August 1: Spanish is hard.

Guess oversharing is now my new form of procrastination. I'm supposed to be translating my resumé into Spanish, but its not going so well...Instead, I'm using wordreference.com to look up all the words I've written down in the last week or so which is sort of productive, just not what I should be doing. It's interesting, Spanish never really gets easier. The more I learn, the more things I realize I don't know or the more similar it all seems.

For example:
-cartelera=listing
-carretera=highway
-carrete= party (Chilean slang)
-carterear= to pickpocket

Despite being in a Spanish speaking country, it's hard to keep from sliding into inglés on occasion. For instance, so much of the TV is in English, although it has Spanish subtitles, which still means it's "educational." Yesterday, I watched "Titanic" with the fam and learned some words I had forgotten about such as "hundir"= to sink. And today I learned "somníferos"=sleeping pills, from watching some show with Julia Louis Dreyfuss in it.

Other things I've been doing to learn Spanish:
-Reading poetry- I only brought books in Spanish with me
-I've changed all electrical appliances to English (phone, computer) but a lot of websites still come up in English, and I have to remember to do searches in Spanish
-Playing a game with myself where for 10 minutes I'll look around and see if I can name every object around me
-Listening to music in Spanish, and limiting myself to 1 hour daily of music in English
-Looking at maps constantly

At least understanding Chileans has gotten easier, a bit. A few of us went to a small carrete last night in a friend's host brother's friend's apartment last night and I understand the majority of what they were saying. Once you realize that "cachai" & "po" are essentially just filler words, that a lot of people are just really mumbly when they talk, and that much of what Chileans say is meant jokingly things start being a bit clearer. Before I left, I read a bunch of places that Chileans have a reputation for being really austere people. I don't know where this reputation came from- maybe the people I've met are just exceptions, but everyone has been so funny, warm and friendly. Or just that the US is such a cold culture by comparison. But I'm inclined to think that cultural stereotypes are generally "basura."