The Next Step

So my parents and brother have left, gone back to the US. My brother left me with two hours of spanish lessons so I´m trying to figure out what to do. I´m beginning to reailize that my abilities have become really advanced, and aside from simple review, there really isn´t a whole lot more to learn in the grammar part of it. RIght now, even though I speak well, I just need to continue to use it. I need to keep developing my vocabulary and my comfort with using some of the complex sentence structures in speech. For this reason I think it´s goo that I´m at the end of my trip. I´ll have a seven more weeks to continue with my progress and then when I get back I´ll reevaluate what my options are. At this point I have a few general ideas for what I could do to continue improving my spanish and to give me time in South American countries while at the same time reverse the trend in my bank account.

While the opportunity is definitely there, I am not sure I would want to be an English teacher. It would definitely give me time to be in a cool place like Pichilemu. But I would like to be in an environment where I´m speaking more spanish than english.

With the burgeoning wine countries of Chile and Argentina, the opportunities to work with the wineries would provide a good opportunity to give me time in South America and BAck home. Unfortunately, the ideal job would be being a buyer and I lack the palate to do this. The more likely of this would be to be a guide at a South American winery, but that would probably mean that I would be speaking mostly english and I would be away from home for the whole year. Ironically this field is something I grew up hating due to the fact that my old man and his cronies would gather around a bottle of wine and talk about it like it´s a person.

Spanish television has become big in southern California and it would be really cool to be involved in something where I would probably be dealing with an array of accents and dialects in spanish. And because I have background working for advertising I could probably get a job starting somewhere. However, there probably would not be too much room for travel though as it would likely be something on set and pretty stationary.

Because of the size of the hispanic work force, Construction would be another good option. It would allow me to be outside and using spanish. Unfortunately I have very little experience (by that I mean zero) with construction so I would probably have a hard time getting a job.

A dream job of mine would be to work with the Dodgers in the scouting department and some sort of scouts assistant. I would get to travel around Latin America, talking baseball and checking out places like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia (all of which have coastline, so surfing could be done). And when I come back I´d be back in LA with the dodgers. However I get the feeling that to get in the sporting world you need to have some sort of connections or to have played the sport to get in. Maybe that´s just a misconception, but I´m definitely going to at least give that a look.

A spinoff of that would be to work for ESPNDeportes and pray that I didn´t have to work in Bristol, Conneticut. There would probably be less travel though and If I ended up in Bristol I would only be able to last a year at the most.

Probably the most ideal would be to work as an international rep (probably starting as an assistant) for a surf company (like Quiksilver/Body Glove/Rip Curl/Billabong/Hurley) and that would get me tons of time in South America, around the surf and free or cheaper gear.

I guess it´s really up in the air at this point, but at least I´ll be coming home with some ideas of what could be possible. I´m sure that there are other areas in which spanish is needed so I´m just going to keep my head up and my eyes open for what´s next.

Chilean Cheerleading Championship Cheerleaders

In my life I have spent plenty of time around sports. I´ve played most of them and have been a fan of those I learned I wasn´t fit to play (i.e. basketball, football, soccer, well anything with running really). Which puts me in the position of also having watched thousands of cheerleaders, but until now it had always been about what girls were the hottest not which routines were the best. Now, I´m living with a family in Chile that has two daughters that are incredibly involved in cheerleading. It´s a strange phenomenon actually caring what is going on in the routine but I better be able to at least fake it because the girls are competing in the first national cheerleading championships of Chile, this weekend, right here in Pichilemu. And because I´ve become so close to the family, not only will I go to the Cheer Championships this weekend, but I´m going with the whole family to Concepcion (about 8 hours south in bus) in three weeks for another Cheer competition.

It´s going to be weird going to a competition where there are cheerleaders but no sports. And focusing on routines rather than, well...you know, the girls (especially since these girls are 14 and 15). But I figure that I´ve ogled enough cheerleaders that maybe now I should appreciate all the work that they do to perform. THoughts to come, Saturday should be interesting.

You Are Afraid, Go Buy a Dog

Today was a long day. I had a few drinks last night and didn't get too much sleep and since we had a travel day, it made it for a long slow drug out day. To top it all off the forty minute drive into Buenos Aires from the airport turned into a two hour traffic jammed adventure. Naturally, I got shotgun, because my spanish is the best and I get to talk to the driver and help him get to the hotel. So we were talking and this lady driving the car in front of us is not paying attention at all to anything that's going on and she just stops up all the anxious drivers.

I mention that the lady has no idea what she's doing and doesn't even know how to drive. The driver then goes into this explanation that some people are afraid to drive and instead of owning a car they should go buy a dog. This obviously baffled me, but I laughed at it and translated to the family and they laughed too. No one seemed to know what it meant either.

The funniest part of the long drive into town was when we hit a bottleneck and the guy next to us, even though he had plenty of space, wouldn't move over. This was really annoying because there was a parked car in front of us and so the the driver rolls down his window to talk to the guy and he says "why don't you move over? There is plenty of space? You are a coward! You are afraid! GO BUY A DOG!" I just laughed because the other driver's face showed all the shock he must have been thinking "this guys is yelling at me to get a dog, he must be nuts, I better just move over." So he moved right over and we ended up getting to the hotel pretty quickly after. I'm not sure if I'll ever run into that guy again, but I'll definitely be using his saying.

Natural Beauty

The first three months I spent in Pichilemu, I saw some of the best waves I have ever seen in my life. Beautiful, crystalline barrels running down a sandy point almost everyday. I was spending more daylight hours in the water than out of the water. It was great and I couldn´t help but tell people about it. I mean it was absolutely incredible.

So my parents and brother decide to head down to see this cold water perfection. They make plans while I steal up north to Peru to avoid the winter here in Pichilemu. I spent two months away from Pichilemu but when I came back the wave had been completely changed. I knew this was a possibility as the wave here is a sand point so it´s incredibly sensitive to wind, rain and swell. There happened to be all three while I was gone. A huge storm came through with Northerly winds, monster surf and so much rain that the rivermouth broke open and poured sand into the well formed point leaving it broken out of shape like a frat boy on Sunday morning.

There has been some swell pass through Pichilemu, and since my brother has been here for a couple weeks we´ve gotten some good days at Pichilemu/Punta de Lobos, but it´s been a shadow of it´s former self. But my dad doesn´t even get to see what my brother saw. Reyn at least got to see three weeks of swells start to reshape the point, until, the day before my parents left, a huge southern ocean swell came through. I had thought it would possibly be the best thing for the point as south winds and swell usually lead to a better forming of the point, however I was wrong. The size of the swell and possibly the fact that it was more westerly than normal completely undid the past three weeks grooming. My dad got here and we paddled out for a couple mediocre (by Pichilemu standards) waves. My dad was cool enough to say that he could see the potential, but there is something about actually seeing a wave of this break. It´s like seeing a bald eagle if you are an ornithologist or a lion if you are a safari trekker. It is impressive to see in the magazines, but to see it in real life, just seems to add a special bit of magic to your life. You understand that you are in the presence of greatness, which is just as important and impressive (if not more so) in the non human world as it is within it. I think it´s great that we recognize greatness and its importance in the human world. How special it is to read Catcher in the Rye/Great Gatsby/On the Road, or watch Kobe Bryant/Tiger Woods play their respective sports. But I think it gets lost how amazing greatness is outside of the human touch. And for that I´m sorry that my dad and brother don´t get to see what the wave at Pichilemu is, or what it can be.

I would dog I have to go

One of the most frequent mistakes of english speakers speaking spanish is that they mispronounce the ´rr´in words and it comes out sounding somewhat ridiculous to all the native spanish speakers. So when I started speaking spanish I made a concerted effort to roll my ´r´s and correctly pronounce them. I hadn´t really had anybody tell me that my accent was good or bad, so I just kept going.

Until last night.

One of the english teachers at the institute, Brian, had a clam bake last night (my first) and invited a few people over. We had a great time, at first by just playing a bit of scrabble and having a few beers, but then we ate the clams and everyone just ended up scrunched together in the cozy, fire heated living room. I had started to talk to a chilean girl from Santiago, who was a friend of Brian´s old roommate. We got along pretty well and it got to a point in the night where I realized that I had been talking to her for a while and that, intermittently, she would just start giggling without (so I thought) any reason. At one point she broke out in full laughter and I had to ask her what was so funny. She was very blunt, plainly stating that my accent was funny. Of course, I didn´t feel all that great because I had felt that my accent, while far from perfect, was much better than the average gringo accent. And since I am actually trying to get better I asked her what was so funny about my accent and she said that I overpronounce my ´r´s and make them sound too much like ´rr´s. I didn´t understand what this meant until she told me what impact it was having on the meaning of my spanish.

Because we were having somewhat of a debate there was a lot of counterarguing, which led to a overuse of the word ´but´ which in spanish is ´pero.´ However, with my overpronunciation it was coming out as ´perro´ which means dog. So I basically spent two hours trying to impress this girl while frequently using the word dog as the start to my interjections. Needless to say, I slept alone last night. Dog at least I learned a lesson.