And now for the new media portion, followed by a nursery rhyme that’s so cute, you’ll want to learn it, even if you don’t speak Spanish.

Media; my cryptic talk about the media was about a couple of intereviews with El Mercurio about being a “famous” (?) travel blogger.

1. Little magazine article in the Sunday El Mercurio travel magazine here.

2. The film version, which features not a small number of some of my more recent favorite pictures of Chile, here.

The feedback has been lovely, with the issue of whether or not I sound Chilean center stage. “Your accent is slight,” they say or “You’re more Chilean than beans” (this is s compliment, really). I still hear my accent, of course, and my goddaughter (age 6) recently pointed out a few pronunciation snafus that I still have. But still, it’s nice to know that I sound more like a person who lives here and less like a person who doesn’t, since that is actually the case.

However, no matter how long I live here, I’ll still never have grown up here. And while I’ll have five little monkeys jumping on the bed, or I like to eat apples and bananas as cutesy childhood songs, Chileans have elephants swinging on a spiderweb.

Un elefante (an elephant)
se balanceaba (was swinging)
sobre la tela de araña (on a spiderweb)
como veía, que resistía (when he realized that it was strong enough)
fueron(!) a llamar otro elefante (he went to call another elephant)

And the elephants keep piling on, and the numbers go up.

And though it’s not part of the fabric of my youth, if I want to surprise anyone around me, should the song happen to come up (as it did at a concert I went to recently), I can sing along. Though then they’ll talk about the issue of whether the last line has the swinging elephant calling elephant or a comrade and I remember that I am, in actual fact, significantly less Chilean than beans. But at least I have a sweet song about elephants (which I now cannot get out of my head). Oh, and bit of snazzy news coverage.

:::::::::::::

fueron is grammatically incorrect for the first version as it is the third person plural. It should be “fue,” but, probably for simplicity’s sake, it is often sung with fueron for all versions, even the first one.