first day of class for real

Today was mixed. I got up this morning, looked at the syllabus for the first class I had intended to go to (the COPA academic adviser, heretoforward called Saint Isabel on this blog) and realized that it would be demanding in English (two mid-length papers that require considerable depth of thought and complexity of expression, things of which I am not capable in Spanish at this point...maybe next semester). It's too bad, too, I had really wanted to take the class. It was the one about the five Latin American Nobel Prize winners (Neruda, Mistral, Paz, Asturias and Garcia Marquez), which I think I'll still try to cover the syllabus for. Just too much writing and too much reading. As a sole class it'd be great, but on top of all the other reading I'm going to have to struggle through, it's just too much. Hopefully my one class tomorrow, Modern Chilean Literature, will look easier and as interesting.

Anyhow I went instead to Relations Between Europe and Latin America Throughout History, which was quite interesting and small. The profe (pro-fay) seemed really nice and she smiled a lot and interrupted her lecture to question the gringos in the class (there are only four including me, which is good, too). Also there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of reading. Super bien. Then I and the other gringos (two go to GW and the other to Berkeley) went and got lunch in Santiago Centro, where the government studies building is. I finished my (very cheap) ham and cheese and Coke and metroed on over to COPA, where I had another joyous installment of Spanish grammar and vocab class. I think it'll be good for me, but GOD is it boring. Oh well, that's all right. I came home after that for a little while, made myself a sandwich on some toast and some tea and watched TV with Francisco, before heading over to Chile and the International Political System at UDP. That class was so boring I thought I'd cry. Sara, if you're still reading this ever, it was a confusingly explained summary of realist theory and followed by an awkward transition into how that applies to Chile's economic interests as the preferred point of entry for commerce from the Pacific into South America and its competition for that title with Peru and Colombia. The teacher seemed really nice and he was very young and smiley and cracked jokes, but he couldn't make up for the incredibly pedestrian material and the confusing and not particularly coherent way he tried to convey it. Also at the end there was a movement among the Chilean students to move the class to 8:30 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays because they all have the same schedule and apparently want to work at night or something like that. There was much finger pointing at us gringos because we aren't on the same schedule as them so it was thought that the class shouldn't be changed because it would impede us. That was the real problem with this class. I was all ready to decide not to take it and then all the kids in it were incredibly friendly. Guh. I'm still not going to take it. Too boring.

Then Rosie and I went and got pizzas at that awesome pizza cafe joint I wrote about a little while ago. I guess Rosie and I are dating now. There are about 50 million reasons why we shouldn't be, which I won't get into because most of them ought to obvious and to tell the truth I'd just rather not write them all out. But we talked about that, and the fact of the matter is, we both really like each other, so why the fuck not. Take THAT, logic and reason. If Rosie reads this, she will be embarrassed. But that's all right. Seems stupid not to write about it.

Speaking of which, it is interesting and kind of sad how sexually repressed Chilean young people are. It means that you can't really ever have privacy. Because families are still so traditional, there is absolutely NO closing of doors allowed and really no PDA indoors and so anyone with any sexual attraction at all is forced outside. So you get parks with a couple making out on every bench. This seems to me a very, very unhealthy way of acting and thinking about sex and all things sex-related. There's a lot to be said for self-restraint, but social repression is a whole different animal. Say, a big, angry german shepherd with fangs and big loud barks, like the ones two doors down from me that SCREAM at me every time I walk past. Perhaps that wasn't the best analogy, but I wanted to throw in a reference to them, as they are an integral part of my day. I wish they'd just get over people walking by their yard, which, by the way, is surrounded, like all yards in this neighborhood, by a seven or eight-foot fence with spikes on the top. Commas! Yay, commas! Anyhow it'd be nice if maybe the Catholic Church could look at itself and say, "Hmmm, some of our celibate priests take out their sexual energy on young boys, and on a much MUCH bigger scale, all of our young people are so desperate to express themselves sexually and so restrained in our strict dogma that they make out anywhere there's four square feet of space out of sight of parents and priests. Hey, maybe sexuality is an integral part of being a human and it's really not a good idea to tell everyone that it's sinful because, well, it's not!" Okay, this has gone on long enough and I've started bitching about Catholicism, which is really not something I have any right to be doing. Tomorrow I only have the aforementioned lit class in the afternoon, but in the morning I have to back to UDP to preregister for the classes I might take there and then I have to buy a jacket and a new shoulder bag because the free one from la Chile is already falling apart. You get what you pay for, right? 'Night.