El Mercado Central

Sitting in a restaurant eating eel (which tastes like fish) last Tuesday, watching one of the restaurant hustlers enjoying his job...

Chile para niños

Chile para niños is an awesome kids' website. I should probably use it myself to get to know the history and stories of this land. Everything down the left-hand column is brilliant for English speakers. You can find desert flowers, volcanos, football, museums, and famous people and places. Click on something (including Tesoros de Chile) and a new page will come up. There'll be lots of Spanish writing, but don't freak out - click on Música or Fotos, Juegos or Animación - you don't need Spanish for (most of) these. Another page will come up and you'll probably need to click one of the pictures to make the photo (etc) appear.

Another cool place to go is the horizontal bar that runs across the top of the page. Click on Juegos and you will find all sorts of games (including the wonderful Juego de los absurdos). Click on Baul and you can find Fotos or Dibujos (drawings) from real Chilean kids. ¡Disfrutenlo!

Feliz Día del Papa

It was Fathers' Day here yesterday, so I thought I'd share this with you.

La cordillera

What I woke up to this morning:

Los santos

Even as Christianized Indians adopted and adapted the new faith, priests in the Americas continued to find ways of expressing the faith in simple terms. Often evangelizers turned to sacramentals - holy water, candles, and rosaries - as ways of instructing the Indians. The extra income from sales that such items generated for the priest was undoubtably an attractive feature, but underlying the use of tangible reminders of the faith as instructive devices was the belief that the Indians were too unsophisticated to understand the abstract concepts of Christianity. Likewise, the cult of saints was deemed an easy way for the priests to tie the new faith to old patterns, thereby linking Catholicism more closely to the world of the Indians. This path, however, was reluctantly pursued by the priests whose initial goal was the complete obliteration of pre-Hispanic religions - which proved impossible. Instead, various saints gradually replaced the gods of the Americas; for example, the patron saint of pregnant women, St. Anne, replaced a goddess of fertility. However, the priests emphasized that the saints were subordinate to the Triune God of Christianity, a concept often lost on the Indians. The saints, however, were quite significant in their own right to the peoples of the Indies; in fact, the calendar of saints' days and the corresponding celebrations were more central in the yearly religious cycle of many a New World community than was the liturgical calendar. Some scholars argue that in addition to the equating of saints with bygone gods, the role of the Catholic saints in the Americas derives from two distinct European roots: First, veneration of saints had long been part of popular Catholicism in Spain and undoubtably crossed the Atlanic Ocean with the multitude of Spanish commoners. Second, increasingly in response to the Protestant Reformation taking place in Europe, the church hierarchy, including the missionaries who came to the New World, emphasized the non-Protestant elements of Roman Catholicism, and among those was the cult of saints. from OE González & JL González, Christianity In Latin America: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 58. (underlining mine)

Valparaíso / 2

Valparaíso / 1

Ten Things I Love About You

I was asked what I LOVE about Chile the other day - a great question, so I've been jotting down a few things, ten in fact. There's no logic to the order.

1. Nature. The mountains that ring Santiago are imposing, magnificent things. And I'm told of awesome beauty all through the north and south of the land.
2. Topics of conversation. People love a rollicking discussion and they're really interesting in what's going on politically.
3. Men taking the lead. Men seem sure of what it is to be a man, and comfortable kicking off discussions or making decisions.
4. Graffiti. The graffiti here is impressively classy and creative.
5. Style. There's an - alternative, cutting-edge - element of Chilean society that has just got so much style. It's as if they took the best of Melbourne's dark quirkness, added bold, confident colour and design, and ended up with something all their own. 
6. Literature. I'm still on the outside looking in at this, but it's obvious that literature and poetry is highly prized, at least among the rich/er. If nothing else, the surfeit of quality bookshops that manage to stay in business, selling (expensive) books tells me so.
7. Humour. I feel like I must be missing something, but so far the humour seems to be akin to that of Australia, even including giving the people you love a hard time. ♥
8. Taking it easy. There's no popping in to visit someone: instead you hang around chatting a while and enjoying a bite to eat. Plans can be equally fluid, but people treat each other with such warmth that no offence is taken. 
9. Hospitality. As I mentioned before, the hospitality is generous and welcoming.
10. Warmth and openess. I'm not talking about the climate here (at least not for this time of year), but rather the affection and trust that comes so naturally to folks here.

Bumping into people

In Hobart I'm always bumping into people and I love it. It tells me this is the place where I belong, my home. And it was something I gave up to come to Santiago. But so far, I've bumped into seven lots of people! - a man from my church and, another day, the Chilean husband of an English friend, both in the centre of town; Emy's niece, and then her Mum and boy, near our house; Felipe's brother and, later on, a friend of his, in a shopping mall just south of here; and some other missionaries, taking the same bus home after church on Sunday. It's no big deal ;).

Photographic evidence

Until now I haven't actually shown you any photos with me in them, so maybe I never really made it to Santiago afterall. Maybe I've been writing all these posts from an island in the Caribbean. Well here's proof that I really am getting on with business here in Chile. The first is of me, Emy and Samy.

This one's of Emy's extended family.

And here are some people from my church. My pastor, Juan Esteban, is the guy at the front left of the photo, across from me, and his wife Carolina is next to him.

As you may have noticed, I have a bit of a thing for sitting on the far right of any table/room.

Tricky Spanish things / 2

So last time I said there are two ways to say "I am, you are, he is (etc)". The difference between the two is sometimes bleedingly obvious, but mostly not.

I think the key difference is that you use the verb estar when you are talking about something once-of:

Yo también estoy de acuerdo contigo...
("I also agree with you...": ie in this moment)

and ser when you are talking about something fundamental:

... es decir, soy de tu misma opinión.
("... that is to say, I'm of the same opinion": ie fundamentally, as a matter of identity)

It gets tricky when you want to talk about something that happened yesterday because then you also have to choose whether the thing you are talking about was an ongoing state (tiempo imperfecto) or a point in time (tiempo indefinito). So in the handful of seconds you have to think, you have to decide if the thing you are talking about is once-of/fundamental + ongoing/point-in-time. It's rare and chancy for me to get this right.

And then there's the matter of the subjunctive mode, used to used to indicate uncertainty (where in English we would - sometimes - insert "might"). Oh yes, and all the different prepositions and adverbs coupled with specific verbs (eg "tuvimos que esperar", "we had to wait", where "que" is normally translated "that" or "which"). Oh and the hundreds of verbs which either must be or sometimes are reflexive (like the English "I hurt myself"). And the words that range more widely than a single English word (eg "todavía" which can mean "still/yet/even").

Feel sorry for me? You shouldn't - despite these fine differences, Spanish is ridiculously similar to English. I go about converting English words into Spanish, successfully ("¿Es una palabra?"), and when it comes to putting sentences together, most of the time I can do pretty much what I would in English. The people you should really feel sorry for are those missionaries having a shot at learning non-romance languages.*


*Wikipedia informs me that English isn't actually a romance language, but I don't care, it has to be close.