Our Introduction to Chile

The big day finally arrived on Friday, May 28th. We all boarded a plane in our home cities and we flew to Miami before taking a direct flight to Santiago, Chile. We had a little scare when we couldn´t find Sofi and it was time to board for Santiago, but she showed up just in time to catch the flight. After we calmed down from our little scare, excitement quickly surrouned us because we were going to be in Chile in 9 hours.

The flight to Santiago was relaxing and our group either slept or watched the wide variety of movies that LAN Airlines offered. We arrived to a rainy Santiago around 730 am, and since it was late fall in Santiago, the sun was barely rising. Marlen and Antonio met us at the airport and they had a van ready for us to take to el hostal (the hostel) that was located in Santiago Centro. We were going to be staying there for the next two days. All of us were exhausted from the trip so we slept at until 2 p.m.

Ater we awoke, Antonio and Marlen took us around Santiago Centro. We went to eat at a restaurant by the name of El Hazadero, and the restaurant brought us four small grills of already cooked meat to eat. The food was delicious, but it was too much
for the nine of us so we had to get a large quantity in a to-go plate. Afterwards, we began our first excursions around the metros and that´s how we learned that the metros are the popular choice of travel since they are inexpensive and transport people to further stretches of the city. We walked around cafés and tried some chilean drinks and quickly learned that we needed to change our dollars to pesos because some restaurants over-valued the peso. We walked to the Mall del Centro and found the mall American-like fit to Chilean tastes. We figured that downtown Santiago would have more American and European stores.

Later that night, we had dinner at a restaurant called El Cosmopolitano
and that´s where we met a group of Chilean university students that will be our buddies during the trip and show us around Santiago. After getting acquainted with our Chilean buddies, Joseph Repp, a Duke student who lived a year in Chile working for an NGO, was in Santiago for the weekend and he took us to a friend´s get-together. We enjoyed a good time with the Chilean locals and our Chilean buddies. We were slowly becoming acquainted with the Chilean norms and slang. It was difficult at first for those of us who haven´t been to Chile before because Chilean spanish is spoken differently than most other versions of Spanish and takes time to get used to.

Our second day, Sunday, was the day we were finally going to meet our host parents. We started the day by going to downtown Santiago because it was Patrimonío Nacíonal.
It is the one day, other than Día de la Independencía, when the city opens important sections in government buildings that aren´t usually open to the public. Antonio and Marlen took us around the city to visit the buildings, but we couldn´t get into many of the buildings because there was at least an hour-long wait, and we preferred to walk rather than wait. However, we did manage to get into La Bolsa de Valores, which
is where Santiago conducts its stock trading. It was also evident that the earthquake had affected the government buildings because there were cracks on the walls and parts of buildings were closed off because the earthquake had affected the building so much that it was unsafe.

It was finally time to meet our host parents. We were a little jittery before meeting them because we had talked to them through email before but had not seen them in person yet. However, once we got to introducing ourselves to them we were completely fine. We all happened to get along very well with our host families and we asked them how life was in Santiago and they asked us a about our lives in the U.S. Eduardo and I are both living with our host Yanina in Santiago Centro. She is a 55-year-old single mother who is a social worker. She is very nice and we constantly conversate about politics in Chile and around the world. The other 5 Duke students have families ranging from sixy-year-old retired grandparents to a 25-year-old couple and we are all spread out around different communities in Santiago. Our first couple of days have been great and we can only wait to see what more Chile has in store for us.