Valparaíso and Volunteering

Titles for these are not always easy. Like this one, do I think I'm being witty with an alliteration?

I didn't expect to have any difficulties with an American credit card but I have had a few. A major bus company doesn't take them so I had to go buy a ticket at the office and pay in cash. A funnier story was when we reserved plane tickets online but had to call to pay by phone. They seemed to accept my card but then called me back in half an hour to say it didn't work because it is foreign so I had to come in. The next day I went in and again they said it worked. When I got home they called me and said they had swiped my card through the "peso machine" instead of the "dollar machine" and so I would have to come back again. Before going in I decided to check my online statement and saw that my credit limit was showing that the transaction had gone through and I didn't have enough left to charge it again. I called them and had my first ever phone conversation in Spanish with a customer service rep. At one point we were both just talking at one another because she thought I didn't understand. She went to find out what to do and called me back to say that everything was fine and I didn't need to come in again. Plus one for me for getting my point across in Spanish and being right.

Semi-traditions: Wednesday night happy hour after Spanish class and Thursday night Comilones dinner. Last week we followed up happy hour with some classic Chilean churrasco sandwiches at Fuente Suiza and on Thursday went to Rishtedar for some really great Indian food - bindis included!

More last minute indecision about classes. Social History of Chile has not been the most interesting or organized class and after so many people dropped one of their classes I was really tempted to do the same. It doesn't actually fulfill anything I need but I decided to stay in it and chose pass/fail so that I don't feel like a slacker, maybe learn something, but don't stress out about it ruining my GPA. Now I have to write an actual paper for it...what??

Last Friday we had a group museum trip that only 8 people went on but I decided to go because I had no other plans and didn't know when I would make it out there on my own. Museo de Arte Colonial San Francisco, which is in a Franciscan monastery, had a lot of religious themed, European influence sort of art which is not my thing. Museo de Bellas Artes I really enjoyed because it had a mix of different kinds of art, like photographs taken by public school children of their neighborhoods and a great sculpture exhibit. Museo de Arte Visual had modern works and I liked it too. Overall a good short overview for a non-art museum person like me.

Saturday we had a group trip to Valparaíso, a port city about an hour and a half away from Santiago, and the second largest city in Chile. I loved it. The city is full of hills, called cerros, has 15 elevators to take people up to the peaks, all of the houses are colorful and mismatched, and the streets are windy, steep and sometimes just staircases. It really felt like I was in a foreign country, unlike in Santiago which can sometimes feel like just any metropolitan city. We had a very clear tour guide with us all day; some interesting things he told us were that unlike in most places here the poor, cemeteries and jails are on the tops of the hills and have the best views of the Pacific and that all firemen in Valpo are volunteers. Six of us planned to spend the night in a hostel after the group left. We ate chorillana (fries, fried onions, eggs, pieces of steak and probably half a cup of oil, so basically the ultimate heart attack food) in the place that claims to have invented it, power-napped, pregamed in the hostel and went out to a huge club called Huevo. Really fun night followed by acrobatics at the nicest hostel I've stayed in, which had some random bars and ropes hanging down from the ceiling. On Sunday we took a bus to Reñaca, past Viña del Mar, to these huge sand dunes where we spent hours climbing and having photoshoots while being followed by stray dogs, which we're used to by now. On the way back I got the only accessible thing from my backpack stolen: my makeup. That was just silly.

English Opens Doors: went in one day to meet with the teachers who were all nice and speak English really well, unlike stories that I've heard from friends who are volunteering in different schools. On Wednesday I went for my first day of volunteering and went on a trip to a theater competition with a group of 8th grade girls who were all thrilled to have me around. They surrounded me, asked me all kinds of American pop culture questions, sang "Pokerface," asked me to be their facebook friend, and argued over who would sit next to me. One even asked me what I think about Obama. All this in English because I am there to give them more practice, and am not allowed to speak Spanish.I think my "cool" image would shatter if they heard my broken Spanish haha.