Hola!
Where to begin? These past two days have been incredibly long; I had my first day of school here on Monday and it was possibly one of the longest school days I've ever had in my entire life, in more ways than one. We have an add-drop period here, which basically means you can "window shop" for classes, and attend lectures for the first week and then decide which classes to register for. This idea sounds great in theory, until you realize that we can take classes at 2 different universities, each of which have 4 separate campuses in completely different parts of the city, some of which are accessible only by buses, and while I can handle the metro, I haven't quite mastered the bus system here yet (and when I say haven't quite mastered...let's just say that's a bit of an understatement..)
The time slots of all the classes I liked also overlap...so on Monday, I had to wake up at 7 (it's still dark here at 7, and I can see my breath even in the shower...brr) I got on the metro (the campus where I have most of my classes is about 40 minutes from where I live), and transferred to the right line at the right place, and thought I was doing great..until I realized that the line I had transferred to runs express trains early in the morning-there is a red train and a green train,and each color stops at every other station along the line. The campus was a red stop and I was on a green train...I had to do a U turn and I finally wound up at the campus, an hour early.
The first class I took was called 'Enfrentando la Pobreza' (encountering/understanding poverty) and it's focused on public policy and development, and also has a social learning component where we volunteer. The professor made us go around the class and introduce ourselves, and I was sitting with my american friends and we all stuck out (the three of them all have blonde hair...) and that was the first of many points during which I felt super awkward and painfully aware of the fact that talking was no longer a neutral activity...at home, for example, if you're lost or confused, or want to make a joke, you can do so without thinking about it..here, the minute you open your mouth people know you're a foreigner, and it's super weird to get used to. I also went to a sociolinguistics class, and *tried* to go to an environmental ethics class. I got super lost, wandered around the campus, and finally found the building and got to class half an hour late, and walked in in the middle of a "quiz" about environmental laws in Chile. Needless to say, had it been a real quiz I would have failed miserably..luckily it was one of those first day things professors like to do to make you realize you know nothing about the subject. Environmental ethics sounded cool, but sitting through the class made me realize my scientific vocabulary in Spanish is rather lacking..plus, the professor was British, and his accent, while amusing, made the Spanish a bit hard to follow.
It was a long, long day, and none of my classrooms were heated (the first class, I saw people taking notes with gloves on, a skill I've yet to master..) and when I got lost and somehow wound up in the back of the campus near the greenhouses I sort of wanted to cry..but it was worth having a rough first day because today when I went back I had a little chat with myself (you know... a mental pep talk? in Spanglish? Spanish is infiltrating my brain since I hear it all the time now...) and decided that the worst that could happen was that I ask for directions and people laugh at me/don't understand me and I wind up lost..since I was already lost all day yesterday, I figured I didn't have much to lose. Today I sat through "Corrupcion en Latinoamerica" and "Mexico: Cultura y historia." My class on corruption was FULL of foreigners (my professor asked the Chileans in the class to raise their hands, and there was one row of them, all sitting along the back row of the class, and the rest, about 40 people, were all from the US and Europe.) My Mexico class (I know, ironic right..I go to Chile and wind up taking a history class on Mexico) was by far my favorite so far. The professor was hilarious (and I understood his jokes!) and we get to watch Mexican movies and listen to music as part of our class.
After class, my friend Landry and I tried to find a mall near where I live to get fro-yo, and we took a bus ..wound up lost (story of my life) and wandered through a grocery store looking for peanut butter (no luck...what they do sell here: mayonnaise (in bags) milk (in cartons, not refrigerated or pasteurized), hot dogs (an entire huge shelf of them, next to the dairy section), yogurt (soupy consistency), and bread (they eat SO much bread).
Other fun facts: there is no toilet paper in bathroom stalls here, instead, there is one huge dispenser near the sink of every bathroom. You take a piece off before you enter the bathroom. The library at La Catolica is super secure,they have lockers for your backpacks and you have to scan your student ID card to enter. Keyboards are formatted differently here (some keys have accents/diacritical markings, and the @ key is in a weird place..). Chileans don't pronounce their "s"s when they speak, and in standard Spanish (i.e. what they teach us in school) you do pronounce "s"s. This creates problems--for example, Landry and I wanted to get to a mall called Los Altos, and we asked the bus driver, and he looked at us like we were from Mars, said "no entiendo" (I don't understand), gestured to other passengers to 'translate" for us, and wound up driving away, leaving us on the curb.
It's been a rough but (ultimately) rewarding couple of days lol. My dark hair is a mixed blessing, because some people think I'm Chilean, and when I don't understand something they say, they think it's because I'm stupid and not because I'm still learning Spanish. It really makes me empathize with people who come to the US knowing no English. I've studied Spanish for almost five years, and was fluent-ish before I came here, and I'm still having trouble almost everyday...imagine someone who comes knowing nothing and doesn't have the support network I have to help make the adjustment process easier.
On a less related note, I also signed up for a Portugeuse workshop which will meet every Monday at the Facultad de Letras here. Maybe when I come back, I'll have learned a few words..the trick will be not mixing them up with Spanish!
Miss everyone, skype me!
<3
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