www.thegilmours.co.uk

Although still very busy!

Doug here. This is the first week when i’m actually facing the prospect of boredom unless i find work!

Rachel’s sister, Kim and her boyfriend, Chris, left last week as Rachel and myself were recovering from a cold and a dose of typhoid, respectively! Rachel left to Paranal on saturday morning. We enjoyed our last evening together by taking a trip to the Irish Bar and the cinema (to see a film called Millions, 2004).

This week, i’m applying for jobs and have more spanish lessons with a teacher from church, called Noemi. She is great- she works so hard and prepares so much for each class! I’m feeling quite confident about my spanish now- I can see that it has improved a lot recently and that I am able to use a lot more tenses. But I still need to use more verbs (I think i just forget at the time). So tonight i’m hoping to go to spanish-english conversation practice in a local cafe, called, ironically, the English Reader.

I’ve also found some temporary unpaid work to keep me occupied- the church needs a new webmaster and a gringo friend has introduced me to an english teaching institute that requires gringos for conversation classes rather than teaching. I don’t want to teach english at all, but I realise that lots of people are keen to learn, so this seems like a good half-way house, especially since it is with intermediate/advanced students who require business english.

…I asked in Spanish.

Paraphrasing a little…
“Do you want the dark variety (called Bock), the light one (called, rather unimaginably, Light), or the near-as-damn-it-English Ale (called Torobayo)?” came the reply from the waitress in a funky bar in Vina del Mar.

“What?” I said in my polite spanish. “Oh, Torobayo please”.

“Pally Ally?”, she confirms with me.

“What?” I said again in disbelief.

Yes, that’s right. Kunstmann Ale, possibly the finest (or only) product to come from Valdivia, about 12 hours south-west of Santiago, has a variety of Ale called Pale Ale. And the Chileans pronounce it Pally Alley!

Scandelous. “Escandeloso!” (in spanish). Maybe I should stick to being a stupid Gringo- if I just ask for a Pale Ale in english in future I won’t run the risk of asking for a pint of Pally Alley in Britain one day!

At 4.30am on Thursday 13th April, I woke up startled to what I thought were the sprinklers in the garden of the nearby block of flats. But the sound of water got louder and louder until it dawned on me that it was very early in the morning, still very dark outside and actually raining! Pouring!

I got up to see this amazing thing. Since arriving in Chile in December it has not once threatened to be humid, let alone rain. I stood out on our balcony just watching the rain pour down, filling the streets with black or grey dusty, oily water. The passing cars seemed to make such a lot of noise and spray. It was a strange sensation of being back home in the UK! I don’t think i’ve experienced that smell of warm, fresh, wet air since St. Lucia in November last year.

I was beginning to wonder if it would ever rain here! With most people back from holiday now, the santiago smog has gradually worsened again. And the cool afternoon winds appeared to have decreased, leaving the city in a kind of limbo, a dusty, oily, dry one. The mornings and evenings were getting colder but this was not accompanied by rain. Until now.

They say in Santiago that it will always rain on Good Friday. Indeed, most Chileans, on this national holiday, plan to stay in their bed, feeling miserable, knowing that it will rain. I guess that suits the Catholic Good Friday feeling of uugghhhh and thoughts of arrrghhhh.

They were right- it always does rain on Good Friday…it did again this year. But I kind of enjoyed defying the tradition of feeling miserable by welcoming the refreshment of rain, standing on the balcony in my PJs chuckling at the mere sight of water falling from the sky for the first time in exactly 4 months and 14 days! What a sight for the chileans, I thought. But there weren’t many around at 4.30am.

Next morning, you’d never have thought it had rained. No indication whatsoever, except for the clearer, smogless view of the mountains.

Kim, Chris, Rachel and myself prepared to leave the city for the Easter weekend. We went armed with raincoats just in case. We didn’t need them. No surprises there.

Hi all, sorry we’ve not blogged for ages! To summarise, we’ve been lazy, tired or ill. Or just busy entertaining our recent guests, Rachel’s sister, Kim and her boyfriend Chris. They were with us for more than 2 weeks and left on tuesday past. It was BRILLIANT! to have them to stay, to chat in english and to take a small three day trip to the coast.

On our wee trip west, three highlights were…. giant starfish in a rockpool at Cachagua, pelicans catching and eating fish guts (nice) in a place called Con-Con (great name huh?) and two giant tarantula spiders in a National Park. As we kept saying to each other (from the Fast Show)- BRILLIANT!

Rachel leaves to Paranal tomorrow for another 10 days. So i’m now required to leave for romantic dinner for two followed by a trip to the cinema. Ciao muchachos y muchachas.

Last night, I met with our friends Paul and Joyce Jeffers and their son, Gabriel for dinner! It was great to see friends, speak english to native speakers and have a bit of “home” chat! Welcome to Chile guys! We know its going to be a great adventure for you as it has for us! But you won’t regret it!

They arrived in Chile on thursday for Paul to start a year-long contract based in Antofagasta but working at the Paranal Observatory. He is responsible for getting a construction project back on target there… and will work up the mountain in 6 day shifts. Joyce will be holding the fort and looking after Gabriel in Antofagasta. She also hopes to study textile designs in Chile while she is here (she formerly worked at Edinburgh Art School).

The story of our meeting each other in Edinburgh is one of divine coincidence. I started a spanish course at the University of Edinburgh last June and, in the second lesson, we were asked why we wanted to learn spanish. When Joyce explained that she was moving to Chile, my ears picked up and my head lifted! Que? Porque? She didn’t explain why. So it came to my turn in the class and I said I was moving to Chile too… because my wife was an astronomer.

We spoke afterwards and it emerged that Paul was working at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, where Rachel was completing her PhD at the time. Indeed, Rachel knew that she would be working at Paranal by this point, so there was a good chance they may cross paths in her new workplace, despite being 12,000 miles from Edinburgh!

In addition, I knew immediately that Joyce was a Christian (funny how Christians can discern and identify another Christian so quickly!). So we also shared church connections!

So, here we are, almost 9 months later, in Chile together, facing the challenges of setting up home, phone, family life, making new friends, learning another language and joining a christian community! Its great to have christian friends here in Chile, even better to have Christian friends from the UK in Chile!

Que buenissimo! Que rico! I’ll leave Joyce to work out what that means!