Archive for laws

Where’s my camera when I need it?

21 April 2008 at 8:57 pm · Filed under cooking, food, jobs, laws, my kids, purchases, travel

Maybe I need a camera phone after all. I needed it on Sunday, and since I didn’t have one, I will try to paint a word picture for you.

We drove up to the butcher’s store in Doug and Carey’s Hyundai van. It’s a big store on a corner of a major street. Don’t think of these outdoor markets with slabs of meat hanging around in the open air. This is a meat store with coolers and freezers and men who use plastic gloves to cut normal slabs of meat and weigh it on digital scales.

Mark and Carey went in to buy steak to grill while Doug and I sat in the van out front with the kids. Doug and Carey have four kids, ages 14 to 7, and our three were there, too. Megan, the baby, was asleep on my lap. (Okay, so it is still Chile. We didn’t have any carseats that day.)

Johnny, age 11-ish, and Doug start talking about the guy who has a little stand out front of the butcher’s shop. I hadn’t really noticed him before that. He has a square table and a big umbrella for shade. He also has a display board of maybe 12 folk music cds that he’s selling, and a karaoke machine. He’s playing loud music and occasionally breaking in with an advertisement for the butcher’s shop. “Today only, get your steak at only $2.50 a pound.” Or something like that using pesos and kilos instead. It goes really well with his folk music, let me tell you.

Doug tells Johnny, “I’ll give you three dollars if you go over there and ask the guy to sing ‘O Canada’ on his karaoke machine.” Johnny’s thinking about it. I say, “I’ll give you three dollars if you get him to turn the thing off.” I didn’t think he would, but I should have known. It was Johnny. He’s fearless.

After a couple of minutes of thinking it over, he jumps out of the passenger side door and walks over to the 60-something-year-old man. We can’t hear what he says, but the music keeps playing and Johnny comes back grinning.

“What did he say?” “He said I would have to pay him to turn it off.” “Did you offer him part of your three dollar reward?” “No, why should I share my reward with him?” “Well, what reason did you give him to turn it off?” “None.” Silly Johnny.

Mark and Carey came back and we drove away. But it didn’t occur to me until later that it’s not normal to have a karaoke guy advertising the butcher under an umbrella on the street. Funny.

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What would you do?

16 April 2008 at 8:08 pm · Filed under jobs, laws, travel

I had been waiting there for 45 minutes. Yes, at a bus stop. Where else?

And I had all three kids with me. Megan was strapped on my front. Jenna was asleep in the stroller. Rachel was bouncing all over the place, still under the influence of her coloring-laced antibiotic from last week.

It took 25 minutes till the first bus came. And went. Without stopping.

Ten minutes later, another bus passed us as I frantically waved it down. To no avail.

The third guy stopped after I stepped out into the street (He was a good way back, I promise, I’m not suicidal) and waved him down. 

I lifted the stroller into the wide entry and scanned my bus card. I started to roll my child down to the wide-open handicapped and stand-room-only space. I said “Thank you for stopping for me,” to the driver. I was going to be a duck, and just let the water roll off my back. It wasn’t going to affect my day that the other two drivers didn’t stop. Then the driver spoke up.

“They didn’t stop for you because you have a stroller,” he said. “Strollers are prohibited.”

WHAAAT??? “So how would you suggest that I bring my three children on the bus without a stroller?” I asked, trying REALLY hard to not get mad at the guy. After all, HE had stopped for me, right?

“I suggest you leave them home with the maid next time.”

Typical.

“Don’t you think that if I could afford to have a full-time maid to watch my kids, I would just buy a car?” I said. 

“Whatever,” the driver said. “I can’t talk about this now. I have to drive.”

Yeah, but at the next stop his buddy got on, and it didn’t seem to bother him to talk then.

I figure some bus drivers still let me on with my stroller, and I can’t figure out any other way to carry a baby and a napping preschooler on a bus. Pretty soon it will start getting winter and rainy and cold, and then maybe the dollar will be stronger and I can take a taxi.

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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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The first row of seats on each side of the buses i…

5 June 2007 at 6:33 pm · Filed under laws, people, travel

The first row of seats on each side of the buses in Chile is supposed to be “preferencial” for the handicapped, senior citizens, and pregnant women.

Today when I got on the bus, there was an open seat in one of these preferential seats, so being 37 weeks pregnant, I took it. The man next to me looked to be a businessman in his mid-50s. The other preferential seats were taken by middle-aged women.

As the bus filled up, the aisle began to fill with people who couldn’t find empty seats. The “bien educado” (well-educated = polite) thing to do is for younger people to give up their seats for the older and less mobile people. This doesn’t always happen, of course. And some people aren’t happy about it, including the next woman who got on our bus today.

She was about mid-50s, I would guess, and a bit overweight, with a huge purse that was hanging under her arm. She decided to position herself in the aisle right beside me, hanging on to the back of my chair. This left her purse to bang me in the head every time the bus changed lanes.

I first just made a face, but then she just shrugged and it happened again. So I asked her to please lower her purse so it wouldn’t hit me.

Then it happened, and I couldn’t believe it…She told me I should give her the seat! She pointed at the sign on the window indicating that this was a preferential seat we were talking about. Thankfully she didn’t tell me I was “maleducada” (poorly educated = impolite). I was speechless.

The man next to me quickly intervened and informed the woman that I was pregnant (couldn’t she see?), then stood up to give her his chair. (Forget the fact that neither of them really was qualified for the preference of the chair anyway.)

If I had been in a hurry or had something else happen to me badly today, it probably wouldn’t have been funny at all. But at least today I can look at it like this: Even though none of my clothes fit anymore, I guess I don’t LOOK that big after all!

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Hoops. Lots of them. The kind you have to jump thr…

14 March 2007 at 12:51 am · Filed under jobs, laws

Hoops. Lots of them. The kind you have to jump through.

The hoops are one of the things that surprised me about Chile. I guess I thought things in Latin America would be really laid back and relaxed. Well, one more reason to wonder if Chile is still Latin, I guess.

Today I went to the notary to get two notarized copies of the ID card of Crusade in Chile. That in itself wasn’t too bad a process. In and out in a few minutes. But the fact that I have to go to the notary so often makes it a bit irritating. In the last week alone, I think Doug, Mark and I have been to the notary approximately 20 times for different tramites (errands). Maybe more, I lost track.

If I were to consider a well-paying job in Chile, I would seriously consider becoming a notary. The real notary, the one whose name appears on the seal and stamp and signature they affix to your papers, is a completely unseen entity, hiding in some back room or upstairs office. The real work is done by approximately 6 workers in the reception area, who receive documents and identification papers, who type common forms such as contracts and powers of attorney, whom you pay for the “service” of legalizing your papers. I wouldn’t want to be one of the workers, but the notary him/herself seems to get by pretty easy. It might be the only job in Chile where you could wear shorts to the office with flipflops. Everyone else wears a suit. Everyone.

The thing about the hoops is, once you jump through the notary hoop, you still have to actually go do the job you needed done in the first place. Always another hoop. So when you think of me in Chile, you can imagine the real work that I do here: hop, hop, hop; hoop, hoop, hoop!

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