Chile, Days 1 and 2...

My first chilean lesson: it is more difficult to sleep on planes than I once thought. But besides that, and the very sudden awakening at 6:30 am, the flight wasn't too bad. Waking up early was hard, but it payed off when I looked out the window (I was on the east side of the plane) and saw the sun rising over the Andes mountains. The first day was busy - it felt five days long. The program staff met us at the airport and took us to the hotel, which was somewhat comforting. There we had lunch and began our orientation before leaving for the Cerro de San Cristóbal. Cerro means hill or mountain, and the Cerro de San Cristobal has a lift you can use to access the middle and top of the hill. Everywhere you look, you see city, because Santiago is absolutely enormous.

After the Cerro, Jeff, my roommate Lucy, and I went out to find some dinner. Chilenos tend to eat dinner very late, so us US-ers felt pretty stupid trying to find dinner at 6:30. I have a feeling I will love the 9:00 dinners when I haven't been awake since 6:30 in the morning, but last night, all I wanted to do was get some warm meat in my stomach (there are a few vegetareans on the trip, so our provided meals have been mostly vegetables), and go to bed. We finally found a restaurant that would be considered fairly pricey, and had our meal in pleasant solitude as no one else was eating yet. The bill? 22,000 pesos, which is about $11 US per person. I went home and was asleep by 10 pm.

This morning Lucy and I were up at 7 to get ready for breakfast. The hotel breakfast was quite tasty, and afterward we all went to the campus of El Mercurio, one of the major Chilean newspapers. The grounds were huge, and the building we went through was so extensive. Much bigger than the tour I went on of the Vineyard Gazette... all two rooms of it. We had lunch at the hotel, vegetarean again, and then had more orientation sessions and a trip to the Precolumbian Art Museum. While I must admit my interest in Precolumbian South American art is somewhat low, the trip was still fun. We were all really tired though, so it was good to get back to the hotel before our welcome dinner.

The dinner was great. The location was a surprise: a restaurant in the center of the region of Santiago in which our hotel is located, Providencia. It was on the top floor, and slowly spun around for a view of the whole city. I had turkey (meat again!), and they served us pisco sours (pisco is unaged whisky, and a pisco sour kind of tastes like a strong margarita... not something i would order on my own, but it's the national drink of chile) and wine (i had red, because come on, it's chile!). The view was beautiful, but my pictures don't do it justice because of the glare from the window.

Overall, orientation is somewhat exhausting, and I miss my friends and family back home a lot. The highs are really high and the lows are really low, but I am still glad to be here. Santiago is a very interesting city, and has some beautiful buildings, but others are somewhat dilapidated. The architectural variation is extensive, mostly due to earthquakes which have given way to a need for rebuilding during many different time periods. The city is home to 5 million people, and is absolutely enormous. In some part because of this, I'm sure, it is one of the most polluted cities, which makes me glad that I'll be moving to Valparaíso on Sunday. Providencia is a very nice area, however, and all of the government buildings are quite impressive in their architectural style. (Sorry for the boring tourist information!)

The people in my program are very nice, and it's also great to have a familiar face in the other Georgetown participants. I would love to get e-mails from people at home, though, because I am missing everyone more than I ever imagined possible. Just to assure you that I am in fact having a good time, though, here are my pictures...

The CIEE group waiting in the Santiago airport. Don't we blend in.


Lucy and my room... so cute! The maids even straightened up our stuff, putting our books in piles and organizing our shower supplies!


Me on top of Cerro de San Cristóbal. Picture taken by Jeff :)


One of the views from the Cerro. One of the most interesting things here is the great variety in plant life. There are evergreen trees alongside palm trees and cactuses, and some trees are bare while others have all their leaves. There are cactuses (or cacti... which is correct?) in the bottom of this picture.


Believe it or not, those are snow covered mountains through the fog and smog. The view was clearer today, but I wasn't able to get a picture of the mountains without power lines or construction blocking the view.