Otro Pisco Sour, Por Favor

July was a stressful month, but luckily I scheduled time to enjoy the wonderful things of life and new cultures. What about you? Any new foods or friends in your life?

Thanks to those of you who joined the You Have Homework community this past month. ¡Bienvenid@s!

This month’s newsletter includes:

📬 Receiving mail in South America

🎉 Fiestas Patrias in Peru

🫠 Another imperfect vs. preterite confusion

✒️ Part one of my Chile travel guide

📬 TL;DR – Pay extra for guaranteed delivery from abroad

I’ve got to tell you that I’m fed with getting mail in South America. The last straw happened last week, and I’ll try to make this story short.

For the second time, I had new credit cards sent to my mail service in the US, but this time I had them send the package to my Mail Boxes Etc. address in Miami, instead of mailing it directly to Chile. Because it got lost the first time around. 

Well, maybe not lost because apparently a flat envelope going through customs in Chile takes almost two months! Much worse than Colombia or Argentina. I found this out because I had already departed the country when the envelope finally arrived at the MBE store in Santiago. I paid them to forward it to Lima and hoped for the best.

My estimated delivery was that same week, but for whatever reason was held up in Miami, Florida, the United States of America. What?! After reaching out to customer service, I was informed that DHL didn’t operate flights between Chile and Peru – can you believe that?

While I am happy I was able to conduct all this troubleshooting in Spanish, I couldn’t help but wonder what is going on down here? If it was cost-effective to create a network between the countries in the region, DHL would do that.

However, I wondered if they purposefully delayed shipment because of the holidays…

🎉  ¡VIVA LA PATRIA!, ¡VIVA LA LIBERTAD!, ¡VIVA LA INDEPENDENCIA!

I had some luck with my travel timing, because I am in Lima, Peru now, where they just celebrated their Independence Day. It’s been a good week to learn about the country’s culture, and a lot of businesses put up decorations to celebrate. 

One such sign quoted a criolla song called Y se llama Perú by Arturo "Zambo" Cavero y Oscar Aviles:

Con P de patria

La E del ejemplo

La R del rifle

La U de la unión

At an event I attended in an artisan market in my neighborhood, this song brought tears to the eyes of a few citizens. If you weren’t in town for the holiday, maybe you should schedule a dinner out for some ceviche, causa, or their famous style pollo a la brasa to celebrate.

🫠 I accept I’ll keep making mistakes with the imperfect tense

This sentence from Malas Mujeres by María Hesse threw me for a loop:

Años después, él decidía volver porque no conseguía olvidarla y ponía pata arriba la vida que su exmujer había logrado rehacer casándose con otro hombre.

First, I had to confirm my suspicion on what poner patas arriba meant. But after reading the sentence again I wondered why the imperfect was used – as a non-native speaker, I would have defaulted to the preterite tense because it seemed like a definitive action.

Looking up the rules again online (probably for the millionth time), I think I have a bit of a better understanding. In this paragraph, the author is describing the background of the movie Son de mar, and was using that example about how “bad mothers” are defined in fiction.

In an article published by Mango Languages, they have a section titled, “Describing the background context or circumstances of an action”. OK, that makes a bit of sense because she is setting up the context for the outcome of the couple (spoiler alert: it’s not good). The article also has the section “Mental states or mental actions in the past”. I'm already comfortable defaulting to “no sabía…” but now I see why decidir and conseguir (olvidar) could make sense in this rule. 

And here comes a reminder to not fully rely on a translation app. When I reversed the English output of the original sentence in DeepL, I got this:

While this might not be fully incorrect, it gives us a good lesson. We might not always get the answer to “why did they say XYZ like that?” but it’s good to track the different construction surprises you come across.

✒️ In case you missed it

I finally published the first part of my guide to traveling in Chile, and it’s all about 11 Things To Know Before You Travel to Chile. You can read it for free through this friend link from Medium.

Have you been to or do you plan on visiting this beautiful country? There are surprises and culture shocks everywhere, and I hope this light-hearted guide will prepare you for your trip.

And if you go to either Chile or Peru, ask your new friends which country invented pisco!

😩😅🥃

My July was filled with both stressful and celebratory moments. Let’s hope for more peaceful moments in August!

¡Hasta el próximo!

Chloe

Founder, You Have Homework