Hablamos Espanol

Chris and I are wrapping up our first week in Santiago taking Spanish classes at Escuela Bellavista. The house with the old people was too much to handle, and we told the school we wanted to leave. On Tuesday, we got out.

After escaping from the crazy old people (“Ooooooo, you must take a da soup! Pepe he loooooooooove the soup! Everyday, Pepe he take the soup!”) we made it to a home that rents rooms by the week or month for various students. We now have our own room and share a kitchen and bathroom with a Chilean girl studying theatre and a Chinese guy studying Spanish. It’s not the best environment to practice more Spanish, but they have WiFi and the magical SAP button on the remote that changes the audio on the television from Spanish to English.

Chris was sick on Monday (and Sunday and part of Tuesday) suffering from the Chilean two-step, probably as a result of eating food that had been set out for some time off dirty plates at Señor Pepe and Señora Angelica’s house. He missed his first day of school and I went on without him. But he’s better now and we’re in the same Spanish class with about 4 other people.

We study for three hours a day with two separate teachers. The class is all in Spanish (our teachers don’t speak English very well) and it’s been a really worthwhile experience. Everyone in the class in their early to mid twenties and we all seem to be on about the same level... which is pretty basic but not completely retarded. We have a guy from Utah that’s living here with his half-Chilean son and ex-wife that fled the US after embezzling money, a guy from New Mexico that is a drum line teacher/coach and is able to teach via a webcam and MySpace to his students in Las Cruces, an English girl who is in Santiago for one year to teach English and needs to learn how to talk to her beginner students in Spanish, and a Swiss girl who is a librarian and here to visit some of her family from Italy that immigrated to Chile.

We spend time speaking to each other in Spanish, learning grammar, doing little exercises like pretending to order food at a restaurant, the professors mime a lot of things due to our inability to understand, and we have homework. Tomorrow we’re learning past tense… very exciting. I like going to school again and I like walking to the subway every morning with a purpose and a place to go. Tomorrow night we get to learn salsa, so that should be fun too.

This weekend we might try and take a bus to the coast to see some vineyards and the ocean. I finally was able to put up photos from San Rafael, so that’s on the photo page under Argentina. Enjoy!