4. Earthquake

I recall having a great deal of confidence in my Spanish skills before I left Houston for Valparaíso. I was able to communicate just fine with Yandee’s family, only getting stuck when the conversation wandered into something technical or otherwise complicated.

            I knew, however, that it would be a different thing in Chile, having to rely entirely on Spanish instead of being able to use that one word or phrase in English that I couldn’t translate but the others in the conversation would likely recognize. What I didn’t count on was how different Chilean Spanish was from the Mexican or even Castilian Spanish to which I had mostly been exposed.

            In the breakroom at school I was having lunch with some of the other students, and they asked me why I had chosen to come to Chile. I told them, among other things, to improve my Spanish – and the whole table erupted in laughter. “But we speak the worst Spanish,” one woman told me. “We don’t pronounce all the sounds, we use a lot of words that no-one else does, and we talk so fast.” Now, at this point I was rather acutely aware of these differences in the dialects. But I was surprised to hear them say that they speak Spanish “poorly.” I’ve heard it several times now, and it only gets weirder the more I hear it. Can you imagine going to New Orleans and hearing people apologize for speaking poor English?? Not everyone claims that their English is the best, but most of us are proud of our accents.

            Now, my linguistic training is not so weak that I will succumb to prescriptivism even when encouraged by the natives… but it is really hard for me to understand the Chileans. Imagine you took English classes from a Briton, had a long-term girlfriend from Kansas, and then, for an immersion experience, you decided to go to Scotland. After three weeks, I can understand pretty much everything when I’m spoken to directly, but I get lost really easily if there’s a lot of noise, or if there’s a larger conversation. Which makes it a little difficult to meet people, because I wind up smiling and nodding like the worst kind of pretender. However, it makes it easy to pick out foreigners – they’re the ones I can understand without work! I’ve made friends with the Mexicans and the Spaniards, and they help me out with the slang and sift out some of my Tex-Mex.

            I think this is the point where I regret everything and want to go home. Only I don’t. Even when I have to stop and think of the word, even when I conjugate something wrong, even when I messed up and said wine in the US is full of condoms (I wanted to say “preservatives”), I love speaking this language every day and getting just a little bit better at it, I love going through my flash cards and reading in Spanish, and I love living in this city of crazy houses and poets.

I do, however, feel like I should call all my international friends up and apologize for talking so fast all the time.

In conclusion, it’s not been easy…

… but boy, is it worth it.

By the way, there was a terrible earthquake here and we’ve all been without power for six days. Just kidding. But last week we were trying to eat dinner and the table started shaking – I thought it was people dancing upstairs, but nope – tremor. Nothing crazy happened, but it was a noteworthy experience for the boy from hurricane country.

Next time: No predictions (just in case).

Previously: 

3. There are no hurricanes in Chile, but…

While I was researching Chile in the lead-up to my year here, one of the most attractive things for me was that there are NO HURRICANES in this country. As someone who has lived most of his life on the US Third Coast, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time watching the Weather Channel like it was tracking Lord Voldemort, stocking up bottled water, and trying to decide whether I should literally head for the hills.

            Unlike the Gulf of Mexico, however, conditions here are non-conducive to hurricane formation. The movement of tropical weather systems is usually strongly skewed from the East to the West, and Chile is on the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean; hurricanes require warm water, and the oceans in the southern hemisphere are in general colder than in the northern hemisphere (especially the shallow Gulf of Mexico), because there’s a lot more water to heat down here; and the atmospheric winds are much stronger in the southern hemisphere, because there is less land to drag against them, which tends to blow storm systems apart. Also, while water in the toilets does not actually spin clockwise in the southern hemisphere due to the Coriolis effect, tropical cyclones, when they are able to form, DO spin clockwise. This doesn’t have anything to do with why Chile doesn’t get hurricanes, but it makes an eye-catching picture for someone who has seen a thousand counter-clockwise satellite images:

Anyway, while Australia and New Zealand occasionally have to look out for hurricanes and even Brazil seems to have got one once, Chile seems to have never recorded a hurricane landing. I would mention this to people who were worried about me leaving Houston to live in South America for a year to take some edge off their fears, but the response was always the same: “Sure, no hurricanes, but they have earthquakes. You can’t predict an earthquake.”

            I began writing this post in my head a while ago, ready to tell the story of living through a temblor in Chile. What has happened instead is we got something that looks an awful lot like a hurricane.

            It’s the rainy time of year in this part of Chile, and apparently it has been quite a dry one. The news on Monday was predicting a rainy week, and I thought oh, great, maybe that’ll help with the drought. It was mostly cloudy and misty on Tuesday, but on Thursday it began what I would call a light drizzle. I had just gotten to school when the postdoc who has been helping me with research called, telling me not to leave home and if I had, to go back as soon as possible, because very hard rains were expected and I might end up stranded if the streets flooded and the buses couldn’t run. It didn’t look that bad to me; in fact, I didn’t even take any pictures because it looked so benign. I decided, however, that as a foreigner I might be ahead to take the natives’ advice, and that my productivity might actually be improved if I could read about my bacteria in bed or on the sofa instead of a cold, empty meeting room.

           The forecasters were predicting about 2-4 inches of rain on Thursday, and it had rained about an inch already (over something like 12 hours) when I took the bus home. Having lived in Houston, where it is fairly normal to get an inch in an hour, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The streets were already beginning to flood in the middle of town, and once the bus began climbing up the hill to my apartment, it was like driving through a river. The whole road was covered in water cascading down to the ocean, and the bus’s tires pushing through it cast water up seven or eight feet into the air, drenching anyone waiting at the stops or trying to walk.

            Things were clearer on Friday, but Saturday we woke up with no power or water in the apartment. The storms had come in that night with such strong winds that the electrical grid for the entire region had been badly damaged, and the floods in the valley and landslides and fallen trees on the hills were making everything hard to repair. We were totally fine on top of our hill, I should stress, but there was an awful lot of damage in neighboring Viña del Mar, lots of flooded homes and washed-out roads. It continued to rain “a little” and flood a lot most of the day, but the power was eventually restored to our apartment around 6:00pm. It just goes to show that everything is relative: what would be a

little storm in Houston was enough to shut down Valparaíso most of the day. And it makes me wonder, having lived through the heaviest rain in Houston in fifty years and the floods in Chile in the same summer, if someone might be interested in paying me to spend some time in California!

Needless to say, Yandee and I did not make it to the beach this week. I have, however, learned a lot about purple photosynthetic bacteria. We will be using them to produce hydrogen gas, which is in a lot of ways even cooler than biodiesel, because it doesn’t require as much processing to purify, and it does not use carbon at all; the carbon from the wastewater feedstock is all locked into the bacteria’s biomass, making this process potentially carbon negative instead of carbon neutral. Hydrogen also burns much cleaner than any carbon fuel - if we could produce enough to power our cars, there would be no carbon monoxide produced as exhaust, no soot, only water vapor. But that kind of discussion is getting a little too far ahead – first we have to find out if we can get more energy out of the bacteria in the form of hydrogen than we put into them.

Next time: Earthquakes, who knows??

Previously: First week of school

2. First week of school

I’ve been in Valparaíso a week now, and I’ve learned a lot. A lot about purple bacteria. A lot about the Spanish language. A lot about how sometimes, when you find yourself feeling comfortable in a new country, it’s a sign of terrible things about to happen.

Do you see anything missing here? I didn't!

            I’ve spent some time outside the US before, and often been surprised at how different things are. In Chile, however, I arrived and was most surprised by how normal everything was. Part of it may be that I’d never been to South America, and was preparing for everything to be VERY different. But my expectations of culture shock have largely fallen flat – there aren’t any water fountains, but I’ve dealt with that before. I’m staying in an apartment just like one I could find in Houston, with a professional landlord instead of a scatterbrained music teacher. If I need a plumber on Sunday, I can find one.

            So it may be that I’ve let my guard down a little bit too much, but there have been a few things that have really surprised me. Spoilers, if you’re still trying to figure out the above picture: there are no rolls of toilet paper in the bathroom stalls. Fortunately, this one had some by the sink (maybe it’s actually for hands, but it looks like toilet paper and I haven’t been corrected so far). There’s also a lot more arithmetic involved in daily life, because the dollar trades for about 670 pesos, so all the bills are 1000 pesos, 2000 pesos, 10000 pesos. Things normally come out cheaper here than in the US, but all these huge numbers make me feel like I’m hemorrhaging money trying to buy groceries.

            The other weird thing is that this year, Chile has decided not to come off of daylight savings time, apparently without telling Google. So for the first couple of days, I thought we were one hour ahead of Houston, when in fact we were two hours ahead. So when I showed up at 4:03 to my meeting in the international office at school, I was in fact just over an hour late to my meeting. The lady at the office kept saying she thought I wasn’t going to come and how glad she was I’d made it before she left, and I apologized and told her how I’d left early but got off on the wrong bus stop, all the while a little confused about how being three minutes late made her think I wasn’t going to show up at all. Just as I was leaving it became clear what the error actually was, and realized just how very nice she was being when I had in fact arrived at 5:00 on a Friday. I will omit the pictures, but you could’ve fried an egg on my face, winter or no. I was glad I’d discovered the mistake at the international office though, instead of elsewhere; she said she’d had one student earlier in the week who came to his appointment THREE hours late. I had manually set my clocks to the correct hour, but I’ve gotten everywhere on time since.

            Including my first meeting with the Rotary Club in Quilpué! Iván and René drove into Valparaíso with the car and brought Yandee and me both to Quilpué. We had a wonderful time with

Presenting the Memorial-Spring Branch Flag to Iván Hernandez, left, and
René Zuñiga, right.

all the Rotarians, many of whom speak perfect English and were able to help me out when my Spanish wasn’t quite cutting it. Valparaíso, it turns out, was the first city in Chile with a Rotary Club, and RC Quilpué is also quite old, founded in 1938. They even have their own song they sing to start meetings! We exchanged flags, shared some stories, and talked a little bit about sustainable water treatment. I believe they have a member who was not there this week who is involved in water systems and treatment, who is familiar with the water and waste situation in the area.

            I say “I believe,” because while my Spanish has improved enormously, it’s still very difficult to understand everything. Chilean Spanish is spoken very fast, and they “eat” the ends of the words and some of the sounds from the middle, too. They also use a lot of different words than the Mexican Spanish I’m more used to – instead of “novios” they say “pololos,” and when you go to work, it’s not your “trabajo” but your “pega.” I can understand almost everything now without a struggle, and my speech is also much, much better. It’s been a little difficult at school, however, because I’ve been reviewing the literature on my project, which means reading and writing in English. There are also a lot of English words and phrases in the science lexicon, and when I speak with the folks in the lab they will sometimes give me the word in English if I look confused. All this code switching has been exhausting on my brain, but I’m getting used to that, too. I still have to stop to search for the word I want sometimes, but not as often, and my tongue doesn’t trip over the sounds anymore. In fact, at the end of the Rotary meeting I stood up to introduce myself and talk a little about my studies and projects, and found public speaking is actually WAYYY easier in Spanish. All my awkwardness can be explained away as foreignness, and therefore there is much less of it. Next time, dear reader, you find yourself haranguing multitudes, I highly recommend you do it in a language other than your mother tongue. It’s great practice, besides!

Next time: Purple photosynthetic bacteria, and a trip to the beach.

Previously: Travel and first impressions