Born in the U.S.A.

Natalie at the Mercado Central
I miss this already!
In the Andes!
The photographer in action
The crew at the markets

Everyone just left a couple of days ago and my life here in Santiago finally seems to be in full swing. I am teaching 4 classes and slowly speaking more and more Spanish. Having everyone together in Santiago was an absolute blast. Together we learned valuable life lessons such as there is such thing as too much of a good thing (if that good thing happens to be white bread or Kookies), and Born in the USA is NOT an appropriate song to karaokee. I’d like to draw attention to the second lesson…because honestly…who knew?!? We learned this harsh lesson at Chilean gay biker karaokee bar at around 4:00 Friday night. In case it wasn’t already obvious by our loud voices and midwest accents, we thought it would be best to let the entire bar know just exactly where we were born via song. The Boss was a natural choice. It wasn’t until we were halfway through the song that we realized…this song has NOTHING to do with being born in the USA and everything to do with the Vietnam war. Not exactly the fun loving song we were looking for. Never the less, the show must go on. It wasn’t until we got to lyrics such as “and they put a rifle in his hands, sent me off to Vietnam to kill the yellow man” that things went south. After taking a second to listen to the crickets in the audience, we all just looked at each other with what I think was the exact same thought…if we just sing the chorus really loud no one will realize what a terrible song we chose. So sing the chorus we did. But lesson learned…next time I want to karaokee my American pride…I’m sticking to “Party in the USA” or "Sweet Home Chicago."

In other news, teaching English has been great so far if only for the fact that I get to watch other people make the same ridiculous mistakes that I make in Spanish. One of my personal favorites happened earlier today. Our lesson was about travel and the question was “where have you traveled and why did you choose to travel there?” This class is full of high intermediate adults and the one female student responded that she went to Brazil because of the “hot bitches.” She meant hot beaches. I about died. The only thing that kept me from laughing out loud was a flashback to this weekend when I innocently tried to tell someone that I'm scared of heights. In Spanish the literal translation would be they give me fear...."me dan miedo." I said "me dan mierda"....which roughly translates to they give me the shits.