¿Cachai? con Kristin: A day in the life

Hi everybody! A while ago, I was hit with blogging writer’s block, probably because I have gotten used to blogging my travels and I haven’t gotten out of Santiago much lately. But that’s okay, because I figure most of you are here to learn about normal study-abroad-in-Santiago life, anyway. To break out of the writer’s block I was stuck in, I decided to ask a fellow member IBA to do a Q&A with me. As she is a member of Batch 2 of the cohort and will be traveling to Chile for her own study abroad in a few months, I figured she would have some good questions for me, and she sure did! It will probably take me multiple blogs to answer them, and I’m just going to start the basics.

Q: What does your day-to-day schedule look like?

A: There is honestly no such thing! I have had to become A LOT more flexible living here because something unexpected always seems to come up. Sometimes the unexpected thing that comes up is an assignment that wasn’t in the syllabus, which isn’t great. Sometimes it’s a friend or classmate inviting you on some random outing, which is always fun! I have basically accepted that I will wake up each morning not really knowing how the day will unfold. Of course, this is just my experience and I certainly allow myself a lot of flexibility here, especially this semester when I am only taking three classes at FEN and then working on my thesis and research on my own time. Many of the other members of the cohort have internships and therefore have pretty set schedules around work.

To actually answer your questions, here’s what today has looked like:

I had International Marketing class at 8am. I’ll just note—you’ve heard of Chilean time, right? Just because a class is scheduled to start at 8am doesn’t really mean that it does.

On Tuesdays and Fridays I only have this one class, so after that I’m free to do as I please or do whatever needs to be done. Immediately after class, I headed to the FEN library to study for my Urban Economics midterm. This has turned out to be the most drawn-out studying, seeing as this exam has already been rescheduled twice. See what I mean about expecting the unexpected? Anyway, it works for me that the exam has been moved so that I have more time to prepare.

After studying in the library for a while, I decided it was time to eat. I walked the whole ten minutes back to my apartment and on the way up, I chatted with the concierge in the lobby and got the laundry key to wash the rain jacket I finally purchased yesterday, after seven months of living here without any rain jacket or umbrella. I made what can only be called brunch at this point of the day, chatted with my roommate (a lovely French girl—don’t know if I’ve updated on that), and continued to draw graphs and study while I ate and did laundry. (Could this day be any more thrilling?)

At one point this morning I saw on facebook that Starbucks was offering free coffee in celebration of Global Coffee Day, so I walked there, mug in hand, studied there for a while, and then at my favorite spot at FEN. There is a balcony off the second-floor study room that provides views of FEN’s soccer field, the Virgin Mary statue on Cerro San Cristobal, the snow-capped mountains, and some tall palm trees. It’s an interesting mix.

Eventually I came back home and got organized a bit more and finally sat down to write this blog! Soon, it will be time for dinner and then for “Spanglish,” a language exchange that takes place every Tuesday evening.

If you got through that without yawning of boredom, thank you. Of course, some days are more exciting than others (and hoepfully you realize that today is one of the less exciting days). Honestly, on most school days, day-to-day life here isn’t so different from life at USC. Go to class, study, and go to some sort of event or meeting. Just sprinkle in some Spanish interactions and some of the hilarity that ensues as a foreigner in a big city. Typically, this is either overhearing something in Spanish because of the assumption that you don’t speak it or overhearing something in English because of the assumption that everyone here is a Spanish speaker. Actually, these both happened to me today but I’ll spare you the details because in both languages, the thing that I probably wasn’t supposed to hear was mostly just a bunch of curse words.

Since I’ve now managed to take up a lot of your time and mine by answering only one question, I think I’ll save the rest for another time. Just to spice things up, I will add in some photos of life since we’ve last caught up. I hope you enjoy them!