Reality Check

For many years, Stacy and I have had a dream of living abroad for a year. We always thought this would be an exciting way to broaden the kids' perspective, and give them a chance to learn another language at a time during their lives when language learning was easy.

Chile seemed like an easy choice destination for this dream. It was politically stable, had a temperate climate, and was in a relatively compatible time zone with the Pacific. Stacy and I dreamed of a year escaping the suburbs and living in a cosmopolitan city for a year. What fun! How romantic!

This three-week trip was essentially a scouting trip to check out where we might want to live.

One week in, and it is with mixed emotion that I say that this dream has crashed down around us. Perhaps this scouting trip's greatest effect was to give us some perspective of our life in Folsom.

Santiago is a Big City. It moves fast. Very very few people speak, or are willing to speak english here. The spanish is very difficult for us to understand, not only because it is fast but because Chileans have their own "slang" for common\ words, and drop consonants and endings of many well known words. Everything we try and do takes monumental mental effort to successfully complete.

On Monday, I was robbed on the subway; pickpocketed and lost my phone out of a zippered back pocket on an overly full rush-hour train. My concentration was on the kids suffocating in a sea of armpits, and as a result lost my phone. (no more pictures on my posts) I'm lucky it wasn't my wallet. Yesterday, in Valparaiso, we met some people who had all of their belongings stolen.

Santiago is the largest city in all of South America. This city is quite "touristy", but not in the way I'm used to. About 95% of the tourists here speak spanish, hailing from other parts of Chile, or Peru, Argentina, Brazil, etc. American tourists seem quite a rarity here. This means the local ears are not very attuned to crappy spanish pronunciation. Not only can we not understand them, but they often have a hard time understanding us. I suspect that if you learned Spanish here, it wouldn't translate all that well to other spanish speaking countries.

The romantic picture you may have seen of Santiago ringed by rugged peaks is also quite misleading. This city has such bad smog that you can rarely see across the city; forget the beautiful vistas.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is an interesting city to visit. The various "cerros" or hill-parks in the city are pretty cool. Today we visited Cerro San Cristobal (2nd largest urban park in the world), which has a "funicular" that brings you too the top. We walked the long way down, and found a gigantic swimming pool, and an amazing playground, the likes of which you'd never find in the US (too many opportunities to hurt yourself). It's just that the prospect of living here sounds exhausting, dangerous, and expensive.

We have been having some good adventures over the last few days, however. Yesterday, we took a day trip to Valparaiso, a port town about 1.5hr away by bus. This town was built up in a haphazard manner along some very steep hills. The result is a collection of amazingly precarious structures (houses that are 3 stories on one side, 5 on the other). This is a city which boomed during the gold rush, as transport to California often involved transport around Cape Horn. This port was the most developed port on the entire journey around South America. It claims many firsts for south america (newspaper, bank) and for many years was the most populous and prosperous city in Chile. The 1914 opening of the Panama Canal was fairly disastrous for the economy of this port, and I don't think it has ever quite recovered.

Tomorrow we leave our gorgeous 2-floor apartment in Lastarria, in preparation for our flight south to Punta Arenas. I think our journey south to Patagonia will be our most grand adventure of the trip. Penguin Island, here we come!


-Carl