i miss nestle break and bake chocolate chip cookies. i went to a meeting yesterday at san joaquin about the intercambio party that UC's "comision de acogida" (welcome committee) puts on as a tandem welcome to exchange students and an information fair for interested chileans. apparently i was the first norteamericana to ever show up to one of these meetings - even though the majority of intercambios are from the States. way to represent, guys. anyway - so each country has a stand, where they serve some traditional/unique foods, play some music, traditional dress, dance, photos, etc. The director's example of traditional american food was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. i suppose mcdonald's doesn't count because it is everywhere. but back to the cookies - they give us some money for the food, and i am definitely going to try and hunt down stuff for real chocolate chip cookies. there is something about the flour here - it just doesn't set the same. i'll be sending out an email to the rest of the usa kids, so hopefully can get some help on encompassing our entire nation in a booth. yeah.
i had lunch with jenifer (a chilena) and gabriel (brazileno) - jenifer showed us the best cheap place to eat on campus - the engineering cafeteria. they are both geography majors and jenifer had studied in brazil, so she and gabriel were kind of language buddies - he helped her with her portuguese and she helped him with his spanish (although he spoke very well). she told us about hiking up the volcano at Pucon, which one of my friends did this weekend. I really want to go - and hopefully i can get a group together soon. We talked about the relative dangers of different major cities - Santiago, Brooklyn, Rio - gabriel said anything feels safe after growing up in Rio, and we all had a good laugh after i tried to explain the trifunctionality of my pepper spray (pepper, tear gas and UV tracer for later identification). after i walked with them to their classes, i still had about 2 hours until the next item on my list - bowling, at 5:30. i brainstormed for the america stand - which was surprisingly difficult, because so much of american culture has spread so quickly throughout the world it was hard to think of unique things to offer that had not yet been globalized. i found myself focused mostly on southern things - sweet iced (mint) tea, sweet potato casserole, southern rock, folk and bluegrass (with fiddles, washboards and broomstick basses), new orleans jazz. traditional dress had me a bit stumped - um, jeans? i guess native american in general, cowboy hats, Converse sneakers? Polo? GAP? Sport were a bit easier - football, lacrosse, baseball and oh! NASCAR.
i explored the humanities library and listened to some students with a guitar playing and singing songs in english, german and spanish on one of the many grassy quads. i was waiting in line to get some ice cream from a kiosk in the student center when i was approached by a rather unusual character. he was a little taller than me, and his polo shirt was tucked into his belted khaki pants (remember, i am no longer in tuscaloosa - this is unusual dress here). pointing to my green sweater he said (in spanish) "you should had worn that for the festival yesterday" - processing, processing "oh - saint patrick's day, si" (guys: this is not an effective pick up line, for future reference). "Are you american?" he asked loudly in english, his voice had transformed, picking up an odd british accent with an oratorial lilt. he continued to converse loudly and insistently with me in english and by the time i had paid for my icecream i knew that he played bridge and spoke hebrew and french as well and was planning on going to israel this summer. [at this point, i was fairly certain this was the same guy who had struck up a conversation with my friend (also gringa) in the metro while reading his hebrew newspaper and talked her ear off until she was rescued by mireya picking her up at the station.] after awkwardly inviting me to a "cup of teeeea" (which consisted of sitting at the table right next to where we were standing) we continued our conversation. during the next 20 minutes i was told where the best place in south america is to learn spanish (santa cruz, bolivia - b/c the monks from spain taught it to them and they live in the jungle, so it remained uncorrupted), that british women are actually very sweet and romantic at their core (his english tutor was british - hence the odd accent - which, as it waned in and out, and was combined with the strange inflection of someone speaking their non native tongue, really sounded like someone mimicking a eccentric british professor, and doing a rather poor job) and that he wrote romantic poetry - about women, and politics. and that he thought southern girls (this from a girl from georgia he had met) were very sensual and also innocent. and that poetry "was a means to communicate between two eternities." i was really glad i had both an icecream and a coke to bury my laughter into, because in combination with the loud english, awkward topics, and bad british accent i was also being graced with his very thick and animated eyebrows and wild waving hand gestures. i finally excused myself to go meet the group to go bowling and i couldn't stop laughing all the way back to the station.
bowling was fun - i met a girl from holland who has been teaching english here for the past few years and told me that crocs started in holland as a design project based in their traditional wooden clogs. i also got to know two guys from germany and finally met some fellow southerners - a girl from georgia and one from tennessee. they seemed very excited about cooking southern food for the stand - and rochelle (from georgia) even has grits! on the way back on the metro i got dyslexic and missed my stop, so i got off at the next one, changed sides and went back. back in the right direction, i grabbed the overhead handle and settled in for the 15 minute ride, when the guy next to me shifted closer in my direction and i noticed the newspaper he was reading was in....hebrew. yeah. so. god has a sense of humor - especially since ricardo's country club is my same stop. on this ride, i was treated to another loud conversation, insistently in english, about the history of the metro - and the reason why there is no line 3 (not worth the story...), a conversation in hebrew on his cell phone, a story about a jewish taxi driver, and given the presupposition that i was neither a woman, nor an american, and i were to go to iraq and ask a single man where he was from, apparently he would respond: i don't know, i am not married. the things you can learn on the metro.
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