Friday, September 28th, 2007 Day 2 of my 4 day weekend: Culture and Class

I woke up relatively early for a Friday without class because I had to be at the CIEE office at 9:30 for our day trip. About 30 of the 45 students went to a beautiful old colonial house about 1.5 hours north of Santiago. The first half of the day we had a taller or workshop about our cultural experiences and understanding in Chile. We got to speak in English, the first time with the program and one of our directors, Elsa, led the discussion. Elsa is from Minnesota but married a Chilean she met when she was studying abroad and now lives and works here. It was really weird hearing her speak English. Anyway, we began the workshop with a great article called Baby Alien Spanish written by a former exchange student from our program who attended Georgetown. She talks about the difficulty of learning a new language and the challenges we face in our day to day lives due to our inability to communicate properly. It is definitely worth reading, especially if you want a humorous portrayal of how I really feel almost everyday. I may make it mandatory for my family to read it before I come home, just so they realized that I am not, nor will be fluent in Spanish. Here is the article online if you are interested:

http://www.georgetownvoice.com/2002-04-11/voices/baby-alien-spanish

The rest of the workshop was a very productive and helpful way to process some of our observations about Chileans culture and what they really mean. We learned about visual culture (what we observe) versus invisible culture (what our observations really mean). We talked about:

• gender roles: they are very defined here in Chile. The men are men and the women take care of them.
• Familial interaction: the kids live at home until they get married, sometimes 30 and older. And they act like 14 year olds. The moms do everything for them (cook, wash their clothes, make their beds, clean their rooms, everything)
• Making Chilean friends: it is so hard because they have super tight groups of friends, aren’t necessarily outgoing, although they are very nice when you initiate.
• The boyfriend/girlfriend situation: almost everyone over the age of 14 has a pololo or boyfriend/girlfriend. And they spend all their time together and there is no concept of PDA in Chile.
• Chilean concept of time: its very fluid and there is no such thing as time management. They are generally very inefficient with their time in United States terms.
• Food, exercise, and body image: Chileans like there food and a lot of it. Most Chilean women have a bit of meat on their bones and almost never exercise. But this is also very variable on class. The upper class is more US like: skinny women that are overly concerned about their body image.

After the taller we ate the almuerzos we’d brought from home then picked incredible, huge, juicy tangerines from the huge tangerine tree in the back by the vineyard with the Andes in the background. In was one of those, “I can’t believe I’m doing this right now” moments.

Next we went to a small winery called Viña San Esteban. We had a great tour and learned how they make the wine (a very very complicated process) then had a wine tasting. I felt very cultured. We headed back to Santiago around 5:00 and got there at about 7:30 because of the horrible traffic in the city. Courtney, Lorin and I tried to go to a musical at La Católica called La Opera de Asis about the life of Saint Francis of Asís (his feast day is October 4th) but the tickets were all sold out. So instead we got dinner at a restaurant across the street from campus. We split a delicious chicken pizza and I was completely stuffed. So much for giving up bread and eating healthy all week right!?!?

I walked (more like waddled) home after eating and my friends called to tell me they were going to meet up at 11 to go out. I was completely exhausted and overly stuffed and didn’t really want to go out, but I hadn’t been out in a while and they convinced me to go, so I went. Olga chuckled as I left but just told me to be careful. We met up and went to Bella Vista, the neighborhood full of bars. It was a beautiful night so we sat outside and had a beer. I got a Fanschop (Fanta with beer) but could only drink about half of it. It was a super relaxing time and I got to meet the pololo of my friend Nicole. We headed back home around 2 and by 2:30 I was asleep in bed.