Archive for August, 2007

Driving Charlet

23 August 2007 at 9:21 pm · Filed under travel

My mother-in-law has been visiting us from the States for the past week, and she has been a great help in remembering things that have begun to seem normal to me here in Santiago. Driving seems to be the thing that surprised her the most so far.

Driving in Santiago is an art form. The skills that you gain by dodging pedestrians and other vehicles can be applied in other areas of life here, as well.

Take the issue of personal space, for example. Chileans stand much closer to one another when having a conversation than most Americans would find comfortable. Well, they drive that way, too. A road that is marked for two lanes each way may become three at some points along the way. Especially if a vehicle decides to stop at the curb with its hazard lights flashing in the middle of traffic, as happens frequently.

And, as in everything else in Chile, you have to expect the unexpected while driving. At a stoplight, you may be asked by people standing in the space between the cars to give to charity, pay to have your windshield washed, buy a charger for your cellphone, buy a newspaper or lottery ticket, or give coins to a street performer. (Personally, I like the fire jugglers best.) When the light turns green, they will likely just stand on the yellow line and wait for the cars to pass before heading to the curb.

Nose in. That’s the rule when it comes to so-called merging traffic. Traffic here doesn’t actually merge; you just have to butt in. And honk. When I was in the States last, it had been almost two weeks before I heard a car horn and realized that we drive a lot more quietly there. Here a toot of the horn just means, “Here I am!”

Yes, driving around town with Charlet has made me aware of one fact: I will definitely have to re-adapt when I get back to the States, or I will not have a driver’s license for long!

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Meat is meat, right?

13 August 2007 at 8:40 pm · Filed under animals, food, purchases

Meat is meat, right? In Chile we get our meat at the supermarket, just like you do in the States. But what you get here varies between slightly different and WAY different than what you buy there.

Let’s take chicken for example. You can buy boxed containers of boneless skinless chicken breast just like you get in the States…or you can buy chicken feet. Yeah, the yellow knobby feet of a chicken. You didn’t even know they were classified as a meat, did you? Well, if you can’t afford to actually put chicken in your chicken soup, you can at least boil some feet in the water and make yourself think it tastes like chicken. And you can buy a package of these feet in the supermarket, right next to the livers and gizzards and other assorted chicken pieces.

And there’s the beef. Except this poor beef got butchered according to a completely different map than ours does in the States. I want sirloin or brisket or even rump roast. I find pieces of beef that I can’t identify their previous location on the animal. I guess someone in the States decided how to cut up beef there, and someone else decided how to cut it here. I still haven’t figured out which piece will turn out like I want it to.

At least there’s always ground beef. I mean hamburger meat is the same everywhere, right? Wrong! Here if you want ground beef, you have to choose between 4% fat and 10% fat. Why so little? No, they don’t put their cows on a fat-reduction diet. They grind up steaks! At one supermarket we used to go to, they didn’t even have ground beef in the case. You just had to ask, and they would freshly grind your steaks into hamburger meat. Why not just eat steak?, I ask!

I can also buy fish, with or without their heads. And lots of other seafood things that I might mistake for cacti if they weren’t in the ice with the other seafood. Something they call a loco looks pretty scary to me. How would you begin to cook or eat something so spiny and prickly? Good thing Mark doesn’t like seafood except for fish. I don’t have to figure that part out much!

My favorite meat that I buy here that I haven’t seen before in the States is a turkey breast that comes in a oven-ready tub. All I have to do is take off the outer wrapping, dump in my seasonings (ask me for that recipe sometime!), and cover it with foil. It takes an hour in the oven, or 20 minutes on the grill, and turkey dinner is ready! Yummy!

Rachel’s favorite part of the meat section is the pork. Not because I ever buy pork, because I don’t. Mostly because it has the silliest looking cuts of meat in the whole store. She especially likes to laugh at the cuts that have a snout in the plastic wrapped foam tray. Now THAT is gross!

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One way that you know you are a foreigner and a stranger in a new place is because your name is weird there.

12 August 2007 at 7:54 pm · Filed under language, laws, people

One way that you know you are a foreigner and a stranger in a new place is because your name is weird there.

Okay, so Essenmacher would be difficult for many people in many places. My friend Marion who is from Germany is the only one who thinks our last name isn’t too odd. Essenmacher means food-maker in German, and Marion likes to come over and bake with me, so she thinks it fits us pretty well. And when she prays before the meal, the only word I recognize is “essen.”

But in Chile, my family’s names are weird for another reason: we only have one last name.

Just as we learned in our high school Spanish classes, people in Spanish-speaking countries have two last names, one from their father and one from their mother. For example, my friend Verónica’s full name is Verónica Alejandra Carrera Jara. Verónica and Alejandra are her nombres, her first and middle name as we would describe them in the States. Carrera is her father’s last name, and Jara is her mother’s.

My name is therefore incredibly strange to the poor people who want me to fill out forms that ask for two last names. They deal with it in different ways. The hospital makes the mother’s last name optional, so I can just skip that field when I go online to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The lady who entered my info into the system so I could get a grocery store discount card couldn’t believe it…so she just put her second last name in the place where mine should have gone. Amanda Mead Essenmacher Perez is what my grocery card says!

So you can imagine our shock when we went to get Megan’s Chilean birth certificate and were informed that by law everyone born in Chile must have two last names, and that they must be the last names of the parents of the baby. So poor little Megan was saddled with Megan Hope Essenmacher Essenmacher for the first days of her life. And she will always be legally known as such here in Chile. Thankfully, the American Embassy in Santiago knows how to fix such things when applying for a US passport!

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I never really thought about the benefits of being born a citizen of a nation before.

12 August 2007 at 1:21 am · Filed under language, laws, visas

I never really thought about the benefits of being born a citizen of a nation before. I mean, who thinks about proving who you are and why you should be allowed to stay where you are? That is, until you move to another country and you start to be someone strange (In Spanish the words strange and foreigner are very closely related: extraño, extranjero) and you have to prove that you should be allowed to stay.

This week Mark, Rachel, Jenna, and I received our permanent residency in Chile. It only took forever!

Once we realized that we didn’t want to travel out of Chile and back every 90 days to renew our tourist cards, we applied for our temporary visas. You have to hold a temporary visa for at least a year before you can apply for a permanent one. Well, our angelic visa worker in Concepción only allowed us 10 months on the first one, so we had to do another year of temporary visas after that in Santiago.

Then we applied for our permanencia in October 2006. It was supposed to take 6 months to process. They sent us some papers in the mail that explained to others that our ID cards were expired, but that was okay because our applications were in process. Those papers expired in May, so we went and they stamped them on the back with a new expiration date. That stamp expired at the end of July, so we went back to see what they would do this time.

Amazingly, our permanent residency had been approved! With the new papers that say we are approved, we now have to register with InterPol and get new ID cards at the local Civil Registry. And we can stay forever (if we want) without anymore paperwork!

All this, and Megan, who was born here, has automatic citizenship.

I never thought about the benefits of citizenship before this, but even if it just cuts out the paperwork, it is worth it!

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