Meeting, Greeting, Studying

It’s been a pretty busy week and I can only access the internet either from the computer lab or an area near my roommate’s desk, so I haven’t posted for a while. Now I have to recap everything that happened since Monday.
On Tuesday, we went around and met all the important officers around here including the Superintendent and his Deputy. Meeting with the Superintendent was a pretty high profile affair. We had to have our pants pressed at the cadet laundry service before we could go down and see him. When we went down to his office, the school photographer was there, ready to take pictures of us meeting the Superintendent, who is a Colonel in the Chilean Army. We filed in one after the other and stood at attention. The photographer took pictures as the Supe shook each of our hands. He welcomed us to Chile and asked each of us how our Spanish was. I didn’t understand the question at first (indicative of the answer to his question), but eventually figured out what he was saying. While we were shaking hands and trying to be as formal and serious as possible, a stereo was playing “All You Need Is Love” in the background. Chileans seem to love American music, even if they can’t understand all the words. My roommate will play anything from Blink-182 to Britney Spears to the Halo theme song.
Wednesday we started classes. I have all the same classes as my West Point classmate, Antonio. We started off by heading to the library for a class that only meets on Friday. After figuring that out, we screwed around until we had to go to Political Science. I didn’t understand almost anything the teacher said, but the students told me that they didn’t understand him either. That day we had to go to sports for the afternoon. I wanted to do swimming, but since the pool is broken due to the earthquake in Concepcion, I decided to go to Judo instead, figuring that it’s never a bad idea to learn a martial art. Some of the student’s took time to teach Jordan and I some of the basics of Judo since we are pretty far behind. On the other hand, the instructor obviously did not want us to be there. One Chilean cadet asked me “What are you doing here man? Why aren’t you swimming?” I responded that the pool is broken. If someone wanted to do intramural swimming at West Point, but didn’t know how to swim, I’d volunteer to teach them. That’s all I’ll say about that.
Thursday and Friday were similar in that we kept up our routine of eating breakfast, going to class, eating lunch, going to class and eating dinner. All three of us had our PE class both days, which consisted of at least 6 miles of running on the first day and running with weightlifting on the second day. Although I’m still sore, I’m looking forward to improving my running ability. The Chileans smoked us on the run, but when it came to weightlifting, we had them beat. We’ll have to keep supplementing our diets with hot dogs at their firstie club if we don’t want to lose weight though.
Friday night we headed over to my roommate’s apartment to hang out and then go to a nightclub. We had a good time talking, alternating between practicing Spanish and teaching English. After midnight we drove over the club and somehow managed to get in free. Some interesting things about Chilean nightclub are as follows. First, when we got there the girls were all in the middle dancing with each other and the guys were all on the outside dancing with their friends. There was almost no interacting between the two as far as I could tell. Eventually, more people started showing up and that brings us to odd thing number two. The girls didn’t seem to want to dance with guys. I must have approached about 50 different groups of girls between the two nights we were there and only ended up dancing with two or three girls. It’s possible that I have bad game. It’s also possible that I’m missing some key cultural component. Either way, I’ve got to figure out how this works. We left around 5:00 AM and came back to the school.
Saturday, we ate breakfast and then slept until about 3:00 PM. We then headed over to the mall and ate at this nice steakhouse. The food was good, but pretty expensive. We also gave our waiter way more of a tip than he should have gotten, because we got confused with the pesos. That night, we first went to my roommate’s apartment, then to another person’s apartment then to the club for another night similar to the first.
This morning, we woke up for lunch and celebrated Independence Day by watching a Chinese kung fu movie and eating at Pizza Hut. I think we’re having a little bit of trouble adjusting to Chile’s culture, but hopefully we’ll get used to it.