My First Two Months (Mas o Menos) in Chile
by Charlie Johnson

I’m not really the type of person to go off on grand globe-trotting adventures, so for a couple of months after I sent in my study abroad applications, and even for a little while after I had confirmed my participation in the IFSA-Butler program in Valparaíso, Chile, for this semester, I waited for that compelling urge to chicken out.  I knew that of course I would apply and create some scenario in my mind of a theoretical semester abroad, but then after a while I’d realize that I would be much more comfortable sitting in my PC dorm, hanging out with PC friends, and living my normal, happy PC life.  So by the time PC classes started back up (along with the majority of those north of the equator), I was a bit surprised to find myself still at home in Columbia, waiting for my semester to begin. 

So on February 26, after a couple of months in Columbia and a couple of visits to shocked and alarmed PC folk who thought I should have already been in the thick of my abroad experience, I finally boarded a plane from Columbia, which took me to Dallas, then Miami, then, finally, Santiago, Chile, where the program staff was awaiting our group.  We had a short orientation those last few days of February in Olmué, a small, indistinct town an hour or two away from both Santiago and Valparaíso before arriving in Viña del Mar (Valparaíso’s twin city) to meet our Chilean host families on the first of March.

I was, admittedly, very nervous the first day with my host family.  While our orientation time had been a mix of both languages, on that Saturday afternoon I felt that, for the first time, I was genuinely incorporated into the Spanish-speaking world.  I didn’t know what level of fluency they were expecting to encounter, and I felt like all of the Spanish I thought I knew had vanished.  I confined myself to a lot of one to three-word sentences, trying to convey that yes, everything was great, gracias.  At dinner I was sure I would commit some sort of cultural error and/or do something universally disgraceful like somehow manage to empty the bottle of vinegar on the tablecloth.  By the second day, though, I was already feeling comfortable with my surroundings, and, honestly, within the first week, I felt like a part of the family.

My Chilean family, in-house, consists of my host mom, my 25 year-old brother who’s finishing up his medical studies, and a girl from a city further north who is a friend of the family and studies engineering at Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, the same university where I’m currently taking classes.  In addition, there are literally about ten other family members that live within a block from my house, including my brother’s middle sister and her husband, the oldest sister and her three kids (ages 4, 14, and 15), and the grandparents.  That means that practically every day there are other family members that join us for almuerzo (lunch) or once (something that varies in style and formality between tea-time and a full dinner).  As an only child, I’ve enjoyed seeing the dynamics of my new “big family” every day, the most obvious of these being the way they do meals.

What I learned after my first day here, is that meals (in my house, at least) are very informal in many ways.  There is never an expectation to wait on anyone else to start “digging in,” so the meal might begin with two people with six more arriving at some point in the next half hour.  Sometimes, especially for once, people eat different things.  Sometimes, the television’s on.  However, in another sense, Chilean meals (seemingly as a general rule) are formal times to spend time together.  Whereas many American families, if they typically eat together at all, tend to break off for various activities immediately after the last bite of mashed potatoes has been swallowed, for Chileans, meals constitute a reason for gathering but not the totality of the together-time that follows.  When everyone’s finished eating, an individual might head off to work on something, but there is never a sense that mealtime is over.  If there’s a small gathering, say four or five people, the family might linger conversing for another twenty minutes or so after all the plates are empty.  With a larger crowd, this time might extend through much of the evening.  Chileans in general, but especially in this sense, rarely seem to be in a terrible hurry, something I have appreciated during my stay here.

Upon my arrival in Viña, I had a couple of days just to get used to my new home, new room, new family, before the orientation for Universidad Católica began.  So while I was using my map to explore on foot some of the (thank God) numbered streets surrounding my house, I also had to figure out the micro (bus) system.  I still have yet to find a map with micro routes, so I’ve just been relying on someone to tell me which micro to take to get where I want to go.  As anyone who has ever let me drive them anywhere, accidentally let me lead when walking somewhere, or agreed to meet me somewhere knows, I have an abysmal sense of direction.  During my first few weeks here, I batted about .750 with micros, meaning that, three quarters of the time, I actually ended up following my prescribed route (usually just the one route) to its logical endpoint (usually just the one endpoint), while roughly one out of every four micro rides landed me past my stop or brought me up into the cerros (hills), where some helpful conductores (drivers) got me onto another micro headed back the way I had mistakenly come. 

Micros have their own little quirks, in addition to being seemingly impossible to track down if someone hasn’t told you which one to take, where to catch it, and where it will drop you off.  We spent an entire day in my Spanish class discussing the different non-passengers that board the micro from time to time.  The most frequent are the vendedores ambulantes, traveling salesmen of sorts, usually spending about a minute tops on a micro stopped in traffic trying to make a couple sales of ice cream, peanuts, or other products.  A different type of vendor sells things like strips of band-aids or tiny calendars for one hundred pesos (roughly a US quarter), often accompanied by a story of why they need your financial support.  So far, I have also seen one example of each of the following:  a person with documents suggesting some kind of illness (apparently very common), a pair of clowns, trying unsuccessfully to get audience participation for ten minutes of a micro ride, and a “professor” lecturing for a few minutes on various previous uses of the name “Valparaiso” in order to sell two books (which appeared to be about thirty pages each) about the city’s history for a little over two bucks. 

As I discovered during the same time that I was trying to figure out the convoluted micro system, the university system here has its own organizational challenges.  Course sign-ups for extranjeros (foreigners) were done in a two-day whirlwind of paper in one room where student representatives from each of the carreras (departments) were on hand to advise us on potential courses.  These monitores (basically orientation leaders) also were responsible for “officially” registering you for classes by writing your name on a piece of paper.  In all had the feel of how I imagine a presidential primary caucus would be.  For several weeks after that, every day we received emails about room changes for classes, schedule changes for classes, and occasional cancellations, only a couple of which affected the six classes I ended up with after the drop/add period (which for us lasted about a month) came to a close.  My final schedule is a mix of three classes with gringos (foreigners that look and talk like me) and three with Chilean student.  In another university quirk, there have been recent cancellations of my Chilean classes, due to widespread student protests, ironically enough, about the proposed increase in the student rate on the micros and about some more vague issue of funding for public and private education in Chile.  Apparently this happens, to some extent, roughly every year, so it’s just another piece of the culture.  I’m not sure what kind of perceived injustice would cause thousands of US college students to take to the streets, so it’s interesting that the students here seem to feel such solidarity in their need and ability to influence the political system.

As a part of PC’s Maymester program, I had the opportunity to come to Chile for two weeks last May with the Spanish department.  One of the things that struck me at the time about Chileans was that everyone we met seemed to be very open to foreigners in their country.  There are so many American influences here, from music to movies to television channels to popular characters on notebooks, clothing, etc. that it does seem to make sense, in a way.  However, just as other parts of the world are greatly offended by the degree of influence maintained by the US in their cultural spheres, it is possible that Chileans could have taken up this same disdain for the “invasion” of these outside influences and the outsiders who, however unwittingly, represent them.  Instead, my initial impressions from that short trip in May have held firm so far in my semester here.  Of the dozen or so people I’ve been forced to get assistance from during my many directional blunderings, not one has ever conveyed an attitude of disdain at my less-than-adequate Spanish.  The same applies with all the people I have conversed with, if only for a minute.  A few give me patronizing smiles when I fail to understand their basic replies, but so far, I have yet to meet anyone definitively “rude” here.  More often, after I begin to speak with someone, he or she will start asking me questions, where I’m from, what I’m doing here, etc.  I would hope that if the Chileans I have encountered were to visit the US, they would be greeted with the same level of interest and respect, even as they struggled through halting English.  I’m afraid, though, that this would not be the case.

For people like me, for whom the primary purpose of the study abroad experience is to improve the language, Chile is a great country to live in for a semester.  Here it seems that just about everyone knows a few phrases of English, which they love to practice with you, but there are relatively few Chileans that speak a lot of English.  This means that, unlike what I’ve heard about some Europeans, Chileans are less likely to immediately switch to English when they realize you are foreign.  Just as is necessary in my house, to request any kind of information from people in general, I almost always have to use my Spanish.  Even the people I have met (mostly university students) that do have a high level of English and appreciate the opportunity to practice generally interpret our interaction as an “exchange,” in which we take turns conversing in both languages.  The most difficult aspect of maintaining progress in the language has been time spent with other people from the program.  I’ve taken two trips with people from our group, and there is always a battle between the need to continue to practice Spanish and the desire to get to know someone more profoundly through our more advanced, shared first language.  Both of these trips were meaningful because of their personal interactions but were also linguistic setbacks. 

It’s still hard to tell sometimes, two months (“mas o menos”) into my stay here in Chile how far I have actually progressed from when I began.  In addition to the (temporary) setbacks that occur from spending time with other English-speakers and, to be fair, diverting my linguistic energy to talk with friends online, send email updates, or even to write this scattered summary of my time here, I often feel a sense of the enormity of things I don’t know about this language.  I only recently learned the words for sheet (on a bed) and pipe (in plumbing), and there are so many more incredibly basic nouns, verbs, and adjectives that I have yet to encounter and keep forgetting to look up in my massive “Concise” Oxford Spanish Dictionary, which, despite its vast contents, idiomatic translations, and regional slang, cannot make a list for me of “the two thousand words it would be really helpful for you to know right now.”  Some nights, I can have a deep forty-five minute conversation with my host mom, when earlier that day I stumbled over a simple question to the micro driver. 

Despite my uncertainties and my sporadic linguistic incompetence, when I really look at where I am now, I can tell that I have moved forward considerably since I got here.  Chilean Spanish is notorious throughout the Latin American world for its disregard for ending consonants and the sheer volume of regional variants that have been fully incorporated across generations into the dialect.  However, I have come from understanding almost nothing upon my arrival that was not directed slowly and specifically toward me with painstaking formality to understanding quite a lot.  Although my comprehension depends on my familiarity with the speaker and his or her style, something I discovered upon meeting the various family members and as I began my university classes, I find that I am more and more able to follow the conversations at mealtimes and contribute, instead of always waiting for a keyword that might give me a clue.  As a speaker, I still have to conjugate verbs in my mind sometimes to come across the right tense, person, and number, and I’m sure that my spoken Spanish, just like my written, is littered with nuanced errors that I may never fully understand.  However, in the right context, I can have a more or less (“mas o menos”) fluid conversation with someone for an hour, during which I seem to forget how much I don’t know.  And every time I read anything in Spanish, I learn something new about how this language works.

So it’s still shocking to me sometimes that I chose to leave the ever-comfortable PC bubble to travel so far away from home the semester before I begin my senior year, a year which will surely pass in a whirlwind of memories as have all the others.  In just a few months it seems that there is so much to miss in a familiar place, so much to hold one there, that to leave it for somewhere foreign, figuratively or literally, would be too much emotional effort.  Although I’m still only about halfway through my semester here, I think I can already say that coming to live in Chile for a few months is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.  I had no reason to leave, and I have so much to look forward to when I return, but, in between, I have a semester to discover a language, a people, and a lot more about myself.  And I think that’s worth the plane ticket.

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