Wow, I REALLY am here.

Now, I know I already used a similar title, but this is different...
Today, we went on a great tour of Valparaíso to get to know some different parts of the city better and understand its history. On our excursion we had some great views of the city and saw some incredibly picturesque scenes. Which brings me back to my title. I took this picture just a few hours ago:

This house has been one of the symbols of Valparaíso. It sits on the ledge of a hill next to one of the city's famous ascensors. If you do a google search of the city, I guarantee that this house, with the ascencor, will be one of the top 10 photos. An image of it is also on the back of my travel guide that I was thumbing through months before I left for my program. Well today, I was actually in front of this building and I had an incredible experience of realization of where I am. I REALLY am here in Valparaíso, Chile. Wow.

Since my last update quite a few things have happened here in my chilean life.

First and foremost, I started school! I am in a variety of classes including Phonetics and Phonology, Advanced Spanish Writing, History of Chile, History of Valparaíso, and Chilean Sign Language! Pretty fun schedule if I do say so myself  :)

The first week of school was an absolute joke. It was like a warm up week, some classes actually happened, others didn't. Some the teachers showed up way late. Other classes were interrupted by acts of hazing... Yeah, it happens here.

So in the Latin American system, students pick a Career to study in. They only take classes in that career and pretty much stick together for 4-7 years of study depending on what their career choice is. Needless to say they are a pretty close group and I guess to help with this they have "La Semana Menchona" which is like 'Freshman Week'. Actually it lasts about 2 weeks, but thats beside the point. The upperclassmen show up to kidnap the first years, essentially destroy their clothes, take away their personal belongings, have them do humiliating games, cover them in anything from tomatoes to spray paint and then send them out in the city to ask people for money to get to some other destination to get their things back. I understand the idea of being a tight knit group, but it definitely goes too far, too often. So everyone knows that this goes down, and teachers often don't show up for the first few sessions of their freshman level classes because they know that they wont have students. This even got to the point where 7 other gringos and I were standing outside of our classroom without a professor, without a single other chilean student and we realized that they all knew something we didn't... Semana Menchona. At least we didn't get mixed into the madness.

I feel that once everybody actually get's into the swing of being in school, it will be a fun and challenging experience. As my mom always says, it takes about 2 weeks to get adjusted...

Aside from school, these past few weeks have been crazy. Last Friday, February 11th, a huge earthquake struck in Japan. The news coming out of there every day is devastating and thoughts and prayers are constantly being sent their way. Japan and Chile sit on opposite ends of the Ring of Fire, a seismic hot zone around the Pacific Ocean. So when news got out about the huge quake in Japan, alerts in Chile went out like wildfire. The concern here was the great risk of a tsunami traveling across the Pacific and doing severe damage to the the Chilean Coast line.  So alerts went up, events were cancelled, bars were closed, and some people in low zones even got evacuated as a precautionary measure. As news came out that Hawaii came out alright, as well as Easter Island, the tension for a big tsunami here was pretty low. When 'the big wave' got to the Valparaíso area, it was apparently measured at 40cm. Which is like 16in... No biggie. But in the end, Chile would rather be prepared, than have the need to rebuild. 

But as I mentioned before, Chile is on the Ring of Fire, so seismic activity does happen here. On Wednesday evening a 5.3 Quake happened right in Valparaíso but when they are below 6.0 they call them 'temblors'. I guess it gave some people a little shock, but I failed to feel it. THEN later that night another temblor happened, but I didn't feel that one either... If that weren't enough, another one happened the following morning. ...which I also didn't feel... Kind of weird to have a bunch of temblors like that, but I guess I've just got my quake-legs! Either way, we would rather have a bunch of little shakes here and there, rather than have all of that tension built up in the earth that causes the kind of damage seen in Japan. For a great explanation of all this earthquake talk, check out this video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12739417

As if Semana Menchona and Earthquakes weren't enough, getting to know the area has been quite an adventure as well! I successfully do not have classes on Mondays which is pretty awesome, so Megan and I decided to go exploring around Valpo to get some pictures and enjoy the day. Well, at one point we stumbled upon the stairs that I'm pretty sure must have been used to film a certain scene from Lord of the Rings: 

We decided to conquer this flight of stairs and set up on it with cameras in hand and a mentality to do some climbing. About 3/4 of the way up, some random older man coming down looked at me and made a universal motion that informed us to lookout and be careful at the top. So we stowed our cameras and held tight to our bags as we came out on top of the stairs. When we got there, we were in a cute little plaza with nothing to fear but a few students sketching the view. So out came the cameras and got some cool photos: 

(This photo perfectly captures our adventure: paintings, photography and caution...)

After catching some cool shots, we again packed our cameras and checked the map to decide where we wanted to go next. Essentially our walking plan included going up the hill a bit, then over towards some other marked points of interest on our maps. But as we walked up, a lady came right up to us and informed us very rapidly, and very bluntly, that tourists had no business going where we were headed. Apparently people have had all of their things stolen after heading up that way and she didn't want to see that happen to us. 2 people withing 10 minutes of each other informed us to be careful where we were. How nice of them. It put a damper on our adventure, but not nearly as bad as being robbed would have been... So after her kindly advice, we went straight down hill back to the familiar and safer areas of the city.

All in all, life in Chile has been pretty exciting! I have been experiencing quite a few new things and am even beginning to get into this school thing, which is apparently what I came here to do...

I'll end this blog by relating it back to an earlier post where I posted a picture and briefly mentioned an interesting juxtaposition between old and new...

 Mast ship docked in front of some pretty high tech military ships

Thank you for reading, everyone.
Desde Chile,
Matthew


ps. For more photos go to: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=278859&id=617398962&l=9b502d5283