Santiago de Chile

After the commotion of arriving, we found ourselves tumbled into the city of Santiago. Never having been to Latin America before, there really aren't any meaningful comparisons I can make. It is busy but not frenetic, old but still modern, polite but not super friendly, and for the most part pretty clean and safe. The parks are well kept, the streets are cleaned every night, there are a lot of police but aside from a riot van that we see every night, their presence isn't overwhelming. There are shiny, busy supermarkets no different from those in downtown Boston (though you have to weigh your own fruit and stick the label on your bag. Our cashier was not impressed when we failed to do this). But there are also little hawker stands down the main streets in the evenings, selling TV antennas, shoe insoles, pantyhose, and wool hats. Dogs wander everywhere, which has really caught our interest.

I am sharing an apartment with 2 other girls, Morgan and Tina. We are in Centro, the downtown of Santiago. Our apartment is on the 12th floor with Southeast facing windows with views of the Andes. On the roof there is a small gym, a swimming pool that has been drained for the winter, and a BBQ area. The first day we explored the building, going up and down the elevators and stairs, much to the amusement of the guys at the front desk, who we later realized monitored the camera footage constantly streaming from all parts of the building.

Arriving in a Spanish speaking country, you are really thrown into the language. Everywhere else I have traveled, including Asia, it has been pretty easy to get around speaking only English with a few words of the local language. Not so here. Chilean Spanish is also a whole different beast than classroom Spanish. People speak FAST, there are a lot of different words for common things, and accents are thick. We get on ok in restaurants and shops (for the most part) but we had to go enquire about getting internet access in our apartment, and I felt like I had run a marathon by the time we walked out. What we found out, though, is you need a Chilean identification number (kind of like our social security number) in order to get a phone line, which is necessary in order to get internet. We are hoping our apartment service can find a way around that, but til then it is internet cafes.