7 de octubre
Chillan is a sweet city; I'm getting to like it more and more. It's about the size of Eugene more or less (160.000 people). Mi padre took me on a tour the first week and I've since walked home from the centro and around the barrio a few times, not to mention taking the micro to class and colectivos around town, etc. Mi familia lives in a middle class neighborhood (called jardines de ñuble). It's really nice. I like it way better than a lot of the sterile rich-folk neighborhoods. Mi padre showed me the various other parts of town too. the rich part is insane. huge houses, manicured lawns, ADT security systems (no joke, i saw the sign), fenced driveways with gates that open mechanically (like with a garage door opener)... we visited mi tia (aunt), and she lives in this new neighborhood, every house looks the same with tall white cement walls completely surrounding the yards and driveways of each one. They were nice, but everything looked and felt fake. Kind of like a Stepford wives type thing. I think. I don't really remember what that was about, except they were fake, and too perfect or something. That's a little what it was like. Sterile and fake and way too white... like a hospital.
Anyway (sidetracked) ... it seems like every house has a gate in Chillan, our gate doesn't have a garage door opener type thing though. We have to get out of the car and use brute force. We live in a duplex. Or at least that is what I choose to call it. Half the building is the neighbor's house, and sometimes I can hear them going down the stairs or hammering nails into the wall. Other than that, I hardly know we have neighbors. It's kinda funny, because each half of each duplex is painted a different color. The one across the street is white and orange. Ours is red and the neighbor's is brick. Our other neighbor has a purple half. We have wireless internet and cable/satellite (not sure which), but mis padres worry about money sometimes and are very good about conserving energy. Electricity is expensive. Gas is expensive. We only turn on the calefon (gas water heater) in the morning before showers, and to do dishes. The gas heaters don't get used except when mi madre can't take the cold any more... she really doesn't like being cold. But there's a nice little front lawn and a groovy patio area. More than adequate, way nicer than the apartment I used to call home in Corvallis.
The streets are lined with trees; some of the sidewalks are paved, some are just dirt. Some of the roads are paved, some are dirt/gravel, some are half-paved (its funny because cars/buses/trucks going both ways use the paved side, then play a pseudo game of chicken, before one or the other pulls onto the dirt part until the other car passes.)
I also saw some of the poor sector. It's pretty much the same everywhere in the world. The houses get smaller and the neighborhoods more dangerous. More drugs, delinquency, crime, etc. I don't really know much about the poorer parts of town, just what i saw through the window of a tiny green speeding Hyundai (or however you spell it). Tiny ramshackle huts in some places, rampant (and utterly fantastic) graffiti, fewer amenities.
The driving here is different. The micros (buses) are a daily adventure. They stop anywhere, for any raised hand indicating a passenger. It is 300 pesos to ride (about $0.60). To exit the vehicle, you walk up and tell the driver you want off, and he (I have yet to encounter a she) pulls over, many times to a symphony of impatient honks. I think I like the driving. It wakes you up in the morning. It seems to be the rule that if you are in a car, you might as well be moving as fast as possible. And lanes are just suggestions. And if you need to hop a curb to get around someone, well you gotta do what you gotta do. And passing people on little side streets is the norm...
My favorite thing here is el mercado (the market). It's seriously awesome. It's the saturday market amped up to a whole new level, and it's every day. Piles of amazing fruit, vegetables, flowers, nuts, second hand clothing, a tiny stand with a few books, and tons of hand made chilean stuff: many leather crafts, alpaca fur knit hats and gloves and sweaters, scarves, wooden trinkets, incredible arrays of colors and materials. It is a square block, and a fantastic one I might add. It is downtown next to the mall.
The mall, a mall which all the chileans say is small and not very good, is much larger than the Heritage Mall in Albany. It's like five or six floors with sundry labyrinthine escalators... yeah I got lost in the mall... maybe twice. It's hard to get out. I find it the opposite of small. I shudder to think how long it would take to make my way out of a "big" mall. There are all the sort of regular stores you'd expect. A few department stores, a food court, a McDonald's where a bunch of the gringos went for lunch at least once. Shame. And a supermercado, or two, and a bunch of little places: a Kodak store, office supply place, shoe store, sporting goods, a little kiosk where you can buy bus tickets, etc.
Outside the mall, in much of the downtown, are many street artists, creating their wares before your eyes. I watched a guy do spray painted landscapes for almost a half hour. It's amazing stuff.
Mi familia shops at the Jumbo, a supermercado (super market) close to our house... it's eerily similar to a Wal-Mart... everything you could possibly need. Another one is the Hyper Lider (not to be confused with the Express Lider, which is a small Hyper Lider), but mi familia doesn't like to shop there, because the people who shop there are "tonto" (I think that's how its spelled) or "fome" which are kind of all encompassing negative words meaning boring or stupid that get bandied about pretty heavily. It cracks me up.
I've also been to the bus terminal, well two of them, one downtown, one next to Jumbo, and to the post office, to mail in my absentee ballot.
Oh and I've been to the university... surprise. It's very small, but nice and relaxed. We have classes in one room (reduces the number of time we get lost). There's a cafeteria. I ate spaghetti there once. Yeah that's about it for the Universidad del Bio Bio. There are two campuses of this university in Chillan, and the main campus is in Concepcion (a little over an hour away, on the coast). I only ended up at the wrong Chillan campus once. Classes are going smoothly. Florencia, the professor in charge of the program, is perhaps one of my favorite people on the planet. She is exceptionally nice and fun and smart. The other professors are getting used to dealing with our poor Spanish skills. The classes so far are fun. This is the beginning of the third week of classes. Two tests down.
I've also been to my companera's (my Spanish tutor's) house twice now. Her dad is a mechanic who works out of their house. He's a member of the Gideons I think, assuming I understood him correctly. In any case, I now have a bilingual New Testament. He's rather hilarious, and he plays the guitar and sings very well.
Anyway, that's a bit about Chillan. I'm catching up on writing... well no. I've been writing, but not well or in any organized fashion. So I've been catching up on weeding through the excessive notebook entries and randomly typed thoughts, often late at night, and fogged with sleep-haze. One such random typed thought: there are too many names among the gringos with "k" sounds: Kelsie, Caylin, Kaitlin, Kyle, Kelly, Corey, Kasie, Kenzie... I think that's all of them. I feel bad for the Chilean professors attempting to learn these names and decipher them from one another. That's all for now. More pictures and whatnot to come shortly.
Fotos:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?UV=146926005779_23873423714&collid=72157078614.82251813714.1223411734626&page=1
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