When you study Spanish in school you learn the really important words. Baño means toilet. Pantalones are pants. Cerveza is beer. These are important words that one uses on a daily basis, of course with moderation Mother...The word ceniza, however, is not a word that I had the opportunity to learn in school. Cenizas are ashes. I learned this word when I woke up one morning to see a dusting of ashes in my room below the open window. As I sat down for breakfast I looked outside and saw a carpet of black and grey on the patio. And as I looked to the sky, ashes were falling like a flurry of snow. "This is odd," I thought to myself. The previous day when I was downtown I remembered seeing a thick layer of dark clouds above the hills that line the city but I thought it was just an inland storm. It turns out the west coast of this continent and its northern brother are not so different after all. About an hour or so away from Valparaiso there are some nasty forest fires flaring and spitting ashes in the surrounding areas as well as filling the sky with dark smoke. It is a most strange feeling to be sitting in a cafe and smell smoke when no one around you has a cigarette between their fingers. It is equally strange when you have to brush ashes out of your hair after walking down the street. What is the world coming to? Is it the apocalypse? Is this one of those darn plagues? Well I say, bring on the frogs.
My first few days living in Valparaiso have gone nice and smooth and I have been adjusting myself to the Chilean lifestyle. A bit about the dining style of the Chileans is in order. In the morning we have desayuno. The Chilean breakfast includes coffee or tea (té para mi), bread, butter, cheese, ham, and some fruit. For me this meal has been often late and by myself because when I don't have to wake up in the mornings, sleep is my number one priority. Almuerzo, lunch, comes at around two in the afternoon and is the biggest meal of the day, usually a full course meal. Today we had salad, soup, ravioli, tea, and ice cream. The other day we had salad, salmon, and fresh fruit. I usually find myself eating all that I can as the food is delicious and perfect to break up the day with. In the evenings, at around eight, we have once which is a light meal of bread and ham or the like. The other day I had quiche, which was scrumptious, and yesterday a few of the students in the program and I had once at La Cafe del Poeta in the Plaza Anibal Pinto where I enjoyed an Austral Lager and a open faced sandwich with ham, tomato, asparagus, and cheese.
The night life here is very different than that of the United States, at least for me at Middlebury, where all the parties start at eleven and are promptly shut down by two in the morning by a stern public safety officer. Here, it is ludicrous to be home before two in the morning, in fact, this is when many clubs open their doors. However, being the new guy in town I haven't really tasted my share of the night life yet and need to get in good with some locals in order to really check things out. The past few nights have been spent mostly walking around the plan, the downtown area, exploring, and usually coming home early. In fact, one night when I returned at around two I was surprised to see that I had arrived for bed earlier than my host parents. To say the least, I was ashamed.
Yesterday, all the students in the Middlebury program that are studing at the University de Playa Ancha, or UPLA for short, went to the University for a meeting with the office for foreign students. There, we were told very important information in indiscernably fast Spanish that I understood maybe ten percent of. However, I did catch one interesting fact: classes do not start until March 17. Interesting. It was at that moment that I began making plans for the weekend...
There are some pros and cons to this unexpected vacation. For one, I get to do some traveling for now and am hoping to check out a National Park for some camping and hiking east of Santiago this weekend. Also, with few priorities during the coming week, hopefully I will be able to get out to the beaches if the sky actually turns blue again. On the other hand, it will be a lot harder to meet Chileans in these next few weeks if I don't have class. But another juicy piece of information that I managed to salvage from the speeding lips of the university employees was that the six students in the Middlebury program are the only foreign students studying at UPLA this semester. This is definately good news, as one other student studying at La Catolica, the private university in Valpo told me yesterday that there are five hundred foreign students in her university. This will make integration a must within classes, once they start of course.
Now that I am so involved in the world of Blogs I have been purusing the Blogosphere and have tried to make mine a little more advanced. I added a few new features and pictures. I hope you like it. I can even put the music that is stuck in my head on here! Wow, technology is rad huh?
Whistling is an international tongue, making this song a perfect choice.
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