Rapturous!

Our favorite watering hole after class

In the first 3 days of intensive Spanish instruction, my brain couldn't stop processing. All night long I was repeating random Spanish phrases in my head. It would have been great if it had all made sense but the next morning I was just really tired and hardly able to generate a coherent greeting. Since we're living with a Spanish family, breakfast has to be taken in company with only a weak cup of Nescafé to get the synapses firing. Ah well. We'll be doing this for 6 weeks. We're bound to get beyond ser and estar.

Funny things happen when you're learning a brand new language. You lose your previous identity as an experienced professional. Suddenly you regress to babble. Your classmates wait patiently thinking "kind" thoughts while you struggle to express simple sentences. Most recently our exercise was describing a person and, knowing I'm from South Africa, our teacher thoughtfully gave me a picture of Nelson Mandela to identify . Total senior moment¡ Él se llama.......? My classmates held their breath while I thumped my forehead. Greg kindly whispered the answer causing me to relate to my ex students when they hated being called on in class. Then there is always the inadvertent stumble onto a bad word in Spanish. Don't mispronounce pisco sour without the s! You might imply a certain part of the male anatomy below the belt. Or don't slip in an r when you say, "I fear - Yo miedo." It could cause hilarity by suggesting a daily necessary biological function. Other times you are so tongue tied all you can do is bury your face in your hands and just shake your head, as Greg has done several times.

But it's also fun. We start the day at 9:00am with a private lesson. Our teacher's purpose is to make us talk. Our teachers know well how to motivate uncaffeinated total beginners. By the end of the hour we are mentally stunned and we still have 3 hours of class. Fortunately, it's with others who struggle just as much giving us moments to recover and breathe. Why are we putting ourselves through this? Because it feels great to use those little grey cells; because we meet interesting, broad minded people with global perspectives; because we'll use Spanish a lot in the future and because the school has a plethora of fun outings. Last week we had a wine tasting in school followed by a field trip to a winery on Saturday. This week we will have a historical tour of the city and a tasting of Concho y Toro wines or maybe a lesson on how to make ceviche. Such tough decisions!

You can't come to Chile without going hiking. This place is a geologists dream. On Sunday we hiked up to the foot of the active volcano San Jose, which is over 19,000 feet in elevation with many glaciers. One of them tumbles into a muddy tarn,where we stopped for lunch. It is only a two hour drive from the big city of Santiago to the base of Volcan San Jose. On the hike up to nearly 11,000 feet we were awestruck by the rawness of the landscape. The great, solid mass of the volcano pushes up from scree fields hundreds of feet high. The strata are perfectly vertical as they were thrust up by rising magma and then sliced off at the top by some cataclysmic eruption. Every type of igneous and metamorphic rock is represented, and the landscape is barren of trees. Only small shrubs can take hold in this austere environment.


Maipo Canyon

Our muscles didn't complain much on the hike but the altitude really got to us. The final half mile was a death march. Living at sea level for 2 and a half years does not boost one's aerobic capacity. We're going to have to run up the 5 flights of stairs to our apartment at least twice a day to get us ready for Patagonia. Next week we hike to the base of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas. Although it will be high, the hike is not as steep and very beautiful. It should be fun.



Maipo -the tarn at the foot of the hanging glacier


Maipo U-shaped valley