Taking time to smell the roses

I've been so busy and a little stressed with my teaching schedule lately that I feel like I haven't had a whole lot of time to do anything else. It's not so much the teaching part as it is the random hours, and just when I thought I might have 2 days to breathe in between terms, I got a new class that starts on Monday on one side of the city that will give me just enough time to get back to teach my night class on the other side. That also means having to take the metro at the busiest time of day in the hot months...yuck.
Luckily, I'm always able to ride my bike to my Saturday morning class, and this Saturday I noticed so many of the beautiful flowers that have popped up around the city. Because of my winter arrival in August, I have really appreciated the winter/spring transition, and this Midwestern girl doesn't take these kinds of things for granted. I enjoy the little container gardening that I can do at home and it never involves any of the tropical plants that I've seen here. Geraniums come and go during our 3 hot summer months, and the roses never look anything like this. Other than those two, I'm not even sure what all of these flowers are, so jump in if you are good at that sort of thing!

When where you live becomes your home

After a long travel weekend last weekend (more on that to come), it struck me that I was ready to go home, and that "home" was Santiago. It might not be my permanent home, but sometime into my 3rd month here in Chile, it became the place that I wanted to come back to. I craved the familiarity of my "own" bed, my space in la casita, my comfort zone here in Chile. As much as I've enjoyed running around each weekend trying to see and do as much as I could fit in, I decided this weekend to do the opposite. I enjoy Santiago on the weekends since there is a certain tranquility that you just don't experience during the week. I can ride my bike and not have to carefully weave through both people and cars on every block, I can take the bus or the metro without being a piece of some sweaty sandwich, and I can sleep in on Sunday without having to set an alarm. I did the things that people who live here do. Instead of going to a museum or a new restaurant, I disinfected veggies from the feria, soaked and boiled beans, and organized my winter and summer clothes. I went to yoga, rode my bike, and even went to see "Eat, Pray, Love" with some gringa friends. Although I'm not taking a year to travel around Italy, India, and Indonesia, I am taking a year to go where I want to go and do what I want to do, so I definitely identified with Liz Gilbert's journey. Right now I'm just enjoying the peace that comes with living in a different place in the world and having it be comfortable enough to be called home.

Celebrating the Miners

I haven't been here in Chile long, but one day I will look back at my blog and remember this historic day. I'll remember that I was here in Chile the day that the trapped miners were rescued, and that along with everyone else in Chile and around the world, I stayed up late watching each miner be rescued one by one. I heard the horns honking in celebration around Santiago as the last miner was rescued. I'll remember that I lived here in 2010, the year of the earthquake, the bicentennial, and the year that the trapped miners were rescued.
I'm truly impressed and amazed by the strength and patriotism of the people in this country.
Thanks to everyone back home who's been asking about the 33 miners since they were discovered on August 22nd. Please continue to keep the miners and their families in your thoughts and prayers.
Viva Chile!

Teaching Here 'n There

I will try to take a break from the "look at all of the day-trips I am taking" picture portion of the blog that seems to have taken over and focus on the reason why I actually came to Chile, to teach English. I haven't said a lot about this yet and I can't give any specifics about my institute on my blog, but let me take this opportunity to report my experience teaching English here thus far.

As a teacher by trade, my observations could be vastly different from those who have never taught in a classroom in the U.S., but maybe not? I think with teaching your first language comes a certain level confidence that one doesn't ever have with their second language. Of course, there are exceptions for people who grow up other countries, live there for many years, have bilingual parents, etc. My experience in learning Spanish was in school so I became a lot more adept at learning grammatical rules of Spanish and how to use it "correctly" and completed ignored all of the English grammar rules in English class and continued to speak as I always had. This combined with several years of teaching Spanish translates to me being able to explain those rules of the Spanish language pretty well. Sure, my students here might laugh because I can't say my "r's" exactly the way that a native can, but I do have the benefit of understanding the grammatical structures of Spanish and how my students think. I know why they want to say "Have your parents any car?" and that learning "do" is difficult concept because it's so opposite the Spanish structure.

What I don't know all that well quite yet is how to explain English rules for things that I can repeat to myself 2-3 times and still not know which is the correct one since they both sound "right" to me! These are the moments that frustrate me since students seem to get caught up on some of those rules that I'm not accustomed to teaching. Meanwhile I'm waving my arms and saying "look over here at this awesome thematic lesson that I've planned" and never mind the picky grammar rule, let's just continue the conversation we were having about gossip and its negative effects. Over the course of the last few years I had stopped teaching grammar as a separate lesson and begun incorporating it a lot more holistically, hence the difficulty I'm having of doing things the "old way". I'm also working on an online TEFL course that wasn't required of me since I have teaching experience, but I want to complete one just to have the extra practice as well as the certification.

Two months into my experience I'd have to say that for me the positives outweigh the negatives. I love the change of teaching adults as well as teenagers. I love not having to spend hours and hours grading papers and being able to put that time into planning lessons for 8 students instead of 27. I'm also fortunate to be able to dip into my previous lessons that I used back home and try to use them here as an English lesson. I love being able to explain vocabulary as it comes up in class and tell an accompanying story in my first language. (last week it was "leftovers")

The schedule isn't always optimal, but I do often have time during the day to catch up on email, Skype with my family and friends at school, and possibly take a quick nap if I'm exhausted from teaching til 9 and then running home and having to be somewhere else at 8 the next morning. When you look at the breakdown of the hours, it doesn't look like much compared to what I was doing at home, but it does begin to wear you down. It's impossible to get home at 9:40 and get anything done and also be in bed at a decent time to feel rested enough for the next day's early class. That combined with also working early on Saturday mornings makes the week feel a lot longer.

Overall, I've found that it's just like anything else in life, create a balance for yourself and learn what works for you!

Mercado Libre

In the States I wasn´t much of an Ebay or a Craigslist kind of girl since if you needed to exchange some kind of goods or services with someone on Craigslist there was always that chance that you could end up well, dead. For this reason I was very cautious about using it to sell any of my belongings before I came to Chile. I know many people swear by Ebay, but I am more of an Amazon girl...yeah, go ahead and click on one of those links on my blog and buy something so I can make 50 cents!
When I began the search for my bike, a friend of mine recommended a site here called Mercado Libre, I didn't really know anything about it and I can't say that I'm an expert on it now by any means, but I can say that I've had two successful experiences here to date and would recommend for people here to at least do a search to see if someone here might be selling what you are looking for. Both of the items that I purchased were right here in Santiago and I was able to meet with the sellers face to face to complete the transactions in cash. Since many of these sites like Ebay rely on seller ratings, the sellers seem to go out of their way to be extra accommodating.
This week I used the site again to find a new camera, and I found an honest young man who was selling a new one in the box with the accompanying sales receipt. It only cost a few dollars more than I would have paid for it in the US, minus the hassle of shipping, insurance, and customs. I met up with him at Starbucks to pick it up, so as soon as class ends in a few hours I´ll be on my way to La Serena and ready to take pictures as if nothing had ever happened!

Noises in the Night

I'm lucky to live in a pretty peaceful neighborhood, all things considered. I think using the word "quiet" would be a stretch, but overall I'm really grateful to live where I do and know that when I come home that I'll be able to sleep. It's pretty sheltered back here from a lot of the typical noise that one might hear in a big city. In any new living situation, it takes some time to become accustomed to the little noises that makes a house its own. At home those noises were usually a result of something my cat was doing, but here those little noises are due to a number of things. Random car alarms sounding in the night, someone deciding to park out on the street at 4am with the radio blaring as loud as possible, something that sounds like dripping water but isn't, and many days very early in the morning, cats on the roof. None of these things are severe enough to keep me awake for any great length of time, but they do have me waking up more often. In fact, as I reach over to press the light button on my little travel alarm clock, my internal dialogue sounds a little like this: It's 3 am/I think I have to go to the bathroom/but it's cold if I get out of my bed/I'm too lazy to go all the way downstairs/my roommate's alarm is going to go off in 3 hours/I think I can make it 'til then...

This usually results in me getting out of bed anyway, and then sleeping for a few more hours until the alarm clock madness begins. First I hear her alarm, then my alarm, then usually my snooze, then my phone as a back up, then snooze again, etc. We have enough alarms in this place to wake up 10 people, but I'm extra paranoid lately since I overslept and was 15 minutes late to my Saturday class a few weeks ago and I have a new class 3 days a week that begins at 8am.

Last night the light switch in the kitchen stopped working, a common occurrence I've been told, but this resulted in Ita coming in at about 10pm with a big roll of packing tape and trying to tape it flat against the wall so it would stay off. We thought she was successful and went to bed as usual a little later. I heard some noises and hit the clock at 2am, and wouldn't you know, Ita was back downstairs working on the switch since evidently she had gotten up to take the dog out and seen the light back on in the middle of the night. I learned this morning that she had given up and just turned off the breaker, so when I went downstairs this morning there was no power at all anywhere. Luckily by 6:45 it's pretty light out now so I was able to see, but I didn't know where the breaker switch was so I just dragged the electric kettle upstairs to my bedroom and plug it so I could make my coffee.

By the time I got home from class, she already had an electrician here repairing the switch and she also showed me how to turn the power on/off should something like that happen again. I wanted to ask her about my eggs and yogurt and other perishables in the refrigerator, since obviously that is connected to the power source downstairs, but I'm not so good at cracking jokes in Spanish. :)
It's all pretty amusing to me, but I wonder why I've been so tired lately?

Drinking Wine and Whining

Sunday has become our excursion day around here mostly due to the fact that English teachers also work on Saturdays. I'm still new enough to Chile that the thrill of the day trip has not yet worn off since within 30 minutes it's lusher greener views instead of concrete. I've also been enjoying all of the wine benefits that Chile has to offer, so I figured it was time to organize a little trip to do a wine tour. I did some research and chose Vina Undurraga mostly because it's one of the smaller wineries near Santiago that offers both a tour and tastings on Sundays for a decent price.

I took charge of this outing and made the reservation for my friends and I, got the bus details, etc. and was really excited to set off to taste some wine on such a beautiful day. Fast forward to the bus ride to the winery, my bag was kind of wedged between the seat and the window. It tipped over slightly and I heard my water bottle fall on the floor. I bent over to pick it up and since there wasn't much room between me and the person next to me so I couldn't look underneath the seat and didn't realize that at the same time my camera had also fallen out of my bag and onto the floor. Now fast forward to my friends and I getting off of the bus and beginning to take pictures of the sign outside the winery, and just as the bus is pulling away I reach into my bag to discover that my camera isn't there and realize that it's on the floor of the bus...Adios.

The two most frustrating things about this experience:
1) I am camera-less due to my own stupidity and can't even blame it on some crafty thief. Someone just got a free camera and is now perusing all the gringa touristy pictures on my memory card that I hadn't yet saved.
2) My camera was probably laying on the floor 6 inches away from the foot of my friend who was sitting behind me.

Thankfully my friends helped me to lift my spirits and I wasn't about to let the day that I had planned be ruined. There was wine to be tasted! We had an excellent tour with a knowledgeable guide and tasted 4 delicious wines. I'm also fortunate to have some friends with nice cameras, so included on this post are a couple shots of the winery courtesy of my friend Scott. :)

***Also, since I'm in a country where electronics are expensive and getting them here from the outside isn't an easy task either, I'm open to hear any suggestions on an "easy" way to get my hands on another camera.***