Finally, Some Photos of the School and My House

I finally charged my batteries and am able to upload some photos of my house and the school. I hope you enjoy! They are: my room 2x, Princesa, my ancient dog, the living room and a colectivo, my main mode of transportation to and from school. Graffiti on the way to school, a view of the building from the street and a couple shots from inside the building and the patio. I also work at an annex down the street but it's not very photogenic. There's also a ton of graffiti in the school, which I'll have to upload at some point in the future. The graffic design students have a lot of skill and there are some awesome murals in the hallways on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors that I enjoy all the time.

Also, I had the opportunity to help some of my students out with a video they were making for a different class. I played the part of a tourist who asked the wrong person to take a photo of me and had my camera stolen. It was fun because the students had to make an actual video with multiple angles and cut shots and other technical terms. I had to memorize a few short lines of dialogue for my part and was in several scenes. It was pretty fun and my students enjoyed the extra points having a professor in their video might bring them!

My First Riot!

Today was Day of the Youth Combatant in Santiago. Two sides to this story. 1. It marked the killing of two young brothers, Rafael and Eduardo Vergara, who were fighting for MIR, or the leftist revolutionary movement. They were assasinated by carabineros in the Pinochet regime March 29th, 1985. High school and university students protest against a dictatorial educational system and various other demands, like changing the newly established transportation system, Transantiago. 2. The two brothers killed were robbing a bakery, and the carabineros showed up to arrest them, the situation escalated, and they were killed. My director told me that today is also called "El día de los Delincuentes" because in general, delinquents use the occasion to rob, beat up, break windows, burn tires, and cause general mayhem. Unfortunately, I don't live in a well lit area and have been directed to cancel my last class, which would normally end at 10:45, and go directly to my house. Also, I've been told that my neighborhood is rife with delinquents and there isn't reliable transportation anywhere: colectivos, taxis, metro, buses, and the like are spotty. How will I get home? I certainly don't want to walk through some of the projects that litter my path to and from the school...

Anyways, students usually come out in droves for these protests, which often turn violent, with students clashing against water cannon spraying and tear gas lobbing carabineros. Today has been no different. Lots of fire bombs and rock throwing went on as carabineros in riot gear knocked some heads around and arrested a couple hundred people. Some students had organized a peaceful protest in Plaza Italia, at the center of the city, but everybody knew that fighting would break out, which it did sporadically throughout the city. As I write this, it is early evening, and more mayhem is predicted to occur later tonight.

I had plans to go clubbing with all the people from Pelotón, the reality TV show that one of my acquaintances was on. We've got free VIP passes and are going to rub shoulders with a lot of rich people that piss me off and make me wish I had paying job, not a volunteer job. Either way, I'm pretty far away from the a majority of the violence, and only need to worry about my long, dark, and now, presumably dangerous trip home. Don't know if I'll make it to the club though. I will be going downtown tomorrow, but by then the carabineros should have kicked everybodies asses enough so they calm down.

Classes are going well and I have my first test to give on Monday and Wednesday. I was able to burn my photos to some cds and should have some new ones of my house and my school posted whenever I write next. I also get my first stipend next week, which is dandy! I can blow through that instead of my own money, which continues to dwindle rapidly...

I would've put some photos of the riots on there, but I couldn't transfer the photos correctly. Just look up http://www.infoshop.org/ and search for Day of the Youth Combatant, Chile. It's a pretty leftist website, which you might gather from all the "comrades" and "down with capitalism" that pops up, so take it with a grain of salt and search CNN, too. Or google image the photos, because I've certainly never been anywhere where stuff like this happens.

Week One, Almost Done

This has been an interesting week. I've met with all my classes and tommorow will finish my first week. Thursday and Friday I teach until ten-forty five at night which is kind of a bummer but that's life. I've learned quite a bit about the flexibility required to be a teacher and have already encountered some troubles, which are as follows:

1. Students who have class late at night are about as motivated to learn as a millionaire being told they have to eat fast food the rest of their life instead of going to awesome restaurants.

2. Students don't like to either 1. Show up for the first day of class or 2. Show up for the first day of class and then don´t come for the rest of the week, even if they saw their professor twenty minutes before class starts and said hello.

3. Students have a wide variety of knowledge about the English language ranging from extensive (even if they´re in basic one) to not at all (even if they're in intermediate one) and I have to make sure that there is an even blend of difficulty so that everybody can grasp the material.

4. If a lot of students miss class, I feel obligated to review for at least twenty minutes what we covered in the last class, while everybody else who came before nods off or starts talking to their friends in Spanish, which is an English class no no.

5. If I go through the material too fast, I have to think up activities for the students to until at least seven minutes before the class is done, otherwise the students feel jilted and the other professors think I'm a slacker. (I found out that making everybody write paragraphs about what we've learned can suck up seven or eight minutes, and having them share what they've written can suck up another five to seven minutes, leaving me with twenty minutes to panic until I can kick them out and breath easy.)

6. Beauracracy sucks! I have to grin and bear it when the administration tells me that I won't be receiving any of my books for at least two weeks and I just need to review what they learned last year for the next two weeks, about which of course, I haven't the faintest clue. Also I won't have my password to access the school's network to communicate with my students about upcoming homework assignments and quizzes until the middle of the semester. (Using the school's network is a required part of the curriculum, I should point out.)


Despite all these frustrations, I feel incredibly successful and happy with how I've taught. There are several little things about teaching that I've already noticed that make me really happy, which are:

1. Recognizing your students and remembering their names and having them say hello to you when you're not in class.

2. Having students tell you after the class that they really enjoyed class and look forward to the next one.

3. Having a student who is having a really hard time grasping the material finally have it click in their head and being able to praise them for the small victories and knowing that they feel good about what they learned.

4. When students say something that you haven't taught them specifically but have been using in class, and they form a sentence or a statement with vocabulary they've never used before.

5. What teacher doesn't like being in a position of power? To be at the helm of a class and have everybody taking notes over what you're putting on the board, following the directions you give them for activities, and participating in the manner you want them to is a great feeling, especially if they're laughing and enjoying the activities that you planned. It is nice to be in a position of respect, and I hope that through diverse lesson plans and sound teaching, I maintain and cultivate the respect that the students and staff have for me. Although the power thing is awesome.


So getting through this first week has been a big challenge, but now that it's almost over, I'm looking forward to the rest of the semester even though this lesson planning business takes up a huge chunk of my time. I signed up for it though, so I better produce.

Oh, yeah, and having all my chica students who wore unflattering pants on the first day show up in mini-skirts on the second day smiling widely at me was pretty sweet, too. Down boy!

First Day of Class!

Well, I´m halfway through the first day of classes. I had one intermediate class at two in the afternoon and then a four hour break until my first basic class at seven in the evening. My last class is another intermediate class from eight thirty until ten o´clock at night. Tuesday I have another intermediate class at two and that´s it. Wednesday I have a new basic class and my fifth and final class, which is an intermediate class.

I was pretty nervous for my first class but it went really well and I feel a lot better about stepping into the other classrooms. My students were hesitant at first but got into it as the class went along. I only had four students in that class, even though there is supposed to be fourteen in the class. Similar to the United States and the first day of classes where no one shows up.

I teach blocks of students that are all in the same program. For example, my first class were all computer engineering students and my next class is graphic design students. I think I have some publishing students and one other program that I´ll be teaching English to. Either way, it went really well and I hope to be able to prepare some fun classes as the semester progresses.

I am all moved in with my family now and it´s nice to have my own room. My room is tinier than when I lived in Costa Rica but that´s okay. I have all my stuff unpacked and was able to find my credit card and drivers license but need to get my card unblocked so I can use it.

My family is really nice and I went out salsa and merengue dancing with my homestay sister and some of her friends and we came home all sweaty at like, five-thirty in the morning. It´s nice that I don´t have to work until two in the afternoon everyday. Hopefully I can get into some sort of excercise rythm because I feel like I´m getting pretty out of shape, but who´s to say? At least I´m close enough to the school to walk every day until it starts raining heavily. It´s still pretty hot but that should change in the next month or so.

My friend Jane with whom I studied and traveled with in Costa Rica is down here in Santiago trying to find work. Ironically, we went out for some beers and a movie and while we were dringking she enquired about work and might have gotten a job working in a bar right next to where I teach at Mall Plaza Vespucio! Hopefully when this year is done if I want to stay I´ll be able to find work fairly quickly. Who knows? I might have to start working in a restaurant again down here, but I doubt that. My years worth of teaching experience and native language skills should be able to secure a job in the rich part of Santiago to the northeast.

Well, that´s all for now. I have to get ready for class. I need to burn some pictures to cds so I can take some of my family and where I live. I will talk to everybody later!

Night Terrors!

All right, so I´ve wrapped up my training this week and next week begin four days of training with the Chilean educational folks for my work at DuocUC. It sucks that soon a lot of my friends will be spread out around the country and we won´t be able to hang out so much but at the same time, it is nice to be moving in with a family and next spending so much money.

I´ve met some really cool people and went to an asado, or a barbecue, with a family of Carabineros. The Carabineros are the national police and a branch of the military. God forbid I get arrested for anything down here, but at least I have some people I can call and name drop...

I also met this girl on a Chilean reality TV show and a guy that plays for one of the most popular soccer teams in Chile, Colo Colo. They are all friends with the Carabinero family and through them I met a really cute girl who I´ve been hanging out with. It´s pretty expensive to do any dating, but girls are nice, so I´ll have to sacrifice a little something I suppose.

Probably the most god awful experience I´ve had occurred last week at three in the morning. That evening, I had just finished reading a terrifying psychological thriller that was on par with ¨Silence of the Lambs¨. I went to bed around one AM and had these really creepy dreams where my apartment was being broken into and there were dead cats with kittens mewing and crawling around. Really creepy stuff. Well anyways, the guy that sleeps on the bunk below me snores, and around three in the morning, I woke up because he was kind of snorting a little. The ambient light was really bright, and it was like a city looks like in winter at night, kind of reddish brown. I look down, and my other roommate is on top of his sheets with his arms flat against his body, which is completely rigid and looks like a human board. That kind of creeped me out, but then I hear this other noise, that isn´t my friend snoring. It sounds like metal tearing while a teapot is whistling, with weird clicks and sounds like the kid from The Shining saying ¨redrum, redrum¨. I look over on the other top bunk and see my other roommate with his arms extended behind his head, screeching. He then slams his arms down on his side and whips his body halfway and starts jerking erratically and shaking, all while making this noise. Then he stops with his leg extended all the way out over the bed. He flips his leg back on the bed and stops. Five seconds later, he whips back up and starts jerking around and making this noise, seemingly like someone possessed by the devil. He slams back down on his bed and doesn´t move. I´m basically crying in fear at this point and spent the rest of the night sleepless, or bolting awake if anyone makes any sort of motion whatsoever. When everybody gets up, I tell this dude what happened, and he´s like ¨I don´t remember any of that, but my leg is really sore, and I didn´t do anything strenuous to make it sore.¨ Needless to say, it´s been hard for me to fall asleep now.

That´s it for now. Here´s to no more night terrors!

Training is Intense!

Well, I'm halfway through my orientation and teacher training. It's really intense and I need some more time to myself, but I think that when I live with my homestay family I'll have ample time to unwind and relax a little more. It's definitely a grueling schedule but I'm learning a lot. I had my first actual teaching experience at the Instituto Chileno de Norteamericano teaching two nights in the same class for about an hour. It was really fun and I have a lot of good ideas about how I can teach in my own classroom. At first the students were hesitant to get involved in the activities we had planned but they really got into it after a few minutes.

I lost my credit card and driver's license somewhere. I think it's in my luggage but whatever. I blocked my credit card so hopefully nothing bad happens. It's definitely a good thing that I copied my credit card numbers down.

I've been to a lot of places around Santiago now and checked out the city from Cerro San Cristobal, which is where Santiago was founded. The view was spectacular and I rode the gondola and went down on this railroad type thing called a funicular. It's amazing how sprawling and massive the city is and dramatically the ambience changes from comuna to comuna. I was in the south side of the city and it was much more slow paced, no high rises, and had a definite small town feel to it, minus the metro line. It felt like a dusty town in Mexico rather than an urban area. Most of the skyscrapers are located in the northeast comunas of Vitacura and Providencia, and the area is nicknamed Sanhattan, the Manhattan of Santiago.

I'm pretty tired but I'm still enjoying just being here. Having a cell phone is really handy and it's nice to be able to call my friends down here as well as receive phonecalls from home for free. I need to watch my pennies because I'm a volunteer living like a rock star, which isn't wise. It'll be nice to have a family to cook for me so I don't have to eat out all the time. Until next time, ciao!

Photos: Gondola ride to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, a small portion of Santiago, statue of the Virgin Mary on top of Cerro San Cristobal, another view of some more of Santiago, tower designed as a cell phone.

Getting Used to Santiago

Well, I´ve finally started getting accustomed to Santiago. I´ve figured out the metro system and have no problem cruising all over the city. If there´s a spot that the metro can´t take me to I can just find the right bus which all have numbers and their destinations posted on the front. Santiago is a pretty modern city, but it´s divided by class and the north eastern part of Santiago is much wealthier and looks like a completely different city from the much power southwest side.

Teenagers define themselves by their style of dress and haircuts, and there are different names for the different kinds of haircuts like: Pokemon, which is usually dyed and spiky, peloleis, which is blond straight hair, and probably like six or seven other kinds that I can´t remember. Punk clothing and death metal are extremely popular, and it´s not uncommon to see some serious makeup going on with both men and women. And speaking of, the ladies are rather attractive. Still lookin for my first polola, or Chilean girlfriend. It´s a little like fishin´.

The food is all right, but there´s not a lot of variety, although you can pay more for pretty tasty stuff. I had sushi with a bunch of friends and it was pretty cheap, although the cuts of nigiri were a bit thinner than in the U.S. Haven´t eaten a lot of mayo although hot dogs are extremely popular and pretty tasty.

I learned about the national dance, the cueca, and had an opportunity to try it out. It´s pretty difficult. I definitely need some practice. This weekend is one of my friends birthday so were going out to some clubs that are pretty nice. Polola town, here I come! I don´t have any pictures that you haven´t really seen already so I´ll post some more when I do something interesting. Talk to everyone later!