Bienvenido a Casa!

Whenever I write about a fictional character, I think about what they carry, as inspired by Tim O’Brien’s amazing short story, “The Things They Carried,” and subsequent creative writing prompts I’ve come across based on the basic premise that what you keep on your person or by your side reveals quite a bit about you. Friends have been asking, so today I thought I’d share a few pics of our home and the things we carried here.
Where we veg…
Thanks to Ryan’s surfing memorabilia,
we can at least pretend the ocean isn’t an hour and a half away!

The concept of “our home” in and of itself is a wonderful thing to be able to say after a year of long-distance living! We’ve successfully merged his and mine (it helps that the majority of the furniture is rented with the apartment; such a convenient way to go when you and your belongings arrive by plane.)

Where we dine.

The move itself also helped us streamline–selling off my car, starter furniture, electronics that can’t convert down here, CDs, books (yes, I managed to part with a few) and their shelves, and all the stuff that ends up in a junk drawer that someone at a sidewalk sale ends up LOVING! Thanks to the knowledge of my friend Emily, the Chilenos have a perfect word for junk-drawer chatzky, but my Spanish amnesia will have to settle on a literal translation of junk drawer (“basura cajón”) for now.

A little reminder of home in the morning.
I have grown to truly love Chile’s best powdered instant coffee!
Where we drop our keys and mail,
though the only mail we’ve gotten so far
are bills that are shrink-wrapped like junkmail,
so we have to be careful not to throw those out!

Plus, a whole bunch of giveaways, like houseplants and clothes and coffee mugs to friends and cousins and Goodwill. For instance, an old typewriter–that one was hard to part with sentimentally speaking since I think an old typewriter is pretty much my personal metaphor when it comes to the craft and tradition of writing, my until-recent skepticism of technology, and my true love affair with the remnants of decades of old–but it weighed a good 20 pounds, and there’s something lovely about knowing your cousin will have something that means a lot to you, and that she might think of you when she looks upon it, and maybe she won’t miss you quite as much as you’re missing her.

All of this means we’re traveling (relatively) light. But, as I’ve mentioned, we have the important things here with us. In addition to the writing table and the books, we have Ryan’s father’s guitar, framed photos of our friends and family, going-away gifts and cards wishing us well, and, yes, as pictured above, a couple of coffee mugs 🙂

Enclosed patio beyond and previously posted about desk,
where the magic happens 🙂

All told, the list of “the things we carry” is surely longer than what you would run out of a burning building with, but it’s a much shorter list than I’ve managed over all these years of moving back and forth across the country… from my first 18 years in the SFBay, then east to Boston, New York, and London, back to New York, Westward Ho! back to SF, and now super south to Santiago. And as a perma-list-maker, I like a short one 🙂

As for where our things may head next, that’s still up in the air (we’re here for the foreseeable future) and that trust and mystery are part of the overall adventure. 

Technically a bedroom, but now Ryan’s music studio,
aka, where his magic happens 🙂
Guest room that is not as small as it looks.
Okay, maybe it is, but we promise it’s cozy 🙂
After all, it’s not everyday that you enter your 30s, get married, achieve a graduate degree, and move to Chile to finally join your husband (in that order). I’m content to just soak all of that in for now…

…and keep learning my way all around this kitchen!
New houseplants, both indoors and out 🙂
From our home to yours, Saludos! xo

Salsa Is the New Hummus

Prepped food in little bowls makes me happy.

Ryan and I are getting a hang of things. Correction, I am getting the hang of things. He’s had a year to learn the language and the metro system and which cheese at the market is Mozzarella and which most definitely is not! I, on the other hand, am still working on leaving the apartment on a daily basis and setting out not just to wander (tho that’s important, too), but to really accomplish something. I’ve got Unimarc (picture 7/11 if it sold some produce and had a meat counter) down pat. I know the questions that are going to be asked of me:

At the butcher: “How will I be paying for this chicken?”
“Efectivo.”
(At least I think that’s what he asked. Or I answered “Cash” to his inquiry if I needed anything else today. Ha, I’m a comedian down here!)

At check out: “Would I like to make a 3 pesos donation to a children’s fund for Chile?”
“Si!”

If any other surprises get thrown my way, however, all I’ve got to throw back is a deer-in-the-headlights stare and maybe a gapping jaw. Oh, dear. I usually stammer a “lo siento” apology, but I’ve also heard the locals don’t throw around “I’m sorry” in the same, casual way I do back in the States — i.e. constantly. I think that is a good thing. There must be several other more productive avenues out of a bind, be it related to language or any kind of miscommunication, than an “I’m sorry” bandaid. Point being, I need to learn what sort of bandaids I can use down here – in Spanish – to breakthrough into coherency. I “am getting” there in the present progressive tense after all. Very little has already been had.

Oh, wait, so back to the salsa. Ryan and I had our first little dinner party down here, inviting Emily – a girl from one hometown over from mine who also went to my high school – and her husband, Rodolfo, who is from Santiago. Yay for first friends! Emily writes a great blog herself (Don’t Call Me Gringa) and is a lifesaver when it comes to navigating expat life, thanks to her fluency and many years of residency. Now I know where to find a Brita filter, what shelf in the good market the tahini is on, and that our little dinner party the other night was actually part of a Chilean housewarming custom – the proper name of which is pending as my brain’s ability to remember Spanish orally is next to nil, so check back in a few. It may or may not be “inauguración de la case del partido.”

In preparation, Ryan and I made a Mexican feast, as we both miss our La Playa Beach burritos something fierce. As I’ve been here cooking two meals a day for us and wondering where does the time go as I shop and prep? I’ve also been asking: “How the heck did I feed myself three times a day in California?” Oh, yeah, burritos (and hummus :). So, I took a gander at these gorgeous veggies and whipped up a killer salsa:

 

It consists of:
• 4 good-sized tomatoes
• 1/2 a red onion, finely chopped
• 1 large green onion, not so finely chopped
• The diced leaves of about 6 stems of cilantro
• The juice of 1/2 a lemon (lime would be ideal, but the market was out of those 🙂
Salt and pepper

AND!! I found gluten free chili/lime tortilla chips. I’m suspicious that my three-day migraines have something to do with a gluten connection (a million blogs also tipped me off), so I’m four days into gluten-free living. The irony that hummus is the perfect gluten-free food is not lost on me… until I grab that tahini, the salsa will have to do! I welcome all great gluten-free recipes (provided they don’t require a Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods run).

And Happy 4th, everyone. Ryan and I will just have to gather around YouTube and catch some fireworks later 🙂

It’s Here.

 

Yesterday, our shipment from the States arrived! All 663 pounds of our belongings. Technically, most of that weight was mine since Ryan got his shipment a year ago now. But he had some guitars in there to balance out my incurable need to travel with my favorite books. And as my brilliant husband pointed out, books are made of paper, which is made from trees, so books are technically wood. No wonder they are so heavy! A few of them have moved with me to Boston, London, New York, back to San Francisco, and now here to Santiago. But most of them have been gathered along the way, as I acquired new favorites (anything by, to name a few, Lorrie Moore, Ian McEwan, Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, Eric Puchner, Amanda Davis, Michael Cunningham, Charles Baxter, Lauren Slater, Nicole Krauss, Julie Orringer, Cornelia Nixon, and now Jennifer Egan) as well as more published insights about screenwriting, the craft of fiction, writing exercises, interviews with writers (nothing beats the Paris Review anthologies), teaching creative writing, and now teaching the English language. Because I won’t be getting a job down here until I’m TEFL certified, I wasn’t sure exactly what I would need, true. But I also need these books simply for their presence. If you can believe it, I was discriminating–the vast majority remain at my mom’s house, where she generously built some new bookshelves simply to house them while I’m down here near the bottom of the Earth.

But all these books mean even more to me because they are lined up next to my writing table, which has anchored me to NY and SF so far. It is the one piece of furniture I didn’t post on craigslist or give away or leave on the sidewalk. I could have found a way to merge it into my mom’s garage and bought a DIY version from Home Center (the locals call it Homey; it’s similar to IKEA), but where would the sense of “home” really be in that? I simply couldn’t compromise. All of its 150 pounds had to come with me.

 

And here it is! It arrived yesterday, along with my very first set of big girl pots and pans, which can still go head-to-head with what we have going on down here. We also have a few choice kitchen accoutrements (the Supreme Green Lime Squeezer, for example), gifts from family, picture frames, three boxes of books (okay, five, but two of them were small :), select pieces of art (though our walls are made out of wallpaper laid over concrete, so not sure how exactly we’re going to hang anything), and finally, wrapped in butcher paper, five legs out, my writing table. After I put some soaked beans in a pot that finally won’t boil over, it was the first thing I set up, after giving it a little love and tapping it on the back for making this long journey with me. I guess it’s how some people feel about their car or their bike or their horse or whatever it is that gets them where they need to go. That’s how I feel about this desk, and I trust it will get me there… as I finish my novel, as I prepare for employment, as I gaze at my storyboard’s collection of photos and notecards and general inspiration.

They may have said: “You want to take your desk? It’s six feet long? I’m not sure about that.” But thanks to a couch box and some well-intentioned pleading, it made it. And after two weeks, I finally feel like I have, too.

Now, back to those beans.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

So, we felt our first earthquake in Chile. We and the city are perfectly fine, as we are more or less in a daily earthquake zone, but this recent one woke us up around 4AM. A 5.0 centered at the coast in Valparaiso, due west of here. And somewhat eerily, Ryan and I actually fell asleep last night talking about our earthquake plan and how we needed a meeting place, how we should re-fill and store those water bottles I keep taking to recycling. (Duh.) Did we sense it? But why my surprise? We expect for dogs to circle and horses to buck and cats to scurry in the hours leading up to an earthquake; why shouldn’t we humans anticipate?

We are both Northern Californians. Having an earthquake plan is second-nature because we grew up making them. It used to be so easy though, walk outside into open space at home in Portola Valley. Here, we are five stories up an 11-story building. Where should we go? Before anyone worries, I feel absolutely safe. Santiago was built to withstand the fault lines it capitalizes, yet another similarity to San Francisco. In fact, I feel safer here, nestled against mountains. Though I miss my morning beach walks something fierce, my old neighborhood’s mid-Tuesday tsunami warning signal is also a thing of the past. New terrain brings new adventure, surely, but also new conditions to prepare for and respect and understand the community impact of since parts of this country are still recovering from last year’s 8.8 megaquake.

And there’s yet another difference. Now, when things go bump in the night, I can reach over and feel that my husband is right there alongside me. Because even when you are perfectly safe, you just want to know that someone else felt it, too.

For anyone else interested in tracking earthquakes and volcanos (as we know we have those down here as well), check out SolarWatcher Channel‘s weekly report.

Moving Abroad Doesn’t Happen Overnight

I knew things weren’t going to be the same in Chile. That was the idea–so Ryan and I could live and work in another part of the world and grow stronger for it. I also expect this experience–its challenges as much as its joys–to make me a better writer, a better person. And while you may be able to (with planning) hop a plane and wake up in another season and time zone, I’m realizing it takes much longer than an overnight flight to move abroad.

There’s the pre-moving one might expect: calls to banks, medical records to pick up, vaccines to get, visas to acquire, netflix accounts to suspend, and maybe a language to start learning. You arrive, and there’s a whole new country to tackle with its slightly or drastically different ways. For example, a slight difference is that milk isn’t found in the refrigerator section of the store. It’s on the shelf next to the eggs. Yes, the eggs. A drastic one is that many billed services require third party verification, so yay for standing in line for an hour and half to pay the gas bill!). You follow.

I know things will get easier as I feel my way along these new walls, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a few more things I’m getting used to…

1. The aforementioned milk. No one-gallons here, so you buy a great bit box at a time if you can get to the Jumbo (kinda like Costco) or you buy three one-liters at a time each time you walk to the store.

 

2. Plastic bags. They love them here! They will put your five-liter water bottle that comes with a plastic handle (see next point) in not one, but doubled plastic bags for you! I have my reusable grocery bags here with me to limit our household footprint, but I just can’t get my head around it. It’s like coming across styrofoam. I shudder, not out of judgment, but just because it’s been so ingrained in me to head plastic off at the pass least I contribute further to the huge plastic islands floating around in our oceans!

3. The water. It’s not recommended that you immediately drink the tap (though we’ve been making ice-cubes out of it and we’re just fine). While we investigate water filters, we resort to giant plastic bottles and the recycling fanatic in me cringes again. While recycling is well established here, chugging our way through at least three of these empty vessels a week just makes me feel like a bad person. Surely, we’re going to be able to construct our own two-story life-raft by the time we leave or I can get my hands on a Britta.

 

4. Services enacted in the States (i.e. converting from a post-pay to a pre-pay plan with a leading wireless carrier) may be impossible to resolve abroad. With said example, after an hour on a Skype call with said wireless carrier’s customer service representative (bless her heart), it turns out you can’t monitor your balance through your current online account, no matter what that nice man at the store said, but to set up a new account, all you have to do is enter the temporary passcode that was just texted to you.

“But I can’t check text messages.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m in Chile!”

Yes, 45 minutes into the call, this was still unclear. You gotta laugh at this point. Because there is no workaround for the auto-generated texted temporary password (for my own protection, of course), this gets added to a new list I have going of “Things To Take Care Of When I’m Back in the States.”

5. Garbonzo beans. I know, I can’t get enough of talking about how much I miss hummus. Well, I’m on my way to success. I found this beautiful bag of garbonzos in the raw! Stay tuned as I undertake a two-day hummus-making mission! Right after I hunt down some tahini!

 

I know it’s not about finding in Chile exactly what I would in California. The growth is going to be hard-earned, as I explain to a woman in Alabama that I can’t check text messages in Chile, as I boil beans, and as I brave the water in many ways. I’m clearly in the Negotiation phase of Culture Shock (between Honeymoon and Adjustment), which hits a few weeks in (bingo). As in, “I will love you unconditionally, Chile, if I can just take this hummus with me.” They say I only need 6-12 months for Adjustment to set it, so bear with me.