Confratulations, devinmalone!

Or so exclaimed the headline from one of the latest batches of spam to hit my inbox.

I moved into an apartment yesterday. It's on the top floor of an eight story building; two blocks from the beach with a view of the sea (but those of you reading this up north don't get excited - it's winter here), and at night I can faintly hear the surf crashing onto the beach. It's also two blocks from the mall so I can shop to my hearts content (How COOL will it be to say I've bought Gucci in Chile?!? Seriously though, there's a supermarket in the mall, which is nice), and it's four blocks from Jason's house. There's a well-equipped kitchen, laundry machine, large living/dining area, two beds and two baths (although one bath you practically have to get into the shower to close the door). Across the street is an Oregon pine-furniture store (who knew the US still had a marketable durable-good export?).

Since I have a spare room with two beds, I listed myself as available to host on Couchsurfing, so we'll see if anything comes of that, although it's low season in Chile and I'm kind of far from the center of Valpo, which is really the touristy bit of this area. My apartment, like all Chilean apartments, is cold pretty much all the time. It's not super cold here, but imagine a brisk fall day that makes you want to bundle up, and then imagine that none of the buildings are heated and you put up with that weather 24/7. I have a plug-in electric heater, but am nervous about how much that will bump my utility bills by the end of the month, so I pretty much do the Mr. Rogers thing: come home, take off my "outside" sweater, and put on my "inside" sweater. If only I had some slippers for my tile floor!

The apartment search was actually tedious and frustrating, and I'm glad it's over. It's tough to find a furnished apartment that someone will rent for a month, even in a little vacation beach town like Vina del Mar. I looked at a lot of places, a lot of which were crap (which would be understandable perhaps if they weren't also expensive, like $500 a month for crap. Who wants to pay $500 for crap?), and I spent a lot of time thinking about how awesome payphones are in America. In fact, everything about our telephone system pretty much kicks ass to anything I've encountered down here. I mean, stuff here works fine, it's just so annoying to use and expensive. Examples: 1) I got a cell phone here, which has really different ways of dialing land lines and other cells (actually not so in Bolivia. Score one Bolivia). So I couldn't figure out how to call anyone for the first few days. 2) Using your cell to call during the day is like $45 a minute, and your other two options are to use a payphone or a home phone. If you use a payphone, you have to have 100 pesos (a little under a quarter) to talk for 35 seconds. So you have to continually feed coins in, and the phone only accepts 100 peso coins, and no one gives change here. So when you run out before your conversation is over (which has happened EVERY time I've tried to do this), the phone hangs up on you and you beat the receiver against the machine in hopes that it might spit a bunch of money out in response to your anger. After I got sick of that, I went to buy a prepaid phone card. I started in the supermarket, where they told me to go to some other store, which I couldn't find. So I basically spent an hour wandering through the city, trying to explain to people what I was trying to buy and them not really understanding. In Bolivia, there is a call center with rows of phone booths on every corner (score two Bolivia. In fact, the same problem exists for me with internet places here, because in Chile people are wealthier and tend to have PCs in their houses, whereas in Bolivia you can't walk two blocks without passing a dozen internet places. Score THREE Bolivia). And then, once you get your phone card that you spend $10 on, you get home and find out that lasts about three minutes if you want to call cells. Fantastic. I don't know why phone calls are so cheap and easy in the States, but they are.

So more or less, my plan is to live in Vina for a month, and try and set up interviews with CEPAL. In the meantime, the activities will revolve around Learn Spanish, Swim/Gym, Party. Busy schedule, I know. But I'm actually looking forward to a little routine for a while. And going out, which is great fun here because it's a little college town so there's lots of bars and clubs. And I will add this: Chilenas tend to wear their big brothers' pants, but also manage to look pretty hot in them. Actually, people aren't really very fashion conscious here (compared to, say, Argentina), which I think is pretty cool (and it might explain why fanny packs and dreadlock mullets are so popular). Generally, people don't seem to focus so much on what you look like; neither your body nor what you're wearing (I've definately seen model-attractive Chilenas with Chilenos that look like they spend their Saturdays role-playing as Elven wizards). On the other hand, they are really classist here: one of the worst things you can say about a thing or person is that it's ordinario - "ordinary," which doesn't sound so bad in English, but here it's closer to "white trash." Fortunately, as a foreigner I'm more or less outside of that, so I don't have to explain the fact that I'm relatively wealthy but wear socks with holes and old worn jeans (and that I don't cut my hair, and that I wear big clunky hiking boots, and that I haven't showered in 10 weeks and...)

Chilenos are so friendly, too. I've had so many encounters where I come away with the thought "wow, that person was really nice!" It's a stark contrast to when I got to Bolivia, where I got the distinct impression that people had it in for me. Like my doorman today, who asked me if I needed anything when I came downstairs, and then very patiently explained to me (because my Spanish sucks) about the trash system in the building, and not only that no, toilet paper can't go in the toilet, but he added some suggestions about what I should do with it instead (OK, that part basically boiled down to "put it in a plastic bag," but he gave such a lengthy, whole-hearted explanation that I was still impressed).

Hm. I can't think of anything else to write right now. Usually I have a little list of notes. This one was freelanced. So if it sucked maybe that's why. Anyways, goodbye to you, dear reader, of which there are five of you that I'm aware of (although I did finally add a blog counter to the new site, so I can know which of you really like me and which don't).