Saturday, February 7, 2009

Estoy pasando la raja!

I've been at Liz's for a few days now and Im having a great time here. Getting into Chile was a process though... I noticed that there was a lot of traffic at the border but it was in the middle of the night so I figured I would just go back to sleep. Around 4:30am I woke up and realized that we had to actually get off the bus to go through immigration and customs. It took forever! There were probably over 100people in line already but at least the line was moving. Well, after I waited for about an hour and thought I was all set I realized that I still had my customs form. I was wondering if they were going to check our bags but I figured it out quick enough. We had to take all of our luggage off the bus and get it examined and of course they thought I had fruits and vegetables in my bags which then required extra screening. The whole process took a few hours and I finally arrved in Santiago at about 11am. I realized during all of this that Liz was expecting the bus to arrive at 6am! It's a good thing she wasnt planning on picking me up at the station. Luckilly she's taken plenty of public transportation in Latin America to know that arriving on time means arriving sometime that day.

Liz and Julio both have the next two weeks off of work and they've planned a bunch of stuff to do when I'm here. We went to the mountains one day and went swimming which was a lot of fun. They also had a bbq for me last night and the food was amazing. Tonight we're going to go out with some of thier friends to the discos. It's been nice to sleep in a bed everynight and be able to relax! And I've been able to give my feet a rest from all the walking I was doing before. The weather here is awesome, it' the summer in Chile right now and most days are sunny and between 70-90F. I think I will miss the snow by the time I get home though.

Most of their friends and family only speak spanish so I have been getting A LOT of practice. At first it was really frustrating to not be able to understand everything and even when I could understand I wasnt able to say much. I've been learning a lot and I can already communicate much better than when I arrived. Most Latin Americans will agree that Chilean spanish is very difficult to understand, even for fluent spanish speakers because they speak very fast and use a lot of slang terms. Catchay?

I've stated uploading my pictures and on the right side of the page there are links to the different albums. It's been taking longer than I expected so I'm still adding captions and uploading pictures. Hopefully they will all be up by the end of the week!

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