by Eileen | Jun 20, 2016 | chile, food, haha, language
Fishing with peas. You wouldn’t think you could. I have never known anyone who has. But for a long time I was convinced I’d met someone who had done just that. Once upon a time, when Eileen was just a fairly beginning Chilean Spanish speaker, she was in a...
by Eileen | Jun 1, 2014 | bicycle, chile, feria, food
My new upstairs neighbors have given me a gift, with which they have occasionally taken away my sleep. They start riotously laughing sometimes at 7:30 in the morning, on you know, a Saturday. This, as you might expect, wakes me up. And you would think that after the...
by Eileen | Sep 15, 2013 | chile, language
There’s this thing that happens quite a lot in Chile, when people hear an English speaker speaking Spanish, they respond, usually among their group, not to the foreigner in question, by exaggerating an English/American/gringo accent in Spanish. You know, the one...
by Eileen | Jun 1, 2013 | chile, health, photography
I’m endlessly fascinated by language, especially as spoken by Chileans. I haven’t taken nine years (oh hell, when did that happen?) to think about another language like I have Spanish, and I find certain contrasts in what I consider to be formality, odd....
by Eileen | Mar 8, 2013 | chile, language
My efforts to speak the best possible Spanish (for me) are far from over, and I just want to think a little bit here about the word effort. Last night I was at a photo exhibit launch at the improperly named “Mall Sport,” which should be called “the...
