hot for teacher

well i got it bad. lemme tell ya. im well aware that my entire class is half in love with our teacher, boy, girl, gay, straight,whatever. she is just so fuckin cute i cant stand it. i suspect that i have taken things a little too far. i have daydreams about this teacher, masturbation fantasies about this teacher...i am seriously in love with my teacher. it was fun at first. every little bit of attention she lavished, i lapped up. when she told me to tell her if i had trouble in my classes i thought "she loves me!!!" and then when she told the whole class, i was like "oh". today was our last day. we had a review, then a test, then a final little get together. i went to check my email, and looked in ofoto to see if she had seen the pics of my school that i sent to all the students and to her, in which i labeled her picture "la profesora preciosa"...when all the other students left at the same time i didnt quite figure it out...i looked at my watch and it said it wasnt 5 yet. but then the attendent told me a while later that they were closing in 10 minutes, at six...i hadnt wound my watch so it stopped...well i jammed outta there and saw all the students in a group with aforementioned profesora preciosa, Natalia...when they saw me they all asked where i had been...they had watched a presentation and eaten cake and were now taking pictures with Natalia. they said they had even looked for me...i explained about my watch, and how i didnt pay attention when everyone left. i felt so sad, i had missed the last hour i would have with la profesora...¨;( then she insisted that someone take a picture of us, with some of the other students...then she told me she liked my jacket..and jokingly grabbed the pack of smokes in my pocket with a raised eyebrow "no mio" i said with a grin...we stood around talking for a little bit, when i started to speak in english, bitching about the fucking military time on the computer, she admonished "en castellano rachel" and i replied that i couldnt even say my favorite word in spanish and nobody would tell me how. she leaned in close and whispered it in my ear, then she said, por ejemplo si quieres decir "fucking priest" and explained that it has to match in gender and number. then with cheek kisses and quick hugs for everyone she was off...god how i love that woman.

chopping aqui

so i have never found grocery shopping a particularly easy task..you gotta sorta juggle what you need with what you want with what you wanna spend/cook/carry...pretty complicada..now try that in spanish. in a way, all bets are off. i found that my first week here i just stuck to some really really basic shit...i figured, if i recognize it, i will probably eat it...so i lived for my first week on yogurt (good and plentiful here) bread (otra vez) and cereal (ok but nothin to blog home abt), and some fruit to round it all out. Breakfast i thought to myself...its the breakfast, lunch, onces, (kinda like chilean teatime features tea and breakfasty foods and takes place between light lunch and light dinner)and dinner of champions. or so i thought...for like a week things were cool, id have some cereal or yogurt for breakfast, bread and yogurt for lunch and maybe cereal and bread for dinner with the ocasional uno mas uno to liven things up (uno mas uno is a very cleverly prepacked meal with one little cup of yogurt and one of cereal, the packaging actually bends to allow you to pour the cereal into the yogurt) so that was all good, until i realized i was LITERALLY STARVING TO DEATH and that if i had to eat any more fucking cereal or yogurt I WOULD LITERALLY DIE. so i decided to go grocery shopping. everything is complicated when you cant speak the frickin language...of course...but shopping is already complicated and is continually compounded by the language barrier plus unfamiliar products labelled in said (containing certain amount of barrier) language plus cultural differences such as: in a crowded supermarket should i politely excuse myself as i move my cart past others or swerve past like a mad speed demon?...im actually still not sure, thats why i went to JUMBO (gracias a dios por Jumbo) chiles answer to costco, on a sunday. i dont know where everyone is on sunday, they cant all be in church, but one thing is for certain, they are not out shopping. so i avoided the madness..then there is the fact that bread and fruit are to be weighed before reaching checkout, bread in the bread area and fruit in the fruit area...i was all over that one. then there was the issue of, i wonder what that is? and would i eat it? i have decided to minimize the number of curiosity purchases to just a few in order to be certain that i will end up with things that i actually will eat. smart huh? so then theres the deal abt what will i actually eat. heres where jumbo comes in handy. there are tons of packaged and imported foods, the thing is that this food tends to be spendier so you need to decide when to bite the bullet and pay for something you have to have (chocolate, imported earl grey because your other caffiene options are lipton tea and nescafe coffee)they also had mac and cheese, some yummy breads, microwave popcorn and wonder of wonders ramen noodles. never thought id see the day when someone said to me i found ramen noodles and i would reply where...well that day has come and then some..not to mention tortillas (pretty tough to find here) and tortilla chips...needles to say i am now chillin after a delicious meal of mac and cheese...it aint gourmet but hey. and now on the joeinspired more to follow como playboy except i got my clothes on, likes and dislikes...

Me gusta
flan in a yogurt cup at the grocery store
being stared at by young chilean men
the metro, clean fast transportation plus music videos on bigscreen tvs
the computer lab where you dont pay to print you just bring paper
fresh baked yummy bread
mi maestra, la profesora preciosa


No me gusta
being stared at by old chilean men
how the buses basically pause to let you off and you jump for the curb
the wierd yogurt/juice liquid
dulce de leche whatver the hell it is
trying to understand what people are
saying when they are talking fast, using hella chilean slang and bustin out some crazy vos, essentially all the time (catchais?)
four hours of spanish class daily

so it seems i have landed in the party house

the first party i experienced in my new place was in honor of macas birthday...so it was of course a warrented fiesta...welllll...when i got home last night around 11 or so i was surpised to see a bunch of people upstairs including many of my classmates...for a minute i was like, thats cool...its friday night and i want to play but dont have a lot of energy anyway...so i came up and started uploading pictures intending to join in on the festivities in the room...but then i remembered that i dont much like big groups of loud drunk people, especially when i dont know many of them...and its even more intense in spanish. i mean, i can have a convo en español...with like 3 people maybe in a quiet room...with a huge amount in a loud room where madonna is suggesting loudly that we take a holiday? yo creo que no. so i bounced around online, putting pics up and reading cheetsblog...laughing out loud and drinkin a little pisco...but never really joined in on the festivities...i decided to go to be around 2, and as is my habit, read a little and smoked a smokey antes de dormir...and found that i could hear pretty clearly all the noise (from up in the den i guess youd call it, its basically the attic plus sofas and chairs a desk and computer) despite the three big wooden doors and one small hallway separating me from the peeps. this is bc drunk people are loud and inconsiderate, so that while i kept on closing the door to the den and the door to my hallway, anybody who needed to pee opened both doors and on one occasion even the door to my room looking for the bathroom...well what are ya gonna do? people gotta pee, and maca cleans up after the parties but im starting to wonder is this what happens here every weekend? its not so bad...i did live down the street from the cafe so im used to going to sleep while people dance and scream and party and play shitty music...the difference is that then all the noise was outside my house, now its just outside my room.....

learning a language is like playing charades

so i wandered down from the fiesta the other night to check on my laundry and decompress..the woman who owns the house, Alicia, and her sister were down there and asked me why i wasnt at the party with the other kids...i told them i just needed to escape for a minute..then they asked how exactly i do my hair in this manner. I tried to explain about having curly hair and how twisting your hair locks it,using lots of physical demonstration. they asked how i wash it and i told them in the normal way but with more shampoo. i started to explain that i sometimes use beeswax on the ends to hold together the baby dreads...my referring to my little ones as niños cracked them up..but i realized that i didnt know how to say beeswax..and i couldnt even remember bee...so i began a rather roundabout manner of describing beeswax...i said there is a creature who makes honey, and they said abeja..(sounds like,rhymes with) then i said there is a small light which you have to put the fire, this one stumped them for a while, i tried to come up with other ways to describe candles, named a few places one might find them...finally they got candle..so then i said, the same thing the candle is made of when its made by a bee.....and found my way to beeswax..good thing for me im good at charades

The cool thing is, all the blogstuff comes up in Spanish

por ejemplo, para ecritir un entry yo necesito click on nuevo entrada.
fuckin a right my ass bloggin in spanglish, ¿who got beef? you cant fuck with this i got big dark circles under my eyes and i can make upside down punctuation and i am about to bitch about having to go and drink a bunch of free wine today. thats right. i have never been so tired, so fucked up, or so very strange...and banks are chargin my ass 9 dollas every single time i use an atm. so if you got a problem, i suggest you bring it. k
last night was another student, maca´s birthday..so there was un gran fiesta aca. that was fun for a while, drank some pisco (natl drink and some cheap liquor let me tell you) smoked a lot of cigarettes...btw, i had sorta kinda thought maybe i would quit while im here? not gonna happen. everyone here smokes everywhere..not to get off topic but here is a short list of places i have seen people smoking
1 in resteraunts
2 while walking through "commercial" bldgs like shopping centers, not in the stores, but in the somewhat open air areas between them
3 having entered the metro station but not yet past the gates
4 i said it already but, in line for customs (it bears repeating)
5 elsewhere in the airport, like waiting for bags..
6 in my kitchen with tea and yogurt in the morning (not me i swear, i smoke upstairs)
7 (i didnt actually see this a fellow student did) while walking into a church.
ok so where the fuck....oh yeah big fat party, well it was ok at first people were nice and all but it just kept going...maca, thats the bday girl, shes about as cute as can be....so it was more that chileans only do after hours, meaning that mostly they dont bother going out until like 11 or 12...so around 1am i was getting sleepy and the party was just getting started. then there were the leather jacket clad chilean heavy metal listening to and playin on the stereo for all to hear folks in the corner....finally i just went to bed. i had offered the 2nd bed to a classmate adrian who is going to live here...so it must have been 2 before we were both settled into our respective beds and he began snoring really really loud. another 15 minutes or so and i have managed to tuck my head beneath two pillows and stick my fingers in my ears and aprox five hours later when the alarm goes off, had to fight my way out.....
ok
so its this totally cute idea that they are going to take us on a vineyard tour but we have to meet at the farthest end of town at 9am. so we do. and its cold. and raining. then we take a bus, farther into the cold and drizzly and get out in this crazy beautiful my dumb ass forgot my camera and ran out of batteries in mp3 on the way sort of place. (yeah i dunno) ok so its cold as fuck the tour is in spanish everything is lovely but freezing the wine is good and helps a little, for a little while....until we have to get back on the jam packed bus to the jam packed peak hours metro in order to get back to school on time to get food and do our homework which is to write about aformentioned tour before attending a 4 hour daily spanish class. by the time we get to the school we have abt 40 minutes in which to do this.
k
so needles to say we are all tired and fucked up (like half the class was at the party) and today is the day Natalia (i even love her name) our totally adorable teacher with her little turquoise boots and her almond eyes and plump lips and wispy waify hair and her ok ok you get it...she decides that maybe theres been too much talk of grammer and we just need to have some convo. so she says, well..what do you think about this article we were reading about globalization and colonialism and destruction of native people and the lack of a real presence of the indigenous people of chile (mapuche) and so we chat. about colonialism..in spanish..for a few.
yeah.
then she says she is giving us an extra long break to finish our homework, so i go get a coffee...and try my damndest to write something that makes some kind of sense. then we come back, at this point all the brains are melting, and we have to give brief presentations about newspaper articles we read.. she is no longer sweetly but diligently correcting our pronunciacion...oh no. she looks bored as hell and is waving us past the hard words with no me importa, esta bien..this is the point where she tells us this class isnt supposed to be boring, we are all dead today and wont get much done anyway so she is assigning extra homework and just having us read for the rest of the class. we are so fucked up we can barely read. i was stumbling all over the place, usually my pronunciation is pretty good but today man i was just throwing extra zacions on everybody...it was ugly.
so finally it ended.
rode the metro home with no music, got lost cause i walked to the providencia north exit instead of just plain providencia and couldnt find the street i turn on for like 20 minutes...got home and my key wouldnt work...because its a copy..its a little sticky...when alicia´s sister opened the door i had already dropped my bag and was still wrestling in the dark with the key...all she said was pobrecita...and boy howdy. i sure as fuck am.

tengo una casa tengo una casa

so i got in two days ago i think, on the 14th but was so tired and out of it that all i could tell you about that day was that its hard to pronounce marmalade in spanish, really fucking goddam cold here, and my ass brought waaaaay too much shit bc i need to go shopping asap these chilenas got some fuckin cute clothes and everybody got what appear to be cute and funky and warm and waterproof and practical boots. so i got a bunch of crap i wont be wearing for another four months or so and like a sweater. yeah. anyway, all that really happened that day was finding food and eating it. the next day we started our spanish class waaaay early in the morning. i overslept cause all my and my roomies time apparatuses are set three hours slow...had to rush out with no coffee and hit the metro. luckily for me they have coffee in a machine on campus. its pretty cool,it spits out a cup and fills it with instant. petes it aint but hey. so they gave us a test, split us up into two groups and started class. lucky for me im in the dummy class taught by this beautiful young chilena who is getting her masters at catolica. yet another example of chilena chic, bobbed hair funky but forties long skirt and coat plus lovely bluish boots...after that more food...and then the attempt to find a home. i had begun to worry and decided to hit a place that another student already moved into...so i made my way out there and was in love. its a huge and lovely house in a huge and lovely hood with lots of students and one of them is the daughter of the woman who owns the house. she and mom are really sweet and kind of funny (as far as i can tell) and everyone kisses you when you mmet which was odd at first but its nice...so i have a big room with two small beds and a big window. just got settled in a bit, feeling pretty sleepy still so yo me voy a descansar.

fraggle rocks chile

even as i went to bed way too fuckin late after the packing party i kept thinking i cant believe im going to chile in the morning, well, by the time i got to bed it was already morning but who am i to quibble abt deets...so i woke up when my alarm went off some three hours after hitting the sack, hit some snooze for a few and then remembered i gotta catch a plane taking me far away from everyone i love for a year. i just stared at sleeping j beside me, he woke and we both just started to cry. we cried for a while, until we started choking on snot then had to get up and search our mostly packed somewhat destroyed place for tissues..finally found some but i started crying again, just having a hard time believing that we would be so far away from each other. its just unreal i told j, like the beatles breaking up or something...so then we were laughing hysterically and trying to stop crying in order to brush our teeth. i got in the shower and j put on the beatles all you need is love, we laughed, cried more, choked on snot more, and continued getting ready to go. meant to get breakfast but took too long with the emotional breakdown...so we headed out lugging way too many way too heavy bags...so finally we were headed to the airport with big coffees and scones...got me and all my bags and my teddy, Dakota Salvador Allende, through bag check where we noted that the security frowns upon baggage that includes chainsaws, torches, lighters, matches...they also provided a helpful display of these items near bag check. i took a picture. so i checked in, may my way to the gate where j and i hugged, i went through while j blew kisses...waiting to board i started compiling a playlist on my going away present mp3 player (thank you kerm, cheets, vic, and j) and noticed a few tracks that came up titled I LOVE YOU RA (actual title in parentheses) finally boarded and was seated way way way at the back of the plane. fortunately there was an empty seat between my neighbor and i so exile has its benefits, but it also has its downside. the seat behind me contained the requisite seat kicking toddler, and nearby the even smaller louder runt, the screaming baby. i know i know its the pressure and the canned air it makes em crazy. Salvador and i were strapped in and ready for flight well aware that the ocntents of the overhead bin tend to shift during flight...so that flight was to miami, it took years and all they fed us was pretzals. after we landed and maggie (the crying baby) was about to go nuts just wanting to get off the damn plane and i was thinking along those lines as well, we had some technical diff that kept us there long enough to make me late boarding my next flight..luckily the far far back of that plane was even more deserted...i got to stretch out over three seats with extra blankets, found that if i kept playing coltrane on the mp3 i could sleep somewhat restlessly...we landed at 7:30am local time...sal and i trudged sleepily through the customs line and noted to our surprise that some people were smoking in line...now i smoke, and i have been known to smoke indoors, you know like in tejas or vegas...but i mean really, smoking in the airport in line for customs? well i never...we got through, found our bags after a small child from the same flight intercepted our confused vigil at the wrong baggage carousel, and kindly (bless you sweet english speaking chilean child!) pointed us in the right direction...another line where a young woman instructed me to do something to a machine...i musta looked as confused as i felt, bc she then inquired in english if i understood, to which i replied kinda...then got that my bags had to be x rayed...changed money found an official taxi and repeated like a mantra the name of my hotel...had a long convo with the cab driver as he maneuvered along a busy narrow freeway through a dreamy landscape of enormous mountains and green green land...all of which was rather wet and really really cold. my part of the conversation consisted mostly of ¿si? ¿Si? ah ¡si! anyway...i checked in, stared out the window for a minute, stunned that i was actually in chile, repeated to myself im here, in chile. huh. wow. intense. but so tired....so i curled up with salvador and took a nap.

all my exes live in texas

or at least thats what pops up when i type an a. and i couldnt think of anything better. so i am running around trying to pack. just had the big going away bash slash art party benefit ect. it was pretty great, lots of people came out and i looked amazing in this crazy little outfit consisting of a black lace skirt and pink sequined top, and i got to listen to v play and my brother got really drunk and obnoxious but in a cute and funny way and people i havent seen in a while came out and some people didnt but i guess thats the way the cookie crumbles. its really wierd how for like the last 3 months people have been saying to me you must be so excited and in reply i smile a sickly little grimace of a grin and say well terrified might be a better word. as i prepared to leave my partner of almost 3 years now who is moving in with roomates for the year, and my apartment and the friends who are like family and go to what i hear is an academically rigorous school where everyone will be speaking spanish ALL THE TIME it all basically kept my belly knotted up from the continual fear of being alone in another country while everyone i love is here speaking english for a year and my ass trying to get along in literature classes with my broke up spanish...and so surprisingly i find that we are all switching places. One close friend called me up today all choked up about im gonna miss you and ect and its really strange because for the past few weeks i had been really feeling how much i will miss those i love...as well as tons of anxiety about how i have to find a place in like five days once i get there, and the thought of interviewing for a place in spanish....... and there has been this insane like war inside me, where every time i get to spend time with those i love i want to cry because they wont be around for a year. and i guess maybe its just that whole irony robert stack narrating my subconscious mind thing cause now that folks are like jonesin for me im getting really excited about going. i did missing them and feeling scared early which is cool cause now i get to be soooooo excited! desafortunamente this means i am not much help to anyone who says they will miss me cause all i can see is bright sky and the andes and nerudas chile and salvador allende after whom my teddy bear is named and i decided in the midst of packing to take his ass with me and stopped j to ask how to say bear in spanish...