A new chapter in this crazy memoir of mine

I should have started writing about all this earlier. Now it's been a month already and I have to recap everything. I can't remember all the specifics! Everyone will have to bear with me.

Let's briefly continue with the night I met my family, since I didn't get to finish that part yesterday.

July 27. We finally arrived to my little hacienda in Viña del Mar. When we arrived I saw a huge gate and a door which were part of a think wall. I thought this was the house, with a door to an adjacent garage. But when my mamá chilena opened the door, we were still outside. I saw a pool, a huge palm tree, and a three story house inside this enclosure. I had never seen a fence or enclosure such as this before! It was a bit surprising. I really liked the look of things so far.

As everyone helped me with my bags, I walked inside and met my hermanita chilena (my little Chilean sister), Macarena. She gave me the traditional kiss on the cheek and gave me the grand tour of the house. In the downstairs I saw the kitchen, a huge dining room with an all-wood interior, a giant living room with couches, a stereo, a fire place, and arches everywhere. In the next room was a full size pool table. I honestly think it's larger than full size; I don't believe I've ever seen a pool table that big. The last room in the downstairs belongs to my hermano mayor (older brother), Felipe, and it had its own bathroom (well, a Jack-and-Jill bathroom with the room with the pool table) with a jacuzzi. On the second floor, I saw a bedroom painted green with a desk and a display board on Patagonia (the bedroom of the Chilean student that lives here, but she was on vacation), a large bathroom with an opaque door, another bathroom ("my" bathroom), my mamá chilena's room, my hermana mayor (older sister) Paula's room, my hermanita Maca's room, the computer room on the third floor, and finally, "my" room.
Mi pieza. For the first time in over a year, I have a room! I don't have to sleep in a closet or on the top bunk of someone else's bunk bed, I don't have to share a 14' x 15' square with someone else and use a communal bathroom in flip-flops, I don't have to sleep on a mat on the floor, I don't have to sleep on a couch in a living room. I have a room! All to myself! And it's painted green!

Don't get me wrong, I have had a wonderful experience in all of the aforementioned sleeping situations. It's just that with all the nomading around that I've been doing the last year or so, it's really nice to once again have a place that I can call my own for a while, and not have to worry if my sleeping habits, music, or obsessive-compulsive tendencies (thanks mom) are going to bother anybody else. I can hang pictures by the thousands, I can hang my clothes or keep them in drawers, I can pile my hoodies on the chair (something I am very guilty of, no matter where I go), and I can stay awake until the sun comes up and sleep until it goes back down. In addition, I only share the bathroom with one other person, who is hardly ever here. Yay, I can keep my shampoo in the shower, I can keep my toothbrush on the counter, and I can leave my hairbrush wherever I please! No shower baskets, no flip-flops, no bottom drawers, no shave cream for men, no electric razors... This is great!

Immediately after my helpers dumped my bags on my hard wood floor, we all went downstairs to tomar once. Once is like tea time. It takes place sometime between 7 and 10pm, sometimes later. It's a time when the family can all sit down and recap their days over a cup of tea and some bread. I was seated next to Maca, with mamá to my left and Felipe to my right, with Paula and her pololo (Chilean word for boyfriend) in front of me.

Once made me really nervous. I was already a bag of nerves from the time of descent in Viña del Mar and throughout the family assignment process, and here I was sitting in a brand new kitchen with six people I'd never met before, preparing myself to speak in a language not my own, a language I had more or less dabbled in but had not really lived.

But it wasn't so bad. One of the very first things they asked me was ¿Estás pololeando? and I hadn't the slighest clue what that could mean. On top of my blank stare, I think I may have raised my eyebrow like I'm known to do, because my hermanita started cracking up. They tried explaining: ¿Tienes pololo? ¿Estás pololeando? Again, I had no idea what a pololo was and the gerund pololeando just sounded absurd to me. Finally, the mom asked me ¿Tienes alguien que es como tu novio? Ahhhh. The light bulb has been illuminated. Apparently, here in Chile a novio is a like a groom in a wedding, and less like a boyfriend. If I were to say I had a novio here like I had learned back in the US, I would be speaking very formally. So they use the word pololo for boyfriend (or polola for girlfriend), and pololear means to date. Now I get it!

Unfortunately, to this day, I still have trouble understanding Paula because she speaks really fast. It's a bit easier now, but sometimes my head still spins when she asks me a question. My program director, Lizette, told us all at our orientation meetings in Santiago that we picked a hard country to study Spanish in because the people here speak such a distinct dialect that it's going to be one hell of a time for us to pick it up, especially the decent percentage of kids who came with zero Spanish-speaking background (and I mean zero. I know several people who came here without knowing how to say ¿Dónde está el baño?. And I thought I was nervous).

The reason is, a vast majority of the Chileans speak very fast, they omit the s at the end of all of their words and the d in words like nada (naa) and complicado (complicao), and they speak in a familiar "you" form different than the usual. When I want to say ¿Quieres comer? (Do you want to eat?), they would say ¿Querí comer?. When I want to say ¿Cómo te llamas? (What's your name?), they would say ¿Cómo te llamai?. When I want to say ¿Dónde vives? (Where do you live?), they would say ¿Dónde viví?. Another thing the Chileans use that no one else uses is this cute little suffix po. Sípo, yapo, claropo, nopo, levántatepo, cállatepo, déjamepo, obviopo, etc etc. It's like an emphatic note at the end of each word. You'd hear it most in arguments or commands, but in other situations too. Like the other day my hermano told my mamá, "Si necesitas algo mamá llámamepo" (If you need something, call me!). Sometimes my hermano Felipe and I banter back and forth as such, and obviopo is my favorite one. Hence the url of this blog.

So as you can see, being fairly recently introduced to a Spanish-speaking environment, not only do I have to try and pick out all the words in a rapid-fire conversation, but I also have to distinguish the new form from the form I am used to. I don't really use the new form myself, because to me it's a bit strange to just adopt it when I can't hardly explain how I slept the night before, but now I can understand it a lot better than when I first arrived.

Well, anyway, the rest of my first night went well. I felt a little weird after eating because I didn't know if I was eating too much or too little, and I didn't know when would be an appropriate time to get up and excuse myself, as I never eat at a dinner table and thus have zero table manners. When I finally made my way up to mi pieza, I started unraveling my life and tried putting the pieces back together. It was still so surreal to me to have two canvas bags sitting on a bed with an unfamiliar comforter in a lime green bedroom with three big windows and a view of the populated hills. I remembered telling my friends in Atlanta that if we missed our rescheduled flight to Santiago that I was going to get back on a plane destined for Seattle and forget this whole thing. At this point in my night, despite all the neat people in my family, despite the big house with the palm tree and pool out front, despite the sunset over the port that I had seen before all of that, I half-wished that's what I had done. I spent a good five to ten minutes just staring into my two suitcases that were overflowing with unfolded shirts and beauty products and pictures and books and school supplies. I unpacked the pictures first.
I sat on my bed and looked through every single picture I brought. There must be about 400 of them. I have three or four Walgreens picture pockets full. The first twenty or so in the first pocket are pictures that I printed from my month or two of staying at Keith's house. A picture of him smoking, a bundle of pictures of Caleb's girlfriend Autumn and I, Keith and Caleb being twin jerks, the Cat, Karl making a weird face... Those two months meant the world to me. What Keith and I had going before I left Seattle was amazing, comfortable, shared, lovely. I can't wait to live it again when I get back in three months.

I was up until two in the morning unpacking my suitcases. I believe my goal at the time was less focused on organizing the things in my room and more focused on just getting the stupid things out of my sight.

July 28 - August 1. Week of orientation. That's right, my first full day of actually living in Chile was also my first day of orientation. I remember thinking, "Am I ever going to get a break? I haven't stopped since I started..." And I spent this week running on empty from around 8:30 in the morning until about 6:45 at night. Thursday was the only exception. On Thursday, we had to spend the entire morning registering for classes, and since there was no way of knowing when everyone would be done with this clusterfuck of an event, we had the afternoon off. I got home around two that afternoon, and I took a three hour nap.

August 2-3. My first weekend in Viña del Mar. Want to know how exciting it was? I slept. All day, both days. I seriously needed it.

August 4. First day of classes. My first class was Español Escrito (Written Spanish), 11:45-1:15, and I found it to be quite boring (and still do). We just chose partners and took down each others' information in order to present one another to the class. It was like being in nineth grade all over again. This class only had twelve people in it. Later, four hours later to be exact, I had another class, Gramática para Extranjeros (Grammar for Foreigners), 5:20-6:50. The professor for this class is pretty funny. He makes the lectures a little more fun with his weird examples. I got home around seven, ate once, waited around for Keith to get off work so I could give him a call, and went to bed.

August 5. This day was easy, because on Tuesdays I only have one class, Español Comunicacional y Cultura Chilena (Communicational Spanish and Chilean Culture), 2:00-3:30. I didn't have to get up early, I didn't have to sit around for lectures all day, and I was out before four. The profesora for this class was really sweet. I love her.

August 6. This was my most complicated day (before the classes with Chilean students started after August 18). Español Escrito 11:45-1:15, just enough time to run across the street to the ISA office and eat my colación (sack lunch), then back to Cultura Chilena 2:00-3:30, with a two hour break just hanging out in the computer lab at the ISA office until my Gramática class 5:20-6:50.

August 7. Cultura Chilena 2:00-3:30. That was all.

August 8. No classes on Fridays, ever! Yay!

Well, after yet another suffocatingly long blog entry, I must say goodnight. My mamá noticed I was busy typing away and brought me once...


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Hasta pronto!
Kelsey