Better Late Than Never!

Better 8 months late than never, right? Yes, blogging has quite gotten away from me this past year, but I've been reading some good ones lately that inspired me to get back on the bandwagon.

I have no idea who even follows this anymore, but if there's someone I haven't emailed and told you all about life here so far already, I'll write about what an average week in Korea is like.

I magically ended up being placed at a school not only in the same tiny area as Ryan, but in the same apartment building as well! So everyday Ryan drops me off at school on the scooter we bought on his way to his work across the river. I work at a public elementary school, so my hours are roughly 9-5 everyday. Last semester Ryan and I each taught an after school class that required planning 10-15 lessons a week (which is a lot!) and being at the school about 10 hours a day. Honestly, between learning the art of teaching, planning a lot, and adjusting to both grown-up life AND a new culture, I was exhausted the majority of the time. However, simply by eliminating that after school class, my life has become a lot more relaxed and basically awesome this semester. After school now, we have time to make dinner or meet up with friends or pursue interests like studying Korean, reading for pleasure, or playing music. Most weekends include some excitement. We have two other sets of couple friends who have identical scooters as ours, so we've ventured to the beautiful beaches of Busan, to the ancient and mysterious empire capital of Gyeongju, to the Yeongnam Alps that border my small town, and by bullet train to the cities of Daegu and Seoul. The weekends in town usually consist of going out for or making dinner with friends, visiting an occasional strange festival, or just wandering around. That's a rough outline of what living in Korea is like, schedule-wise. Hopefully in subsequent posts I'll write about more interesting topics such as the culture, food, and hilarious things that happen to foreigners in Korea everyday.

Thanks for joining me again!

Welcome to Korea!

Well "anyeong haseyo" there!

That means 'hello', so welcome back if you're back to read my blog as I begin anew my travels. This time I've ended up in Korea, teaching for a year. I've been here approximately 8 days now, still recovering from jet lag, eating lots of great Korean food, and already feeling surprisingly comfortable in Asia so far.

The week I've spent here so far has been at a university in a town in central Korea called Jeonju, where we've been having orientation. I have no idea where the week's gone (time is still fuzzy from all the sleeping to catch up and comparing time here to the 15 hours difference at home), but I know we've had several days of lectures on how to prepare for teaching next week, on Korean culture, and on the Korean language.

Korean language class has, of course, been my favorite and I can pretty much read now and say enough key phrases to get the convenience store clerk where I go to buy ice cream quite frequently to smile at my efforts.

We had a field trip one day to a local touristy village and to an incredible temple built in 599 AD. Besides the sights, another fun part of the field trip was walking back to our bus through a shadey picnic area next to a river where Korean families were playing in the water. A bunch of the EPIK teachers (that's me) jumped in the water too and got to play with the kids and have their Korean parents ask for pictures of us with them.

Today is our last official day of orientation. We're meeting the directions of our regions and finding out what grades and what schools we'll be teaching at, which has been the question on everyone's minds for months now. That's followed by a farewell dinner and a talent show that Ryan and I signed up to sing an original song for - , which we still have to get around to writing. ;)

My next post should hopefully include some pictures of my new town, new apartment, etc. I'm very excited and looking forward to jumping into my new job - I'm a TEACHER! :)

North, South, and Everything in Between

I have been one lucky girl and have gotten the opportunity to do quite a bit of sightseeing here in Chile.

My first weekend adventure of April was to Santiago. There, some friends and I participated in the Santiago Marathon (just the 10K part, don't be too impressed), went for a hike in the nearby and stunning Cajon de Maipo where we saw waterfalls and ate fruit off wild trees, and saw many of the traditional cultural attractions like la Moneda, San Cristobal Zoo, and Santa Lucia. I really liked Santiago; it seems like there's a ton to do and I'm anxious to go back and walk around some more and finish my sightseeing to-do list that my Lee friend, Emily, made for me from her month there.

The following week, for a total of six days, I went with my host mom and sister to Argentina. Like I said, my host mom is from there, so we spent a couple days with her brother and his family in Mendoza, which is about 6 or 7 by bus (but TWELVE if you go on a busy, Easter weekend like we did because you get stuck in customs for 6 hours in the middle of the night and the young bus attendant guy starts telling you he's in love with you... but that's another story) and then spent a couple days with her father in San Rafael, a couple hours north of there. In San Rafael we went to this place called Valle Grande, I think, that reminded me so much of Zion National Park in Utah. It was this gorgeous, deserty mountain canyon with a river running through it where we did white water tubing and we all came away having had a great time and with bruises on our knees from smacking rocks.

The week after that, 5 friends and I flew to Punta Arenas which, I believe, is the southernmost actual town in Chile. We took about a billion buses and stuff and eventually found ourselves in the middle of nowhere in a rainstorm in Patagonia. We pitched our tents and began what was to be the most challenging outdoor experience of my life. Haha. It wasn't really that bad; we were just, from that point forward, constantly constantly wet and cold, likely because we chose to go to Patagonia in the very last month the park is open before they shut it down for anything but extreme winter sports. We had decent views the whole time, but the second day was my absolute favorite; it went as follows: we climbed out of our tent in the morning to find the ground dusted in snow. Initially we were discouraged, as we'd all already ran out of dry clothes, however as we reluctantly began our hike, the sky was clear and the snow dusting the Torres de Paine that towered above us as well as the trees and ground gave everything a very peaceful feel. The day got nicer and the sun came out and soon we were hiking in t shirts through the peaks covered in autumn-orange trees. We soon came to the lake we would follow the next several days that was the strangest, jade green color and was surrounded by both cliffs and rolling hills that kind of made me think of Ireland although I don't really know what Ireland looks like. The final morning we hiked to a view of some glaciers that were pretty amazing. After 4 nights of camping we went back to civilization for our last night and made dinner and met interesting people at our hostel, including these three Aussies who were seriously recreating the Motorcycle Diaries and then some - riding from Argentina to California. So sweet!

And for the final trip... the world's driest desert. Well, so we've been told. On our trip to the San Pedro de Atacama in the north of Chile, we were told we were seeing the 'most ___' everything several times: biggest copper mine, highest geyers, driest desert. Who knows? I went with four friends from my university and we had a really fun time in this teeny pueblo that seriously had one, pedestrian street lined with adobe buildings housing restaurants and tourist offices and very little else. Our first day we started by renting bikes and riding them just outside of town to some Incan ruins which were interesting and also had an impressive view of the range of dusty red mountains surrounding the town. On other days we did tours that allowed us to watch the sun set in the famous Valley of the Moon, swim in a lake so full of salt that our feet floated to the surface with no effort at all, see a whole valley full of geysers, and go to a salt flat which was just this lake that looked like it was frozen over, but was in fact just covered in salt that you could walk on and that reflected a really pretty sunset.

And that about covers it. I feel pretty good about how much of Chile I've covered and think I got the travel bug out of my system... for now. ;)

Abril y Mayo

So clearly the last two months got away from me a little bit. Sorry to anyone who's been on the edge of their seat for new posts. I think I'll break up aspects of these last two months into different posts so you don't get bored.

Po, Po, Po

March has been a great month here in Chile in a lot of ways:

CLASSES. Classes "started" March 2nd, but this coming week will be the first time I'll actually have all of my classes at the right times and hopefully consistently. I've had all of them at least once or twice so far, though, and they are all amazing and exactly how I imagined a perfect semester of classes would be. I spend all day learning about indirect object pronouns, the social situation leading up to the military overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973, and getting to ask Chilean students why they can't dance or eat hot sauce in my class that's dedicated to bettering cultural understanding.

THE HOME. My host family is still lots of fun. My host mom and I have long, relaxing lunches together most days and I like that I get both a Chilean and Argentinian perspective from her about thoughts on culture, because she's from Argentina. My host dad is super-amusing and talks and sings and tells us interesting things about Chile whenever he's home. Last weekend they gave me a lesson on how to make the famous Corn Casserole of Chile - pastel de choclo - which was entertaining and took all three of us a couple hours to prepare. The host sister, her friend and I watched Twilight on the computer in Spanish the other day. Haha.

SIGHTS. I'm actually a little disappointed in myself for not having traveled more already with the last few weeks of warm-ish weather before winter sets in, but our group that I hang out with is huge and I let that slow me down a little. However, we've actually done pretty well for ourselves by average standards. A few weekends ago several of us took a double-decker bus overnight to a town 12 hours south of here where we went white water rafting, tried climbing a volcano (but couldn't summit because the wind kept knocking us over), went to some hot springs, and went biking through the mountains. Our school took us on a tour of a couple vineyards one weekend which made me realize I am sadly not a very good wine connesur (I can't spell that). Yesterday some of us went to a national park with a lake and wild horses where we walked around and enjoyed the sun that only seems to appear outside of Vina. On my less-busy class days, my class buddy Kayla and I have mini-adventures. We've gone to museums where we've seen art and real shrunken heads from the Amazon, to randomly-selected, tiny towns along the subway line where we buy cheap books and ice cream, and to cheap movies.

FRIENDS. I have a really fun little group of Americans that I hang out with a lot. We have fun going to our weekly salsa lessons, getting together almost every night for a walk or dancing or a bakery-run, and hanging out on weekends. They're all really sweet, funny people that I for some reason hadn't even envisioned meeting - I'm not totally sure who I thought I'd be hanging out with - and I'm blessed to have met them. We are slowly making acquaintances with actual Chileans also and some of them have been joining us to go dancing or for terremotos - these drinks we like made of wine, blended fruit, and ice cream.

IMMERSION. I'm definitely feeling more confident every week in my Spanish. Being in a setting where you get to practice what you're learning every single day is absolutely amazing. Between making new friends, classes, and just going about daily business in Latin America, I am getting SO much input every day and it's helping me learn a lot of vocab and just get better at listening and communicating.

And that's about it for excitement so far. The next few weeks look like they'll be pretty eventful, so I'll be sure to keep this updated!

Settling In

Well, it's been a pretty non-stop crazy week and a half since I arrived in Chile, but I've enjoyed every minute of it.

My host house and family are great. I sadly don't see my 14 year old host sister much as she is at school like 12 hours a day, but my host mom and I chat a lot and my host dad talks a lot and quickly about pretty much every topic imaginable, which has been funny, interesting, and great Spanish practice. I have the best located house of any of the other students. Its' 5 minutes walking from the school and the beach, 10 to downtown, and it's adorable.

Like I wrote earlier, the day I got here, so did my host family's four nieces and nephews, so I got to spend four days with them, going to the beach every day, learning slang at night, and getting a handle on my new city of residence.

The day after they left a friend I met at the Chilean embassy in California came to town, so I went out with him and two sweet Canadian girls who were traveling Chile. The following day the four of us took the subway to Vina del Mar's neighboring city, Valparaiso. We just wandered around on foot with no real agenda but managed to stumble across the house of Chile's Nobel Peace Prize winning poet, Pablo Nerudo which we toured, an "ascensor" or pretty much little railway box that took us to the top of the hill where we discovered the Historic District. The whole city is made up of a mix of shacks and Victorian mansions, all painted bright, flamboyant colors, like La Boca neighborhood in Buenos Aires and with laundry on lines streaming from window to window. It's hilly and rather dirty, but charming in a very lifelike way. I went back with my school for a tour the following Saturday and our guide masterfully pointed out how vibrant a city it really was. He talked about how Chileans say that in all of Chile the women with the best legs are from here because of all the arduous walking. He told the history of a town whose income died with the construction of the Panama Canal and how despite not have been able to to fix their houses in decades, everyone there is fiercy proud of which "cerro" or hill they come from. The Historic District had many unique and illogical houses and had the best murals in the city. In almost every nook and cranny of the city there were paintings and graffati expressing everything from love and nature to political revolution. After walking all day and eating lunch at a sidewalk cafe, we came back to Vina and sat on the beach in the dark and looked at the stars. The next day the fun Canadian girls and I went to the beach for the first sunny day since I arrived and I got burned to a crisp! Whoops.

And Monday began the first day of orientation. Really, every day all week had only a couple hours of important things to do, but it got dragged out due to the slightly slower pace of life and progress here - one result of which was the 2 or 3 hour lunch breaks each afternoon to come home and eat what for Chileans is the biggest meal of the day. Each afternoon, my new American, German, and Moroccan friends would go after school to walk around "el Centro" and buy things like adapters and gelato. Most nights we did something fun as well. Tuesday I brought a group to salsa lessons, Wednesday we went to the busiest night at the infamous Cafe Journal - the hangout for all the internationals of Vina, and Thursday we celebrated one girl's birthday with her and her boarding house neighbors who gave us lots of tips on what to experience in Chile.

Friday after orientation ended, a group of 8 of us caught a bus to Maitencillo, supposedly one of Chile's nicest beaches - a two hour busride with just suits and towels. After "taking the sun" and attempting skim boarding and surfing (my friends, not me) we ate dinner at this sweet little restaurant called La Canasta that had a live trees growing all throughout it and felt like the jungle and had seafood and Chilean wine. We then found a little "cabana" with a kitchen and enough beds to comfortably sleep 5, but we packed all 8 of us in for the night and played some cards. Saturday some of us went on our school's first activity - a guided tour of Valparaiso. It was fun to go this time by bus and get a historical perspective from our guide, especially when our guide had the driver of our huge tour bus intentionally weave up the narrowest, steepest roads with the blindest corners and no room for errors. We ended the tour with a boat ride around the harbor during which we got to see war ships, fishing boats, and SEA LIONS! They smelled awful but were so cool up close.

And that brings me to the present. Official classes start tomorrow, and assuming they all are being offered (some are still up in the air), they sound like they'll be great.

So This is What Evita Felt Like

Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires. It was a crazy 5 days. I think I managed to get a pretty basic overview of all the things you "have" to do while there, although I could have spent a month there really getting to know the place.

I met a fellow Coloradan girl named Phoebe at the airport in B.A., so we did everything together that week.

Our first night we wanted to see some tango, so we looked at a booklet that listed all the 'milongas' in town and went to the very last one listed. We showed up, and just as we went to pay the entrance fee we noticed the sign said "Milonga Gay". We went for it anyways and it was amazing. Admittedly, it was strange getting used to seeing same gender partner dancing together, especially such a sensual dance, but after a while it was amazing watching couples of any combination because they were all really good. They cleared the floor and turned up the lights for a performance half-way through where these two guys did a choreographed dance with aerials, sparkly hair, and drama; it was breathtaking.

The following day we met up with a Brazilian, an Australian, and a Seattlite and explored the city. We walked around the area by our hostel "el Centro" which included many ornate government buildings, the famous "Obelisco", Florida St with all its shopping, and stopped at Puerto Madero for lunch. From there we went to the nearby la Boca neighborhood that was originally inhabited by Italian immigrants. The immigrants were so poor that they would paint their house the color of whatever paint they could find, resulting houses of clashing, bright, and cheery hues. By then we were all dehydrated and sunburned - in Februrary, so we came back and were just in time for my hostel's all-you-can eat Argentinian barbeque. It's not like American bbq with the sweet sauce and stuff, but it was amazing.

The Brazilian boy we hung out with that day for some reason came to believe Phoebe and I spoke Portuguese, so he spoke to us in it all day. At first I went with it cause I was having fun picking out cognates and because it's pretty, but I continued to keep up the facade because I felt bad and didn't know how to tell him I'd had no idea what he was saying all day.

That was the night I began to realize that Lonely Planet (I know, I know - I quote it like a nerd) wasn't joking when they said B.A. nightlife doesn't even started till 2 a.m. or so. After visiting with people at our hostel for a long time, some friends and I went out at 2 to go dancing. Too much rap; I would have preferred salsa - I'll try to avoid that scene in the future. I felt bad that the follow morning and following several mornings we didn't get up till 1 or so, but I was comforted by the fact that there was always a group getting back from the night before just as I was getting up (yes, at 1 p.m.).

Friday we met up with some Brits and an Italian and set out for the famous Recoleta Cemetery. I love Latin American cemeteries and this one was up to my standards. They're all above - ground, small, opulant tombs set up in tall rows so that it's almost like visiting a neighborhood except that when you peer through the doors of the building there're coffins, not people.

Saturday Phoebe and I met up with our friend Salvatore again and went to a neighborhood called Palermo which was full of boutiques and a fun market. Being that Salvatorte was Italian and had in conversation already acknowledged that he understood fashion, I felt lots of pressure to buy anything I tried on that he approved of, but I resisted. We wandered from there to the Botanical Gardens where we meandered through tall trees and ancient statues and finally sat for a while visiting, avoiding the phenomenal number of cats sprinkled through the garden, and making awkward eye contact with this band of brass players dressed in 1900's clothes that we eventually awkwardly talked to.

That night we finally went to tango lessons. It is definitely a dance of tradition and hierarchies, so as beginners we were kind of shunned and put in the corner, but we learned a lot and afterwards were invited to join our instructors at the beginner table for drinks and conversation - all the other beginners were Argentinian, so it was good Spanish practice.

Sunday morning we met up with our new friend Vithente from Spain with whom we journeyed by subway and train to a town on the inlet of the Rio de la Plata, speaking Spanish the whole way. The town had lots of nice German-ish architecture and we took a chartered boat ride for an hour down the river, hearing about the history of the area and admiring the pretty shacks along the shore. We wandered around Tigre's market afterward, looking at ma'tes, leather, and cowboy hats before heading back and going out for the completely mandatory steak and wine dinner which was about $20. Realizing going to sleep was just silly because I had to leave so early for the airport, I just stayed up with Phoebe and Vithente and we took a walk around the still busy city at about 4 a.m.

Sunday night/Monday morning were filled with taxis, buses, planes, and shuttles before I arrived at my host home in Vina del Mar, Chile mid-morning. I was excited to learn that my host mom, Fabiana, is Argentinian so she can show me how to make the tea I never learned how to in B.A. I met her loud and friendly husband, Jose, and then she and I went and found her daughter Denise, who's 14 and her four cousins in the middle of all the Festival of Vina del Mar festivities just down the street.

Since then I've been pretending I'm a Chilean teenager, and it's amazing. I've heard who knows how many comments on how pale and skinny I am, resulting in being forced to eat ice cream three times a day and I hang out all the time with all the cousins (ages 13-20). We go to the beach, walk the streets late at night and buy fried, sugary desserts, watch t.v., visit the grandparents, teach each other bad words, and go to concerts - yes, I saw Juanes live and although we were so far away that I couldn't even see his face, I was blown away. And I can't even tell you what their new favorite phrases to write on dusty cars or jokingly yell at each other are, because they're far too vulgar.

I like Chile a ton so far and am absolutely loving that fact that I haven't spoken English in four days, but this afternoon I got homesick. It's hard living in a partial fog and never quite knowing what people are saying and wishing you could just talk to your mom, but it'll get better and is already so worth it. Chau, chau.

One time I went to Buenos Aires...

I thought I would share a humorous anecdote about something that happened in my preparations for this trip. On Monday, the day before I left, Alyssa and I got on couchsurfing and began to look for people whose icons had the coffee cup, indicating that they didn't have a place for people to stay (which I don't think I would in S. America anyways), but they'd meet for a drink or to show you around.

We found a couple interesting and safe looking people, so I wrote them both the same, short message telling them when I'd be in town, a couple things I want to try, and asking if they were free if they'd want to hang out.

Later that night I saw I'd gotten a response and excitedly opened my message from this guy and began reading it aloud to Lyss and Deo. It went as follow (italics are mine):

"i'd say great timing brianna!i just got slightly more free from my job and waited 2months and still couldnt try tango. i wanted to takeclasses this week.i'll take you to the coolest milonga(places where youdance tango, wiki search it so you will learn thesecret eye codes) we can have dinner, mate, and then we go to this place.its gonna be 10 pesos per hour, something like 3$."

When I got to the word 'mate', I stopped reading and stared in shock. Lyss grabbed the laptop, and upon reading it herself began to yell that she'd known this 'couchsurfing' was super-dangerous. I racked my brain for ways to salvage the awkward situation - I figured I could write him and ask if he was okay with just dancing meanwhile insisting to Lyss and Deo that this guy was foreign - he surely just didn't understand what he was saying. Deo pointed out that the English up until there seemed pretty competent.

Lyss went to dictionary.com to see if there was some unusual usage for that word we just didn't know when one result came up with the words 'south america' in it and it jogged my brain. I remembered that in my original message to this guy, I'd told him one of my goals was to try 'máte', a famous Argentinian tea. Suddenly it all made sense and this guy went from being a creeper to even nicer than before. And it was especially ridiculous of me because I hadn't even included accent marks in my original message either. Jajaja, no?

And that brings me to now, Wednesday evening, waiting for me two new friends from the shuttle, Phoebe from Colorado and Rob from Brisbane, to arrive so we can meet up with Arash.

Rob and I did a short walk through the city earlier in search of lunch and so far it is very Latin American - it has kioskos clogging the sidewalks, 'tiendas' selling all varieties of barrets and candy, and girls in skimpy tops (it's HOT here), but it differs from the only other Latin American capital that I really know - San Jose - in that it's beautiful. There's lots of huge, ornate buildings and many parks with regal fountains and statues. I'll report more later. Más luego!