Warming up...

It seems like spring is just about here – it was in the 60’s (F) this weekend, flowers are starting to bloom all over the place, and we've had a lot of chances to get outside. We just got back from a hike through a canyon not far from school. Here are a few pics…

You can't tell from the picture, but this lizard along the path was at least 15 feet long:

It was yearbook-picture time at school this past week, and the photo-taking experience was A LOT different than what we expected. The photographers play dance music and encourage everyone getting their picture taken (and waiting in line) to dance around. The dance-party atmosphere is encouraged by the fact that it’s dark in the room and the only lights are the spotlights on the student getting his or her picture taken. Each student gets 3-4 minutes worth of pictures, and the photographer (who is also dancing) tells them do things like toss their hair around or spin around in the chair and make a Zoolander-esque sort of face. AND THE PHOTOGRAPHERS PUT MAKE-UP ON THE KIDS. Even the boys. They powder-up their faces and cover up pimples and things. It was pretty unreal.

We had our first brush with the law a couple of days ago after turning the wrong way down a one-way road. We got pulled over and briefly spoke with the cop as he took my ID card and started to write the ticket. We were pretty bummed out because we’ve heard stories about $150 tickets and having to take a day off of work to go to court, but just as he was starting to write it there was a huge CRASH! sound because somebody rear-ended somebody else literally fifteen feet away from us (totally unrelated). The cop had to go deal with the accident and so he quickly gave us a warning and then let us go. Pretty nice timing.

It was Claire’s birthday this past week, and yesterday we had a joint party with a few other friends from work who have late August / early September birthdays. The party had an Olympic theme and everyone was supposed to dress up as an athlete. Lots of soccer players, runners, cyclists, and a few field hockey players. Claire and I opted for a vintage look and wore togas with laurels on our heads.

This is kind of random, but here's a picture of what is probably the funniest Chilean adthat we've seen (it's on the back of buses all around the city) - the baby's incredibly thick head of hair is AWESOME:

We saw a kid running around in the neighborhood the other day wearing a Duke University sweatshirt – pretty surprising.

We’re only two weeks away from our Spring Break! It falls the week of Chilean Independence Day (September, 18^th). Everyone here calls the holiday “dieciocho”, and it celebrates Chilean freedom from Spain (led by a red-haired Irish guy named Bernardo O’Higgins, who then became Chile’s first independent leader and has TONS of stuff around Santiago named after him). We’re looking forward to Chris and Erin coming into town and then heading north to La Serena and the Elqui Valley to do some exploring.

Last, but not least, here are two mullets of the week (taken as we pulled away from our hike this afternoon). The first one is from a guy who was unloading a mountain bike, and it’s a style that a lot of dudes at our gym have. For now we can call it the MEATHEAD MULLET:

The second is a little bit more alternative, and while we can call it the RAT-TAIL MULLET it’s a little bit more distinct than that because it’s usually off to one side (I don’t know if you can tell in this picture but it’s definitely to the right side of his head):

We hope you’re feeling better, Meg!

The children shall NOT be motivated!

As I look at the title of Justin's last post, I realize it's a damn shame that we didn't experience all of those things at once: mullets, puppets and pirates all magically combined. What could be better? Thanks to those that have commented (although we noticed a precipitous drop-off this week)--it makes us feel like we aren't just talking to ourselves.

After torrential rains yesterday, we woke up to crystal clear mountains today. A huge payoff. Our morning commutes are usually quite spectacular as we are driving towards the mountains on a big open highway (for part of it) and in the evening, we often get the sun setting on the mountain snow. I keep trying to take a picture but it never captures just how cool it is.

So my weekly observations...

I can't pass up also commenting on mullets. Mullets here are not the hairstyle of the backwards or unhip (or damned), rather, it is THE cool-kid hairstyle. Much as ridiculous shaggy, glorified bowlcuts are cool for American boys right now (those of you not in the world of high schools may or may not have noticed), a short-in-front, just-long-enough in the back is a MUST for any hip teenager. They tends to muss the back, so it kinda puffs out a bit and is fluffy. Justin also forgot to mention that we work with someone who has a braided rat-tail that goes down to her butt. While mullets are for men here, her's is a noteworthy exception.

On the side of women, EVERYONE here loves tucking their boots into their pants and walking around looking like storm troopers or something. And, at least in the winter, the colors are pretty drab. A lot like the US. Big, wrappy sweaters are also very very cool. Can't say I dislike a trend that makes it acceptable for me to swaddle myself like a baby and feel like I'm walking around in a bathrobe all day.

This week we had our "Week Without Walls" assembly in the high school. In November, every student will spend a week outside of the school on a trip of some sort. Teachers go too (for free!). They get to choose from any number of absolutely drool-worthy trips (surfing, rafting, biking, glacier hiking, yoga...all in spectacular settings). There is supposed to be either a service component or an environmental component to each trip. I can't wait...the trips look amazing. I'm hoping for surfing but would be happy with almost anywhere. Except the freshman trip. The freshman all have to go to this one place (which I'm sure is gorgeous and lovely but quite frankly the idea of a week with freshman provokes a mix of intense irritation and exhaustion). The kids have to pay for the trips, though, so I think it gets a little unfair because the coolest trips are obviously the most expensive.

Incidentally, we also had a motivation speaker this week that was the worst motivational speaker I've ever heard. She blathered on for @80 minutes, without break or visual aid, about how they need to be more grateful and hug their parents and live in the moment by telling people you love them AND, by the way, don't have sex or drink. It was like having the students' moms come in a just talk at them for over an hour. Plus a pretty conservative, perhaps unrealistic and no useful message. You could tell there was some pent-up annoyance by the end by the following series of questions (why this woman would think that kids had legitimate questions to ask her, I have no idea..."Mees, can you tell us MORE about how our souls become old if we drink?"). Incidentally, they were asked by different kids in different parts of the room, thus verifying that it was a really group effort to undermine her.

Question 1: "So, do you think that if we have sex that means that we are corrupted?" (I know the kid who asked this question; it wasn't genuine and everyone knew it)
Answer 1 (roughly): No, you just need to wait until you are old enough, blah blah blah...

Q2: "So, you are saying that we can have sex once we get to college because we are old enough?"
A2: No, I mean that you have to have a certain maturity level, blah blah blah...

Q3: "But aren't you contradicting yourself? You said that we should live in the moment, so doesn't that mean that we should have sex and drink if that is what we want to do in the moment?"

aaaaand scene. Can't say I blamed them.

School continues to go well. Justin and I play basketball on Wednesdays with some of the faculty and other gringos in the area. This last time there was this ridiculous dude who was probably between 55 and 60 that was AWESOME. I mean, shot 90% from three point range with a hand in his face awesome. I mean, threw full court passes that were PERFECT awesome. I mean, could beat Justin (who is quick!) off the dribble and get a free shot awesome. And he was super nice. Basketball is pretty fun though. Thankfully the headmaster didn't show this week so I didn't have to guard him.

This weekend we don't have any real plans. I am throwing a bday party with some work friends who have bdays around this time. Kinda sucks because I have buy $100 worth of wine and pisco, but I'm trying to be a good sport. Oh, last weekend we saw "Death at a Funeral." If you think British people are funny, you should definitely see it. I was pulling a Meg and giggling really loudly in the theater.

We watched the DNC on youtube and saw Obama live last night. Some great speeches this week...It kinda kills me that I can't really talk about it with my kids.

Hope all is well!

Mullets, puppet shows, and a pirate fortress

YO! Good luck to everyone that is heading back to work/school this week. We've been thinking about school starting back up around Chicago (and we can empathize with summer being over)!

It was a really nice day here, and so we took a walk to Cerro Santa Lucia, a hill in the middle of the city and a few miles from our apartment. It has historic buildings surrounded by gardens (very fortressy looking - part Olmsted and part Blackbeard the pirate) and incredible views in all directions. At the bottom before the walk up:





















Here's a picture from the top...















One of the monuments commemorated a period that Charles Darwin spent studying in Santiago and another was for Don Pedro de Valdivia (he gets credit for founding Santiago. If you feel like getting creeped out then click on the picture and you'll see that he's staring right at you...).




















Pretty hilarious that when we got to the top there was a photo shoot in progress for a ridiculous band - we were trying to guess which guy played what (after some deliberation over guitarist vs. singer our final guess was from left to right: drummer, bass player, singer, guitar):















Claire hanging out with the band (no doubt working on a North American/South American tour with them and Beardog. Aaron? Boj?)...















On the way back home we walked through a park that runs along the Mapocho River and were enthralled for a few minutes by a puppet show. It was a version of Little Red Riding Hood, and every time the wolf would come on stage and talk the crowd of kids would chant "Malo! Malo! Malo!"















Other stuff this week:

• The registration for our car officially went through this past Thursday, and so we were finally able to get a TAG (Chilean version of i-Pass), which is going to make driving, especially to work, exponentially easier. Pretty hilarious how excited we were to get it.

• Because they're so common and there are so many different styles, I've decided to begin documenting the different types of mullets people down here have. Here's one of the more common ones: the dreadlock mullet (there will be plenty more pics in the future - I don't know what took me so long to think of this but it didn't hit me that I should start logging these until the end of our walk today):

• After forgetting to bring shorts to basketball this Wednesday after work I had to run out and pick up a pair at a local store. Very short and also (oddly) very tapered. I didn't take any pictures. Sorry.

On the way back home we saw this poster for a cover band show this Friday with Journey and Guns-n-Roses tribute bands. I guess we know what we'll be doing on Friday (although we'll have to show up late. I honestly cannot think of anything worse than the Pink Floyd cover band that is opening.)...

A typical Chilean day...

Today was a pretty classic day for us in Chile. We arrive at school in relative dark and it is very cloudy. The weather has been all over the place this week. It will go from cloudy bordering on foggy to crystal clear in minutes. And then back again. We are mostly arriving at school in the dark and leaving in the dark. The upside is that I am outside all the time because there basically aren't hallways in the high school. It is all outside.

Before I go any further, I would like to direct you to the website for the new CD of my exceptionally talented cousin Kyle. This CD is spectacular and I hope you check it out (Frank--this definitely goes in the category of 'merican music): http://emporium.echobloom.com/download.php

School went well, no surprises and we seem to keep rolling along. I had a meeting about establishing standards for high school social studies at the school. The teachers out there can peel their jaws off the floor. Yes, there are no existing standards. Go figure. I guess that's the world of international private schooling. We played basketball with some teachers after school, a few marines stationed in Chile, and most importantly, our boss. Who I got to guard. He is little man who had no problem putting his shoulder down and trying to mow me over. Right on. He was wearing a mock turtleneck. That's right.

The very typical Chilean thing that happened was we went to retrieve our car papers (basically the title) that we had paid someone from the school to take to the DMV and do our title transfer for us. It closes @2 so there is no way we could do it without taking off school. The school seems well set up to help us with this kind of thing. We had given the papers to this person a week ago. Yesterday we get an email that says they're done and will be here tomorrow (today). So we go to pick them up, VERY excited because with these papers we can get the tag (ipass) that allows us to drive on the highway to work in the morning (rather than backroads that turn me into a psychotic driver). If you are wondering if we can just drive on the highway and pay the tolls manually, the answer is no. That's right. No. You must have the little thing that goes beep when you drive under the purple light thingys. Needless to say, the papers are not ready ("But we thought you sent an email...ok nevermind") and the person who had sent the email seemed surprised to see us. The upside, is that we were pretty prepared for this possible outcome, so it didn't bother us too much. I guess we are adjusting...

Two funny things: one is that Justin forgot his shorts for basketball and had to buy some at the local Wal-Mart type of place. Despite getting a large they were small, rather tight, and very static-y. Second, my 10th grade boys LOVE Alkaline Trio. And a really odd collection of bands have played in Chile and they have gone to see them (NOFX, Poison the Well, Bad Brains, Bad Religion...They are very excited to go see Reel Big Fish in November).

Some highs (and lows)

Claire did a really nice job of summing up our first month here, and hopefully we'll have more frequent updates throughout the future. Here are a few interesting highlights (and lowlights):

some highlights...

1. Like most cities, Santiago has a fair number of people asking for change at intersections. Only instead of holding up signs and walking up and down the traffic, they juggle. Sometimes they juggle balls, and sometimes they juggle sticks on fire, but they're almost always performing. Last week we saw an entire squad of cheerleaders/people-asking-for-change that made a human pyramid and even threw someone up in the air that did flips during red lights. Pretty awesome.
2. There are stray dogs almost everywhere. There is no animal control, and so there's no one to take the dogs off the street. And the weird thing is they're not mangy, scrawny-looking dogs, but for the most part they are pretty healthy, pet-looking dogs. A lot of them are even wearing sweaters. And they rarely follow you around, but they seem for the most part to be pretty occupied and have agendas of their own. They even cross at cross-walks and wait for green lights.
   
3. Not sure if this one is a highlight or a lowlight, but ALL students here refer to us only as "meeeh-ster" or "meeeehs." Even the kids from the US (around 15% of the student body) who definitely know better and don't even have spanish accents will speak flawless english and then finish by saying "thanks meeh-ster." Pretty entertaining, but also pretty annoying. I've begun to take points away from kids who don't at least call me by my last name during class.
4. Things are extremely modern here, but then all of a sudden we'll get stuck behind a bunch of dudes on horses in the middle of a busy road. Definitely awesome (except when you're late).
5. As far as street-culture goes, a lot of things here are pretty 1986-or-so. There is a gang of free-style bikers, for example, that likes to ride pretty close to our apartment. (I apologize for saying "street-culture" by the way, and won't do it any more after this post).

some lowlights...

1. IMPOSSIBLE to watch the olympics. I don't know whether it's because there are only like four Chileans in the entire Games or if it's just general lack of interest, but we've searched the entire city (including the "Sports Cafe") and have found NOTHING. And none of the streams from the US (nbcolympics.com, etc) can be received from outside of the States. Pretty lame.
2. No Chicago-style hot dogs, and instead there is a type of hot dog here called the "Completo" which some Chilean dude told me is better than Chicago dogs. I haven't had one yet, but I'm only putting this as a low-light because it is lame to think that it could be better. (Also lame that we got in small argument about it considering he had never had a Chicago one and Claire and I had never had a Chilean one).
3. Our first snow-boarding experience. Claire definitely bruised her ribs for the past week, and my self-confidence probably should be bruised after TONS of laughter from little Chilean kids as I repeatedly fell off of the tow-rope during our first outing.
4. Most everything that involves me trying to communicate in spanish (although i AM getting exponentially better!). It's impossible to be the least bit discreet when barely able to communicate (personal low-light involves an entire cadre of female custodians trying to understand what I needed at work when I was saying "necessito un plunger de banos." The highlight was that their eventual laughter implied that I at least amused them. Their continued laughter when they see me implies that it still amuses them.)

I hope everyone is doing well! We were a little homesick the other night when we went to the movie theater to see the new Batman (which they call "Batman: El Caballero de la Noche") and saw all the shots from Chicago!

First Blog in Chile

Hello, all! If you are reading this, you are probably connected to Justin or I in some way. Welcome to our blog and we hope you will stay, comment, etc. We also hope that we will be good and diligent about posting our ramblings and reflections about life abroad. Without any further ado, here we go.

We arrived in Santiago in the beginning of July. We were immediately greeted by a friendly settling-in team from our school that made the handling of our 10 duffel bags at 80lbs a pop very easy. And didn't make us feel stupid for moving our life this way. We received a shipping stipend of $3500 to move our lives to Chile. We chose not to ship anything via freight and instead decided that we would pay out the nose to put everything on the plane with us. That way we would not have to diggle around trying to get our bags 6 weeks later off a dock in Valparaiso. This is actually happening to another new family at our school. A very patient American Airlines attendant helped us move our belongings from one bag to another until they were all under the 70lb limit. All in all it cost us $900 to put all of our bags on the plane. She very nervously told us the total cost, to which we scoffed, said we were high rollers and that money was no object to us and then quietly put the receipt in an extremely safe place, lest we lost it and could not get reimbursed.

Upon arrival we were put up in the home of another Nido family that was on vacation in the States [Nido de Aguilas is the name of our school]. Upon entering the house and realizing that it was no more than 40 degrees inside, we immediately jumped under the down comforter and slept the sleep of people who had just gotten off a redeye where they didn't get exit row or bulkhead seating. Chileans don't really believe in indoor heating. For one, it is very expensive. Second, winter here is short and, to Chicagoans, a joke. That said, it manages to be much colder inside than out in many Chilean homes. The temp is anywhere from 30s at night to 60s on a really nice day. When it is sunny, it warms up quickly.

The next two weeks were a whirlwind of apartment shopping, buying mattresses, haggling with internets companies and generally trying to settle our affairs. We ended up in a high rise building in a neighborhood of downtown Santiago that provides easy access to the school. The school seemed loathe to show us places outside of the school's neighborhood, which is technically Santiago but basically like a suburb--malls, track homes, etc. We briefly entertained the notion of a more remote house, but quickly realized that we needed to have life within walking distance. Here are some pics of our apartment and neighborhood. It feels a little like a Michigan Ave. type of area (there is a healthy mix of financial buildings, etc in the 'hood), but the more we explore to more we find that there is some personality under the surface.

This is the view from our balcony. Those are the Andes, bros!! Mountains = #1 thing you can get in Santiago that you can't get in Chicago.
This is the view out of the bathroom window. This window takes up the entire shower and you have to open it in order to not steam up the whole apartment. THERE IS NO SCREEN. Not only do I give all of Santiago a show when I shower, but I feel like to successfully shower = to cheat death. All the more reason to not to risk showering.

This is our living room. Chicago represent!!


This is Valparaiso, where we visited when Sarah Natchez, best friend and haggling extraordinaire, was here. It only took her two weeks of our being here to drop in. She got us internet in a matter of 3 days. This was a task that had been taking the settling-in crew at Nido WEEKS. No one busts balls like Sarah does.


This is Pablo Neruda's house in Valparaiso. It was incredibly cool. He seemed like he must have been a pretty awesome dude. Sarah and I express our affection.

We have been at school now for three weeks. We had a three day weekend for some Catholic holiday this weekend. Most of our holidays are obscure Catholic holidays that I never knew existed. School thus far is VERY different from Lincoln Park. The biggest difference is that the school is private. Our classes are around 20 kids which is very small for us. The other teachers here find that to be very large. They have a pretty different perspective on what constitutes hardship on the job. They can't imagine having more than one classroom (I actually have 3 at this school but I get my own office to compensate), have people who make their photocopies for them, no behavior problems...The school has a campus set-up and is in the mountains. The high school also has a block schedule where we only have four classes a day for 90 minutes apiece. It is awesome! I can get so much done at school it is ridiculous. Over the course of two weeks I see kids for the exact same amount of time, but I actually get more instructional time because there is less time spent setting up, settling down, taking attendance, packing up, blah blah blah.


This is a typical view from campus. You can see the mountains from most spots on campus. It is really gorgeous. When you look back towards the city you can also the brown smog cloud that sits on Santiago. The cloud disappears after a good rain, but if that doesn't happen it can really build up. You can't tell its there when you are in the city, except that the mountains get pretty hazed. Below is the view from the parking lot--not the boarded up Doggie Diner but not bad.

I'll stop there for now. Hope everyone is well. I am going to go eat an empanada--an amazing bundle of food in a baked pocket/bun thing. It's usually filled with some combination of meat, veggies and cheese. They are OFF THE CHAIN and the inspiration for the name of this blog. We miss you and hope you'll get in touch!!