I´m out of my suitcase and finally at home! I arrived in Puerto Natales Tuesday and am living with Hector (Nino) Soto, his wife Paola, and their three children...Belen, 12, Benjamin, 2, and Alejandro, 1. Life at home is very busy with Nino and Paola running to their jobs as teachers, the little boys scampering around, and telenovelas blasting on the TV all the time. I´m starting to get into one show El Senior de la Querencia. Everyone seems to watch this historical drama...I have to see what will happen next, since one of the characters just received a sort of "chastity belt" as punishment for being my "ponica," another chilenismo.
After our flight down from Santiago, we spent one night in Punta Arenas--I´ve added a few photos of the Strait of Magellan and the town on Flickr, but I didn´t have a chance to see a whole lot. Tuesday afternoon, we took the bus up from Punta Arenas, it was a three hour ride through a landscape that was mostly flat, bleak, and covered with snow. Although the afternoon was clear and mild, the road was white and packed down with ice. We didn´t see many other vehicles on the ride north. Each time we did, our bus driver would flash his lights and wave before moving off to the side of the road a bit to make some room.
Puerto Natales, on Last Hope Sound, is beuatiful with rocky, snow-capped mountains in the distance and the water quiet and still in the sound. Wednesday morning, they had a little ceremony for us at the polytechnic school, and I met the mayor (an old and forceful Italian man), governor of the province, my students for the first time. The students gave me a little figurine of a milodon, a prehistoric animal that used to live in Patagonia. Yesterday, I gave my host family a few presents from home, including Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. When I showed Benjamin the book, he shouted milodon, because that´s exactly what the pictures look like.
Life at home is very nice so far. I´ve been helping out a little bit at a Catholic school for girls today and yesterday. I won´t start working with my partner teacher Claudio until Monday. It´s a little cold in the house and I´ve been feeling a little sick the past few days, but everything is nice overall. Even for the smallest meal, a little "once" before bed, the table is always set elaborately with palcemats, a tablecloth bread, sugar, and lots of condiments, including a gigantic bag of Hellman´s mayonaise, which many Chileans like to put on just about everything. It´s a nice little formality, I think, and it´s been great sitting and talking with my new parents, brothers, and sister.
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