A empezar... I posted this message on myspace the day I got here....
´´Well....in case you were wondering...I´m here. I pretty much spent an entire day on a plane--which isn´t very fun for the record. Especially since it was overnight, and sleeping in noisy, cold, cramped spaces isn´t exactly my idea of ideal conditions. However, I had a very nice woman meet me at the airport and deliver me to my new home (as we listened to the Black Eyed Peas and Greenday on the radio), where my ´brother´and another American student studying here, Maggie, were waiting for me. I´ll post pictures of the view from my room --lemon trees on the patio with scenic snowcapped Andes mountains in the background -- as soon as I take some. I´m already pretty much totally immersed in Spanish, and Maggie and Felipe both have told me I´m doing pretty well (they´re probably just being nice.) That´s about it....until later.....adios.´´
This is my fourth day in Santiago de Chile, surrounded by people and Spanish. I remember before I left my family and I had a discussion regarding things which I would find different and strange here, but wouldn´t anticipate. So far, certainly the most different thing is that they don´t flush toilet paper here. Instead, they throw it away in a trash can beside the throne. Gross, huh! I guess that the plumbing systems can´t support large volumes of solid material, so this is the solution. A little secret--I can´t quite bring myself to do that, so I usually flush anyways. I figure if everyone else isn´t flushing, my tiny contribution shouldn´t bring the sewage system of the city to a screeching halt.
My first day here was a bit exhausting--I didn´t really sleep on the plane, since it´s kind of impossible to be comfortable on a cramped, noisy, cold capsule hurtling across the world. I arrived in Santiago at about 9 in the morning, and was picked up at the airport by the very nice woman (se llama Veronica Pomar) who arranged my housing. She delivered me to my new home, where my brother Felipe and Maggie, the American student who has been living here for the past six months, greeted me. We spent the afternoon getting to know each other, eating a very nice lunch prepared by the maid (I can´t remember her name, but I don´t like calling her that--she doesn´t feel like a maid, she´s more like a second mom who does all of the chores.) Later that evening I went with Maggie to the final meeting of her ´afro-dance´class, where a handful of people ran around the room gyrating there hips and throwing their bodies through the air to the beat of the bongo drums being played in the corner. Then, we returned to the house, where I met Myrna, the mother who´s a nurse practioner & midwife (or something like that) and la polola (girlfriend) of my brother, Andrea. It was a very exhausting day, and I think I slept 14 hours that night.
The next day I awoke quite late, and spent the afternoon with Maggie--we walked around the city for a while and went to ónces´(evening tea) at the home of another Californian student here. I met several other norteamericanos there, and then Maggie and I left to attend a meeting (the last for her) of her mountineering club. It was quite an overwhelming experience, with probably 15 excited Chileans chatting away and drinking beer in a pub downtown. I tried my hardest to understand them, but to be quite honest I have pretty much no idea what I talked about the entire night. In spite of this, they were all quite convinced that I should return and be a member of their club, and they insisted that I give them my email address (since I don´t have a phone yet.) I´ve already recieved several emails... After that, we went to a small party at the home of one of Maggie´s fellow exchange students, where I discovered that it was already difficult for me to think in english. I began talking to this guy (in castellaño) who pretty much immediately asked me if I spoke english, since he didn´t speak castellaño. Turns out he´s from Austria and is here visiting his girlfriend, a student at the U de Chile. I had a terrible time trying to talk to him in english and to the people around me in castellaño--apparently my mind doesn´t switch back and forth easily. At this carreta (castellaño for ´party´) I tried my first Pisco--an sort of liquor with is ´super-Chilena´--in the form of Piscola...Pisco with cola. It´s pretty good, I suppose-about the same as any alcohol, really. A Chilean man with whom I was conversing that evening cautioned that the next morning I would ´discubrir una nueva forma de dolor´, but I purposefully didn´t drink much, certainly not enough to have that experience.
The next day, Maggie, Felipe and I went to the Universidad Catolica Campus Occidental to poke around--it´s absolutely beautiful. A very old campus, which used to be a monastery, I believe, it has very interesting and beautiful buildings with prehistoric looking plants everywhere. Then, we went to the downtown shopping center with Kari, where we looked for a U de Chile futbol jersey for Maggie. We didn´t have any success in that, but we did find the local Pizza Hut, where we enjoyed a totally Chilean meal of pizza. Afterwards we went to see and Argentinian movie, se llama Un Buda, of which I pretty much didn´t understand a damn thing. Curse this foreign language crap!
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