de Viña

A lot has happened since I arrived in Chile on Weds! Here are some highlights. In Olmué, a small town in the mountains where we’ve had our orientation for the past 3 days, we got to ride horses around the town. I was amazed because there are 19 students, and we each had our own Chilean horse to ride. (This program is really well-run, as this excursion demonstrated; they teach everything we need to know about living in Chile—like how to ride the “micro” bus, register for classes, recognize Chilean slang—and organize fun/active things like horseback riding for our spare time. We also had salsa/merengue lessons for an hour a half each night.) I hadn’t ever been let loose on a horse before, and it was pretty exciting even though we didn’t go very fast. We had to keeping pulling over (“¡a la derecha!”) for cars to go by on the dirt roads.

Today we hiked in the national park La Campana, which is like an island of preserved land between the two large cities Santiago (by the snow-capped Andes, where we flew in) and Valparaíso (the city I’m next to right now, now that I’m in my host family’s house in Viña del Mar). It’s interesting because on one side of a mountain, there’s one type of ecosystem that is cooler, with lots of green plants; on the other side, and on the opposing mountain face, the ecosystem is different, with cacti like the ones in roadrunner cartoons and fewer trees. It’s because the sun hits the earth at this point at a certain angle. Also in La Campana, we went into a copper mine that had been dug out by hand many years ago—kind of scary because, even though it was only a few hundred feet long, it was totally dark so we had to keep our hands above our heads to make sure not to hit the ceiling. …It’s obvious to me here that there aren’t the same preoccupations with safety that we enjoy in the U.S. This copper mine excursion is just one example; now that I’m in the city, I’m sure I’ll witness/participate in many more (My host father, René, demonstrated how everyone jaywalks in Viña del Mar, because there aren’t enough crosswalks, as he said. And how people drive somewhat…hmm…recklessly).

My host family is great, I like them a lot and I hope I made a good first impression. They’re very friendly and eager to make me feel at home, but also to let me know that I am free to come and go as I please. They pepper their speech with English words for my benefit, tomorrow I’m planning to ask how they learned so much English, but I think the answer is that it’s all around here, on signs and on TV, so I imagine anyone could pick up a lot of English if they wanted to learn.

The food is good too! I haven’t had anything that I hated yet, although some things I can’t say I liked, because I’m just not used to them. And so much meat! But I love cheese empanadas (hot cheese in a not-flakey pastry shell), and today we had empanadas with I think beef and onions, and, interestingly, one black olive, some slices of hardboiled egg, and 3 golden raisins inside. I think the rule with empanadas is that there are no rules. They’re really popular here.

I can understand with almost no problems the Spanish that our program directors and (thankfully!) my host family speak. But I’ll be interested (and I’m nervous) to see how I understand the university students and others, because many Chileans reputedly use a lot of slang and abbreviations, some of which I’ve learned here already (for example, for “where are you going?” it should be “¿Para dónde vas?”, but they’ll say “¿Pa’ ‘onde vai?”). We’ll see! On Monday, I think we’re going to the university to be shown around by a real, live student. Tomorrow, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m looking forward to it. I almost forgot to say, it’s incredibly beautiful here, right by the ocean where you can see across the water Valparaíso laid out in lights on the hills. My host family drove me around to show me the place and I was sitting with my mouth open, it’s just really amazing.