Punch drunk and "Crazy People"

March 2014

When they heard about our language immersion plans, several friends of Kat and I warned us, "Your brain is going to hurt all the time. You will be exhausted. Then it'll just click." Well, we're still waiting for the click, but we experienced the brain-ache and exhaustion right away, and it wasn't how I expected.

The Friday night after my first week of working in an all-Spanish environment, I felt drunk. Not dizzy, but thick and slow, or very, very tired without being sleepy. All my reaction times were slow, my words came slowly-- I'm pretty sure I was even blinking slowly.

That was me. It still is.

Partly it was exhaustion from listening so carefully all day, and from having to think so hard to understand anything at all. I've done my share of traveling to places that don't speak English, but I've never lived somewhere for the express purpose of learning the language. In the US I usually just know what people are saying without thinking about it, and I have completely taken that for granted.

For years I have taken the liberty of giving myself global awareness cred. I am comfortable working in an environment where I hear Somali and Spanish spoken frequently every day– yay me! Pfft. I realize now that was hubris. Not understanding a few passing conversations is totally different than not understanding the street signs, the billboards, the TV, the language of commerce. My boss. The pharmacist. Any given voice on the phone. Not speaking the language where you live is exhausting. I don't know how I will act on this hard-won knowledge, but I already have about 500% more empathy for English language learners in the US.

I said before that I didn't feel sleepy, but have I mentioned the sleeping? Man. Both Kat and I need a lot more sleep than usual, and if we attempt to get by on our normal amount, one of us will lay back to "relax" at 8:30 p.m. only to wake up 11 hours later. I would like to think it's the adult brain version of when kids have growth spurts and sleep a lot. Here's hoping our brains are making good use of the extra hours to build the blessed synapses of pre-fluency.

Even though living life in Spanish is eating up a lot of energy, my progress still feels frustratingly slow. I'm sure (?) I'm learning faster than it seems from the inside, but some days are still "hello" days. There's a movie called "Crazy People" about a collection of asylum inmates, and one of them is a guy who only ever says "hello." Entire sentences go, "Hello, hello hello hello hello, hello hello." And so on. The kids at my school come running up, hug my legs, and say...something... and sometimes the most I can manage is that.

"¡Hola!"

Pablo Neruda: one poet, three houses, and thousands of intentional toys

Part 1: La Sebastiana

Cerro Bellavista, Valparaíso

8 March 2014

So, Pablo Neruda. Poet. Chileno. Won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He is a huge deal in Chile, and he was even a huge deal while he was still alive to enjoy it, which must put him in the top 0.01% or so of poets worldwide. I did in fact read and enjoy Neruda prior to coming here; his Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair is one of a handful of poetry books I bothered to both buy and keep over the years.

As a commercially successful poet (I think he also bred unicorns and hiked with Bigfoot), Neruda owned multiple houses, all of which he filled with lots and lots of stuff.

I'm not talking about the usual "Hey, I own a house now. I better find a couch" approach. This is more like, "Hey, which one of my three houses should host my nautical figurehead collection and my carousel horse?" (The answers are Isla Negra and Le Sebastiana, respectively.) I'll get into the topic of his stuff more when I blog about house number two, Isla Negra.

The first Neruda house we visited was the closest to home: La Sebastiana on Cerro Bellavista in Valpo. It was the hottest day of our entire time in Chile, so of course we walked up a really steep hill with a broken acensor (elevator). I think it was snowing in Minnesota that day; we tried not to complain much.

 

Hanging out at a park near his house

Photography inside the house is forbidden, so I don't have much visual evidence of my visit to the inside...besides this one. What can I say, my finger slipped. As you can see, the entrance to the house proper is a narrow doorway flanked by lady angels on great big gilded pillars. Typical Chilean architecture, really.

From the outside it looks like the multi-layer cake version of a typical (if unusually well-maintained) Valparaíso house.

I was completely taken with the vertical method of home building. This is a house with basically five rooms stacked on top of one another. Not convenient if you've got mobility issues, but otherwise kind of awesome. Each room feels completely independent from the others, each has a different theme and quirky collection of stuff, and each is a comfortable not-too-big size with excellent views from every window. Of course, that might be more about location than architecture.

View from the porch(es)

 Pablo Nerudo: he knew how to pick a house. And also write a poem.

Chilean Writer, Poet, Thinker, Politician and Diplomat

That Charlie Brown

Kat and I work in a preschool/daycare called Charlie Brown Jardin Infantil. It is a job we found on the internet and accepted after little more than a Skype conversation and an internet search to see if they were legit, so all things considered I think we did pretty well.

Street view; the 3rd (a.k.a "robot head") floor is under construction and not in use

El patio, here featuring the 2-yr-olds hopping like frogs

We hold sort of hybrid positions at the school. Several times a week we make the rounds to lead English lessons for all the classes, with students ranging from two to six years old. The rest of the week we are classroom assistants. I started in Medio Menor (2-year-olds), and Kat is with Pre-Kinder (4-year-olds).

Toddler dance party!

After a week or so I switched to Medio Mayor (3-year-olds) in the hopes of having a better chance of using/learning Spanish with an age group that says more than just "Miyo!" (mine!) and where the kids don't all eat the Play-Doh. Some still do, but at least it's not all of them.

Here's part of my class enjoying sandwiches and cookies for the monthly "Who's got a birthday this month?" party.

The tia in my class is named Michelle, and she's great; very engaging and caring, and the kids love her. I would actually entrust my imaginary children to her in imaginary real life. The assistant in my class is less what I would call "great" and more what I would call "embittered and kind of useless," and I'll leave it at that.

Tia Michelle. The hair is a wig, but the hair net is real

The kids are the usual three-year-old mix of adorable and crazy-making. I have picked up such useful phrases as Tienes a compartir (you have to share), Quieres hacer pipi?(do you need to pee?), and Subirse los pantalones! (pull up your pants!).

Not that I would ever have favorite children...but here are two of my favorites.

Fernando is a beautiful boy and a complete space cadet, constantly wandering around the room talking to himself and striking what at first I thought were Wolverine fight poses. I was also perplexed yet entertained that he was constantly singing Iron Maiden, in English. Where in the world did a three-year-old pick that up? Are Mom and Dad into heavy metal? On day three it finally clicked: it was the end credits song from Iron Man. The Wolverine claw hands were actually Tony Stark's repulsor beams. Good choice, kid.

Fernando in a rare moment of sitting still

Now meet Florencia, who is not even in my class but I reserve the right to make her a favorite anyway. She's sweet and imaginative and says things very intently and thoughtfully to me that I hope I will understand more fully before I leave. Here she is as a dragon during one of the afternoon special activity times.

"Respiro fuego! Raawwrrr!"

So yeah, the kids are cute. In other ways, the setting has been limiting and frustrating. I came to Chile expecting to be frustrated by not speaking the language, especially the first few months. However, we have discovered that frustration with the vague concept of a language barrier is very different than frustration with seeing things we could improve, and that we excel at improving in an English workplace, but can't express or change in Spanish. We'll see if that changes before we leave, but there seems to be more than just language at play. Workplace strife, thy name is politics.

Also, there are sometimes costumed water droplets. And that's kind of freaky. But all things considered, it's a decent place.

We're okay! (again)

1 April 2014
12 April 2014

A few weeks ago, there was a major 8.2 earthquake in northern Chile. Chile is a really, really long country, and here in the middle we didn't feel a thing, nor did we get the tsunami we were warned about. However, lest we forgot that we, too, are in the Ring of Fire, there was a little one right here in (or near) Viña a few days later.

In the same way that Inuit have multiple words for snow (which I know is not quite true but go with it), folks around here have multiple words for "earthquake." What happened up near Iquique was a terremoto. What we felt was a mere sismo, and turning on the news was about all the action our housemates took.

A sismo preparedness meeting w/ our housemates. Yeah, that's it.

This past Saturday, Kat and I visited Valparaíso for the Tall Ship (Velas) Festival. We took a boat tour of the harbor, and on one side, tall ships.

On the other side were the cerros (hills) of Valpo. There are 42 hills, and one of them had a lot of smoke wafting up.

Shortly after the fire started

There were several fire trucks responding while we were downtown. By the time we headed home, there was a huge plume of smoke trailing out to sea, and the hills were glowing.

The glow is sunset; the fire is out of sight to the left.

Winds were strong Saturday night, and the weather has been dry. Here's an example of what city planning looks like in Valpo.

 

In case you're wondering, this area did not burn

It makes for charming photos, but how in the world are bomberos (firemen) supposed to get a truck anywhere close to a burning building through that?  I feel very lucky that the only effect I felt of those winds was that my underwear fell off the clothesline. The homes that were destroyed were mostly poor; why is that always how it works?

I have learned a new word this weekend: damnificados. Casualties; victims.  It's Holy Week, and that feels like an important translation somehow, like it's closer to its English cousin than it first appears.

They still make those?

8 March 2014


I brought my iPhone with me to Chile, and it has been invaluable. It’s my clock, shopping list, calendar, camera, wifi device, and Spanish dictionary (with verb conjugations!). However, one thing my phone does not do in Chile is make phone calls. Natch. To make non-wifi-based calls possible, we hit the mall and found the cheapest pre-paid cell phones pesos could buy.

It even has the Nokia ring!

We are living the dream, circa 1998.

You Take My Pronouns, I Take Your Toys

11 April 2014

For the entire trip, Kat and I have been experiencing the “two steps forward, one step back” reality of language learning. Every week there are days when we feel confident and optimistic about our progress in Spanish, and other days when our brains just can’t keep up. We both had moments this week that were closer to “two steps forward, five steps back.”

 First, some geeky grammar stuff in case it's new to you. In Spanish, subject pronouns are not necessary because they are implied by how you conjugate the verb. For example, “Yo juego fútbol” (I play soccer) usually becomes “Juego fútbol.” In English, if the subject and verb don’t agree, the pronoun always wins. “I plays the soccer” sounds wrong (in a hip and quirky way), but you still know who is doing that verb. In Spanish, the pronoun safety net is often gone, and if you conjugate the verb wrong, the whole sentence changes. <end grammar geekout>

Yesterday a kid next to me was crying during playtime, and another tia (all the teachers are called “auntie”) asked me what happened. I told her, “I don’t want to share.” Then I realized what I said and “corrected” myself: “You don’t want to share.” Sigh. This is really basic stuff that I knew years ago, but apparently whatever I learned this week displaced the old stuff.

But wait, it gets better. Today one of our toddlers had a pants-filling situation during English class, and Kat took her back to her classroom. The girl’s tia asked what happened, and Kat told her: “I pooped.”

Back when we spoke English at work, Kat and I did not steal toys from children or poop in our pants.

I miss pronouns.

Viña del Mar: home sweet seaside home

6 March 2014 and onward

We arrived in Viña del Mar around 9 or 10 p.m. by way of a ride from Jaimie, our boss/local contact. She had arranged for us to stay with her mother-in-law for a week or so while we looked for a more "permanent" place to live. Cecilia is a very active 70-something with two extra bedrooms in her 16th-floor condo. It wasn't a bad first view of our host city by night:

The lights of Valparaíso

Or by day:

Or at sunset.

 

The condo complex, Gran Océano, looks down from a barrio called Recreo and a little bump of land pushing into the bay, so you can see lots of ocean to the north (Viña), the south (Valparaíso), and the west (hello, Pacific). Gran Océano, indeed.

We were in the tower on the right

Valparaíso got rich in the 19th Century as a port of call for ships heading around the Strait of Magellan, and Viña is the spot up the coast where the rich folks built their rich houses. Valpo has mostly declined in wealth since 1914 when the Panama Canal diverted their gravy train, but Viña is still the newer, cleaner weekend resort half of this twin city. Here's a little photo tour.

There are beaches and ocean-y bits.

There's a mall. In Spanish, it's called el Mall.

Lider is actually Walmart. Hiper Lider is Walmart after too much coffee.

There's a Metro line from Valpo to Viña and beyond, handy for our commute.

There are hills,

Barrio Recreo

...and more hills.

Here's part of my morning commute. The green wall keeps us all from falling into a big underground parking-shaped hole in the ground. The church beyond is called Our Lady of Agony, which always reminds me of Lake Woebegone's Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, except with more Latino flair and less Midwestern understatement.

Another sidewalk leading to work: wide, clean, and always with a sleeping dog or five. After all, this is Chile.

Castillo Wulff. Yep, a little castle by the sea. Mostly it just looks cool and hosts cultural events.

Viña is famous for the Reloq de Flores (flower clock). See, it's a clock...made out of flowers. That's it, really.

Look, it's tourist-o'clock

I saved the best for last. The archaeology museum two blocks from our school/workplace is the home of a bona fide Moai, an Easter Island (Rapa Nui) statue that was relocated to Chile. I don't know when or under what circumstances, but he's here now, and there is a constant train of tour buses that stop by to get pictures with him-- saves $700 in airfare getting from Santiago to Easter Island!

 

Here ends the random photo tour of Viña. More on our school another time.

Rosetta Stone tells it like it is

Before we left for Chile, I borrowed a copy of Rosetta Stone and attempted to learn at least a little more basic Spanish. For those who have never used the program, it uses audio, written text, photos, and lots of repetition and context to teach you stuff. It's pretty effective. I certainly wasn't fluent by the middle of Level 2 (how far I've gotten), but I learned stuff that I used, especially in the first few weeks.

In this lesson about shopping, Rosetta gives us a glimpse into the life of a woman who wants jewelry.

Que linda...lo quiero...

With such desperate longing in her face, I can only assume there is more to this woman's story than simply admiring a shiny bauble that caught her eye. If I continue with Rosetta, I hope to learn more of her lonely, tragic life.

It would be easy to roll my eyes at this stereotypical view of women and our sparkly best friends, but look at how easily Kat recreated the scene, without even seeing it herself. A little too easily, ya know?

Que linda...lo quiero...

Okay, Rosetta Stone, you were right. La mujer quiere joyas.