List of PhotosTop 1 - View west from roof top of our building
Top 2 - View of Sunset over the Andes from our balcony
Lower 1 - Sunset view from our balcony reflected in glass door
Lower 2- Our living room with balcony to left
Hi All;
Greetings after a long while. We are having a wonderful time here in Chile and I have had a hard time finding time to write other than for my dissertation which is my main job while I am here.
We found a lovely apartment in Providencia, a "comuna" of the capital city, Santiago after spending three nights in a hotel. We are on the 5th floor of a 20-story building and have lovely views of the high Andes from our rather small balcony. We had huge terraces in a penthouse apartment last time, so this feels small, but by adding plants - a lemon tree, cala lily, bougainvilla, window box of herbs, and a large pot with floating plants and small fish - it is quite pleasant and wholly ours. We are about 8 blocks south of the metro stop "Los Leones."
Every other day I hike up the stairs...yes, all 20 floors and by early December I am able to do it two and a half times - 50 floors total without stopping - great exercise.
Our fall was filled with getting settled, buying a set of wicker furniture and a desk to flesh out the apartment offerings, getting the kids back into school and/or daily activities and trying to get all the services that one needs...cell phones, Internet, TV, etc. It's not easy as a foreigner and it took us until mid-January just to get a bank account. Thank goodness we have good friends here who helped us get the services at the beginning. The first week you run on adrenalin and the second week you try to catch up on the energy you lost getting ready to move an entire family for a year. The third week it all catches up with you - the extra effort required to do everything in Spanish, the comfort of a new home - and so we found ourselves sleeping alot! I rarely go to bed before midnight or 1 a.m. and we were all crashing between 9 and 10 p.m. Our brains need sleep to process new information.
But before long we were adjusting to the Chilean schedule which generally runs about 2 hours behind the U.S. schedule - arrive at work 8-10 a.m., lunch at 2 p.m., a snack "onces" between 5 and 6, leave work between 7 and 8 p.m. and dinner anytime after 9 p.m. Dinner parties start around 9 or 9:30 with dinner itself served around 10 or 10:30 and often break-up around 1 a.m. For the teens, it's even later...parties start between 10 and 11 p.m. and wrap up around 3 a.m.
We have enjoyed renewing friendships made the last two times that we were here for a sabbatical year (14 years ago and 7 years ago). It is wonderful to be able to speak Spanish reasonably well...noone asks me to repeat everything that I have said the way they did 7 years ago and 14 years ago we arrived not speaking a word of Spanish. So this time feels pretty easy! I am, of course, envious of my kid's ability as they speak Chilean Spanish almost like natives having learned it so young.
Three of the girls are back in their old school from our past trips, Colegio John Dewey. Because the school year runs from March to December (instead of Sept. to June), the two younger ones (Kalindi and Cambria) jumped from the end of 10th grade in the states to the middle of 11th grade here and finished out the school year in December. (They will do 12th grade when they get back to the states). Neelam is taking a leave year from school and working as a volunteer aide in a kindergarten classroom with the teacher who had her in pre-school in 1995/1996. She is also taking an art class and a music class. So all three girls will graduate in June 2011, the year after we get back. We found a wonderful workshop for our son, Sterling. He takes a transition class for developing life skills and works making "alfajores," a Chilean sweet made from 2 cookies filled with a thick "manjar" aka "dulce de leche" (Mexico) aka caramel cream, and then dipped in chocolate. They are beautifully packaged and sold for big events, conferences, weddings, etc. All the kids have made lots of friends and are enjoying it here. Cambria has a Chilean boyfriend who graduated this year and both she and Kalindi attended the school-organized graduation party - quite similar to our proms except that they don't do corsages or boutonnieres. Shopping for party shoes was a big challenge as it is very hard to find women's shoes over size 9 here as the people are generally rather petite.
My fall was more harried than I had hoped. My husbank, Dick, was back in the states teaching his geology students face-to-face for a total of nearly two months in two stints at Binghamton University. Mostly I worked on my research, but I did manage to find time to attend a very interesting conference on the national educational technology project that underlies my dissertation research. With a Chilean colleague, I also gave a 2-hour workshop for 50 teacher-leaders here in the Santiago about the use of educational technologies in the U.S.
Over the Christmas holidays we had family friends visit from Binghamton and I refer you to my older daughter's blog for the details as she has had time to write and I have not. http://skyechile.blogspot.com
We are so proud of her as she graduated in December from SUNY Geneseo with majors in Geography and International Relations and joined us Christmas Day for the next few months. She is applying to graduate programs in Medical Geography, a relatively new field that studies the distribution and spread of diseases. She is particularly interested in infectious diseases in Africa. I hope she doesn't pick ebola!
We are now off on summer vacation...January and February are the heart of summer...yes, it was a bit weird to have Christmas in December with 80 degree temperatures. We spent two weeks in the north of Chile and are now headed to the south for a month. I'll catch up in March when we get back.
We wish you all a Happy New Year and much happiness, success, and good health in 2010.
Cheryl
