Day 8

Hey all. I hope everyone is doing well. Send me updates on your life please!
We have started classes! I have really high standards for classes and professors, and thus far I am not crazy about the lectures and such. Many of my classmates and I feel that the Spanish classes are not covering what we need them to cover (verb tenses) and are instead covering elementary gramatical concepts that we learned in elementary school. We are talking to our program coordinators, and I already asked for a tutor. I am having a lot of trouble with verb tenses, recognizing them when other people are talking and knowing which to use when, and since we are not doing enough of that in class, I figured I would get a tutor who I could boss around about what I want to learn. I came here to learn Spanish, and I damn sure am going to learn, if it kills me or my program coordinators. My Chilean mom is just as determined as I am, and spends lots of time talking to me and explaining things to me, but the only words she knows in English are "yes," "no," "okay," and "hi." It makes it difficult to go over complex verb tenses. But just you wait, I will come back having forgotten English, I'll be speaking Spanish so well!

I've also had some good chances to see first hand what the vocal Chilean male can be like. Men, some of them grossly old, have said things to us while we walked on the street and a lot of them whistle. It doesn't help that me and my friend are both very pale and very blonde. Yesterday I was sitting outside a cafe with a couple girls from my program (we finally found coffee that wasn't made from a powder!), and I spotted a guy around our age who was walking away from us, but kept turning his head around to stare at us, very obviously. Three minutes later, he is walking back toward us, still staring unabashedly. He kept passing every 3 minutes or so until I waved him over from 100 yards past us. I asked him some questions we were assigned for our homework about the history of the area, and then pretty much dismissed him, because he was obviously just going to stand there and continue to stare. It was pretty funny for all of us. There have been tons of less egregious instances of people just staring at us, especially when we are all together.  there really are not many gringas here at all, I have seen none outside of my program, so we are pretty interesting. We have also taken to greeting the other girls from our group as gringas just because Chileans find it so funny.

Yesterday, my brain got so tired that I could not handle another word of Spanish. With perfect timing, my hermana brought me to her gym, and we did a spinning class and a pilates class. There is nothing for a tired brain like tiring out your body, and I didn't really need to understand what they were saying to me, I just had to follow everyone else. Plus, they played American music. My pilates instructor (a man) was a particular fan of Bruno Mars.

Anyway, I am doing well all around, working hard but doing fun stuff too. We signed up for salsa lessons and on Saturday I am taking surfing lessons with some of the other gringas, then in the evening we are going to a soccer game. I do miss the leaves  turning colors, I love the changing of seasons and they don't really have seasons here.