My Spanish...oops

I spent a great deal of time during my spring break reading blogs, researching, and basically doing anything and everything that I could to prepare myself mentally for my move to Chile.  I'm trying to be proactive about tuning into Chilean Spanish so that it doesn't take me 6 months to finally understand what people are saying to me.  As one of many millions of fans of "The Office", I was thrilled to discover clips on You Tube of "La Ofis" (the Chilean version) and wasted a lot of time watching those and trying to convince myself that I could understand everything just fine without the English subtitles.  Riiight. 

Another one of my bright ideas was to try to find podcasts to listen to since I am huge fan of using these in my classroom, especially Notes in Spanish.  I stumbled upon the opportunity to stream Chilean radio stations and spent hours listening while packing boxes and lingering near the computer waiting for the music to stop playing so that I could hear some callers engaged in actual conversations.  I mean come on, it's kind of embarrassing to be a Spanish teacher going to a Spanish speaking country and then be like, um, yeah, I don't understand your Spanish!

Great idea Heather, I'm thinking that one of the many pop-ups that I allowed was infected with some vicious malware that slowly started taking over my school computer.  By the time I was back at school the second week after spring break, I had to throw my hands up, hand it to the tech guys, and wish them luck. Outlook is crashing, Word is saving nothing, Internet Explorer is closing every two seconds, I swear, I wasn't looking at anything bad!  So, I guess I will stick to my harmless blog reading and learning from all of the blogger experts out there who are a few steps ahead of me on this journey.