Upon Arrival: Initial challenges and impressions of moving to Chile

I started this journey with nothing but an 80L backpack, an airline ticket, and an open mind to what obstacles this teaching adventure might bring. Well, those obstacles made themselves apparent very, very early.

My journey started from San Francisco, made a pitstop in Houston, where we were delayed, and was eventually held up by a missed flight in Panama, where I would spend one night, but my backpack would spend two. Upon arrival in Santiago the next morning, I made it safe and sound but my backpack was no where to be found. This situation promptly fed doubt to my brain and and my brain ate it up like shrimp fried rice. It begged the question "what the hell am I doing here?".  Well the truth is that I really didn't know, but luckily my backpack showed up the next day, and along with it my confidence in what I was doing in Chile teaching English. They both looked like something the cat drug in, but at least they were both there.

The first week was a lot of learning at orientation in Santiago. There was a lot of "do this", "don't do this", and "this is how it works in Chile", and it all would have been rather dry, but luckily our presenters were great and so was the company of the other volunteers. All people somewhat similar to myself. Either doing some soul searching, or just doing it because they could. Together we did a lot of exploring, a good amount of drinking, and and ate an absurd amount of bread and cheese.

The "Hotel" where we stayed in Santiago

 View from the top of Cerro San Cristobal

 Some sweet graffiti outside of Pablo Neruda's house

 Post hike photo with some of the volunteer homies atop San Cristobal

The Virgin

When the day came to leave, there were a lot of mixed emotions. I was excited to meet my host family and start practicing Spanish, but it was also slightly scary leaving the comfort of being with 50 english speaking people from all over the world with a good deal of similar interests. It was like, well, living in a foreign country, for real. And I soon found out exactly what that felt like.

First of all, I do speak a good amount of Spanish, and understand a great deal more. But I swear, Chile should have its own language because it is not Spanish. They have so many different words for things than the rest of the Spanish speaking world, and all of their words run together because they drop the S's and a good amount of syllables. Po and Caxai are some of these words, and I now know that "po" means nothing, they just add it on the ends of words, and that caxai means "ya know?". But, when I first got here, some one would say "Caxai" at the end of some long, quickly said statement that all sounded like one word, and a pretty small but bigger than your average size piece of me wanted to say "No, I don't f#$*ing caxai". But of course I didn't, and instead felt like I was in a fish bowl, where I couldn't understand anything being said to me, and clearly couldn't say anything back.

Luckily, this only lasted a few days in my new home. I got settled, felt more comfortable and stopped caring about sounding like an idiot when I spoke Spanish and just said what I thought was right. So far, no one's punched or slapped me so I think that I'm doing alright.

Well, I suppose that I'm just rambling now, but at least the 3 people that read this will know that if they plan on moving to Chile they better 1) study chilean and not Spanish 2) be prepared to eat lots of bread, with a side of some more bread and 3) know that caxai means "ya know?" and that "po" means nothing, absolutely nothing, they just throw it on the end of words for fun, or to confuse foreigners, whichever you want to believe.

So far Patagonia has been very pedagogical. I've learned a lot. Hopefully my students will learn a lot. And hopefully I'll learn some more. Until next time. Chao (and yes, that's how they spell it here).