I knew things weren’t going to be the same in Chile. That was the idea–so Ryan and I could live and work in another part of the world and grow stronger for it. I also expect this experience–its challenges as much as its joys–to make me a better writer, a better person. And while you may be able to (with planning) hop a plane and wake up in another season and time zone, I’m realizing it takes much longer than an overnight flight to move abroad.

There’s the pre-moving one might expect: calls to banks, medical records to pick up, vaccines to get, visas to acquire, netflix accounts to suspend, and maybe a language to start learning. You arrive, and there’s a whole new country to tackle with its slightly or drastically different ways. For example, a slight difference is that milk isn’t found in the refrigerator section of the store. It’s on the shelf next to the eggs. Yes, the eggs. A drastic one is that many billed services require third party verification, so yay for standing in line for an hour and half to pay the gas bill!). You follow.

I know things will get easier as I feel my way along these new walls, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a few more things I’m getting used to…

1. The aforementioned milk. No one-gallons here, so you buy a great bit box at a time if you can get to the Jumbo (kinda like Costco) or you buy three one-liters at a time each time you walk to the store.

 

2. Plastic bags. They love them here! They will put your five-liter water bottle that comes with a plastic handle (see next point) in not one, but doubled plastic bags for you! I have my reusable grocery bags here with me to limit our household footprint, but I just can’t get my head around it. It’s like coming across styrofoam. I shudder, not out of judgment, but just because it’s been so ingrained in me to head plastic off at the pass least I contribute further to the huge plastic islands floating around in our oceans!

3. The water. It’s not recommended that you immediately drink the tap (though we’ve been making ice-cubes out of it and we’re just fine). While we investigate water filters, we resort to giant plastic bottles and the recycling fanatic in me cringes again. While recycling is well established here, chugging our way through at least three of these empty vessels a week just makes me feel like a bad person. Surely, we’re going to be able to construct our own two-story life-raft by the time we leave or I can get my hands on a Britta.

 

4. Services enacted in the States (i.e. converting from a post-pay to a pre-pay plan with a leading wireless carrier) may be impossible to resolve abroad. With said example, after an hour on a Skype call with said wireless carrier’s customer service representative (bless her heart), it turns out you can’t monitor your balance through your current online account, no matter what that nice man at the store said, but to set up a new account, all you have to do is enter the temporary passcode that was just texted to you.

“But I can’t check text messages.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m in Chile!”

Yes, 45 minutes into the call, this was still unclear. You gotta laugh at this point. Because there is no workaround for the auto-generated texted temporary password (for my own protection, of course), this gets added to a new list I have going of “Things To Take Care Of When I’m Back in the States.”

5. Garbonzo beans. I know, I can’t get enough of talking about how much I miss hummus. Well, I’m on my way to success. I found this beautiful bag of garbonzos in the raw! Stay tuned as I undertake a two-day hummus-making mission! Right after I hunt down some tahini!

 

I know it’s not about finding in Chile exactly what I would in California. The growth is going to be hard-earned, as I explain to a woman in Alabama that I can’t check text messages in Chile, as I boil beans, and as I brave the water in many ways. I’m clearly in the Negotiation phase of Culture Shock (between Honeymoon and Adjustment), which hits a few weeks in (bingo). As in, “I will love you unconditionally, Chile, if I can just take this hummus with me.” They say I only need 6-12 months for Adjustment to set it, so bear with me.