Due to a recent flood in the Canales household, my dear old antiquated laptop has sadly passed away, along with all the lovely pictures that are now lost in the bowels of its soaking hard drive. Thus, until I take new photos to replace the old and buy another computer on which to upload them, we're all stuck reading my picture-less blog posts (if you need pics for motivation, read no further). In the meantime, I will try to make my writing style as entertaining as possible and regale everyone with tales of Chilean adventures.
I will introduce my host family by beginning with my mother. María Angélica Canales is a single mother who works long hours (44 teaching hours per week not including lesson planning, to be more precise) to fund her daughters' education. She and I work alongside each other to teach English to students in the 5th - 8th grades in her school. Her eldest daughter, Carola, is studying to become a nurse and is gaining her observation hours by working in a public hospital in Santiago. She is clean, well-organized, and very busy, though she always makes time to speak Spanish with me in the evenings. Though she is 24 and has a pololo of eight years, she is determined not to marry until she achieves her professional goals. The younger daughter, María Jesús, is studying to become a music professor. As is the case with most musical geniuses, she prefers to work in the midst of messiness, sings in the shower (and everywhere else, for that matter), and is highly talented on the guitar and piano, along with a few other instruments with which I am unfamiliar. She also has a pololo who is equally musically gifted.
As for friends, I have made several here, though I would like to mention those from NC in particular. Kirsten Logrande is a current UNC student who happens to be studying in Santiago, Chile this summer. We met two years ago, when I was her RA in an on-campus residence hall, yet neither of us knew of the other's plans to travel. To make a long story short, we found each other via Facebook (of course) and decided to meet up in the downtown area. We visited La Chascona--one of the three houses of famous Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda--and caught up over coffee, empanadas and pastries afterward. (The pictures taken during this visit are among those that were lost--if my laptop memory can be retrieved, you can look for them in a later post!) Here's a link to her blog, which actually inspired me to create mine: http://klogrande.blogspot.com/ Another UNC alum, Karen, has been teaching English here for several months and offered to meet me during orientation. She had plenty of advice to offer regarding city life and has led me in all the right directions, especially with respect to Chilean cuisine. Finally, one of the other girls in my orientation group is a current NC State (rival school!) student majoring in engineering. That brings the Carolina tally to a total of four, with perhaps more to come.
As for my other friends from orientation--collectively from Wisconsin, England, and Minnesota--we met this weekend and went on a Starbucks hunt that endured for several hours. We all decided that instant coffee was no substitute for the real thing and that we needed to find the brewed stuff ASAP. I'm sure every Chilean from whom we asked directions knew instantly that we were Americans--who else would walk out obliviously into oncoming traffic, have only an inkling of a sense of direction, and be so doggedly determined to find this ultra-expensive coffeehouse? Among the items offered on the menu was Café Americano, the contents of which I'm still curious to know. A group of us also ventured to a theater to watch Toy Story 3. We were originally informed that it would be shown in English with Spanish subtitles, but that was not the case when we arrived. As it turned out, the movie was dubbed. We made it through the showing easily enough, however, as the voices were in a more standard Spanish (as opposed to the Chilean version, which is fairly difficult to understand) and the movements of the characters' mouths actually coordinated with their words, surprisingly enough. It turned out to be a pretty good, fairly Americanized weekend.
And then there was the flood. Everything proceeded normally Tuesday (meaning I woke up, froze, thawed by drinking Nescafe and drying my hair with a secador , and then refroze on the way to school), until my mom, Angélica, received a call from the neighbors during lunch. They reported that there was water leaking from her house out onto the street, so she rushed home to see what had happened. We expected that a couple of the rooms would be affected by the pipe that had burst in the bathroom, but we unfortunately underestimated the extent of the damage. The entire house was inches deep in very cold water (it's winter here, remember), and we spent the remainder of the afternoon sweeping/mopping/wiping it all up with various items of old clothing. I had inadvertently left my laptop on the floor that morning when I left the house in a rush, and it had already drowned by the time we arrived on the scene. Among other damaged household items were a TV, a guitar, several books, and lots and lots of shoes. And of course the broken pipe in the bathroom. I was fortunate to have only lost an old, busted computer--the tile floor of the house, on the other hand, is still somewhat damp and very loose in many areas. My mother has in fact been planning on moving to a different location for several months now, as her house sustained a fair amount of damage during the earthquake earlier this year. While the majority of the home was fine, her bedroom wall cracked and is perpetually damp--she must resort to using towels each morning just to wipe the accumulated moisture from the floor.
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