Suggestions: Valparaíso, Chile

Suggestions for people planning to come study or visit here:
(1) Do. By all means, if you have a chance to come to Chile, do so without hesitation (except for the time it takes you to buy a ticket, learn Spanish, and convince yourself that the Spanish you learned will be useless). That brings us to...
(2) For those of you at LC, read the book about chilean modismos that they give you in orientation. Perhaps in lieu of Spanish classes; the people here simply do not speak Spanish. They speak Chilean. Well, in the (paraphrased) words of a Chilean, "Todos los Chilenos hablamos tres idiomas: el Castellano, el Chileno, y puro huevon (accent on the o)" loosely translated (pardon the language): "all Chileans speak three languages: Castillian (Spanish), Chilean, and pure bullshit." To try to explain what you are going to be dealing with, I will give you some examples. They drop the "s" at the end of words. They leave out the "d" in past participles, they insert "po" (pues) at the end of every other sentence, speak more slang than proper spanish, and do not recognize some of the words that you were taught to use. Aguacate? Fresa? Novio? no no, palta, frutilla, and pololo, respectively. The most commonly word, scattered throughout any conversation, would be "¿cachai?" (accent on the i). This means "do you understand?" in second person singular. but chileans often use the vosotros form of a verb and just drop the s. Example: Como estai (accent on the i) instead of como estas (accent on the a)... Okay, since it is doubtful that anyone is still reading this, moving on...
(3) Bring an ISIC card and use it on the micros, because you won't get your matriculation card for a long time and otherwise you would have to pay twice as much for bus fare. The ISIC card will also work as an ID to get into clubs, bars, etc.
(4) Bring a stash of your favorite candy or, if you are so inclined, peanut butter. It's expensive here.
(5) Get classes with mainly chileans, and try to get classes that are required of first year students, since they are friendlier and less cliquish than older chilean students
(6) Go out. Preferably with Chileans. People here go out from around 10 pm to 6 am Thursday through Saturday night. Suggestions: La Torre (near the Casa Central), and Ache Havana (on Errazuriz).
(7) Travel. Both within Valparaiso/Viña del Mar and around Chile. Suggestions: Cerro La Campana, Chiloe (Castro, Dalcauhue and Cucau), Pucon (although you will go with CIEE if you study here for the semester), Machu Pichu and the ruins near Cusco(Peru), Lake Titicaca (Peru or Bolivia), Isla del Sol (Bolivia), and San Pedro de Atacama (in the north of Chile). Trips that other people have suggested: Buenos Aires, Mendoza (Argentina), Easter Island, the Amazon Rainforest, and Patagonia (in the south - easiest to go during the summer). Within Valparaiso, you should take the O micro, which drives through all the hills in Valpo, so you can see the city. Also, Playa Ancha, the southernmost cerro, is gorgeous. Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepcion have a lot of cafes and are popular among tourists and students, and the flat area near the port is where a lot of the nightlife in Valpo is. The Botanical Garden (technically in Viña, I believe), is also lovely, and the beach in Viña is popular (check out the huge sand statues of animals - they change every few days).
(8) Use an ATM card instead of traveller's checks - the checks are a pain to cash and, as long as you take out money in large, infrequent blocks, you will not lose much through the fixed fee that your bank incurs.
(9) Explore the markets and ambulant vendors in northern Viña and downtown Valparaiso near Pedro Montt.
(10) Wander. Drag along a Chilean or another traveller, pick a street or a hill, and start walking. Don't get too lost, of course, and try to avoid the upper parts of the cerros, which are rather dangerous.

Classes: Valparaíso, Chile

Wow. It seems to be May now. I'm not quite sure how that happened, nor how to go about writing this entry since some of you know what's been going on and some of you don't and then there some things I will just not go into online... We'll just break it into categories... Classes, travel, people, random reflections on the overall experionce of being here, and suggestions for anyone else intending to study abroad here, perhaps? I'll break this up by entries.

Classes... So, I've been taking classes here since early March - two obligitory courses from CIEE called Chile Contemporaneo and Globalización, and the rest of my classes are taken through the university: Lengua Materna, Etimologias Greco-Latinas en el Español, Literatura Español 3, Coreano 1, and Baile Social. I am perfectly aware that few (if any) of you care about the classes, so just skip this entry if you want to.

Chile Contemporaneo was a two-week introduction to chilean culture and cities and was over by the time we started the classes at La Catolica. In addition to lectures, we went to various locations in Santiago, Valparaiso, and other areas nearby. In Santiago, we visited the office/press of El Mercurio, one of Chile's most widely read newspapers; La Moneda; El Museo de Arte Precolombino; the cathedral near la Plaza de Armas; the market and La Chascona, one of Pablo Neruda's three houses, in addition to wandering around Providencia, the neighborhood we lived in during our first week in Santiago. In Valparaiso, we went on a tour of the port in a boat, el Museo al Cielo Abierto, La Sebastiana (another Neruda house), and had a general tour of all the buildings of our university, which has different buildings for all the departments spread throughout Viña del Mar and Valparaiso.

Globalization is almost a continuation of Contemporary Chile, but based more in the classroom (two 1.5 - 3 hour lectures by guest speakers each week). We do go on trips as a class as well though. We went to Rabuco, Pucon, and Isla Negra as a group (see pictures on Snapfish). As it is another CIEE class, it is comprised entirely of foreign students, which is unfortunate. Although the lecture topics are varied, they all relate to the theme of... globalization. (Shocking, I know). Right now, we are working on mini-group research projects of our own design and Steph and I are very excited about ours. We're researching the role of women in Chilean culture: how it is changing, how the different generations consider the position of "dueña de casa" (housewife) in terms of influence within the family, the aspirations that younger women have for their futures, and the prevalent ideas regarding the "proper" role for women today versus, say, 50 years ago. We're getting a bit overzealous with this, since we only have a month to do the entire project, which is supposed to culminate in a 3-5 page paper and our project proposal was already 4 pages long... But we're really interested in the topic, especially in connection with the upcomming presidential elections... For those of you who aren't paying attention, the two frontrunners in the presidential race are women and one, Michelle Bachelet, is a single mother (by choice), who is currently the favored candidate. There was a televised debate between the two about a week ago in which a FEMALE reporter asked why the husband of Soledad Alvear, the other candidate, wasn't present, Alvear responded by saying that it was a chauvanistic question that should not have been asked. Anyway, other classes...

Lengua Materna ("mother language") is my favorite class by a long shot. It's a requisite first-year course for students intending to become teachers of Castellano and is mainly an intensive linguistics course on the morphological, semantical, and sintactical aspects of spanish grammar. Next on the list of favorite classes, we have a tie between Greco-latin word roots in Spanish and Korean 1. I am the only gringa in both classes, which I rather enjoy, but I get to learn two new alphabets in additional to the introduction into Latin, Greek, and Korean.

Spanish Literature 3 is an interesting class, but about half of the students are foreign and we don't cover all the material (about 3-4 books per test) before taking the test - we tend to discuss one author and then throw together our own conclusions about the others. But we get to do individually designed research papers in this class too, so I approve of it.

Finally, the dance class rocks. Twice a week, we meet up in the basement of the engineering building to learn salsa (and merengue). With the exception of Jorge, the "professor" (he's also a Chilean student at our university), the class is all gringos. We've also gone out together to go dancing in Valpo, which was very fun. We went out to Aché Havana, which is way better than Puerto Bahia, where we went with Héctor, Juan Pablo, et al a few times. So, we'll be repeating that trip quite a bit in the remaining few months. Overall, classes are going very well.