At some point my luck has to run out. It´s 8:30 a.m. in Chicago at my friend´s apartment in Wrigleyville, and I had set two alarms for 6:15 a.m. to catch a 10:00 a.m. flight to El Salvador. From Salvador, I have a connecting flight to Peru. From Peru, I have a connecting flight to Santiago, Chile.
I panic.
I had stayed up far too late drinking far too much with good friends from college. One of them is at the receiving end of my frantic delerium.
`Mikey, the alarms didn`t go off!!!` (yelled using much more profane language)
`What time is it?` (muffled, sleepily)
`8:30!!!` (insert profanity where logical)
`I`ll hail a cab, you get your stuff together` (sleepily, unphased)
As Mikey shuffles out his door and into the street while still in his boxers, I shove what`s left unpacked (thankfully very little) into my bags. I jump into the taxi as Mikey tells the driver to `step on it`.
Not the greatest start to 18 hours of flights and layovers, but I make it on board in plenty of time.
Fast forward.
I have been in Santiago for a week now. I am staying at a house in one of the richer parts (called Las Condes) of the inner city. My host`s name is Andres and he is extremely hospitable and accomodating to my needs as both a foreigner as well as a student trying to get his TEFL teaching certificate. The house is marvelous (pictures soon to be posted) but is poorly insulated like so many of the apartments and houses in Santiago. They are not used to having such cold weather! As one can imagine, it was quite a shock to come from hot summer in Kansas to late autumn in Chile.
I have had half a week of my training course and there has already been a lot of information thrown at us. In fact, we are doing our first practice teachings on Monday and Tuesday. I´m going on Tuesday and my topic is grocery store vocabulary, specifically focusing on units of food. For instance: loaves of bread, bunches of bananas, and jars of jam. I´m going to make my lesson plan tomorrow and have some ideas of how I want to go about it.
In my course, they focus on teaching a specific style of language teaching called the Communicative Approach in which the student learns language by putting them into `aunthentic`, or real-life situations. So, say instead of having the students do drills in which they just repeat what you say in English, you actually need to make the context something they may encounter on a day-to-day basis like a business meeting or buying food at the grocery store. Also, the focus is on having the teacher talk as little as possible and making sure the students speak English as much as possible. Those are just a couple main points in the Communicative Approach.
Besides my course, I`ve just begun exploring the city and picking up on Chilean culture. I get the impression that Santiago stands out from the rest of Chile in many ways. The most obvious way is the European sensibilities it seems to have combind with their traditional Latin American-Chilean culture. I have not been able to put my finger on it quite yet, but it definitely has something to do with people within the city dress really fashionably and European. Also, on that topic, the American 80s seems to be a huge trend right now. It´s almost as if I have time traveled back to the 80s in the United States...except everyone speaks Spanish and is Chilean. Young people here are wearing stone-washed jeans, Nike high tops, and listening to bands like Journey and Duran Duran. I just can´t explain it.
Luckily my Spanish is revitalizing itself more and more every day, so that is one advantage I have compared to when I was in China. One thing that makes it harder, though, is that the Chileans speak very fast AND speak very sloppily. Chileans tend to leave their `S`s` out of words. So instead of `dos` they say `do`. Instead of `como estas` they say something like `como estai`.
Some other interesting things to note:
- You get receipts for EVERYTHING, and I mean everything. I used a public restroom and got a receipt for that. How many jokes can you derive from that?
´I wasn´t satisfied, I would like my money back´
`I started it, and it just exploded on me!`
`What am I going to do? Take it back because it doesn´t fit?´
- People love to dress their dogs in sweaters. Apparently, a dog´s natural fur isn´t enough to keep them warm in 50 F degree temperature. Thus, colorful, ridiculous looking dog sweaters are a necessity.
- Since dinner time is generally not until at least 9 p.m., people don´t generally go out on the weekends until midnight, which doesn´t seem that crazy...until you realize that it is standard for people to go home at sunrise after drinking all night and you seem like a sissy if you go home at any decent time. Haven´t gone out yet, but I understand the Chileans party HARD.
- You can tell there is a big German influence because people eat tons of sausage and drink really good German-styled beers. Even some of the architecture seems straight out of Germany.
That´s all for now. I´ve been typing entirely too long.
