Summer

I loooove summer, but it's hot! Just to give you a little idea of HOW hot, you might remember a picture from one of Otto's last haircuts....

pobrecito

This time the official peluquero de perros showed up and went to work. This is the result...

I think he's digging his new hairdo, but his ego is taking a beating. Poor guy's been called a rat, a giant chihuahua, you name it. Most of all he's totally sick of the paparazzi following him around to take pictures of his new look.

What are you eating there?

Mark, this post is for you! When I went to China, I posted so many pictures of food it was ridiculous. The food was so unique and the presentation so beautiful that you couldn't help but get your camera out at every meal. (Carol!) I haven't said much about the food here in Chile and it's mostly because my eating habits aren't really that different than before.
I thought I would really learn how to cook, but as it turns out I really don't put together full meals really well. I check out all of the beautiful fresh fruits and veggies and just start cutting up what sounds good at the time. Yesterday it was a tomato and avocado salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar with the tomatoes from yesterday's feria for 300 pesos a kilo!?!
It's also choclo, or corn season around here too, so the other day Ita brought me a stew-like dish with finely ground corn, white beans, and some other veggies. Many of the veggie dishes that I love are winter foods and are way too hot for the summer.
So, here are some pictures of things that people eat around here, and I'm sure you'll be able to distinguish the things that I eat from the ones I'd never touch!

Can't get enough of this stuff

Peruvian salad

Chilean salad

Aji de gallina, a Peruvian spicy chicken dish that's not made as spicy here in Chile since people like things a bit more bland.

Baked seafood empanadas, one of my favorites

Merluza, a typical whitefish with salad. It's pretty plain so you grab the lemon and squeeze it on everything and then salt away!

Fried conger eel with some kind of puree

Chorillana. Red meat, onions, eggs, fries, etc. Thankfully this is supposed to be for more than one person. Thankfully I don't eat it.

Bistec a lo pobre. Another heart stopper.

Meltdown at the Movies

A few Fridays ago I decided to take my Cinemark coupon for a 1600 peso movie and treat myself to a little matinee. My summer teaching schedule is really light and I knew the following weeks were going to be a whirlwind with having all of my family visitors here. I've seen "Meet the Fockers" playing over and over again on TV recently so I chose "Little Fockers."
After living in a place that's sunny every day, it's really easy for me to say that I have no desire to go back and live in the Chicago climate again, that is until I saw the opening scene of the movie with the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan and then suddenly it becomes the best city in the world to me all over again.
Anyway, despite the title of this post, I didn't have a meltdown over missing Chicago or anything like that...
When I arrived I knew something was amiss since there were no movie titles or times listed up on the board and the only thing visible was the Windows Home Edition screen saver floating and bouncing around. It was the middle of the day and there was only a handful of people waiting, and waiting patiently they were not. There seemed to be 3 teenage girls running the show, and after about 15 minutes the natives were incredibly restless, demanding managers and wanting the problem solved immediately. It was obviously a problem with the computer system, and without it they were unable to sell tickets at that exact moment, and were waiting for a supervisor to come help them implement the old-school paper ticket process.
As this scene unfolded around me, I started to think about how people at home would have reacted under the same circumstances, and decided that they would have behaved even worse. The funniest part was even in all of my "gringa-ness", the women standing around me in line just kept talking to me, imploring me to to participate and chime in about how ridiculous it was, how could they not have a supervisor there, how are the movies going to start on time, why don't they have a backup system for emergencies such as this, blah blah blah.
My favorite part was when the women in front of me pointed to her watch to tell me "she said the supervisor would be here in 5 minutes, and it's been 6..."
When the supervisor finally arrived, he came out and explained that they would be using a paper tickets and that we should form 2 lines depending on what movie we wanted to see, and that's when all hell broke lose. People were yelling and getting out of line to approach the ticket counter and I just stood there with a stupid smile on my face laughing to myself at how upset everyone was over this.
I calmly walked up to the window, bought my cheap ticket to Little Fockers, and made my way to the kettle corn line. In the end, the movie started 30 minutes later than it was supposed to, not enough to even come close to ruining my day.

Is happiness a choice?

I've managed to form quite a routine since I began my summer school schedule, one that involves going to bed and waking up at same time every day, something I hadn't been able to do in my first 5 months here. Although it was nice to have a bit of a variation in schedule, it's definitely true what they say about your body being happier if you get the same amount of sleep every night.
Part of my morning routine gets me to the Metro just in time to grab a Publimetro, one of the free newspaper publications that they hand out every morning. I usually go straight to my horoscope, peruse the remaining contents for awhile, and then take it home to Ita who then reads it cover to cover every afternoon.
This morning's edition is dedicated to happiness, more specifically about taking control and learning how to be happy. It also features a brief interview with Gretchen Rubin, the author of a book called The Happiness Project, which now appears to be published in several different languages. I actually read this book over the summer before I left for Chile, and although I didn't start my own project, I focused on the underlying theme that is present in many books of this nature, the idea that we are partially responsible for creating just how happy we actually are. In order to change our level of happiness, we have to change something.
Many of us fall victim to the circumstances of our lives. In saying this I'm not referring to those people who are truly suffering with a horrible disease or who have experienced something really tragic. I mean the people who get caught up in their daily lives without ever really taking the time to think about what's important to them or if they even like what they're doing. I had started to become one of those people, and indirectly that's what brought me here to Chile. I just needed a change...
I wanted to get away from my American lifestyle of going through the motions and killing time by buying more stuff at Target. I didn't give away everything I own, but simply due to space limitations I am living a much more simplistic life on a wage that's about half of what I was making at home. It's not having less stuff that has made a difference, it's what I've done to fill the space that has sparked the change. I don't drive, shop, or watch a lot of TV. That alone has freed up time to ride my bike, practice more yoga, read, journal, walk, improve my Spanish, etc. My friends Amie and Bryan are making similar plans for their own lives, and Bryan writes beautifully about minimalism here.
I know that many of my friends at home don't have the option to spend this much time on "themselves". They have busy lives, small children, work, and other responsibilities that bring them stress. The author of this book was in a similar situation with her own busy life and small children, but over the course of a year she managed to make very small changes and saw significant results.
What's something very small in your own life that you could change that would bring you greater happiness? Not a resolution, not a diet, not a pledge to give up Diet Coke...think about it. Pick up Gretchen's book, check out her website, or start making your own list. It could be something really small like pledging to have dinner with your family at the table every night. It's still January people, the perfect time to start.

Family Time

Sorry for the lack of updating lately, I was fortunate enough to have 3 sets of visitors to come to see me in Chile so I've been super busy since Christmas enjoying the summer here with friends and family. As you saw in earlier posts, one of my super bff's and her hubby came to visit me over their winter break. We brought in the New Year properly and then they made their way back to the States in time to start their respective second semesters.

A week after M and J left, the other M and J came down, my mom and step dad, that is. My step dad had bypass surgery in June so it was great that we were able to hike all the way to the top of Cerro San Cristobal...

We also took the tour and tasted some wine at Cousino Macul...

Then my Aunt Dawn and Uncle Tom came and we maximized the space in the casita...

Ita and Sole put together a delicious meal to welcome them...

And then the guitar playing and singing began...

Even Otto joined in...

The next day we climbed the other cerro, Cerro Santa Lucia...

The view from one cerro to the other...You can even still see a couple of snow capped mountains lingering in the back drop...

I feel very lucky that my friends and family were able to come all the way down here and share this part of my life with me, and in two weeks I'll be re-joining my aunt and uncle down in Punta Arenas for the next phase of the adventure!

Mail

I know some of you out there have sent cards and I really appreciate that in an old-school, running to the mailbox to see what I got, sort of way. Here the mail just gets tossed onto the driveway through the gate so it's fun to take a peak when I come in to see if by chance anything has arrived for me. The only Christmas card related mail that I have received so far is cards that were mailed in November, so if you did send me a card and I never said anything it's because it still isn't here yet. :)

Yesterday I received a package from a friend that was postmarked November 24th, and it caused a funny situation with the mailman. I was walking down the street and saw a guy lurking around the gate so I kind of did a little detour off of the sidewalk and into the street so I could ignore him and walk by the house. He called me by first and last name and because of how he was dressed it still didn't hit me that he was the mailman until he held up the package with my name on it. He explained that he rang the bell and was about to leave since no one was home, and then he saw a tall gringa coming his direction and decided to play the odds. I was a little out of sorts since I had just been to the bank and was nervous about the cash I had on me so I must have looked like an idiot as I fumbled through my purse trying to find my newly issued ID number that I still haven't memorized yet and all the while just trying to get into the gate with all of my belongings properly secured.
We had a laugh and he asked me how in the world I would ever expect to get packages delivered if I avoided the mailman?!? Makes me remember fondly the days of my Amazon.com packages just sitting there, awaiting me on the front porch, untouched. My how times have changed!

In Between Days

I'm think I'm caught in that stage of thinking that I should feel like I'm not that busy but I seem to fill every day doing something. Or maybe that's just life as an adult...Every time I look ahead and think to myself, hm, I'll have so much time when this class ends, it seems like something else always comes up to keep me busy. This includes my brilliant decision to do an online TEFL course during my busiest time at the institute and right before I had multiple sets of guests coming to visit me. Some days I feel like my blog is also a looming homework assignment. It's always on the to-do list and only get checked off if the stars are properly aligned. It can't happen when I'm uninspired or too tired, and let's face it, some days I just live here and have nothing else to say about it.

When I'm not busy with any of the aforementioned stuff, I've been pretty disciplined about keeping up with the yoga 3 times a week. I guess when you add in the 25 minutes on bike each way and a 90 minute class, that does add an extra chunk of time, and it's necessary since I'm still not exercising as much as I used to, and I'm convinced that although the temperatures outside say summer, my body still thinks it's winter. I still drink tea at night like I do all winter at home, I haven't jumped into the ice cream frenzy that is present in Santiago, and I still seem to be holding onto some extra carbs in the midsection. Sounds like a winter body to me...Confusion also sets in when I hear little kids running around and making outside late and night and wonder what the heck they're still doing up at 11:00 pm, and then I remember that they're on summer vacation and I'm in Santiago where everything happens later.

But enough about that, maybe some of you teachers are interested in how we institute teachers actually get vacation around here...???
I ended up with a class until December 30th, the closest to the holidays I have ever worked in my life! We did get the 24th and the 31st as vacation days, and because both Christmas and New Year's both fell on a weekend it seemed like we got a lot more vacation than that. This week Monday and Tuesday I had to put in some hours at the institute giving speaking evaluations to potential new students, but today I was lucky enough to escape and have a free day to wrap up some loose ends, plan some things for my Mom and Jim's visit, and start planning for my 2 summer classes that begin tomorrow.

Things work-wise are obviously pretty slow during the summer months, so I'm happy to report that I'll only be working in the mornings and I actually share my two classes with another teacher. (MWF one class and TR the other) No more running around to 3 very different sides of the city each day, and part-time summer hours are better than no summer hours at all. According to my friend R, as a teacher here in the summer months all you do is "lay around and read books and put on lotion." She is absolutely right, spray SPF 45 is my new best friend. The good news is that if you use my friend M's hair as a gauge, it's not actually as dry here as I originally thought. She straightens it every day and there was some definite wave present when she was here visiting me.

Cheers to my friends back home who are starting Semester 2 of the school year tomorrow, the same day that I'm starting summer school. :)