Three Weeks Down!
My iPhone was nearly stolen by the ocean
On the first day of a strange cycle of dangerous waves last Tuesday to Saturday, myself and many others decided to spend our last official day of “summer” at a beach called Reñaca. Being the morning of the first day, we hadn’t heard anything about these waves prior to going. I set up my towel about 15 feet from the shoreline and was laying out in the sun for about 20 minutes when I suddenly heard water nearby. I looked up and saw a wave quickly approaching us. I was able to scoop up everything except for my phone, which I had to dig out of the wet sand after frantically crawling around on my hands and knees trying to find it. My speaker and earpiece immediately weren’t working, but everything else seemed okay. Later, my screen dimmed to black on one side. All of these things repaired themselves in the coming days, but my volume and lock buttons no longer work and neither does my flash. Thankfully, it is still usable, so I can tough it out until August and then get it repaired. It was going to be about $50 to send home, where I’d then have to pay another $79 for repairs with Apple.
Later in the week, as the waves got bigger, a main avenue was closed as the waves splashed over the barriers and flooded the street. Apparently a large truck was washed into the ocean at some point in the week, as well. One of these mornings I was awoken at 5am by a tsunami alarm on my phone, but apparently it was just a test. -_-
Speaking of dangerous waves, tsunamis, and all things regarding tectonic plates in the earths core, there is a specialty Chilean “cocktail” that is popular around their independence day in November called a terremoto (Spanish for earthquake). I heard from many Chileans about how I MUST try this drink because it is so strong that when you stand, you feel like the ground is shaking, as with a terremoto. I looked far and wide for one of these, awaiting the challenge, “knowing” that one drink could not make me feel THAT drunk. I went to a bar called Ston that had them for roughly USD$4. The four of us that went all ordered one and they were served in a one liter jug. It’s a type of wine flavored with curaçao and pineapple ice cream. The reason they make you feel this way is because it is ONE LITRE OF WINE and added liquor. Let’s just say I was wrong.
Emily, Megan, Riley, and I with our terremotos
I survived my first two weeks of Spanish classes
It’s not really stress-free. Two of the three teachers refuse to speak any English… in the classes designed for people with 0-2 semesters of Spanish experience. So when I don’t catch something, they look at me and ask a question in Spanish which I also don’t understand, so it’s ultimately a stare-off between myself and the professor. It’s not so bad, though. I think I will learn a lot and it’s only two days per week for 4.5 hours straight. It gets a little exhausting by the time the last class rolls around, as the last teacher is also the least interesting. I also have a Latin American films class taught in English. We watch Spanish movies with subtitles. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet.
I’ve fallen victim to the metric system again
I finally got around to signing up for a gym here a few days back. I went to three different ones with Edith and they were all pretty terrible, to be honest. By my American standards, anyway. I picked the nicest (and conveniently cheapest) of the three. The equipment is all old and worn. Most of the weights don’t have their weight written on them because they’ve been rubbed off, which is particularly inconvenient when I already have to figure out how many pounds that x amount of kilograms is for the ones that ARE marked. What can I say, the United States set me up for failure once again, but at least I saw that one coming. The gym also allows men to workout with their shirts off, it is very cramped (despite being the most spacious of the three), there’s only one of everything so it is hard to come by the equipment you want when you want it. They merely wrote my name on a piece of paper upon registration, but the best of all of these differences is that they sell brownies and cookies at the front counter and they also have a cat living inside the gym that is free to roam.
Last thoughts
I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned the giant hill that I have to climb to come home. It’s about 20 minutes total of steep inclines, the latter half of it being stairs. I’m usually DRIPPING by the time I arrive home. Many people keep asking me where I live and I don’t know the specific neighborhood, so I just tell them at the top of a hill. The common response is “everyone lives at the top of a hill!” No, everyone lives ON a hill, I live at the top of one. Anyone that has visited me can attest to that and say that it really is much higher than they thought. And then I have to wrestle with three locks and two keys to get into the condo. I don’t know what it is about the locks here, but I cannot handle them. I stood at the door for five minutes one day trying to get the lock to turn.
Also, I’m making dog friends everywhere I go. I met a dog in town yesterday and he literally followed me for a half hour up the hill and only stopped following me because I had to close the gate on him. :(
LASTLY, I just found out that if you search for flights in Spanish that they are WAY cheaper. I just booked a flight to Patagonia in the VERY south of Chile for USD$102, when before it was looking like $230-400+.