that Santiago is too smoggy to have a nice view from on the hill, hehe.

Anyway, today I have slept in a bit, done some cleaning, some work on the internet and a little Spanish study. I feel much better after the sleep. Soon I’ll walk the dog and then I might go into town to catch up with some friends for the evening

Oh, and the volcano is nowhere near us here, though the volcano at Maipo has been getting a few tremors and might esplöd. I think my teacher Luis mentioned that the ash from Chaiten might be heading our way soon but hopefully it will be high in the atmosphere and not down here making the city smoggier than it already is.

So what’s going on with you guys? Anything awesome?

School

From 9.30am-1pm Monday to Friday of last week I’ve been going to a local Spanish school, about 20 minutes walk from here. My first day was probably the worst experience I’d had in a schoolroom. For reasons unknown I was put in a pre-intermediate class (with people who had, for example, learned spanish at school or had just completed a few weeks of classes). In addition, my three classmates were all german and already spoke both German and English (and in some cases other languages) so learning Spanish was easier for them.

The teachers here will speak in Spanish as much as they can - even if they can speak English or German or whatever. If you ask the teacher what “nube” means, they will say (in spanish) “the white things in the sky” and point and make motions with their hands to help you understand. Only if you are having real trouble will they use English.

My morning teacher, Luis, was great - he spoke reasonably slowly and clearly and the topics we were covering were new to me but I sort of understood what was going on. My afternoon teacher Dario spoke faster and with a heavy chilean accent, and I had no idea what was going on, what I was meant to do, what the exercises were about - nothing.

I even went to the school’s reception office to ask if it were best for me to be put in a lower class, only to be told that the lower class was full. So I went home and studied (covered the earlier parts of the text that I had skipped and looked ahead a little too).

The next day it got better. I could understand much of what my teachers said, even if I couldn’t put sentences together properly yet. And things are still improving. One more week of school to go, then I’ll see how things are!

Intercambio

I went to the school’s “intercambio” (interchange) night on Wednesday night, where chileans and foreigners get together at the school for some activities to encourage you to talk. The first 45 minutes is Spanish only, the second 45 mins is English only.

So I went there without any phrasebook or notepad and wasn’t sure what to expect (at the end of my 3rd day of classes) and found myself in a room only speaking spanish where I was unable to construct a sentence.

The spanish-speaking activity was for the group to construct a story where each person adds a sentence to progress the plot. The highlight of the night was when I was attempting to say “and a small dog” (y una perrita) and instead said “y una la perrita” which is a grammatically incorrect way to say a small dog which then got misunderstood by the spanish speakers as “y lamparita” (a small lamp/light). Which was funny given that the sentence now read “Santa Claus came into the room with a bag of gifts for the children and their friends, and a small lamp.”

The English activity was one-on-one free conversation where I was paired with a guy my age, Fernando, who could speak English reasonably well. We had a good old chat and he and his friend Juan decided to come to the fiesta afterward.

La Fiesta

The fiesta was organised my my teacher Luis, for students of the school and anyone else who wanted to come, at a local bar in the bohemian district. It was a little expensive (a German beer cost a whole AU$2, which is a touch pricey, especially outside of the richer suburbs like Providencia). The turnout was good - there were a lot of foreigners and a whole bunch of Chileans because it turned out to be someone’s birthday (not anyone we knew of course, so there were a bunch of strange people in the club).

I tasted the national drink, pisco, in the form of pisco sour and piscola. Pisco tasted sort of rum-y to me, so I wasn’t really a fan.

The Chilean guys tried to crack onto everything that moves, hahaha. Including the bar tender who was chatting to me and then suggested that he could teach me to dance and maybe by next week we would be boyfriend and girlfriend, at which I laughed, then so did he. And then I realised that there are no responsible service of alcohol rules in Chile. Even if there were, the bar tenders would be too drunk themselves to be able to assess if their customers were fit to consume more alcohol.

Anyway, I caved in early (at about 2.30am) and wandered home. It was a good night - I spoke to some pretty awesome foreigners and Chileans, and tried some drinks and listened to some horrible regaton (Chilean pop music, crossing reggae and hip hop a la the “Gasolina” song). I found out the next day that many of the others did the typical Chilean night out and were up until 6 or 7 am. I think I’ll have to have a siesta before the next one. They are every week :-D.

Next week though Luis will be controlling the music and there will be a cover charge to keep out any weirdos. If you are in Santiago on Thursday, drop me a line at carly[dot]lyddiard[at]gmail[dot]com.

Cajón del Maipo

On Saturday Dane and two of my classmates decided to go explore Cajón del Maipo (”Canyon of the Maipo”) which is a narrow valley south-east of Santiago (pretty close). We knew we had just missed the warm season where all the parks were open, and that the cold season for ski-ing was a way off yet. But we had heard it was still nice, and anyway, the school was going to do a bus trip on the same day but had to cancel due to lack of interest… surely that meant that something would be worth seeing up there.

So off we went on the city bus to Maipo. Maipo should be about an hour away at most. It took us 2.5 hours to get to the main village, San Jose de Maipo, because the city bus zig zags and stops pretty much everywhere and when it does speed up, its on those narrow winding roads on steep mountain sides, while a random passenger chooses that moment to stand up and (in Spanish) “Amigos, do I have an offer for you. Today only, some extra special CDs.. do you like regaton? Sexy music? Rock’n'Roll? I have them all”… for a half an hour. I wondered if the last thing I was going to hear as I plumeted to my death over a steep mountain gorge was a description of a bad regaton CD.

San Jose was a nice little village, though the tourist information office was closed. As my classmates were keen for a walk we decided to get a taxi to San Alfonso (a few villages up) which apparently had a walk or two we could do, but we didn’t know where it was (our guidebooks didn’t list anything too specifically).

We passed Pinochet’s old property on the way, the taxi driver pointed out that this was where he was placed under house arrest. The grounds appeard extensive and the snow-capped mountains towering over in winter would make it a beautiful place to live.

We jumped out at San Alfonso, had some lunch and then started walking to find this hiking trail. We found a private reserve where we would need to pay to walk, and decided to avoid that one - we managed to weasel out of the manager that there was another walk maybe 2km up the road, so off we went again.

Maybe 3 km along we finally got tired and went into some complex to find out if we were close. We got told that the only walks around were in El Volcan, about 15km away. We decided to wait for a bus and got told there would be one in 5 minutes or so.

About 45 minutes later we got on a bus and finally got headed home after a stop again in San Jose for a coffee and a peek at the local markets to buy some cheap and natural organic honey.

So I guess we got our walk, even if it wasn’t the one we were planning to take :-P.

A Walk in Santiago City

I went again for a walk into Santiago city on Sunday, when the weather was nice and the city was quiet, to take some photos and explore a little. This time I made it down to La Moneda, which is the current office of the President. According to a tour guide I had last week, La Moneda was the mint and is currently housing the President, the Ministry of the Interior and maybe one other ministry I can’t remember. All the other ministers are in different buildings.

You can walk through La Moneda (in one direction) for free, on most days. I think they close it when they have very special visitors or if there are demonstrations nearby. Anyway, it was a beautiful day to see it and a nice quiet day to walk through it. Yet another awesome building in Santiago!

Other stuff

I am still posting photos over at my Flickr area if anyone wants to have a look. e.g. My lunch today. Haha.

Hi guys! Let me fill you in (quickly) on what has been happening in the last week:

• I experienced my first tremor in the wee hours of the morning last week. It measured 3 on the Richter scale. I woke up to a bit of shaking, then went “cool” and went back to sleep. It was all good.
• I went on a small bus tour of Santiago (solo) and found some other cool places that I want to see (that I didn’t reach on foot in my last expedition). I’ll go back there soon and get some photos for you - after the photos of the poorer neighbourhoods your head will spin when I show you Providencia.
• I enrolled in a Spanish school in nearby Bellavista. I start my beginner’s course tomorrow
• I finally got bootcamp up and running on my laptop with WinXP Pro SP2 and Parallels (Parallels can mount a bootcamp drive, which is pretty handy)
• I went out for dinner to a nearby Chilean restaurant with Dane and ate a traditional Chilean dish: Pastel de Choclo. Sort of Chile’s version of a shepard’s pie, but still very different. It had more spices, the mince was more like finely chopped steak rather than fatty mince, and the top was some floury meal rather than potatoe. Oh, and the meaty part had vegetables and olives in there too. It was really nice.

I also just got back from an overnight stay at nearby Viñya del Mar - Dane and I caught a bus out to Viñya and then went for a wander around Viñya, Valparaiso and Con Cón. This area is where a lot of city-siders go to holiday (Dane likened it to New South Wales’ Coffs Harbour). Its about 2 hours bus ride from Santiago (a return bus ticket cost me about AU$15 if I got the worst exchange rate in the world) and the bus was a really nice coach with reclining seats, tvs etc.

We went through wine country and over to the coast where we had a nice reasonably warm Saturday. Valparaiso was one of the first cities settled by Spanish colonists and had a lot of historical buildings and museums relating to the first settlement and initial growth. It is also very arty - many young people sitting around drawing or painting, and the ascensors (lifts up the side of a steep hill) were tiny old wooden beasties which are pretty cool too. The architecture continues to astound me - the buildings here are so beautiful and apparently almost everything is a national monument, hahaha.

I bought 2 spanish books at a local market so I can get used to reading spanish - George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and a book of Chilean folktales for children. Nice combo, eh? Hahaha, well they should both be interesting reading!

We took a bus around to Con Cón to have what Dane declared as “the best empanadas in the world” only to find the cafe closed. We resorted to the shop next door which was cheap and very full of locals. Empanadas are fried pastries, usually with cheese inside but you can get all sorts of interesting fillings. I think they’re awesome, but I’m sure my arteries think otherwise!

Anyway, its raining now and getting very cold. We think there might be snow on the mountains in the morning - the first snow of the winter. And tomorrow I go to my first Spanish class (yay!).

I added some pictures to my flickr account. Tomorrow I’ll try to get a worpress plugin working so I can easily add Flickr photos into my posts.

Catch you later, n00bs.

On the first afternoon I arrived in Chile, while my cousin Dane and I were walking the dog, we passed two young men putting up a sign in Spanish. I tried to read it - “The freedom to decide. Protest against the dictatorship of the Constitutional Tribunal”. Dane started telling me about how common protests were in the city and that if I stayed I would almost certainly have an experience with tear gas. I thought that was interesting, especially given that Chile is improving month by month and when compared with the country under Pinochet’s rule I would have thought they’d have little to complain about such that it required a protest, let alone tear gas.

So off I went today, on my own, for a walk. I wandered from Recoleta down through Barrio Bellavista and into the city to Santa Lucia by lunch time, where I happened upon a large group of people preparing to protest. And the media. And a whole swarm of police. And some riot vans. And some armored water cannon vehicles. Not that they were required, it was very peaceful.

The story is this - more than a year ago, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet (a paediatrician and single mother) noted that the morning-after pill was expensive and was effectively unavailable to poor women (who incidentally are in most need of assistance with contraception). She authorised a move to make the morning-after pill available for free to all women over 14 years.

Since that time, the president’s right-wing opponents (read: Catholic conservatives and wealthy male business owners) have taken the matter to the tribunal declaring that the morning-after pill was not a contraceptive but an abortive, and that as such was illegal (abortion for any reason has been illegal under Chilean law since around the end of Pinochet’s rule).

The tribunal agreed and the directive from the president was overturned. Apparently there is no way to appeal a tribunal decision. This didn’t make the morning-after pill illegal, it just overturned the decision for public clinics to provide it. Which is weird… if they decided it was illegal to use it to abort, why not enforce this across the board rather than allowing those that can afford to pay for the drug (or for a doctor to prescribe it in a private clinic) to step around the law?

So a lot of women (and not a few men) gathered together to show their displeasure, as expressing oneself seems to be something highly encouraged in Chile (maybe after such restrictions as Pinochet?) and the protest, while serious, appeared to be in good spirits and peaceful.

I had a bit of a sticky beek at Santa Lucia and then went about my walk through the rest of the city, and eventually found my way to Plaza de Armas, the main plaza in the centre of the CBD. I was standing just in front of the church when a group of police (complete with helmets and bullet-proof jackets) appeared, and their favourite little riot van. Not long after this the protesters arrived as well. Just before they entered the plaza the police closed the gates to the church (kindly informed those inside that no, they would not open the gates) and then blocked off some side roads with other police.

At first I thought they were moving through the plaza on the way to the tribunal, but when they stopped it appeared that they were specifically protesting against the church on this one. As I found myself sandwiched between the church wall, a bunch of armoured cops and a large group of protesters - none of whom I could understand - as well as a few dodgey (cough - pickpocket) looking young men, I thought it prudent to promptly move on from the plaza so I am not sure if they did continue to the Tribunal building. It was only a block or two away so I’m guessing they got there unless the police stopped them.

I did see a single man with a sign standing in front of the Tribunal, but I couldn’t quite make out the message on his billboard, let alone translate it into English.

Anyway, so ends my first experience walking alone in the CBD, and my first Chilean protest. No tear gas this time, but Dane tells me that the May Day protests usually get a bit heated and occasionally end with people interfering with cables for power supply among other things, which of course pretty much guarantees a response from the police. I might stay home for that one

Other info on the protest and the reason for it (all in English):

• Reuters - Court blocks Chile move on morning-after pill
• International Herald Tribune - Dueling protests support, oppose ban on free morning-after pill in Chile
• Catholic News Agency - Bishop Goic calls for end to attempts to distribute abortion pill

Hi all.

Here is a very groggy Carly making her first video blog post evar, from Chile. Please forgive me for the badness… its just… bad. And if you’re wondering about my eyes, they are a touch irritated by the combination of dry heat and pollution

Also, my concept of distance was a bit skewed at time of recording - we are very close to Santiago the suburb, but a bit more than 10 minutes walk from the CBD itself. It took about 10-15 minutes on the metro to get there (underground train). Apologies.

Hi guys.

I have made it safely to Santiago de Chile - I arrived at lunch time today (an hour ahead of schedule) after a 15 hour flight via Auckland. The flight was easier than I expected, though my chair didn’t recline at all which made for a fun and somewhat uncomfortable night.

But here I am after having spent the afternoon with my cousin Dane, who I have discovered all over again as being all types of awesome (and in addition we like a lot of the same foods, music genres and music artists, have similar political views, etc).

We’ve been for a bit of a walk through the blocks near his place and it is still hard to feel like I am really here. It is really weird to hear the kids calling out Spanish as they play in the street tonight.

There is very, very little English is spoken here, lol. Dane has arranged for a friend to help teach me Spanish (Thanks, Dane!) and then we are going to go shopping tomorrow and probably hanging out with his partner Marcelo which should be cool.

Anyway, I’m pretty tired (read: brain is more retarded than usual) so I’ll finish up there and post again in a few days.

I heart you guys!

Carly