The Local Crowd

Monday, Jan 26

Monday started with a bang as I sat down with a glass of peach juice and a cereal bar called Choco-Cereal+Leche. I have been waiting to see this because I have seen similar cereals before in Italy, but this Chilean cereal called Choco has a muppet-like character on the box who is the mascot/character for the cereal much like Count-Chocula or Toucan Sam. It’s completely weird looking like a bizzaro Grover from Sesame Street, but it’s nice to see the cartoon association with cereal translates to Patagonian Chile.

My light breakfast was gone in no time (it seems like the cereal bar portions were made for infants, which they probably were) and I cracked open my Buen Viaje high school Spanish 2 book to get down and dirty with Español. Thanks Julia! I started rolling through the review of Spanish 1, making a list of verbs and conjugations and pronouns…all the good stuff. Then I got to past tense and hit my first stumbling block with Spanish. The Preterite, as they call it in Spanish, does not translate to the Passato Prossimo in Italian or the Passé Composé in French. There is a whole new list of conjugations and irregular conjugations…a huge test for my memory. But, I figure if I practice more with locals it should start to stick. The other weird part is Ser and Ir (to be and to go) have the same conjugation in the Preterite and the only way to tell the difference in the meaning of the words is through the context of the sentence. Kind of annoying, but nothing I didn’t expect.

Lily came home for lunch and we threw together another quick meal of sandwiches and veggies. Side note: the Brita filter is wonderful and will save us so much money with not having to buy bottled water. The tap water here is clean, but chock full of minerals, so the Brita does the trick in filtering out the bad stuff.

After lunch Lily returned to work and returned to my Spanish. Feeling a bit burnt out from so much brain activity, I though some physical activity would make for a welcomed change of pace. Boy was I wrong when I decided to go for my first run in well over a year. I ran for about 2 miles, but by the end I was so crippled by diaphragm cramps and heavy breathing, I pretty much strolled up to my apartment in a limping shuffle. Picture the Hunchback of Notre Dame trying to go for a jog. I’m pretty sure the life guards had a safety watch on me as I passed by atop the sea wall wheezing and coughing. A 24-year-old shouldn’t look like that when going for a run.

I got home and showered just in time to meet Lily coming home from work. We had been invited to a bar to meet all of her Chilean friends in celebration as two of them, Renato and Maca, had gotten engaged just days before. We had a quick dinner of pasta soup in chicken broth, seasoned avocados, and salad. The streak stays alive with another successful meal. We drank some Carmonere wine with dinner and then we were off for a night on the town.

We met Lily’s friends at a bar called Barometro, which was awesome to say the least. The bar had a very lodgey feel as we sat around a table made from the cross-section of a giant beach tree trunk. We laid back in huge leather sofas that swallowed us whole. Lily’s Chilean crew was perfect. They were so incredibly nice and hospitable and they spoke very good English. They were all just as excited to meet me as I was to meet them. They are all extremely well traveled as Rodrigo lived in China, Renato in England, Diego in San Francisco, and Paola in New Zealand. While the accents around the table varied, the quality of English was quite impressive. I hope my Spanish is that good by the end of the trip. I had some great talks about travel and sports and life and just about all of them individually invited Lily and I to asados and dinners at their houses.

As the night moved on I was introduced to the piscola, or the national drink as they call it. Simply enough it is a pisco and coke and is reminisant of a rum and coke or Jack and coke, but much lighter and not as strong (even though half of the glass is filled with pisco). Soon after we had a round of coca-russa which translates to Russian coke. The drink consisted of coating one side of an orange slice with coffee powder, the other side with confectionary sugar, eating the covered orange slice and then tossing back a shot of vodka. It was actually quite good. A little intense in terms of the production associated with the drink, but tasty nonetheless.

Before I knew it the mellow lodge-like bar turned into a techno dance rave with laser lights and fog. Talk about bizarre. Another member of the Chilean crew, Nony (short for Jonathan), got behind the turn tables and started putting together some really good remixes. Lily and I danced for a bit before we strolled home along the Costanera to our apartment. What a night! It was great to meet the people about whom Lily had been telling me…putting faces to the names. I can’t wait for round 2.