Esto es Chile

Several nights ago I experienced something that I have never seen before in my life.  It was also something that I never will see again in my life. This is because it was something that only happens every few years, and you have to be in the right place at exactly that point every few years to be able to experience it.  Had I not been here in Chile at exactly this moment, I would have missed it forever, and never would have known that such a thing could happen.  The experience:  being in Chile when “La Roja” (the Chilean national soccer team) won a spot at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil in 2014.  

Now, being the poor homeschooled kid that I was, I never developed the normal, healthy admiration for competitive sports that most adult people develop around puberty.  I still don’t follow sports very much, and I don’t expect that I ever will.  I believe that sports bring out the worst in people and encourage feelings of “otherness” that turns friends into enemies.  Two people can be good friends until they find out that one is a Redsox fan and the other is a Yankees fan.  Patriotism to a particular sports team becomes almost a personal identity, one that is so strong it can separate people and cause hatred.  Such holds true for soccer, the most popular sport world-wide.  Make the sports team big enough, however, and the same loyalty that can cause otherness seems to unite people of a nation like no other propaganda could ever accomplish.  A war was won on this night, and every Chilean in the city was sharing in the excitement of their victory over the Ecuadorian menace.  

I didn’t see the game, personally.  But I certainly heard it.  Furthermore, I knew exactly the moment that the results were final, marked by the valiant roar of the Chilean population throwing their arms and voices in the air to celebrate.  Everyone was on their balcony screaming and chanting, “Chi-Chi-Chi-Le-Le-Le,” and “Viva Chile, Mierda!” (literally translated, “long live Chile, Shee-yit!”).  Cars driving by on the heavily-trafficked Avenida Providencia honked their horns and waved Chilean flags out of the window.  The blast of vuvuzelas came from all directions and most of the nearby balconies.  For those of you reading who have never heard a vuvuzela in person, they are fucking loud.  About as loud as a car horn.  No wonder issues of noise pollution were such an issue at the last World Cup.  

The most real and exciting part of this whole experience was seeing the fireworks coming from the national stadium where the game was played, less than 4 miles away.  Fireworks hold a very special place in my heart.  They remind me of hope, love, celebration, and they correspond to quite a few cherished memories that I have.  Just to see fireworks alone is always a special thing.  This time, however, I couldn’t help but succumb, seeing the red, white, and blue of the Chilean Flag, to the feeling of being a part of something historical, even if I didn’t participate in the sport or its following.  When I look back on my time in Chile, I can remember the magic of being here at this time and being a part of this monumental event.

 

I may not follow sports very closely, but I’ll be damned if I won’t be watching the World Cup in 2014 while wearing my Chilean flag t-shirt.   

Welcome to G.E. May I take your passport number?

I’m surprised by the amount of truth in the wisdom I was given by my dad before I left the states (such truth is best solidified through personal experience:  “Crap, he was right!”).  This truth is that I was to learn a tremendous amount about those things that I could never possibly have expected to learn about.  I expected that I would, eventually, get to know my future English students in the business realm on a personal level, maybe even become friendly with them.  Who knows, maybe some of them would like me enough that they would remember me later on when I asked for a work reference.  You never know, right?  At this point, this particular expectation that I held has not proven to be impossible, nor has it exactly bloomed to its full potential.  

On the other hand, I’m making great friends with the receptionists.  Being a travelling English teacher, my routine is growing quite regular:  I go to the receptionist of the business for whom my student(s) work(s), recite my name, passport number (because according to the Chilean government, I’m not recognizable as a person yet, but am fully entitled to pay 20% in taxes), who I’m teaching on that particular day, and agree to wait while said student(s) is/are paged.  After several weeks of this, the receptionists to whom I give this information and I have come to an unspoken understanding that the whole process is a mild pain in the ass.  In accordance with this agreement, we are able to socialize.  The usual topics include where I’m from, why I sound like a Spaniard, complaining about co-workers, etc.  During my most recent socialization hour, a security guard for one such company who lived in Miami for 30 years told me that he understands the economic possibility that awaits the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Hondurans, Colombians and other Spanish-speakers who immigrate to the United States looking for work, but to see a young American working in a Latin American country for his own economic possibility was refreshing:  “it makes me feel good,” he said,  “I don’t know why, but I really like it.”

My routine has been made all that much more enjoyable and convenient after moving into my new apartment.  For a kid from a rather small town who watches shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and other shows depicting yuppie characters and their big-city shenanigans, experiencing city-life is a pretty big deal.  I’m on the 8^th floor of a building that’s a block from a subway stop in Providencia, the Manhattan of Santiago.  I live a block from my gym, and the first floor of the very building across the street contains a bar, a 24hr liquor store, an OK Market (7-11), 4 restaurants (one of which is rumored to be Santiago’s best family-owned empanada shop), and a bakery.  The view from my balcony is of the Santiago sky-line, including the Costanera Center, the tallest building on the South American continent.  There pigeons outside my bedroom window right now.  My room is rather small, only 6 inches away from being my stretched arm’s width apart (I measured), but it is quite comfortable and equipped with a new mattress, T.V. and cable, and surprising amounts of storage space.  Need I say more?

Yes.  I share house with two other guys, one financial administrator (I think) for a mining company and the other, a doctor and director of a small out-patient medical center.  I have agreed to start teaching private English lessons to the former, while the latter is fluently bi-lingual already, having studied medicine for a short time at a school in Great Britain.  With these two fellows comes the vast social circle of which they are a part, being shenanigan-prone, big-city yuppies themselves.  Therein lays a possible solution to the piece of my puzzle that I am lacking, making friends.  This weekend is scheduled with a welcome fiesta, which I am certain I will report about soon. 

 

A short review

      Pop Pop would be disappointed in my journal-keeping abilities.  I hadn’t been in Chile 2 months before I had almost abandoned blogging altogether.  Why?  I could make excuses all day long that I had been simply too busy (not untrue) to keep a blog, too buried in lesson planning (untrue) to be able to write weekly blog posts.  Excuses aside, the fact of it is simply that I hate writing blog posts.  They take forever to write, they require a certain element of creativity which I can only tap into with great effort, and I had even convinced myself that keeping a blog was unimportant.  However, due to the petition of family members to the contrary, I realize that I do value being able to share my experiences with those close to me.  Damnit. 

     

To review the past month or so in 50 words or less:  I passed my certification course, which turned out to be one of the most physically and emotionally difficult things I have ever done.  Yes, emotionally: entering an intensive training course with the cocky attitude of “I went to college, I can handle this” and quickly having one’s pride beaten to death by a month of sleep deprivation and constant “constructive criticism” is enough to reduce a man to tears.  Ask me how I know this.

     

Now to the present:  I am a gainfully employed travelling ESL teacher with a full class schedule.   This fact is a strange one for me to think about. My goal all through college was to be a teacher…and now I actually am one.  And I had no idea how bloody tricky it is to teach ESL.  See, I teach using communicative methodology, which means that my only teaching tool is the language which I am teaching.  The students do not know English, and English is the only language permitted in the class room.  It’s like teaching music theory to someone who has never heard music before, using only individual sounds and musical notation to teach it.  Doing this, I have gained a very deep appreciation for what my own language teachers did for me in college.  They always made it look so easy (the good teachers, at least).      

The job has its ups and downs, as does any decent profession.  Being that I teach adult ESL, (most) all of my students are smart, educated, and very motivated to learn.  They ask questions that are difficult to answer, which is good in that they challenge me to become a smarter teacher.  They ask questions that are easy to answer, which are good because they make me feel smart.  There is a very profound joy in seeing the linguistic concept click in a student’s mind and the look of understanding come across their face.   

The down of this job is the “travelling” part.  I give classes to working professionals before or after work, or on their lunch break.  Thus, I have the opportunity to see many different parts of Santiago, a sometimes positive and sometimes negative aspect of the job.  Most of my classes are in Las Condes, a virtual Central Park in upper Santiago.   New, shiny skyscrapers housing international corporations, cafes and sushi restaurants on every corner, all surrounded by beautiful parks and flower gardens to take walks through:

Said flower garden.  There are several such gardens located in a big park in Las Condes.

The view from a building where one of my classes is.

And then there’s my class in Pudahuel.  If Las Condes is like the Central Park of Santiago, Pudahuel is the border town in Mexico that’s been destroyed by the drug war.  Located on the outskirts of the city, Pudahuel is an industrial desert replete with chop shops, shipping warehouses, and dust-filled winds.  This is the part of town where my institution only sends male teachers, and for good reason.  From downtown Santiago, it takes two hours to arrive to this class via the 1 of 2 city busses that go that far. 

On one side of my walk to my Pudahuel class, there is a cement wall topped with razor wire that surrounds what is, from what I can tell, a dump for paper products. 

On the other side, miles and miles of vineyards, dusty and brown from the winter season

This weekend I will be moving into my new apartment in Providencia, known fondly by Santiaguinos as “Sanhattan.”  I’m sure I will have more to post afterward.  Right now, it’s time for another drink, and for a Pino Empanada.  More to come!

First day of Class (no really, I had school today)

Knowing something logically is very different from knowing something intuitively, personally, emotionally.  For example, I knew (logically) that going to live in another country, even for a relatively short period of time, would be difficult.  However, I did not know (emotionally) that going to live in a different country would be difficult.  Even in as metropolitan of a city of Santiago, it seriously feels like I just moved out of mom and dad’s house for the first time and am learning how to live on my own.  Again.  And that sucks.  On top of that, with the start of my IDELT course today, part of me also feels like a terrified freshman on his first day at the university.  Here again, logic diverges from emotion: I know I can do this, having done it before and in far worse circumstances…but can I really do this?  I emotionally digress.

The BridgeChile language institute is a very nice place; albeit small, but welcoming, clean, and equipped with every amenity that a lonely, yuppy trainee-teacher could want (and for those who want to grammar-Nazi me and point out the improperly used semi-colon I used while training to teach proper English grammar can shove it really far up there).  The group of people with whom I will spend 40 hours a week for the next four weeks consists of four people, including myself, plus our trainer.  Ordinarily, I would be very excited for a small class size like this…except that they are all women.  Yes, four weeks in a small room with five women every day and all day.  I can almost feel the eggshells crunching underneath my shoes.  Realistically, though, each of the other three students is in the exact same position that I am in:  Far away from home, brand new to city, and about to be under far more stress that we currently are.  For this reason, I expect we will become fast friends by the end of our course.  Assuming I am still alive by the end of the course.

Despite all of these minor (yet damned frustrating) trials, I often find myself hazily thinking that I almost can’t believe how amazing this whole deal is.  My dad will share the sentiment, fondly I hope, about living the urban life.  I live in a beautiful home in a safe neighborhood that is within walking distance to the Metro 1 line (Santiago’s equivalent to Boston’s T) into downtown, within walking distance to the grocery store, to the shopping mall, to everything.  I commute for 30 minutes in the morning and evening, and never once on this commute do I sit down, unless there happens to be a free seat in that subway car.  I found a bodybuilding gym that’s 4 blocks from the institute and immediately off the Metro.  For a boy who grew up in a city that is made up entirely of suburb and no actual “city” to speak of, this is something that I thought only existed on How I Met Your Mother.  Finally seeing for myself that it is real has inspired me in a way that nothing else has:  if I’m willing to be afraid and try challenging myself, maybe these dreams that I’ve had since starting college could be reality. 

One dream has already started to become a reality since coming here.  My Spanish is becoming second nature, something that I just do without giving much thought to it.  Oh sure, there are still plenty of times where I hit a wall and have to stop entirely to just focus silently on the message that I’m trying to send.  But in daily retrospect, I am distinguishing continually less between my conversations in English and my conversations in Spanish.  It’s all just talking. 

So these are my thoughts and current events.  Having postponed homework to bring you all this, I should actually start challenging myself and stop the talk.  Stay tuned.               

The First Day in Class

I have tried several times to write a subsequent post in this blog, playing with various emotions and descriptions of things which I couldn’t possibly understand before actually doing it.  I failed to finish any of these attempts (Pop-Pop would be disappointed in me for this).  I think, now, that I failed because I had not just flown 6,000 miles to the other side of the world, 6,000 miles away from everyone I know, by myself, with nothing but what I could fit in a few suitcases.  This I have now done, and I am ready to finish a blog post.  It distracts me from the alienation.  As you may have guessed, I made it to Santiago.

First thing is first.  I have heard that goodbyes are tough, but I had no idea just how tough saying goodbye would be.  It was a physical, deeply painful wound that is still tender and will take a very long time to heal.  I don’t want to talk about it more than I have to. 

Between driving to Denver and arriving at the house where I will spend the next five weeks, I was in transit for just over 25 hours (I still haven’t slept since yesterday morning, so my proof-reading may be poor tonight).  Surprisingly, it wasn’t so terrible.  In Minneapolis, I spent a few hours playing around on the complimentary iPad supplied at every lounge seat in the terminal while the bartender kept bringing me vodka tonics until I was dizzy.  There are worse ways to travel.  On the flight from Atlanta to Santiago, I watched several brand new movies and ate airplane food while trying to find a semi-amicable compromise between the sleeping pills and the painfully uncomfortable economy seat.

My warm reception in the house of my host, a quintilingual (that’s five, folks) interpreter by the name of Andres, helped to recuperate me from the long travels and separation anxiety.  This is where things start getting to be pretty cool.  I am currently sharing the house with an ethno-botanic alternative therapist (this is best translation I have), an Egyptian language student and fearless feminist from Cairo who has agreed to teach me Arabic, and a philosophy major from Chicago who, from what I can tell, just likes to travel.  I also met up with an old friend of the Pfisterer family, whose kindness and willingness to help will be the difference between a successful, positive experience, and 7 months of counting the days until I can go home.  I spent several hours in her home, getting to know her family, and this recuperated me even further.    

Tomorrow I will go out and spending time familiarizing myself with the city, the metro stations, where my school is, where the malls are, and hopefully buy a functioning cell-phone.  First, I need sleep.  Stay tuned: pictures are to come.