TravelStream™ news feed for member dicooper10 on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/dicooper10 en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:10:37 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1219978560/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1219978560/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1219978560/tpod.html Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:10:37 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Santiago, Chile

Well this weekend we went up to La Serena with Ivan and Carmen. What a great weekend. We stopped at a little town on the way up for some lunch and a bit of look at the local handicraft. Over lunch I told Carmen about our little mishap with the pronunciation of pisco sour (see previous entry). So I was saying quite loudly that I'd been calling it a PICO sour. We were all having a giggle at which time she said "in English that would be like saying COCK sour". Hahaha. I guess her saying that out loud is as meaningless to her as me saying pico.

Then we headed up to La Serena. Ivan has a friend who has an apartment there. It's this huge complex with the biggest pool in the world. It's all salt water from the ocean that comes in at one end and is cleaned and then flows down the couple of kilometers to go out the other end back into the ocean. In the middle they have a little louvre like glass pyramid with a heated pool and a couple of outside Jacuzzis. All filled with the sea water.

We headed out to the Jacuzzi for an evening of drinking under the stars while sitting in hot water. When we got there we discovered that we had to wear a bathing cap. Yes, a bathing cap. I haven't worn one of them since I was in school! But anyway, at least everyone had to look ridiculous so we weren't alone.

I know it's weird, but there's something very soothing about looking up in the sky and seeing the Southern Cross again. Feels like home.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1218337080/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1218337080/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1218337080/tpod.html Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:58:59 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Santiago, Chile

This weekend we hired a car and headed up to the mountains. The climb up was super steep and Marks driving freaked me out a little as we skidded up the roads. But we made it up there in one piece. The view from the mountain was spectacular. It looked down over the whole of Santiago. We really need to get a bit fitter. We did a few runs and then we were exhausted so, you guessed it,... we headed to the pub an had a beer overlooking the view and the people falling down the mountain at the end of the day.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1217818620/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1217818620/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1217818620/tpod.html Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:58:17 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Santiago, Chile

This weekend we finally made our way into Santiago. We started by going up Cerro San Cristobal. Cerro is hill in Spanish so its this big hill looking over Santiago and they've put a statue of the virgin Mary up there. We took a cable car up to the top and took in the fantastic view over the city.

From there we heading into the center and made our way to an outdoor pub in the middle of this market place. It was great. We ended up hanging out there until late in the evening. We made friends with some psycho guy who kept asking for some our wine in between talking to himself. He spoke some English so decided that we were his friends. He was very entertaining, because he was so crazy.

A guy with a guitar came buy and started singing The Beatles for us after he found out Mark was from Liverpool. So the whole crowd at the bar was singing along to the beatles.

We both had caricatures drawn of us which look ok. I also had a portrait drawn and I'm hoping it doesn't look too much like me.... Otherwise I'm really quite ugly.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1217040840/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1217040840/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1217040840/tpod.html Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:55:15 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Santiago, Chile

Yes, that's our brains frying. Ok, so maybe I overestimated my abilities just a tad. Ok, maybe a lot. I honestly thought I was going to pick it up quickly and that by the end of the week I'd know enough to just keep learning vocabulary. Yeah well I'm definitely not there yet.

I wonder how many people actually remember all that stuff from primary school. Verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, possessive pronouns, prepositions, irregular verbs , conjugation blah, blah, blah. I think I really should have had a few English lessons again before learning Spanish. The teachers seemed to expect us to know what they all were. At one point she was talking about infinitives and spent quite a few minutes talking about how to use them in Spanish. I have no idea what she was saying. I just sat there in a daze wondering what an infitive could be and why I didn't listen more in 3rd grade.

First day we learnt the word for "I am". Ok, so first of all there are 5 different ways to say that. In English we have I am, you are, we are, they are.... So 2 different words - am and are. In Spanish each one is different so there are 5 ways to say it depending on who you are talking about. I, you, we, they and... yous (meaning you'all). That's good old aussie slang there. "Whatta yous doin this arve?" It brought back memories of my grandmother constantly telling me "Yous is not a word in the English language. Please don't say that." If she was still alive I'd enjoy telling her that it is in fact a word in the Spanish language. :-)

So anyway, Yep that's all cool, got that.

Second day...sometimes we don't use those 5 words that we learnt yesterday, sometimes we use these other 5 words. And there's a bunch of rules about when to use which one. Right... kinda got that.

Third day...sometimes we don't use any of those 10 we learnt so far, sometimes we use these other 5 words. Or was it another 12 words. I don't really know, it was a lot of words. Hmmmm getting confused.

Fourth day... CONFUSED!!!

Fifth day ... still confused, brain is fried but it's starting to make a little bit of sense now. I think.

It is so exciting though when we actually put together a sentence. The problem is that we have to think about it for so long. We've been going out to lunch everyday and each day we construct better and better ways to talk to the waiter. As long as they don't ask anything back, we're fine.

Today our teacher told us that Chile is supposed to be the most difficult Spanish to understand because they speak fast and their pronunciation is quite bad. So she assured us that if we can listen and speak here, we can go to any Spanish speaking country. That's great news, but doesn't really help us right now.

We've confirmed how ridiculous the English language can be and I'm just grateful that I'm not learning that as a second language. I have a whole new respect for people learning English. I will never again be impatient or get frustrated with someone trying to speak English. .

Mark has managed to learn a few swear words already. He even worked one into his homework one day. Our teachers were really fantastic. We had a lady called Piedad in the afternoon and she always seemed a bit grumpy when she came in but we always managed to get her laughing with our stupid jokes through the afternoon. We had 4other people in our class as well who were all uni students here on an exchange program.

We also learnt another swear word by accident. Yes, this is language slip up number 2. The local drink here is called the pisco sour. Pisco is an alcohol made from grapes and they mix it with lemon juice to make the pisco sour. Problem is they say it so fast that it almost sounds like pico sour. So during the week I started ordering a pico sour at the pub. During our class we had to say something that we liked in Spanish. So I proceeded to tell the teacher that I like pico sour. She looked at me and said.. Pardon?? Then she proceeded to tell me that in Chile, the word pico is a swear word for the male penis. Great... all week I'd been asking the bar man for a sour dick!

They have a guy who organizes weekend excursions and stuff like that. We had a big group lunch one day and spent most of the time chatting to him about Chile. It is such a fantastic country. It's 4000 km of coast line starts in the most arid desert in the world and travels down to the coldest continent in the world, antarctica. In between there is Patagonia with some of the best hiking, skiing and white water rafting in the world. I can't wait to star t getting around this country a bit, there's so much to do. Speaking of which, we are heading to La Serena tomorrow with Ivan and Carmen. It's a resort with largest man made pool in the world. It's 2 km long.

Ok, well I think I might go do some times tables or something. I need some maths to balance out my brain. :-)
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216428540/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216428540/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216428540/tpod.html Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:15:37 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Tonight we were invited to Ivan's house for dinner. He came to pick us up at 8.30pm and it was a 45 min drive to his house. Little different to the 'yeah come over about 6 or 7' that we're used to. :-) We're loving the late meal times though.

Conversation was great again. We even managed to joke around this time. Their English is getting so much better so quickly. They said they really like being able to speak with us because they get to practice. They taught us a little Spanish as well. The meal was lovely, a big chunk of steak. What they say is true, the meat here really is good.

We talked a little about life in Chile. They were saying that university education is now becoming very expensive here. The government is starting to put up the costs or maybe privatise it. (Not really sure which from the conversation) And health care is also getting expensive. They said you can go to the hospitals for free but they don't have the best doctors and care. Or you can go to a Clinic. But when you check into the clinic you have to give them a blank signed cheque. Can you believe it? Before they even let you in you have to give it to them and then they'll fill in the amount when you leave.

We also talked a little about their time under Pinochet. It didn't sound like a particularly nice time to be in Chile. Although they did say the only good thing about it was that there was absolutely no crime. When there are police running around with machine guns then no one was game to do anything wrong. These days petty crime is pretty rife in the main city area and some other places around Santiago. Like anywhere though, there are just some places you steer clear of.

As we were leaving I slipped up a little. We walked past the kitchen on the way out and I said, oh you have a nice cocina (which I pronounced cochina). Carmen smiled and said, oh I think you mean cocina (pronounced cosina). Cochina means dirty. Hehe oops. We had a good laugh about insulting them to finish out the night J Oh well, I'm sure there'll be plenty more of those to come as we keep learning.

Next weekend we are going out to the beach. They have some friends with an apartment out there so we are going to stay over on Saturday night. They apparently have hot tubs out in the sea water or something like that.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216342080/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216342080/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216342080/tpod.html Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:49:23 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Santiago, Chile

We've discovered pretty quickly the Chilean custom of kissing on your first meeting. It's quite bizarre. I mean, I usually tend to give people I know reasonably well a bit of a hug but not someone I don't know at all. When we went to look at one of the apartments, this guy who owned it came to do the door and slammed one on my cheek. Well anyway, at least that takes some of the awkwardness out of knowing when it's appropriate to kiss or not ...now i should just always do it. Oh and just to clarify, its only man/woman and woman/woman, the guys still shake hands. ;-)

We had the internet turned on this morning. The cable guys came out to turn it on and also install cable tv. One of the guys was so cute. He's a little short guy, as most Chileans are. And he was so excited about it all. He spent ages going through the remote and showing us to work it all. He was trying to speak English and communicate with sign language and seemed to be thrilled when we understood him.

It seems we've been a little spoilt with US cable TV and the inbuilt disk for recording tv shows. After they left we played around with it for a while and found a button to record tv shows. We were pretty excited about being able to record some English shows until we read the message that said, "Ok, now press record on your VCR". VCR? Do they even exist anymore??

Obviously Chileans like music. Most of the apartments that we've seen don't even have a TV in the family room. They seem to keep those only in the bedroom. Of course Mark would die without a TV so lucky we have a nice big LCD in our family room. :-) Anyway, the TV stations tend to just throw in a video clip here and there. So you'll be watching a good show, break for some ads and then break for a bit of a tune, couple more ads and then back to the show.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216169220/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216169220/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216169220/tpod.html Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:48:28 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Santiago, Chile

The guy who owns the apartment gave us a call to make sure everything is ok. Everyone here seems so helpful. He's actually up in Seattle at the moment and travels back and forth between Chile and the US all the time. Turns out he owns both this apartment and the one next to it. The one next door is his office so there's only his assistant there through the day and no one at night. Hopefully we'll have the internet on this week.

And... we've enrolled in Spanish lessons next week! We're going to do a one week super intensive course at a Spanish school. 7 hours a day for 5 days. I'm so looking forward to it. I've wanted to speak another language for so long and now I feel like I'm joining this secret club of second language speakers. There's something intriguing about the fact that someday soon I could be in an English speaking country and be able to listen in to Spanish conversations. You know when you're sitting somewhere like on a bus or train and there's people speaking another language and you can't help but wonder what they're talking about. Well now I may actually know.

I have to say, it is a bit of information overflow just walking around the streets. Normally when all the street signs and ads are in English you just read them without thinking. When you're on holiday in another country it doesn't matter that you can't read the signs and you just ignore them. But here I'm seeing Spanish everywhere and I'm constantly trying to translate it into to English and learn some more words. So my mind is working constantly wherever we go.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216082700/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216082700/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1216082700/tpod.html Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:47:02 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Santiago, Chile

Today we moved into our apartment :-) We had to pay the rent in cash so we made our way to a bank and after a few attempts managed to get out enough cash. We were walking around with $1,000,000 in our pockets. It was nice to be a millionaire, albeit a chillionaire. That's only about US$2,000.

The views from the apartment are just so amazing. It had rained on Sunday so it was super clear. It's not actually 180 degree views, it's more like 270. We can see over the whole city. We didn't take any photos that day because we were expecting it to be the same everyday. Unfortunately though, the pollution is very bad here because the mountains stop it from being blown away. So unless it's been raining, it's quite hazy. We're waiting for another good day to take some nice pics.

The apartment has 2 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms. The weird thing is one of the bathrooms is tacked onto the side of the kitchen. The only way to get to it is through the kitchen. It's very weird. We keep wondering if Chileans just get the urge to shower half way through cooking a meal or something.

We found a nice little restaurant down the road called Happening. We thought that was very apt, a lot of cool stuff is happening to us so we headed down there for dinner. Great steak, as seems usual for Chile.

The views from the apartment at night were just as spectacular. It looks like Xmas lights sparkling across the entire city. So we sat outside on our patio with a nice bottle of wine and took it all in. What a great day. We love Chile.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1215996180/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1215996180/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1215996180/tpod.html Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:45:48 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Well luckily for us it was neither. When they said dancing they actually meant normal dancing at a night club. Here we were thinking that we'd be awkwardly throwing each other around some dance floor while Chileans were masterfully dancing the salsa and tango around us.

We went out for dinner in a great little Japanese restaurant in Bellavista which turns into a night club when everyone finishes eating. We met Ivan's wife, Carmen. She is lovely. She was very nervous about speaking English at first but a couple of glasses of Chilean merlot and she was fine. Her English is actually very good. She did a few lessons about a year ago and has just learned the rest from watching TV. She said that this was her very first conversation in English!

Conversation was actually pretty good. It was just a little hard to joke around. At one point they tried to say something about how nice we were. The word they used sounded like pathetic. It was something completely different but just sounded like that. So Mark and I had a laugh at it and tried to explain that we thought they said pathetic using the dictionary. But I'm not sure if they didn't understand what we were talking about or whether they then thought we were saying they were pathetic. Whatever the case, a little bit of silence and then we continued chatting away.

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1215817080/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1215817080/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dicooper10/3/1215817080/tpod.html Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:47:47 -0400 Santiago, Chile

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Today we found our apartment. It's SO awesome. It's on the top floor of a 26 floor building. It's a 2 bedroom, 2 floor loft style apartment with 180 degree views of the Andes. WOW. It's fantastic. In the corner on the top floor is a huge Jacuzzi. Can't wait to jump in with a bottle of champagne and admire the view from there. Now we just need to make some friends so we can have a house warming party. And it even comes with a cleaner twice a week... perfect! We move in there on Monday.

We tried again for a phone in a few different places. We gave up on that again. We managed to find a couple of people who spoke a bit of English but they all said that we couldn't buy a sim card. Whatever.

We stayed in for the evening watching movies. There's loads of English movies on at night with Spanish subtitles. We not only get some entertainment but we can learn some Spanish at the same time. At around midnight a movie came on staring Mandy Mayhem. Yes, it was soft porn. Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more.
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