Settling In

Well, it's been a pretty non-stop crazy week and a half since I arrived in Chile, but I've enjoyed every minute of it.

My host house and family are great. I sadly don't see my 14 year old host sister much as she is at school like 12 hours a day, but my host mom and I chat a lot and my host dad talks a lot and quickly about pretty much every topic imaginable, which has been funny, interesting, and great Spanish practice. I have the best located house of any of the other students. Its' 5 minutes walking from the school and the beach, 10 to downtown, and it's adorable.

Like I wrote earlier, the day I got here, so did my host family's four nieces and nephews, so I got to spend four days with them, going to the beach every day, learning slang at night, and getting a handle on my new city of residence.

The day after they left a friend I met at the Chilean embassy in California came to town, so I went out with him and two sweet Canadian girls who were traveling Chile. The following day the four of us took the subway to Vina del Mar's neighboring city, Valparaiso. We just wandered around on foot with no real agenda but managed to stumble across the house of Chile's Nobel Peace Prize winning poet, Pablo Nerudo which we toured, an "ascensor" or pretty much little railway box that took us to the top of the hill where we discovered the Historic District. The whole city is made up of a mix of shacks and Victorian mansions, all painted bright, flamboyant colors, like La Boca neighborhood in Buenos Aires and with laundry on lines streaming from window to window. It's hilly and rather dirty, but charming in a very lifelike way. I went back with my school for a tour the following Saturday and our guide masterfully pointed out how vibrant a city it really was. He talked about how Chileans say that in all of Chile the women with the best legs are from here because of all the arduous walking. He told the history of a town whose income died with the construction of the Panama Canal and how despite not have been able to to fix their houses in decades, everyone there is fiercy proud of which "cerro" or hill they come from. The Historic District had many unique and illogical houses and had the best murals in the city. In almost every nook and cranny of the city there were paintings and graffati expressing everything from love and nature to political revolution. After walking all day and eating lunch at a sidewalk cafe, we came back to Vina and sat on the beach in the dark and looked at the stars. The next day the fun Canadian girls and I went to the beach for the first sunny day since I arrived and I got burned to a crisp! Whoops.

And Monday began the first day of orientation. Really, every day all week had only a couple hours of important things to do, but it got dragged out due to the slightly slower pace of life and progress here - one result of which was the 2 or 3 hour lunch breaks each afternoon to come home and eat what for Chileans is the biggest meal of the day. Each afternoon, my new American, German, and Moroccan friends would go after school to walk around "el Centro" and buy things like adapters and gelato. Most nights we did something fun as well. Tuesday I brought a group to salsa lessons, Wednesday we went to the busiest night at the infamous Cafe Journal - the hangout for all the internationals of Vina, and Thursday we celebrated one girl's birthday with her and her boarding house neighbors who gave us lots of tips on what to experience in Chile.

Friday after orientation ended, a group of 8 of us caught a bus to Maitencillo, supposedly one of Chile's nicest beaches - a two hour busride with just suits and towels. After "taking the sun" and attempting skim boarding and surfing (my friends, not me) we ate dinner at this sweet little restaurant called La Canasta that had a live trees growing all throughout it and felt like the jungle and had seafood and Chilean wine. We then found a little "cabana" with a kitchen and enough beds to comfortably sleep 5, but we packed all 8 of us in for the night and played some cards. Saturday some of us went on our school's first activity - a guided tour of Valparaiso. It was fun to go this time by bus and get a historical perspective from our guide, especially when our guide had the driver of our huge tour bus intentionally weave up the narrowest, steepest roads with the blindest corners and no room for errors. We ended the tour with a boat ride around the harbor during which we got to see war ships, fishing boats, and SEA LIONS! They smelled awful but were so cool up close.

And that brings me to the present. Official classes start tomorrow, and assuming they all are being offered (some are still up in the air), they sound like they'll be great.