by Eileen | Oct 7, 2013 | chile, feria, food
Overheard at the Ñuñoa Feria in Santiago, Chile from Eileen Smith on Vimeo. If you’ve ever walked around in a public place, letting the words wash over you, you know some voices carry more than others. And if you happen to be in a foreign country, or the...
by Eileen | Sep 28, 2013 | chile, language, meta
In my last post, I posted an audioclip of a man pretending to speak English. Several people I know, and even some I don’t told me how much they enjoyed it. So far, it’s going strong at 269 listens, which is a lot of people listening to someone speaking...
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 | Aug 21, 2013 | chile, travel
Cuando estás en la naturaleza, un bicho puede picarte, un león puede comerte, y hacerte desaparecer When you’re out in nature, a bug could bite you, a lion could eat you and make you disappear. These are the lines of a song that was going through my head...
by Eileen | Jul 30, 2013 | chile, language
I was recently describing someone I know to a friend of mine, and used the expression “she’s an odd duck,” an English expression that is kind of playful, like, she’s peculiar, but not a bad person. I like her, but she’s not precisely what...
by Eileen | Jul 24, 2013 | chile, home
Once upon a time, when I used to live and move around the United States, I spent a weekend at a retreat center on the Oregon Coast. Here I ate vegan food and learned about the word “gift” used as a verb. It was the kind of mellow, wood-paneled place where...
