1 Semana

I have now lived a grand total of one week in Chile, and attended class for a full week. It’s also a new month. How shocking, even though it seemed like this traveling everywhere thing is eternal, it really does obey the laws of passing time! School: So far I like all my professors. My Chilean Spanish teacher is a tad crazy and I like it (he’s a lot like Todd Marshall, if any GU people read this). That’s to say, he rejects the orthodox idea that formal language is more important than the informal, and if we’re not going to use it here, it’s not worth our time. In Contemporary Latin American Film we watched La Nana, (The Maid) a recent Chilean film. I liked it, and I’m excited to talk about it next week. I have this class for 3 hours Wednesday morning, and I’m glad we’ll be watching films instead of doing calculus; I have 4.5 hours of classes afterwards. There’s some French students in my classes, and I try not to smirk too much when they get out their little rulers and make every single written letter perfect and in different colors…just like the Belgians. I scribble as per usual. I’ve been chatting and learning with and from my host mom, Gabriela, all this week. We’ve had some pretty interesting conversations, and now I understand a few things about Chilean life. For example, heating is super expensive here because the government uses the high fees to subsidize heating for people in the colder, southern regions. People here pay 2,000 pesos, people in the south pay 150 pesos. That explains the frigid interiors here. I also know now that –po is randomly added onto words here and that Chileans eat their s’s. for instance, gracias sounds like gracia. The student protests are still going strong down here. They have several goals, including free tuition, but the most important is that the government renew the scholarships that they recently failed to renew. These vecas are the main source of scholarships for the students in Chile, and the government didn’t renew the usual number of payments this year. Thus, in this second semester of the year, there’s not too many people at the many universities in Viña and Valpo. Gabriela wondered why Americans don’t protest for lowe education costs. The reason I gave was that we are not united enough to do so. Every university is under different powers, what with the State schools and private schools, and then residency changes price again. We just ask the Federal Government for more debt and don’t think about anything past the immediate need. I don’t know if that reason is complete, but that’s what I came up with. In Argentina Universities are prestigious and free. You just have to pass an entrance exam. I’ll probably be a bit more grumbly when I see my next bill from Gonzaga. Another good moment I had with Gabriela: she made sopapillas pasadas, or sopapillas with the wonderful honey stuff that’s typical of Chile. Plus cloves and orange peel. It’s delicious, of course. She was explaining to me that the portable furnace was heavy, or pesada, and I immediately connected the new word with the name of the desert. Made sense, heavy sopapillas. Well, that’s true, but not the same word. We had a good laugh. Another fun fact about desert: Manjar, or dulce de leche, is the staple of Chilean desserts. They use it to hold cakes together, they smoosh cookies together, they drizzle it over pastries. ¡Que rica!