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...