A Week in the Life of Joe: Part 2

Thursday
9:30- The sun is already high in the sky, and Spring seems to have finally warmed the air for good. Class with Rodrigo and Andrea was cancelled, so I go for a run through the park that stretches along Vespucio Sur. At home, I take a longer shower with Spotify on blast, clean my bedroom, fetch my clothes off the clotheslines, and organize my life.

1:00-3:45 The printer at the office keeps jamming, and after the fifth time reaching into the machine to take out scrunched up pieces of paper, I'm about ready to douse it in gasoline and watch it burn in Hell as it pays for its sins. Overreaction? Barely. For three hours, I struggle in an uphill battle, and I end up walking away with 60% of my materials and the battle scars to prove it.

4:45-5:45 Clemente and Matias are are ridiculous, theatric, and avid Michael Jackson fans. Sometimes, I have to put class on hold as they break out in a random fit of singing or a dance they both know all the steps to. They also happen to be the smartest kids in their respective classes, so English comes pretty easily. Clemente is sick again with one of his chronic headaches, so it's just me and Matias.

5:45-6:15 As I walk to my next class, I pass through hordes of high schoolers and university students finding their way to the various buses. Most of the kids, especially in this section of the city, are pale-skinned and light-haired. I work my way past young couples making out at the bus stop and teenagers lounging in small patches of grass eating pizza and smoking week. Here, the mountains are up close and personal, so I take the walk slowly, trying my best to soak in their immensity.

6:15-6:45 Cami is a six-year-old and a roll of the dice. When we first started together, she refused to be with me without her brother or mother there to cling to. Slowly, one gummy bear at a time, I got her to feel more comfortable with me, but we are still continuing our weekly routine of appeasement. Cami chooses from the six activities that I bring, Cami gets continual treats as shameless bribery, and mostly, Cami and I color endless pages of princesses. Even then, sometimes we don't make it the entire thirty minutes without her deciding she's done. Today was a great day, and we play Halloween charades. The highlight: Cami decided that the best way to act out "skeleton" was to dance like a ballerina. Not sure what connection she made, but she was slightly offended I didn't guess it right away.

6:45-7:15 Ignacio is an eight-year-old and a powder keg of energy. Our first class was spent bonding as we belted the chorus of "Counting Stars" by Onerepublic because neither of us knew the verses. He has a knack for English, especially for his age, and our class takes place with no translation required. Sometimes, I forget how young he is. He really comes across as a small, little buddy more than an English student, and I like the short amount of time we spend together.

8:15-9:00 I toss my last bowl of stir fry into the microwave and wait for my dinner to heat up. The dress clothes come off, the slippers go on, and the water for tea starts to boil.

9:00-10:00 About three or four months ago, José and I started having class together. Originally when he expressed interest, I said I would do it for free, but he and Angie both insisted we take the classes out of my rent. Without it, I'm not sure how affordable living here for the entire year would have been.

Needless to say, our class is a lot of fun. We are starting at square one, but he's been making some great progress. Today, we're learning about prepositions of place, which involves a card game with the Simpsons. Next week, a scavenger hunt.

10:00-11:00 I ask José questions in Spanish that I know must annoy him. He tells me about the three different periods that are used in Spanish, the difference between sin embargo and aunque, and why he can say me comí una manzana without it translating to "I ate an apple for myself" or "I ate myself an apple." Language learning is a process, and as my roommate, he has unwilling accepted the role of my personal Spanish sounding board.

11:00-12:15 Fannetta calls for our Skype date and catches me up on all things Galesburg. But at this time of night, my eyes are drooping, my responses are slow, and my brain is already asleep even though my eyes are open. Love has no time limit, but consciousness does.

Friday
8:15- Yet again, my morning class is cancelled, but I set my alarm anyway. Today, I have a morning appointment at the extranjería in Plaza de Armas to continue the never-ending visa process.

José works close by, so we go downtown together. It's nice to have someone to small talk with as the people shuffle in and out of the metro. He connects to the green line with me even though it adds a little more walking time to his morning. As we walk our way up the steps, he turns and makes a profound observation: "Old women on the metro are like ewoks. They're tiny, take up a lot of space, and shuffle into people, bumping their way into the train until they fit." Just to prove his point, he makes a shrill ewok call, and he does a wobbly dance. The resemblance is uncanny.

10:00-11:00 Normally, the extranjería is about a 10-minute trip if you make a reservation, but this time, I get redirected to three different people who tell me I need papers that are different than the ones I brought. Finally, I get my things in order and wait in the common room surrounded by other foreigners jumping through the hoops to stay in this country legally. After seven months, you would think I would have had a visa, and bank account, and a rewards system set up at my grocery store with my fancy, super-authentic cuenta rut. But alas, now I just want my visa before I need to leave the country.

11:35-12:30 I'm a few minutes late to the advanced Spanish class at the office, but I take the time to pour myself a cup of coffee before heading in. Today's topic is the preterito indefinidio versus imperfecto, which we have done before and will probably do again. Three months ago, the idea of attending the advanced class terrified me, and rightly so. Now, it seems so normal, natural, and a lot of fun. Ximena, the teacher, is clearly in love with language, and if the world saw grammar the way that she did, we would all be multilingual.

12:30-1:30 Sometimes, time in the office lapses into an hour of casual social conversation. I print my papers, check some emails, and mainly get wrapped up into a conversation about folklore and fairytales, the eight Harry Potter story to be released, and Sherlock. It's Friday. Laziness is encouraged.

1:30-2:00 My private classes were delayed an hour today, so I have time to visit my old elementary/ intermediate Spanish class before leaving for the day. For a while, I wanted to linger in the intermediate level because I loved Natalia, the teacher, so much. Her Colombian accent was so clean and clear, she was a great teacher, and she laughed at my jokes. Needless to say, we get along great.

2:30-3:30 Juan Carlos is the father of a friend of my roommates, and we started class about a month ago. All this man wants to do is spend his life traveling and learning languages. His English is fantastic, but he comes to class with a long list of questions about the nuances of words, pronunciation, expressions, and the like. Honestly, he is the one who plans the classes, and all I can do is answer the best that I can. The hour often passes without me looking at my watch once.

4:00-5:00 Christie is the girlfriend of Juan Carlos' son, and she also lives about five minutes away. I can honestly say that her class is one of my favorites, and I actively look forward to it. Every class, she has coffee and lunch waiting for me, and as much as I hate to inconvenience her, I can't say "no" to cake, coffee, and a sandwich. One week, I stopped by her apartment, and she had a throbbing headache. She felt so sick that she started to cry from the effort of just talking to me. Before I left, she ran into the kitchen and came out with a sandwich wrapped in plastic. "I made this for you just because I knew you would be hungry."

If anyone could restore faith in humanity, it's her.

5:00-5:45 I make my way down Bilbao towards my next class. This micro is the most consistent when it comes to having singers, rappers, and/or clowns (which I hate). But today seems quite, so I take out my book to pass the time.

6:00-7:00 Borja isn't home yet, so I start class with his older brother, Lucas. Even though I have class on Friday evening, I couldn't imagine giving it up and not seeing these boys. Lucas is incredibly intelligent, very functional in English, and has a whiteboard in his room. We spend the hour talking about the horror movies we've seen and what very real, authentic fears they portray. Are we actually scared of Jaws or is it the latent, more primordial fear of exposure to the unknown?

7:00-7:30 Borja is five, and for the first month, all we would do is play with his light sabers and eat cookies. Now, our classes have a target, ranging from counting to colors or emotions. But today, after a few minutes of coloring Halloween monsters, he lapses into showing me videos of The Amazing World of Gumball on his mom's phone. I work some English in like "who is that?" and "where's Gumball?" But for the most part, he's in rambling-Spanish mode.

It's strange to see Maya now since I met her seven months ago as a small puppy. Back then, she would stand in the boys' doorway and bark at me, not sure why the rest of the family wasn't alarmed by this strange man in their house. Today, she pushes her butt into my lap and nibbles at my arm hair as I scratch her ears. We have a mostly loving relationship.

8:30- I get home and take a nap. Yes, 9:00 is a dangerous time for some shut eye, but my bed is calling, and I can't leave it lonely. I wake up in time to read the group messages and see that people are either scattered around or staying in tonight. Forget paying taxes and wearing fancy clothes: spending a Friday night in is the truest sign of adulthood. I can't muster enough desire to be the change I want to see in the world, so I roll back over, turn on American Horror Story, and fall back asleep.

Reflection
I tried my best to not do anything out of the ordinary to make my life seem more glamorous or active than it is, and since I went to sleep at 9:00 last night, I would say that I was pretty fair. But this was not a typical week:

• I rarely have this many cancellations in a week. Sometimes I have none, and others, I may have one or two. But then again, in July and September, I barely had any kids classes for weeks on end.  
• I usually can't recycle so many lessons, but it's Halloween. I have the luxury of reading tarot cards with all the kids who can handle the future tense. I can play bingo with any child, and I can carry the monster notecards with me and make up an activity to go with them.
• I don't normally go to the extranjería on Fridays, bars on Wednesdays, or stay in on the weekends.
• It usually never rains, especially at this time of year. Nothing about these few months has been normal, from the floods in the North, volcano in the South, the fires on the coast, and the earthquake only a month ago. But then again, after many conversations and stories, I've come to the conclusion that nothing here is ever normal.

My life in Santiago is not consistent. This week was not a standard, cookie-cutter representation of my experience here, but neither were any of the ones before it. Classes cancel, new students come along, people get sick (including me), the weather changes, and a million of factors are always in flux. Through all of the changes, I've found that flexibility is a part of my life as expected as grocery shopping or riding the metro.

It's a small thing, but that's what this post is all about: the small things. This is what day-to-day living looks like, and it is the core of my experience. One by one, these details that I didn't think were worth writing about add up to be a behemoth of a blog post longer than any deep thought, reflection, and/or revelation.

Here it is: my life laid out before you. Naked, stripped of the glamour and grandeur, and in my eyes, still incredibly beautiful. In an hour, I'm going to an Irish festival downtown with some friends. We're going to buy some delicious dark beer and maybe river dance a little bit. It might be exceptional, it might be boring, and who knows? Maybe we won't end up going at all. That's life here in all its random, unexpected, unplanned, inconsistent, chaotic wonder.

I'll let you know how it goes.

A Week in the Life of Joe: Part 1

When I started this blog, I began with pretty loft ambitions. I left the States with this idea of a grand journey where I would truly find out something out about myself, my life, and where I was meant to be. I said things like "adventure of a lifetime" with a confidence and certainty that didn't allow for the possibility of living, y'know, just a normal life. After seven months, I'll I can say was... Whoops.

 Don't get me wrong: this is a journey of a lifetime, an adventure, an unforgettable memory, etc. But it's also my everyday, and mainly, it's the small, mundane details that make up my life here. I have my students, my friends, my small adventures on the weekends, and not much more. I wouldn't write posts because, quite frankly, there wasn't much that I saw as worthy of sharing with the world beyond my own.

Over the past several weeks, I have received a few messages from people who have asked me about my life here on a day-by-day basis. Mostly, they are old friends from college, but more recently, they have been people who are interested in the CIEE Professional program. They were asking for a play-by-play of what life looks like here, and oftentimes I've found myself short on words. I live here non-stop, twenty-four hours a day. Once the words start, they aren't exactly easy to stop.

I spent the last week writing down notes about what happened every day, every hour. I wanted to capture what my life was normally like apart from the adventures and travels. Five days a week, I go to work in a job that I love, and this is what my life actually looks like.

Monday
8:00- I slowly drift into consciousness. The sun slips into my room through a crack in my curtains, and the birds flutter from tree to tree, singing right outside my window. This is my only day of the week with no alarm, and although I wake up "early," it's a natural, peaceful process. I reach over and find my tablet charing on the floor next to my bed. I scroll through Facebook not because I'm interested but because I simply don't want to get up. Not quite yet.

8:30- The holiest of rituals: breakfast. Most people in Chile barely take the time to taste their marraqueta and mermalada before swallowing it down on the way out the door. But me? I cherish my breakfast time, slowly savoring each minute I dedicate to starting my day. Oatmeal and brown sugar with sliced red apple. Bread toasted on the stove with mora mermalada and gouda cheese, washed down with a hot cup of instant coffee.

9:30- My roommate gave me a book about all of the national parks and trails in Chile, so I spend a fine amount of time daydreaming about the places I want to go. Working my way through the Spanish has become a lot easier, but I take a few minutes to jot down unfamiliar words on the notecards on my bedside table.

10:30- I push the rug off to the side of my bed and spread out my yoga mat. Without a gym membership, this is the best way that I've found to stay in shape. I enjoy how comprehensive yoga is and how aware it makes me of my body. I light a stick of incense, breathe in the scent of sandalwood, and get started.

11:30- The walk to my office is one that I have taken too many times to count. It becomes mechanic, and as I go, I play a game I like to call "think in Spanish." It starts by naming as many objects as I can that I see around me. Level 2 is word analysis: I create a chain of related words. Arbol might become rama ardilla nuez bosque salvaje etc. And finally, I think of the longest, most convoluted sentence that I can, and I try to translate it into Spanish. One day, this might be as automatic as my walk, but until then, at least I have my game.

12:00- My favorite computer at the office is open, so I take it. I struggle to pull my head out of the weekend, but it takes me a while to get started. Two cups of not-instant coffee do what they do best, and I get focused. Mostly, all I have to do is update my lesson plans from last Thursday and Friday. Months ago, I spent my Mondays planning, prepping, and printing through Wednesday. Those days have longed past.

3:30-5:00 After a quick trip to fill my bip card for the week, I jump on the C01 and start heading to Lo Barnachea for the only classes I have today. The bus takes an especially long time, so I linger at the bus stop, shamelessly staring at the people around me as they shamelessly stare back. It's an hour-and-a-half ride. Sometimes, people watching is the best that you can do.

5:00-6:00 The nanny opens the door, ushering me forward with one hand while cradling the new-born baby girl in the other. My student, Clara, is a sweet girl under all the sass. She makes fun of me, I make fun of her, and we get along fine. Obviously, this month is dedicated to Halloween, so we do her favorite activity: coloring. She shows me how she can draw all of my pictures better than I can, and we slowly work our way through spelling the new Halloween vocabulary. Her school teaches her German, not English, so this hour is all she has of English for the week. She struggles, and progress has been slow. But she has the exposure, and I try my best to make it fun while giving her a foundation.

6:00-7:00 Domingo comes late to class, which is far from unusual. When we started our class together, the hour dragged on in a haze of crying, yelling, and fighting. "I hate you" was the only coherent English sentence I heard for the first few weeks with him. Maybe months. But we've come along way since then, and a few weeks ago, he actually told me he didn't hate me. And today, he told me I was actually "awesome." Did we do a lot of English today? No, he had an allergic reaction that spread from his arms to his chest and back. But he fought his way through one of my activities and then we brainstormed Halloween recipes as we waited for his step-dad to take him to the clinica.

7:00-8:45 The rain starts to pour as I make my ten-minute walk to the bus stop. I pray that a stranger will pick me up and take me down the hill in their car, but the same luck that brought the weather drove all the good samaritans away. I'm soaked to the bone. When I get on the micro at last, a woman turns around in her seat and makes a face that says "sucks, huh?" I smile back. Yeah, it does.

8:45-9:15 There is a Lider around the corner from my house, so I drag my wet and sopping body through the sliding doors. Food is essential, and as it stands, I have none of it at home. At this point, my weekly shopping trips are so routinized that I could probably work my way though the aisles with my eyes closed. The one choice I have to make is what I want to eat for dinner this week. I am soaking wet and want to be dry, home, and in bed, so I settle on hot dogs and stir fry. Quick, easy, and hot. Perfect.

9:15-10:00 After seven months, my roommates have finally brought home salsa americana to find out if it is in fact American. I've never seen it before in my life, and it is beyond a shadow of a doubt a strange, pickled Chilean invention. It's a type of relish with carrots, onions, and some other things tossed in that I can't quite make out. That does not stop me from slathering it on top of my two completos that I made for dinner. A guy's gotta eat.

10:00- Just in time for one episode of American Horror Story: Asylum. Mondays are typically my t.v. day, but since October started, I've been binge watching everything Netflix has to offer in terms of Halloween. Nothing like a bit of holiday spirit while living abroad.

Tuesday
6:15- The snooze button is a god and a devil.

7:15- It's a crisp and cool morning, and yesterday's rain washed away the ever-present cloud of pollution. The Andes mountains stand in a breath-taking clarity, reminding me exactly how incredible it is to live in this country.

8:00- I walk into my student's office and say "hi" to his receptionist. We kiss on the cheek, and she walks off to get me a coffee from the machine. It's a morning ritual I've come to love and appreciate. This class is for two starter-level adult learners, but Andrea has been out of the office for four weeks. They tell me it is stress, which is especially sad because all she wants to do in life is create murals, teach private yoga classes, and live like a bonafide hippie. The fact that corporate life has brought her down is depressing.

Rodrigo, on the other hand, seems to thrive in his life. He sees selling insurance as offering protection to families, including his own. He has kids he's proud of, a wife he loves, and a heritage he can't stop talking about. This man is German to the bone, minus all the parts of him that are Chilean. For the last ten minutes of class, he tells me all about the city of Valdivia in the South. The German immigrants who settled there generations ago have brought the best of their culture, architecture, and beer to Chile.

9:00-11:45 The office is about a fifteen-minute walk from my first class. It's a big city, but I make this walk four times a week at exactly the same time. Several of the faces that I pass look pretty familiar. At the office, I do the usual: plan, prep, print, and cut small pieces of paper. It's all part of the exhilarating life of a teacher outside of class.

11:45- I read Mockingjay in Spanish as I walk home from the office. This is the first book that I have read in Spanish that I have actually gotten lost in the story. Sure, there are passages that I have to look over again, but I don't feel like I'm translating. Simply reading.

At home, I make myself an egg sandwich for lunch with a touch of garlic and merkén. I would have added avocado, but as delicious as they are, I am way too lazy to go through the process of cutting up a vegetable right now.

1:45- After a quick trip on a micro and the metro, I'm sitting in my students' offices waiting. Why are they late? They're never late. My student walks in and furrows her eyebrows. "Nobody told you?" Class is cancelled today and Thursday. I put away my worksheets and activities reviewing the present perfect and walk out.

3:00- I find myself a park nearby my next class. With an hour to spare, I find my usual place on a bench next to the playground. I'm not sure how I would respond to a strange, foreign man with markers and crayons hanging out while my kids are on the swings, but the nannies don't seem to mind. I open Mockingjay and get lost for a while.

3:45- Pedro is a fun, sweet six-year-old with a lot of energy. Our main problem is starting and ending class, which typically involves a lot of him jumping on my back, climbing up my shoulders, and (after I take him down) clinging to my legs as I try to leave the room. The last thing this child needs is candy, but alas, it is Halloween season. Who am I to say "no"?

4:45- At a ripe ten years of age, Max is much calmer, and for the past two weeks, he's come to class wrapped in a blanket. Maybe he's too relaxed? Today, we are reading tarot cards that we made last class (to teach symbols and the future tense). It quickly devolved into a contest of who can make the other's future the most bleak.

My future (as told by Max): I will be very poor, which is not a stretch of the imagination. Luckily, I also happen to be pretty intelligent. But Max saved his best trick for last: I end up meeting a man and marrying him. That's a bad thing because he's a man.

His future (as told by me): He will have a beautiful daughter with a great mind and ambition. She will move to New York City and fall in love with a criminal. He will go to jail, and because they are married she must stay in the city, which means she will never return to Chile and see him.

You decide who wins.

6:30-8:00 Ale is a twenty-four-year-old designer who wants to learn English to keep up with her coworkers. At first, an hour and a half of one-on-one teaching intimidated me, but it has been one of my easiest classes. She is a great student who enjoys bookwork, writes fake e-mails for me to correct, and sometimes actually does the homework I assign. We spend the first hour simply talking about the Chilean president, Transantiago, friends, weekend plans, etc. For the last half an hour, we do the Reading section of the IELTS test and compare answers. Honestly, she probably had an easier time of it than I did.

8:00-8:45 The ride into the city from the hills is one of my favorites. The city stretches out across the valley, and Costanera center reaches out from the sprawling masses of buildings, highways, and city lights. It's the tallest building in South America, and from way up here, it looks impressive.

8:45-10:30 Life at home is pretty standard: Angie brings home a plant, and we walk around the house and yard trying to find out where it should go. José doesn't like it, so he votes that it goes in the garbage. Angie doesn't play along, and we settle for putting it by the front door for now.

Wednesday
6:20- The question of the morning: shower or sleep? Unsurprisingly, sleep wins.

8:00-9:00 Esteban is a businessman with an impressive title that I have never truly committed to memory. We used to go to his office, but when we realized how much we both liked the café next door, there was no looking back. He orders me a coffee: An americano for the americano. Jajajajaja.

The hour passes in a random strain of conversation, and today, it revolves around his sister in Denmark. I always bring materials for class, but he typically does his best to avoid anything resembling classwork. I sip my coffee and oblige.

9:15-11:45 Standard office work. Ale, the woman who cleans the office, and I chit chat for a bit as she cleans the dishes and I make a fresh pot of coffee. She pulls out a huge chunk of maracuyá pie and offers me a slice. I muster up the willpower to resist for the moment, but an hour later, I find myself at the refrigerator. It's gone, and I add it to the long list of lost opportunities.

12:00-2:45 Going home is a luxury I have taken advantage of more and more as the months go by. I put a load of laundry into the washing machine, make myself a decent lunch, and take a long, long shower. Being home, no matter how long, is a great thing to do when your work is spread out over thirteen hours of the day.

3:15-4:00 Nico is a kindergartner with a sweet side and a sweeter tooth. Our class always seems to go by too quickly, but he often lingers to stay for his brother's class. His little sister, who isn't yet talking, also joins us for a while. Mostly, that means that she stares at me with her giant blue eyes and I'll occasionally make a funny face at her. Over the months, Nico and I have learned body parts, emotions, the alphabet, the days of the week, and other essentials. Today, we play Halloween bingo and practice our monster vocabulary. Like I said: the essentials.

4:00-4:45 Santi is not a stranger to resisting class. I've had to fetch him out of the pantry, turn off his computer, and carry him down the stairs over my shoulder. About 85% of the time, once I get him to class, the battle is won. We play our games, do our activities, and go our separate ways happy. He is a sweet kid, but all he wants to do is play football. Given the chance, so would I. He's a competitive kid, and so I try to use that to hook him in. Sometimes I even let him win.

4:45-5:45 My students have recently moved houses, so I take a last-minute glance at the directions I jotted down to the new address. Two micro rides later, the streets and houses start to look familiar. As it turns out, these students moved about fifteen-minutes away from some of my other students. It's a small world after all.

5:45-6:45 Tomás is about eleven years old and one of the sweetest kids I've met. He is soft spoken, timid, and kind, and one of my proudest moments was when he called me "ugly" while we were practicing physical descriptions. If he's comfortable enough to make fun of me, I'm doing something right. He has a great memory and is fantastic with vocabulary. Our hurdle is  connecting the dots and forming sentences, even the most basic ones. Recently, we've been lingering on "How are you? How was your day? What did you do?"

6:45- Pedro is in seventh grade, and he is a fun kid to have in class. I take out the tarot cards we made the class before, and we get to work. English is not his favorite subject, especially when compared to Catolica and Colo Colo, and sometimes I feel like I'm a human English-Spanish dictionary more than a teacher. But he's smart, and he's been making some good progress.

My future (as told by Pedro): I fall in love with the most beautiful and perfect woman in a dream that I have. Then, the next day, I meet her in real life in a Starbucks. Plot twist: she takes out a knife and kills me.

Pedro's future (as told by me): He will get the house he has always imagined, but after a few years, it burns down in a fire. Likewise, he also has his dream car, but shortly after, he gets in a fatal accident. I told him that at least all of his dreams come true before they come crashing down. He doesn't seem too thrilled.

8:50- I meet up with friends at Barbazul, about a ten-minute bus ride from my house. We get there with three minutes left of happy hour and get a round of mojitos. People start to trickle in, and someone orders a plate of gourmet fries. Then, as the night progresses, we order an entire bottle of pisco to split between five of us. The drinks are strong, the laughter is deep, and the week is half-way finished. This is probably the best way to celebrate.

12:45- I collapse into my bed, tired and slightly buzzed. My bedtime passed almost two hours ago, and the exhaustion sinks into my bones and pulls me into a deep sleep.