Bingology - BingoBoingo's Blog

And the fruit of the first telephone trámite has arrived:

In spite of long hold times and the frustration of having to explain Gringo culture over the phone, UTE managed to get the power turned on within their stated window. Granted the install window was the entirety of business hours today.

Meanwhile the short, easy in person trámite at a retail location to get a net connection so far has only resulted in day one of the quoted three day window to recieve a phone call about scheduling the actual installation to pass without movement.

The short in person trámite to acquire a surface to sleep on, this trámite for comparison was not with one of the official monopolies, resulted in a 5 hour long delivery window for Thursday.

Smaller items are gradually finding their way here as well. An electric kettle, the peculiar sort of football scarf used for cheering during the game and choking out opposing fans after a loss, miscellaneous tools, and a small mountain of microfiber rags used to pad more the important items during my immigrant voyage have made it as well.

The a deposit was made with the Guarantee agency last week and the process of turning the deposit into a certificate of Guarantee is en tramité. Today is a holiday, but I have been unable to determine its name. Tomorrow the national team plays a game starting at noon local time, which is worse than a holiday. This means either Thursday is the optimistic estimate for new news, but la semana que viene is a possibility.

So far long the way:

• 10,000 pesos (315 USD) were placed to take the apartment off the market, credits towards first's month rent
• ~45,000 pesos (1420 USD) were placed with the Garantee club
• Before approaching the Guarantee club a bunch of certificates were generated for my application. Certificates which also make Migracciones happy as the residency process proceeds.
• Changing various registrations made in my passport after landing to the Cedula has consumed a substantial amount of time as well.
• The number of people using the hostel as a long term residence has increased from my singular self to five people. Three of the newcomers are fine. One is an absolute piece of trash that doesn't understand boundries, and if his or my presence continue to overlap in the hostel... It is very likely whether he understands threats will be tested.
• Construction has thrown the Cowork into disarray. The sound of "todo bein" and gossip is still less tolerable than power tools. The local work ethic is such that there is very infrequently any actual construction noise. Instead there's a bunch of bitching about construction noise that isn't actually happening.
• All of the paper shuffling and persistent vermin really has me wishing for a place to hang a whiteboard. A place where I can get hours, plural without the local noise polution.

Having lived more than 6 continuous months in a Spanish speaking country, my Spanish has improved immensly, but in my everyday life it is hard to feel that it has happened. In March I went to Migracciones for a tramité my progress was substantially aided by making eyes at the girl behind the desk flying the bureaucracy. I was functional, but only to a point. This month in the process of securing a door I can lock and wall to hang a whiteboard, I have been corralling the various moving Latino parts of the process exclusively in Spanish. I have still been running the papers I have signed in the process past the Venezolana during lessons after I sign them for my own safety, but the temptation to bring a tag along to meetings hasn't been present.

When viewed the apartment which is now en tramité, the kind girl offered to speak in English. I employed the trick I am every more practiced in where in three to four speaking lines I shift from English to Spanglish to Spanish, and their own mental inertia deprives them of the opportunity to practice English. This is the polite way I defuse the local anglophone fetishists from profiling me as a free chance to practice English.

The less polite way is I indicate their accent in English is unintelligible. It rarely is, and there is more resistance to this avenue. It tends to be more satisfying by far.

I am still dating the Peruana nurse I met in March. Her only language is Spanish. She absolutely adores¹ me. The old "get a girlfriend" advice when it comes to language learning works and is well supplemented by making friends with girls. In the early days and weeks here, my brain couldn't be arsed to try to decode what the boys were saying. Now that the decoding takes far less effort, the brain will bother to decode what the boys say only to be consistently underwhelmed with the poverty of content in their many words.

There's also a lot to be said for sending substantial periods of time alone with someone who only speaks the target language.

Despite being mostly functional in Spanish only environments I continue taking structured lessons three times a week. I still can not express every idea my brain bakes in English into the Spanish language, but I manage to produce effective Spanish language speech with the occasional misconjugation or misgendering.² The need for clarification that follows in these cases creates opportunities for thoughtful composition practice, the only kind that matters.

The difference between thoughtful composition and parrot speaking of lines and scripts can't be emphasized enough. When you are Parrot speaking lines, every incident of novelty is a hard case your scripts can't cover. It can and did cover a substantial number of my everyday activities of living the first few weeks, but the utility is limited. To this end I have decided my goal in Spanish is literacy.

I have not not found any satisfactory definitions of fluency. The language learning fandom has busted the definition of "fluency" all to hell. My goal is literacy or bust and increasing my ability to function in the language still morealong the way. I'll have learned Spanish when I am reliably producing poetry in the language.

1. This adoration is markedly distinct from the varieties of positive attention girls back home could muster. Back home a girl could like, love, or even obsess as their English as a single language programming would let them. [↩]
2. On the plus side I rarely now have verbal conversations in straight English without Spanglish intruding. That doesn't happen when I am speaking Spanish. [↩]

Having survived a close encounter with pneumonia last month, this country made yet another attempt on my life as I slept last night. This time via the orc communication device.

No battery bloat, just a MicroUSB port that appear to have been in tramite to ignite that battery. The phone still works as of the time of this writing. Can't be recharged without at the very least replacing the MicroUSB port with one that doesn't have contacts covered by char and plastic.

Orc contacts recovered and a replacement communication device was put into service earlier today.

Humidity related short?

Over the air update to add murder mode?

Let us start with a picture I forgot I had taken inside a municipal building. Floor 22 of the Intendencia to be exact. Read the rest of this entry »