How to Study Abroad

Here’s another thought I’ve been working on: I screwed up my choice of study abroad. Of course, this is a ‘hindsight is 20/20’ thing, but interesting. 3 clearly better alternatives:

1. I shouldn’t have ever touched ISA. Basically all study abroad programs are built for one type of person – the one who has never travelled, doesn’t know any language coming in and isn’t uncommonly independent. Out of the ISA group, I’d estimate that’s around 75%. The job of study abroad programs is to alleviate those three primary concerns. Think about what the programs advertise and you’ll get the idea.

Where we’ve gone wrong is assuming that all exchange students fit that mold. For the other 25%, the efforts of ISA will effectively sabotage the authenticity of your experience and diminish how much you learn and what you get out of it all. Between organizing tours, offering classes in English, holding required excursions with all the other gringos, setting you up to live with families and all other manner of holding your hand, the true experience (for those who want more than pictures and token cultural integration) gets hopelessly lost for the sake of minimizing pain and culture shock. It’s like boiling broccoli – it may make it more palatable to some but destroys the nutrients and reasons to eat broccoli in the first place.

My DIY study abroad plan for the 25% looks like this. Transfer to your new university (you may even get a scholarship). Get a student visa and pack your bags, leaving yourself plenty of time (at least a month) before term starts. When you arrive, travel around the area for a bit to get familiar with the culture and locale. Then, settle in to your city and stay at a cheap hostel, camp or couchsurf while looking for shared student housing opportunities (you’d be surprised how easy it is to jump in on these – a couple of ISAers did it with no problem). Try to meet one or maybe two other exchange students casually to give you an outlet and a travel partner (most local students won’t want to make weekend trips where they’ve already been). Go from there. You’ll also save about 8 grand.

2. I should have gone somewhere else. Like, a different part of the world, in a different language. I knew before this trip that I wanted to learn one more language (at least) after Spanish. What I didn’t define was how far I wanted to learn each. I’ve been hitting the law of exponentially diminishing returns pretty badly here in Chile – that learning a language to 95% is work but learning it to 98% is brutal. With Spanish, knowing just 2500 words will allow you to understand 95% of all speech and text. Getting to 98% comprehension requires learning an additional 25000 words.

In my case, I’m not yet solidly committed to Spanish as my dominant learned language. I have no idea what that will end up being, or even if there will be one. If, in the future, I get a promising opportunity that requires Spanish, I can get started on it with what I have now while I work further on those extra percentage points. But let’s say I take the time I would spend now to perfect Spanish and get 95% of a different language. My options now expand quite a bit. In my view, it’s probably better to have 90+% of a couple of languages than 99% of one, for the same amount of work.

3. I shouldn’t have studied at all. This, in hindsight, blows all other options out of the water. Since I don’t really need any of these credits, I could have avoided UAI/ISA and learned a whole heck of a lot more by taking that money and travelling/volunteering. Doing this offers a range and depth of experiences that is far greater than any study abroad program can touch. Call it minoring in life. A lot of content on this blog has already been dedicated to the topic, so we’ll leave it at that.

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It is what it is. Like I said, time’s not scarce. But… Weeze – I’m lookin at you son!

More Thoughts on Time

I’ve whined an aweful lot on this blog about time, probably as a result of suffering a year and a half of Michigan Engineering where every microsecond of every day counts (only slight exaggeration). I’ve stated before that I subscribe to the belief that time is your true wealth. The psychology of how we perceive time is interesting, and I had a breakthrough or two recently.

I was, ironically enough, sitting around playing Tetris on Monday night when I had this feeling of frustration wash over. I went out for a walk, which is my way of telling my subconscious: talk to me! It had some interesting things to say to me which changed how I view my time and my expectations. Four main points:

1. Time’s not scarce

2. You don’t have to do anything

3. When you remove all expectations, predictions and pressure, you multiply your capabilities

4. There’s nobody you need to justify yourself to

Let me explain.

First point. My world, like most Americans, is dominated by a sense of urgency. Stuff has to get done, in a certain order, as quick as possible. This is true in day to day routine as well as year to year. ‘Time’s not scarce’ refers to the big picture. The next couple of years for me look like this: Get through school, get internships and experience, pay down your debts, find a real job, get a life. The pressure I’m feeling to chew through all of this has been getting to me while I’m stuck here. But – here’s the interesting part. I know full well that there’s a lot of very worthwhile activities I could and should be doing with my time while I’m here. For the most part, I haven’t been doing them. I realized that my mind prioritizes blasting through schoolwork and the rest of the gig above pretty much all else. I haven’t gotten around to working on my projects because my internal checklist says ‘you still have to do school first, and you’re not’.

When I pretend that university life doesn’t exist; I’m coming home to nothing, no plan… I suddenly feel great about my time here. I immediately think of all the things that I could be doing, and actually want to do them rather than saying ‘I should.’ The anxiety just goes away.

The second point complements perfectly. I realized how much anxiety builds up in my mind about the things I SHOULD be doing with my time and my life. All the advice I’ve ever gotten from people and all the things I tell myself I should be doing build up into this great wall of anxiety. Take them all away, and I realize very clearly the things I WANT to be doing instead. Again, I’m not talking small picture like ‘I should be doing homework, but I want to go have fun’. Much bigger than that. We all say that we are in control of our lives, but most people still end up doing things with it they don’t really want to do. They do things that the ‘should’ do instead.

When I think about that, I realize that I want to do engineering. I’m studying engineering not because I should, but because I want to. I don’t think I’ve ever said it that outright and explicitly to myself before. It’s an empowering idea and it relieves a lot of anxiety. It’s not that I should be an engineer because I’m good at math and science and I like the challenges. It’s that I simply want to do it.

I also let myself say that I want to be an entrepreneur. I’ve been saying to myself that I should be an entrepreneur given the challenges and benefits and lifestyle and the fact that it gets me all kinds of excited. Instead of telling myself that, I just let myself gravitate towards it and realize that it’s something I want to do. Fortunately, I can work on that while I’m here. And when I temporarily de-prioritize engineering and school, I do it.

Moving on to the third point, which builds on the first two. I use a lot of shoulds when I prepare for a challenge. I build an expectation of results that, given my personality, tends to be really high. This is my old inhereted perfectionism illness. That, unfortunately, leads me to avoid things where I’m scared I won’t clear the bar. But more than that, it leads to significantly worse performance. It’s like playing goalie – if you expect perfection, you’re going to be a terrible goalie. I learned to deal with my perfectionism in sports, and I need to transfer that to other areas of interest as well, like speaking Spanish for example. I often won’t speak in class because I don’t want to sound like a gringo, and that’s detrimental. It’s probably no coincidence that my favorite class is the one where I’m forced to speak up anyways – Oral Expression. Practicing how to shut up perfectionism might be the most important thing I ever get out of playing sports.

The final point adds punch to the third. When I screw up and things turn south, I tend to rationalize like mad. That needs to stop. It needs to be replaced by ‘Yes, you screwed up (big time, perhaps), but you’re still plenty good enough’.

To summarize:

- Turning a blind eye to the future allow for making the best use of the present

- Justification for interests needs to be emotional rather than logical

- The best results happen when no results are forecasted

- Isolate internal worth from external results

Each of these reduces anxiety and gets the personal machine running much cleaner. I’ll be practicing these daily. With any luck, soon you won’t have to put up with any more complaints about wasting time. I’ll have to start looking for new things to whine about to keep interest up.

Saturday Stuff: Chile, Time, and the Internet

May 21 every year is literally designated Protest Everything You Hate About Chile day. I’m not kidding. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the biggest difference between Chile and say, Peru, is that attitude that pulses through the entire country. From my experience, Peruvians are awefully proud to be Peruvian. They will make sure you know that fact at every opportunity, and you’d better not contradict them. Especially in the poor areas in the south where I was, the country sometimes feels like it marches to the beat of it’s fists pounding it’s own chest. Chileans, in stark contrast, are quiet and dismissive and will take the opportunity to tell you why Chile sucks. They’re sarcastic, more cynical than is healthy, and generally much more my style. You can really taste the difference by spending any amount of time in both countries.

In any case, the police aren’t taking any crap today, so I’m stuck here for a bit. This post is a partial follow-up on the Wednesday Afternoon Rant, plus some other stuff going through my head and an excuse to catch up on picture posting.

Fact of the Day #1: In a recent informal but highly scientific poll, 8/9 other gringos in ISA agree with me in strongly wanting to go back to normal college life instead of continuing here, given the option.

My housemate Blake was the only exception, taking a very carefree stance. The most commonly cited reasons? 1. UAI is high school, and 2. I’m wasting a whole lot of time. The typical expat complaint list (miss your friends, your family, sick of spanish, etc.) consistently gets beat out by those two.

Conclusion #1: I’m not crazy.

Everything has been happening in reverse here in Chile with this group. From the outset, ISA tries to warn you about pity parties that gringos like to throw in the first few weeks where they just sit around and complain about the new culture and wish they were home rather than integrating as best as possible. For the first three months, almost none of that happened. Now all of the sudden, people are sick of the place. It’s not your typical definition of reverse culture shock, but it’s happening.

In response, we’re trying to be proactive about it. I started two new facebook groups – gringo eats! and Kick the Bucket (dammit). I should have done this a long time ago. gringo eats! is a place to organize restaurant trips and asados; Kick the Bucket (dammit) is an open ended bucket list of easy-but-very-worth-it things to do before leaving. I created a bucket list for myself before, but aimed a little too high (things like ‘go to cuba’ got stuck on there after a friend found the airline mistake fare of US$289 round trip santiago-havana. unfortunately, we never made it).

I also scored a gig along with a few other gringos as a general contributer to the English tourist site Eye on Vina. The founder moved on and left the site in control of a Colorado girl named Kayla, and she desperately needs help with it all. One of my friends does similar work with other, larger media outlets in print and online, and it looks like fun to me. I know I can write well enough to do it when I try. The website is flat broke (part of my job, along with Blake, is to run effective marketing on zero budget) so instead of getting paid, she promised a glowing recommendation. If I can use that to leg-up to a paying outlet later on, that would be beyond prime.

I wish this had all happened a little earlier, but so be it. I have a final note on wasting time that is going to wander a bit, but I need to write this down.

Fact of the Day #2: A recent informal but highly scientific study found that 91.61% of my time-killing activity takes place on my laptop. Of that, approximately 42.77% is spent playing FreeCell, Hearts or Tetris while listening to music; the remaining 57.23% is spent surfing news outlets (ESPN, various political sites, AlJazeera) or blogs (too many to list).

Fact of the Day #3: A recent informal but highly scientific study found that playing FreeCell, Hearts or Tetris for more than about 20 minutes a day is patently ridiculous, and spending more than 15 seconds per week on news outlets or blogs makes you angry and depressed.

Why? Because politics flat out sucks. Because industrialized food is poisoning you in more ways than you can count. Because misplaced corporate interests rule the world. Because dictators, disease and despair kill people. Because regardless of what you think about specific topics (global warming, nuclear energy, etc), there’s no doubt that our world craps on the planet on a daily basis in ways we all agree on (like dumping PCBs into rivers, burning rainforests or whatever else happens to be happening all the time). Because it just seems like the challenges are too big and too deep for us to solve.

But mostly, because there’s basically nothing I can do about it all.

I don’t like my solution, but it’s the only solution I’ve got right now.

Conclusion #2: Ignorance is bliss, or at very least, ignorance is better than prozac.

I’m turning it all off. Unplugging. Shutting down. For the sake of my happiness and sanity. For the sake of not letting ‘angry republican’ or ‘guilty liberal’ consume any more of my personality (I get both sometimes). I’m checking my email, my facebook, Matador Network and ESPN. When there’s more time to kill, I’ll start chugging through my Lord of the Rings books in Spanish and actually learn something. Or go for a run, or try to find a quiet spot in this house to meditate for a bit. If something important enough happens, I’ll find out about it somehow.

Comments? Do you have a better solution? How long do you think I'll last?

Finally, some (really old) picture zen for today, from my trip to the north back in March

A: Bizarre desert-worn quartz formations

B: the strikingly beautiful Valley of the Moon

C: I actually had a long layover in Japan on my way up

D: What's up dude? gotta love the Andes

E: Putre, one of my favorite towns in Chile. Good to be back on the altiplano

Campfire Stories!

Who doesn’t like a good campfire story? Back to travelling = back to storytelling. Pull up a stump and roast a marshmallow or two with me. This is a long one, but a good one.

High on the Chile Bucket List is ‘visit at least 3 more national parks’ for obvious reasons; this country is brimming with diverse and incredible landscapes (soon to be significantly less incredible if HidroAysen goes through, but that’s another story). So I picked a nearby spot, called a few people and organized a camping weekend.

We were leaving Friday morning. Thursday night at 10 pm, I get a call from my camping people – they had picked an entirely new spot and tripled the size of the group. So much for planning.

Regardless, I head to the bus stop bright and early at 8 am, like everybody agreed to, only to find zero out of the other six gringos. I had already bought my ticket, so I hopped on the bus and crossed my fingers that everybody would show up in Santiago. My phone had just ran out of minutes entirely, so I had no way to communicate with the others. Can you guess the theme of this trip yet?

Luckily, everybody met up eventually at the metro stop. We had to cross the entire city, right at morning rush hour, with a bunch of camping gear on the metro. The other Friday morning commuters weren’t the happiest looking Chileans I’d seen, but so be it.

On the flip side, we needed to stock up on food before heading out. Remembering the theme for the weekend, we broke up into three groups to buy food. Thus, we ended up with nearly three times what we needed, including… over 2.5 pounds of liquid caramel, nearly 5 pounds of sliced turkey, 4 pounds of rolled oats for oatmeal, plus many others (all to feed 7 people for 3 days… except after purchasing and leaving, one girl decided it was a good time to share the fact that she had already brought all the food she needed from home).

We leave Santiago by taking over a minibus headed for the hills. Most people are a little unhappy about the excess of food, so we shared two party bags of chips and a roll of cookies with the rest of the bus. We missed the next connection in podonk rural Chile, and would have had to wait over two hours for a shot at the next, so we paid off some locals to drive us up to our first site.

We posted up right next to a beautiful, deliciously cold glacial stream and went for a DIY hike up a nearby mountain. Later on, we set up camp. I brought a four person tent from home. We opened it, only to find that the tent had no poles. So four of us slept right outside on a tarp with no pads and no pillows. Hey, at least I had some sleep saved up from class last week.

The next day we intended to head a little further up the valley near a national park. We had no way of getting there, so we broke up into groups and tried to look friendly on the side of the road. Bret and I went first and hitched a ride in the back of a pickup. We got to the town, waited right alongside the road for a few hours and fished. On my first toss, I caught something huge that fought for nearly 15 minutes before snapping the line. After sitting around for another couple of hours, it was beginning to get dark and we were losing hope that the others would make it.

There was a small campsite in this town, so we pitched a tent. Nobody was at the office/shack. Later, somebody came and yelled at us for pitching a tent, and we had a little argument. Then, this guy changed his mind about us and invited us to take a walk. He showed us this little two bed A-frame hut that he owned and invited us to stay there. We couldn’t refuse.

We cooked some dinner and offered some to our host. He ate a little, and we made some small talk. He was an old dude, but a profilic mountaineer back in the day. He had every major peak in South America and Europe under his belt. He described how the bond between mountaineers was stronger than any other human relationship. Since his climbing days were over, nothing really matched up, so he lived alone with a crippled dog he called Pito (Spanish slang for marijuana).

Out of nowhere, he turned the conversation into a heavy spiritual discussion. He had once lived in the Vatican as a priest, then completely changed his views and now does the whole New Age spirituality thing head-on. We went to bed with our heads spinning in circles.

The next day, we tried to track down the others. There wasn’t much we could do unfortunately as the whole area had no cell coverage (as well as no internet or even electricity – just 60 miles outside of an enormous metropolis). Having no luck, we decided we might as well make something of the day and launched right into the national park.

It wasn’t a big park by any means, but it had all the essentials. A gorgeous valley with springs and rivers, wild horses and condors, capped off by an impressive mountain and glaciar system at the far end. The hike was about 10 miles round trip, rising about 2500 feet. The glaciars were accessible despite a very weak warning sign, so we headed up to check it out.

The front end of the glaciar was flat-out wild. The top of the ice was covered in rock and dirt, so it looked like ground except for the gaping entrance to an icy cave. It was everything you could want from an ice cave; crystalline icicles, layered wavy blue walls, a dripping stream and a ferocious echo. It actually went all the way through – it ended with an opening to the top of the glaciar. Constant falling rocks, slippery conditions and melting ice made it one of the most beautiful but naturally dangerous places I’d ever been.

We still hadn’t heard from or seen our friends by the next day, so we assumed they had turned back. We took the opportunity to outdo ourselves with an even more incredible hike. 17 miles through a different valley, vertical climb of about 4000 feet and featuring dinosaur bones, more towering Andes and a Hindu colorful-flag-mountain-shrine among other attractions. It was too long of a hike to complete before dark, but the moon was full and what was stunning by day was surreal by night.

The final day, we went fossil hunting. We both found a couple of old mollusks in the valley. I was working on a bit of a theory – the higher up the valley, the better the fossil hunting would go. I ended up giving up looking for fossils; eventually I just wanted to summit that dang mountainside and get a good look at the whole range. The climb was tough and getting tougher, but I was literally less than 100 feet from the summit… before finally giving in to that nagging little voice that says ‘hey you – don’t die!’ I gave up.

I stopped ascending, but quickly realized how big of trouble I had already gotten myself into. I was climbing a crowned ridge about 10 feet wide packed with crumbly, loose material everywhere and a brutal drop on either side. I panicked, talked some sense into myself, and slowly wriggled down like an inchworm. It took me a half hour to go about 50 feet, but I just kept going. Once finally off the ridge, I crabwalked it down the entire mountain face to try to avoid causing a rockslide. The two crazy dogs who followed me had just as much trouble. It was the most danger I’ve ever been in. Notice all the superlatives from this weekend? With the ice cave from the day before, that climb became yet another data point in the ‘in adventurous situations I am a serious danger to myself’ theory, which has by now more than enough data to be statistically significant. See also ‘spelunking in valley of the moon’ earlier this spring, among many others.

Its worth putting in a word about this town as well. Picture a classic Puritan settlement during fall in a temperate forest around the 1700s. That image should include farm animals, tall trees with piles of leaves blowing around, a small stone church on the top of a hill, plenty of cabins with smoke coming out of the chimney, stone walls here and there, etc. That place is our town – Banos Morales, Chile. Comically rustic and beautiful.

After finally getting off the mountain and meeting up with Bret, it was time to head out. We hitched a ride on a mining truck and slowly made it back to Valpo. With cell phone reception, it was time to place a few phone calls. Here’s what happened on the second day: Group number 2 hitched a ride with some clown who was convinced that Banos Morales was two hours north, not a half hour east. They ended up camping out around there before heading back. Group 3 actually made it to the real Banos Morales and incredibly slipped by us for two whole days, despite our search efforts and a local gringo alert we put out. We just missed them on the way in, in the national park, and then again on the way out. In such a tiny town, that was nearly impossible.

So that’s that. Going on the trip meant missing a little class including a quiz, but I think I had my priorities straight. I’ll still pass the class, and in exchange I got an bizarre and unbelievable weekend, a good story or two and some lessons on how not to plan a camping trip. With any luck, national parks numbers 2 and 3 to be crossed off will further the story…

Dude, your marshmallow is on fire.

First row: El Morado National Park, the end of the ice cave, Banos Morales and nearby mountain

Second row: Moon over a volcano, the only picture i managed to get on mount doom before descending

New Crap

Well I suppose its way past time I post something up here again, maybe I can scare the cockroaches away and get this blog back to life. I expected to take a little time off; I felt like LWT was getting old, and anyways I was running out of things to say. I never intended to take this long, but I would try to write something interesting and come up empty time and time again. But, happily, that's officially over. I wrote quite a bit on disparate topics, so I'll post it in pieces rather than one long bomb. So here goes part 1.

Life, and UAI's New Castle in the Sky

Well, well.

It’s another beautiful Sunday here in Vina, clear skies, mid-70s and a light breeze coming off the bay. Before the break, word got out around the house that I kept a blog (at one point, that is), so Blake and Cata (fluent in English after spending two high school years in kiwiland) read my Wednesday Afternoon Rant. The response, basically, is that I need to chillll out. Right on, people. So, in my view, I wimped out and life has become a little better. I lifted my expectations considerably. If waste way too much time, only end up getting to know a couple of Chileans, and get out with a functional level of Chilean Spanish, so be it. I made a couple of really good American friends, spent time on the Pacific, grilled steaks on rooftops, practiced karate, travelled to a number of chill destinations, wandered through otherworldly landscapes, and had plenty of experiences I could never have had at home. Really, what’s to complain about? I apologize for being obnoxious.

Also, as if in response to my complaints about UAI, the management decided over the weekend that they’d had enough of being stuck in residential Vina and moved campuses. It basically means I have to get up an hour earlier than normal, but at least the university is growing up (a little bit). The new gig is an absolute castle in the sky. It’s located on the very top of the tallest hill in Vina, which is quite a ways up, overlooking the whole city and bay area. The complex is shockingly futuristic in appearance, playing right into UAI’s image self-consciousness. There are four main buildings, made of minimalist white concrete, glass, and black steel. Each is connected by a small web of skyways and overhangs, surrounded by forest and a single gravel road entrance. Almost all of the parking is underground, built into the hillside. The inside of the building complex is even stranger. There’s absolutely no regularity in the floor plans; every little cluster of rooms is different than the ones above it and next to it. There’s also the numbering system; I was on the third floor, went up two sets of stairs, and was still on the third floor. What? To top it off, there’s exactly one normal staircase in the entire place. The rest? A series of eerily Hogwarts-like, criss-crossing, sloped walkways that go off in all directions and all angles. In all, it’s far and away the most bizarre campus I’ve ever seen. Later this week I’ll bring my camera so you can see for yourself.

At least it feels marginally more like an actual campus, being connected and separated from the rest of town. They extended library closing time from 8 until 10 pm (ooh! look at all the students pulling 1/4-nighters!) . We also get buses that run every 45 minutes or so. Depending on the time of day there are three different routes, which all end up within five blocks of each other. I think they were pretty proud of all the developments, which is why they rushed us into the new campus in the middle of the semester (some buildings aren’t even done yet). I’m proud of them too. I think UAI just passed third grade as a university. The curriculum going forward includes getting a computer lab, getting classroom labs, building a gymnasium, creating a mascot, writing a fight song and starting a sports team or two, organizing the online systems mess, offering extracurriculars like music, paving that gravel road, and most importantly creating a student housing community. I know, I’m picky. Progress is progress; I’ll take what I can get.

... more crap to come, after the break