Slightly Bitter Thanksgiving Salutation

I realize Thanksgiving officially happens tomorrow, but I'm bored and jealous now, so here's your damn holiday blog entry. While you spend the day gorging yourselves on delicious turkey...

...and celebrating the subjugation of Indians (some very attractive Indians, I might add)...

...by merciless religious fanatics...

...please, remember us, all alone in a cold, equally violent, and turkyless country with no attractive natives to speak of. We'll be working. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Parties, Pools, and Poison Ivy, Oh My!

Howdy again from Chile. For those of you who haven’t already figured it out, the blog has recently devolved into being more or less an account of our weekend. Today will be absolutely no exception, as nothing particularly noteworthy seems to happen during the week anymore (unless you count students learning how to use the phrase “used to” correctly in a sentence). Obviously, I suppose this was to be expected, although it’s a little disappointing to realize you’ve traveled thousands of miles away from home just to become part of a different country’s work force. Still, that’s how it goes. Let’s have at it.

This weekend was a party weekend, which inevitably makes Erin very excited and me grit my teeth. Despite my best efforts, Erin has managed to make us a couple friends who actually seem to like us (Erin) for who we are. One of these people is a Scottish teacher, who Erin met online, named Fiona. Despite the inherent creepiness of making friends over the internet, she turned out to be a very nice person and in no way a member of a cult. She’s also about the thousandth female traveler I’ve met here who came specifically because of a Chilean boyfriend. Maybe there’s something unbelievably irresistible about Chilean men that’s not inherently obvious beneath their universally crappy haircuts (seriously, it’s a major problem around here…it’s kept me from getting a haircut for four months), but whatever it is, they attract foreign chicks like moths to flames. I don’t get it, but it may be because the general image I have of the average Chilean dude is the same guy catcalling my girlfriend as we walk down the street together. I will say that many (many) of the girls I meet here, speak openly about wanting a Chilean boyfriend, so I think there’s a little bit of a predisposition in the lady population. This is actually something Erin and I had an argument about not so long ago, so I suppose we might as well air our grievances in public and see what you folks think. I claimed (much to Erin’s disapproval) that it is inherently shallow to come to a foreign country and specifically go looking for a local boyfriend (or girlfriend, I suppose, although it never seems to come up), much the same as it would be shallow to go fishing for a rich husband or a trophy wife. My argument is that you’re essentially focusing on non-personality/character traits. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against being shallow. I just want it acknowledged that this is a shallow dating practice…which it is. Erin’s counter-argument, although she will surely post an editor’s note correcting me and making me out as stupid and thick-headed (which I may very well be), goes something like, “Why would you come to a foreign country and date a white boy?” I’m pretty sure that’s nearly an exact quote. I’ll let her explain it, and feel free to post your own opinions. But I digress…

This weekend was a party weekend. First off, the previously-mentioned Fiona invited us to her apartment where her incredibly hot-accented, Scottish friends were visiting for the week. This mostly involved drinking wine and chatting and was a perfectly fine time. We went with another friend we’ve made and after a couple of hours of her and Erin drinking wine and flirting with all the Chilean boys they could lock in conversation, I took the opportunity to skip out a little early and catch up on some of the sleep I haven’t been getting during the week. Saturday, I forced Erin to embrace her inner old man and go look at antiques with me. A museum up the street from our work was having an antiques exhibition, and I wanted to go look at the furniture. Erin, to her credit, did not enjoy herself one bit, and complained mercilessly pretty much the whole time, with the one notable exception of when she saw an old, sexually suggestive movie poster and inquired about the price. I on the other hand had a pretty good time, since I’m completely lame and dorky like that. It’s true. There were old motorcycles to look at, an early-model MGB, some cool paintings, and interesting furniture. It was more or less a nice little Saturday afternoon. Party number two was Saturday evening, and it was an asado (that’s barbeque), which was also right up my alley. Some girls from our company, decided to throw themselves a going away party and everyone got invited. We grilled a little choripan and talked with the folks we work with, plus anyone they cared to bring along, although nothing more exciting than that really happened. Oh, Erin got into a semi-confrontation with the girls who had thrown the party. A Chilean girl had asked her if she could show her how to hook her MP3 player up to the stereo, and Erin was in the process of explaining it when these girls told her they had already (no doubt, carefully) planned the music for the entire eight hour party, and there unfortunately wouldn’t be time for the Chilean girl to play one song. Seem a little bitchy to you? It did to me.

On Sunday afternoon, WE WENT HERE!!?!

It was absolutely fantastic. We alternated between burning up in the sun and freezing to death in the pool for the entire day. This weekend was apparently the Chilean equivalent of Memorial Day weekend, and therefore the unofficial beginning of summer. Eat your hearts out. Endless summer…WHOO!!?!

Below, Erin, a Peruvian girl we met in the taxi ride up, and I are all hanging out and perfecting our bikini tans. We don't know who the guy is with the baby on the right. That picture was, for some unknown reason, attached to the picture of us.

Other than that, I have only two relatively mindless ramblings to share for the week. Number one, I got a phantom case of poison ivy. It appeared in small, random patches on my arms and one leg. I’m completely confused about how it happened, because in the days prior to getting it, the most nature I’d come in contact with was Gus, our bonsai tree, who is still alive and kicking despite all odds. Number two, some of you may recall me rambling on in some previous blog entry about how the Chileans refuse to walk on one side of the sidewalk. Well, the Santiago metro people must have heard me complaining, because just this week in all the metro stations, there began appearing yellow lines accompanied by small signs asking people to please circula por su derecha (walk to the right), because es mas comodo. It’s the start of big things for this country.

Escalar y Otras Aventuras

So, due to a combination of me working 15 hours a day and Erin being extremely (extremely) lazy, we haven’t managed to write for a while. Turns out we’re getting really busy around here. Work is picking up like crazy, which results in a combination of relief (in the “not going to starve to death” way) and stress (in the “having a job” way). The most ridiculous aspect of the whole working thing is how we’ve somehow ended up with completely different working hours. Specifically, Erin has awesome hours, working between the hours of 10 and 3 just about every day, while I’ve basically gotten screwed, waking up at 6 and ending work at 9 in the evenings with a huge gap of nothing to do during the day but listen to the director’s stories of how she accidentally hired a pedophile one time. Amusing? Yes, but I’ve been instructed not to tell anyone else about it, so don’t mention it to anyone from Chile. Still, work is easy and we both really like our students, which makes even ungodly hours like mine relatively doable.

Also, we’ve managed to have a pretty fun week when not teaching English to businessmen on their lunch hours. On Thursday, Erin dragged me out to this club that was featuring drum music and dancers to meet with some folks. We decided to take the hour walk to the place to avoid paying for what turned out to be a $1.50 cab ride on the way home and got there incredibly late, long after the rest of our group had arrived. Still, when we arrived, the music was passable and the company was excellent. We ended up meeting a Chilean dude named Jose and his Kiwi girlfriend, Louise (which the Chileans think is hilarious, because Luis a guy’s name here). Jose is something of a climber, and we mentioned we were planning on going to Cajon del Maipo this weekend to do some climbing. Jose offered to go along and show us around, which turned out to be a really great thing. Once I started falling asleep at the table, Erin agreed to head home.

On Friday, we weren’t planning on doing anything, but we got a call from our TEFL teacher, James, asking us if we wanted to go and help his new graduates celebrate. We did, and we did. It was an awesome time. We ate delicious Thai food, drank beer, met James’ Chilean girlfriend, and discussed bathroom etiquette. There were also Marlboro Cigarette representatives giving out free, incredibly ugly baseball hats (which of course we all wanted). All you had to do was watch a movie displayed through 3D glasses. First they asked if we smoked, and we all replied no. They then informed us that we couldn’t watch the video, because they weren’t allowed to encourage non-smokers to start. I quickly corrected my mistake, admitting that I’d been smoking for years and years, and they agreed to let me watch. The video, it turns out, was just giant, 3D packs of Marlboro cigarettes floating through space over a western landscape (and not worth the effort), but they let me play a matching game afterwards, and once I won I received a hat that will no doubt make me 100% more attractive to the ladies. Watch out.

Yesterday, we went climbing. We got up early and met Jose, Louise, and their friend Jorge (another Chilean, who Erin claims was attractive despite the fact that he looked nothing like me) to go to Cajon del Maipo, a valley nestled up next to the Andes that’s home to most of the area’s outdoor activities. After an hour on the metro and bus, followed by a fifteen minute walk, we found out that the area we wanted to go to is completely unreachable, since to get to it you have to cross private land, owned by people that don’t want you crossing their land. This is when we realized how lucky we were to have met Jose and his friends, because while we (and by we I mean Erin) would have sat down and cried and then headed home, they informed us that there was another place nearby we could go to that was almost as good. Problem solved. This place, too, lay on the other side of private land, but whereas the first place denied us access, this one only wanted four dollars apiece to cross. We decided not to pay and instead opted for a one and a half hour trip around via a nearby river (in Chile it is against the law to block access to rivers) that would lead us to the spot. It was an incredibly fun walk. The water was a nice temperature, and the land was incredibly beautiful. After about an hour and a half, we came to a spot in the river that seemed impassable (at least without being fully submerged, which doesn’t mesh well with rock climbing gear), but we tooled around for a little while and finally managed it, arriving at the rocks 5 minutes later. I wish we hadn’t been robbed twice, because then we’d have pictures of the place we ended up at. It was a collection of two or three 50-60 foot boulders right next to the river, which was crystal-clear, surrounded by green forests, with the snow-capped Andes visible through the river valley. If I was rich, it’s what my bathroom would look like. It was by far one of the most beautiful spots we’ve ever been. We ate, climbed all day until we were tired, then bought empanadas at a shop on the trip out. It was an awesome day.

That brings us to today. We haven’t done anything of note, but we are planning on having a couple folks over for another asado. And you know what that means. More choripan. Delicious. Hope everyone is doing well.

Halloween Fotos

Apparently a pirates' preferred manner of dress is simply a striped shirt, something wrapped around the head, and leggings.

A pirate brawl

I told you he didn't even try with his costume...

A pirate scowl

Fran and Erin

A Few Minor Corrections

For once, I am home relaxing while Nate is doing something other than playing video games from 1993 on his laptop. That's right. We thought the day would never come, but he's actually working. It's a proud and relieving moment for all of us.

I'm obviously not dead and, perhaps even more obviously, Nate could never manage to pick up a Chilean girl. His catcalling skills are not up to par, and his sketchiness level is far below that of other Chilean males. Anyway, I've been reading the last couple of blogs and I think the time has come to A) take a break from all the extremely hard work I've been doing to ensure that Nate and I don't starve or have to live in a cardboard box in the park and to B) defend my honor and to C) correct all the tiny euphemisms that Nate has been throwing around in our blog lately.

Halloween was great fun, but Nate was a little misleading in his description of our respective costumes. Here is what I looked like:


And here is what Nate looked like:

That's right. The kid refuses to dress up. No fun. No fun at all. By "dressed up like a girl" he meant "wore a skirt over my jeans but otherwise did nothing to change my appearance or even attempt to create a costume."

The part about our bonsai tree is all true, but Nate forgot to write that he now loves Gus more than he loves me, and he spends all the time he isn't playing Zelda crooning to Gus, trimming his tiny branches, and researching what shape he ultimately wants Gus to have. It's nuts. He even built a tiny shelf outside our window so that Gus can have just the right amount of sunshine and so that when he wakes up in the morning, he can open the windows and greet Gus with a hearty "Good morning, Gus!"

Besides those minor corrections, everything else is pretty much true. My classes are surprisingly easy and fun. I only have two, and my students couldn't be more different. My Korean student, Suh-Young, is 15 and is amazingly quick at picking up English (it's that Asian work ethic... and the fact that she has 7 hours of English a day before going to her father's office to study for 3 more hours). She gets embarrassed when we talk about boys (including her two male teachers) and when she finally finds a word she's been searching for her eyes light up and she goes "oohhhhh!!!" My other student is the Vice President of BBVA, an enormous international bank based in Chile. His office is the nicest office I've ever seen; it literally takes up the entire 16th floor of his building, and he has an assistant who serves us drinks during our conversation class. He travels internationally at least once a month, and the purpose of our classes are to prepare him for a trip to Turkey where he'll have to make a presentation in English. Unlike Suh-Young, his English is pretty basic, and because he's Chilean he absolutely refuses to pronounce his s's. Thus, all of his words are singular and possessives are beyond all hope. Whenever he says a word without an s, I am there to hiss at him "sss" to make him tack that s on. At first I was quite intimidated to be teaching this head honcho dude, but after a couple classes, I relaxed and resumed my regular bossy persona.

Last week Nate and finally got ourselves to a climbing store and found out how to access the local climbing spots. Apparently there's a really nice place only 40 minutes from Santiago where the rock is nice and the routes are right around our level. Before heading outside though, we wanted to do a practice run in the gym just to get our bearings back. To put it mildly, we are disgustingly out of shape. When we wrote about losing weight before, it simply wasn't true. What we were losing was muscle, and we have now been rendered absolute weaklings. It was pathetic. For those of you who know us and know how we climb, let's just say that we had to stop after an embarrassingly small number of climbs, and it seemed like the routes were rated easier than they actually were. Needless to say, they weren't. We just suck after 5+ months of not being on rock. Regardless, we'll be heading out to Las Palestras soon, and hopefully whip ourselves back into decent shape.

On a somewhat similar note, because we now know how to access these climbing places and because we've been itching to get out of Santiago as often as possible, we came extremely close to buying a scooter. Moms and Dads, I know you're not huge fans of the idea, but you don't have to worry because we decided we just won't be able to swing it financially. But you have no idea how close we came--we're talking serious research, multiple trips to various moto shops, calculations concerning financial feasibility... It was exciting to think we'd have an independent mode of transportation, and we were already planning all the great weekend trips we'd take. It's sad, but it's not going to happen. We've resigned ourselves to taking buses everywhere--and knowing that we're going to have to padlock ourselves to our bags to make sure nothing else gets taken from us.

This weekend Nate and I are hopefully heading out to the beach--to a tiny but ritzy town called Renaca. We'll let you know how that goes...

Cruising for Chicks at the Family Reunion

It’s been just about a month since Erin has written a blog entry, so I figure most of you are already wise to the fact that I’ve killed her and secretly fed her corpse to the people in our house. Mwahaha…and so on. That being said, I guess everyone is just going to have to get used to hearing my relatively pointless ramblings on Chilean culture and the things we’ve been doing (by we I mean me and my new Chilean girlfriend, who is conveniently also named Erin…and also looks exactly like her in photos). Erin and I are both officially working now. I know Dave and Lisa thought I was just going to sponge off their daughter (may she rest in peace) for months on end, but I’ve actually managed to start work, and beginning next week I’ll be waking up at the ridiculous hour of 5:30 (that’s 3:30 EST) in order to make it to a one-hour private lesson with a man that by all accounts is incapable of learning English. He’s been taking private lessons with several other teachers every day now for several months and has not improved at all. I’m looking forward to it.

In other news, Halloween just passed, which means most of you are already seeing Christmas decorations in your local Walmart or Kohls or whatever soulless corporate super-store sells you your groceries, clothing, electronics, and children. Halloween hasn’t really been a big holiday for me for a while, and the Chileans can sympathize since they’re still emerging from their dictatorship. Apparently, in addition to routinely abducting random people and torturing them, the military regime also took exception to all candy-related holidays, so Halloween went uncelebrated for quite some time. Now it’s getting more popular again, but the Chilenos don’t really seem to know how to do it. Not many kids trick-or-treat, which is probably good since not many people give out stuff and if they do its liable to be cards with religious messages written on them. For us, Halloween meant another opportunity for the owners of our house to try to make some extra cash by trying to throw a party and selling alcohol to foreigners. This has been kind of an ongoing scheme that never seems to work out very well for a couple reasons that I won’t get into. Nobody ever shows up and we all just end up talking about why it wasn’t a good idea in the first place and how we hope this will be the last time they try it. It’s really an awkward situation for everyone involved, but it’s how we spent our evening. For anyone wondering, Erin went as a sexually confused pirate and I went as a girl, so sexual confusion was kind of the theme.

We woke up around 1:00 in the afternoon, to find that someone had brought a ping pong table to the house. This pretty much kicked off what turned out to be a fantastic day for everyone. Having discovered the ping pong table, we spent the first three hours of the day challenging various housemates to games and scaling the fence into the next door neighbor’s yard whenever someone hit a wild shot. Next, since it was a holiday, we managed to convince a fair number of the people in the house to participate in a barbeque, which basically consisted of lots and lots of Choripan (still one of the best things about this country). We spent the rest of the day cooking, gorging ourselves on cheap sausage and vegetables, and discussing marrying first cousins. Interesting fact: Chileans seem to be for it. We learned over the course of the evening that 1) marrying your first cousin is not against the law here (George Michael would be thrilled) and 2) the couple that owns our house are actually cousins. Lest you grab your cutest cousin and jump on a plane to Chile, I think I should point out first that Mexico is closer (it's also allowed there according to our Mexican friend) and also marrying your relative is not all fun and games. Although it’s legal, not everyone approves of it and it's not necessarily easy to do. To manage it in Chile you have to get a letter from the Pope saying that it’s okay. Definitely something to think about though...

Changing subjects, Erin and I welcomed a new member into our Chilean family a couple days ago, a Bonsai tree that despite all odds is still alive. We got it from a plant fair that we happened to pass in the park near our house. I managed to convince Erin to name it Gus, with the promise that I’d never suggest the name for anything else. Hopefully some day he'll look this good.

Happy Halloween everyone.