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 | 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...
by Eileen | Dec 26, 2012 | chile, language, travel
¡Fuera! is what you shout at a dog (if you don’t shout ¡Sale!) when you want him to go outside. Fuera (no exclamation points) is also what we say when it turns out you aren’t, or won’t be where you normally are. BTW, this is about fuera, which is...
