BLOGGING AT FACSO

This year I started studying at University of Chile. When the year started, they told me about an English course. It was obligatory and had 4 levels, each level last one semester.

I started at level 3 so in this year I should be finishing the course.

I can say that I thought it was a good idea to have this kind of courses because we could dominate English, which is necessary for any career.

But I was in a mistake. I still think it is necessary, but it hasn't help too much for reading text of Anthropology because it is not focused on each career.

However, if you ask me if I have learned English: I do. I just don’t think that I am totally prepared for being a bilingual anthropologist.

But it has not finished for me, because I pretend to keep studying English out of the course. If you are wondering how, I can say:  in part reading text in English and in part, speaking in English with people who know more than me.

Using blogs was funny, although I’m not very comfortable sharing all my hobbies and thoughts. But I’ve progressed in my way of communicating in English (at least I feel like that, I hope I really did).

I think that most of all, I need to improve my way of speaking in English because It is difficult for me to talk even in Spanish. I use to be confused about words and its meanings. But it is something that, like I said before, I’m going to keep learning.

2 0 1 4

It is common to make a recount when the year is finishing. Today we are just begging the month number eleven, but we are close to finish classes, so it is a good moment to make it.

This year has been very different from the rest of my life because it is my first year at the University and I had to move to another city and start knowing people again. There have been a lot of changes in my life, some of them have been good, and others weren’t good at all.

 So, this year I had to move to another house twice. I started January living in Talca, as always, but in February I was living in Rancagua; by April I was living in Santiago. It was difficult to learn living in other places but now I can look at the past and say: I’ve survived.

This situation has been a little bad because I don’t like too much living in a bedroom of other house, I feel like I interrupt their life and I can’t feel that room like ‘home’.

 But there is a good part too. In Santiago I’ve met nice people; in fact, I can say that this is the first time that I really like my friends. I used to meet people from my school, but I never really felt like I was in front of the funniest persons of the life. Now I do.

So I can say that this year I learned living under bad –not the worse- conditions at the same I made good friends.

However, there is still year and there are other things that rest to do, for example, I have like 500 pages for read before the year is over.

The Canterville Ghost

“The Canterville Ghost” is a short story written by Oscar Wilde. It is about the typical ghost who lives in a mansion and everybody is scare of him, so the mansion is frequently vacant.

Well, the story start changing when a family buys the big house, the ghost try hardly to scare them, but he can’t. The children more than scare, are laughing of the ghost; so as the father.

The ghost falls in a deeply depression. The woman, pained, helped to the ghost to find the peace in the dead.

I really like this story because it combines the typical horror story about ghosts and the comedy, but at the end it offer a strange way to became a happy person.

Besides, I have to say that I like Wilde’s writings in general, so this is just an example that I chose because it is a movie too and also a song.

The song that I really like too is sung by Sui Generis – an argentine duet- and talks about the moment that you realize you are being ignored by people. They ignore you because they are busy with their works and other kind of preoccupations.  

The relation of the story and the song is that in both, the main character is invisible for the rest of the people. Besides it coincides in the benefits of being a person who knows that is free because anyone is watching at him or her.

  Now please, read a part of the song (I traduce it, so I don’t hope it transmits all the meaning it has je je) :

“Nevertheless, I’m discarded,

And no one can remember me,

I’m walking thought the people

Just like the Canterville Ghost”

green people

A green person is someone who cares about the enviroment and the treatment that people have with it.

It is a practice about respect and equality with  nature, it is about knowing we need each other.

So it involves different practices which we can learn at home and school. For example, when my parents or teachers ttold me not to trash on the plants or when they made me take care of a bean, they were teaching me to be related with  nature.

Besides, at school we learn about the consequences of 'not been green' which can be the acid rain or greenhouse efect. The greenhouse efect can be good until it becames into global warming.

But it is hard to being green when there is easier to not being one, for example, recyclingis very easy, but I'm not very accustomed to do it, so I don't recycle too much.

Another way of being green is not using a car for transport, you can use a bike or you own legs, in my case, I prefer walking anyway I go.

I considere myself someone who cares about the enviroment but I haven't join to a organization to save the planet because I don't think it works that way. What I would like to do is to take advantage to the school by teaching more about the dependence that people have from earth, so we can take care naturally.

I think we have all forget this point. It is necesary to reduce our carbon footprint.

FIELD WORK

Hello everybody, today I'm mean to talk about the field work I’ve realized during my career. 

But first, I'm going to explain a little what a field work is for an anthropologist. 

A field work is when you go where you are going to work, because anthropologist study different cultures and you cannot do that by sitting on a chair. You must go and live the experience of that culture to understand the group.

And here goes a little of history of Anthropology: there was a time in which people wrote a lot of books about exotic groups. They made different theories of them, etc. But there was a problem, they never even visit them! They didn’t know these groups until Malinowski – a famous anthropologist- inaugurated the field work.

In my experience, field work is the most exciting part of the job. I haven’t had too much yet, but I have made short field works in Santiago.

The best part of it is the moment you are there and you see a different world, and people living in it. That is fantastic.

But of course, there are always good things and bad things. I could say that there is something I don’t like too much and is the officiousness; I feel it is like invading people’s life.

 Maybe that’s the biggest difficult that I see.

For example, I remember once I had to observe people in the fair and they looked me back very angry or wondering about my behavior. That’s normal; I was in the fair and wasn’t buying or having lunch. I was walking and looking people. That’s rare.  

My future job

Hello everybody, today I'm supposed to talk about my future job - as you can see in the title-. But I have a small problem with that, because I don't know if I really want to work.

It may seems funny or typical, anybody wants to wake up at six o clock for do the exactly same thing every single day. Besides I don't like what a job represents, not it status, not its way of paying, not anything.

But anyway, we are living this life and I guess I'll have to work some day, so if I must choose, I would say that I prefer working outdoors. Closed places makes me mad. I like more living different experiences, and I think, working outdoor may offer more options of experiences.

Also, I would like to travel, to know other places seems perfect for the experiences I was talking about. Besides, it is perfectly related with being an Anthropologist (who I hope to became). By travelling, you can know other cultures and live other ways to live. It is basically what I would like to do (just not as a job).

I would like to learn what other people know, different people, who I'm not going to meet if I don't travel a lot.

So I want to learn forever, I hope that the fact of need a job for living doesn't mean I have to stop that. 

Cultural Shock

Since an anthropologist point of view, a cultural shock could be a person who leaves his or her reality and normal life to get into other one. Or people who meet other different people; this would be a shock for both groups and could finish in other cultural group different from the previous.

I could say that I suffered a kind of cultural shock because I was born in Talca, then I lived in Antofagasta and Rancagua. Now I am living in Santiago. In every city I have seen different persons.
 It is true that in every places are people of all kind, but it is also true than there is a seal of culture on each city.

It is hard to suffer a cultural shock because you are not pretty sure of how you are supposed to act in a specific situation.

For example, the transport is different in every place. In Talca I can take busses until 10 o’clock, after that you must take a different kind of transportation (a more expensive one), in Rancagua any one is very expensive and there are few busses. In Santiago, there are busses at any hour.

You could think, then, Santiago is better, ¡but it has strange circuits! I’m trying to get used into their rounds, but it is very hard. Maybe it is because Santiago is so much bigger than Talca or Rancagua. 

Anyway, I am pretty sure I will leave this place to suffer another cultural shock again.