Friday, December 24, 2010

Happy December!

It’s time for an update on the latest adventure. Who’s ready? Well, if you’re still reading I’m going to assume you are, so here we go!
I leave in about a week and a half and now have in my possession a lovely new residential visa in my passport (to keep that lonely Mexico City entry stamp company) and feel all ready to go. In 11 (12, sort of) days I will be in Santiago and this is finally going to be real.
Anyway, enough of that. Time for some real, tangible details. I recently learned a little bit about the family I will be staying with. It is a household of three consisting of a banker, his wife and their 25-year-old daughter who is attending university for food engineering. They live in La Reina (a neighborhood in Santiago) which, to be honest with you, I know absolutely nothing about (but Google Maps says there might be a pool in my backyard!).
In the meantime I am just sort of enjoying family time in the Mucc and trying to make a list of all the people I need to see in Reno once I’m back there (anyone know anything fun happening for NYE?).
Well, that’s about all I’ve got for now. Merry Christmas, Happy belated Hanukkah, Happy December/Winter Solstice/Secular-day-of-I’m-sick-of-feeling-left-out-celebration or whatever else you might be preparing to do around this time.
¡Chao!

Sunday, November 21, 2010

All booked up

Alright, so the next chapter of my soon-to-begin adventure is written. My tickets to and from South America are all booked and I'm about to send off my visa application to the consulate in San Francisco. So here's the plan: Leave the States Jan. 4 from Reno to arrive the next morning in Santiago with a connection in Dallas. The way back is a flight from Buenos Aires about two-and-a-half weeks after school ends. That leaves, drumroll please, a ton of time for me to backpack around!


So the plan is for me to head out of Santiago the day the rest of the American students are leaving, but instead of heading north with them, I'll travel east to either Buenos, Montevideo (Uruguay) or somewhere in Brazil (São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro) or Paraguay. I'll then spend a few days in those countries, adjusting for where I prefer (meaning my primary traveling will most likely be via bus). If I run short on time, I'll knock off Paraguay (it's pretty much on the list just because it's in the area) followed by Brazil (I'll admit I'm a little worried about the whole I-don't-speak-Portuguese thing). That said, I'd really like to hit them all, but I've heard Montevideo and Buenos Aires are going to be the best cities to hit.


That's really all I've got for now. I'll have another update soon about the actual studying abroad part with the classes I'll be in and where in Santiago I'll live when I get that information. Does anyone have any other suggestions for places on the Atlantic coast of South America to hit? Or maybe a link to a good backpack I can use for this mini adventure?

Sunday, October 17, 2010

A bit of explanation for my travel infatuation

I’m obsessing over this trip to Chile. Sometimes it seems like it’s the only thing in my head. If you ask me to point out the happiest thing in my life, the thing that keeps my head up and, sometimes, what gets me out of bed in the morning, I’d scream that it was the knowledge that in about 80 days, I will be leaving for South America.


I’ve always loved to travel. In the past year or so, I’ve come to realize I feel more at home when I’m living out of a suitcase, spending entire days in airports, than I do in Reno or Winnemucca. On my first solo trip out of the country, a five-day jaunt to Puebla, Mexico via D.F. to visit my then-girlfriend studying abroad, I came to find that everything I love about travel is brought into much sharper focus when I am abroad.

Allow me to better explain.

I think (and this is just an educated guess because, as anyone around me knows, I really don’t have anything about myself figured out completely) that the reason I love to travel is the thrill of exploration, and not only physical exploration, either (though I enjoy that, too). In addition to finding new restaurants, buildings, neighborhoods and bars, I love getting a taste of the people and their culture in each place.

While in Puebla, D (my new blog codename for my ex-girlfriend, out of respect for her likely wish I not write about her on the Internet. Those who really care probably know who she is anyway, though) left me alone for a morning while she was interning at a hospital. During those few hours alone in a city I’d just arrived in, without knowing more than the most rudimentary of phrases in the local language, I managed to find and purchase breakfast, buy the local newspaper (which I plowed through enough of to get what I still believe were the most important parts) and strike up brief conversations with a handful of people.

The conversations ranged in complexity from a maid asking how I was doing that morning (she kindly corrected my response of “Bien… err… ¿bueno?” to a confident “Bien, ¿y tú?”) to a gentleman who saw me reading the paper and asked what I thought of the proposed Volkswagen factory expansion (through the conversation, which was actually rather long and intelligent for my beginning-level Spanish, I learned that he thought I was a German at first glance) to college students interviewing me on camera in both English and Spanish about what I thought of their city (there was three girls, one a French major, one an English major and the third a German major – they had all the languages they would need covered, I guess).

Though the entire experience lasted no more than a few hours, it is among the things I remember most vividly about my trip to Puebla. Since then, I’ve tried to do the same thing in every city I visit. A week later in Austin, Texas, I managed to strike up conversations with a number of journalists attending a conference with me and even had a (then illegal) drink with a local girl I later learned was my age and a mother of a two-year-old child and wanted nothing more than to leave Texas. While in Washington, I managed short conversations with the District’s locals in coffee shops and bars in Adams Morgan nearly every weekend and by the end of the summer I was giving directions and Metro advice to tourists from the Bible Belt.

I’ve always thought of myself as being a little shy, but something about being taken away from my home (I’d say “out of my comfort zone,” but I already said earlier I am more comfortable traveling) makes me the outgoing person I always want to be. It’s the feeling I get when I’m reporting, but better because it’s not so combative and agenda-driven. Something beautiful inside me bubbles to the surface when I am learning about a new place that I just can’t replicate at home.

I know Santiago is going to challenge my shyness again. Though my Spanish has improved since last fall when I went to Mexico, it is still only conversational. But that’s good. I want to have to work at this, to force myself to learn this language so I can get to know Chileans. I want to kill the image I have of myself as the shy kid in the corner, and what better way to do that once and for all than to live in a county – hell, a continent – I not only have never been to, but don’t even fully know the language of? I’m ready for this.

OK, so that was sort of a long (and, against what I said in the last post, a little self-centered and narcissistic) post. If you read the whole thing, thanks, and feel free to leave me some feedback. Oh, and Mom: It’s not that I don’t want family to read this; it’s just that I’d like some friends and others to see it as well.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Drumroll please...

After almost no thought, and in the face of few other viable options, I have found a new purpose for this blog! IT ... WILL ... BE ... about my upcoming study abroad trip!
Yes, ladies (lady?) and gentlemen (gentleman?), you read that correctly. I will now join the huddled, unthinking masses of middle-class white kids writing about their traveling adventures as if anyone cared what they did. I promise to do my best to make it the least narcissistic, least stereotypical of all in this overdone category.
For those of you that don't know (look at me pretending like anyone I'm not related to reads this thing), I will be spending a semester abroad in Santiago, Chile beginning in January. I'm in the process of completing forms and submitting my visa application.
More details to come soon.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Under construction

This blog is currently under drastic conceptual renovations. I plan on using it again, and updating with some regularity (heard that one before, eh?). You will soon see a new theme and new posts.