Oh hey, if you're at all confused I wrote my first post a few days ago and am only just now putting this all up at once so that is why there's multiple posts even though I'm just now making this blog. I'm going to guess you weren't confused. But if you were you're not any more.

open air museum

And here is a link to a bunch of pictures of the open air museum.

Valpo pictures

Here is a link to a photo album I found online with pictures of Valparaíso. You should look at it. This man takes much better pictures than me.

3.1.13

Ok, so I’m not super great at blogging. This is only my second post and I’m something like a week into this trip. I will say that it feels much more like I’ve been here for much longer though. I suppose that’s what happens when you go so quickly from doing absolutely nothing for three months to doing as much as you possible can every day. But anyways, I’ve been in Viña for a couple days now and I really like it here. It’s really pretty and really warm with nice beaches. I’ve also been spending some time in Valparaíso, which is one of the coolest places I’ve ever been to. It would be a difficult place to live because it’s kind of dirty and doesn’t appear super safe, but it’s a really cool place to walk around. I think we’ve pretty much finished all of our orientation stuff, which was way too much orientating, but we did do some cool things. Let me run you through some highlights: The first day we just kind of toured around the city. We walked around for a while and hung out at the beach. After that we went back to the ISA office where we just waited for way too long. Then we went to the police station to register our visas, which required a ton of waiting in there. Then we came back to the office were we waited some more for our families to pick us. So overall it wasn’t such a great day. You know those daycare rooms they have in Fred Meyers and such places? It felt a lot like that. But whatever I got over it really quickly. The next day we went on a brief tour and orientation of our school. It seems like a pretty cool place. Its super new and modern looking but much smaller than most schools in the US, I imagine it’ll be an enjoyable place. Oh and the view from campus is amazing. It’s built on the top of a hill that overlooks all of Viña and Valpo with the ocean in the background. Its pretty impressive. Later we went to Valpo and walked around for a while. As I mentioned, it’s a pretty cool city. We went to this place called “the open air museum” which was pretty much just this weird street with a ton of murals on all the buildings. Street art appear to be a really big deal in Valpo and I love it. It adds a lot of weird character to the city. We also got to see Pablo Nurado’s house in Valpo. He was a very strange man. The next day we went to what was essentially the Chilean DMV. It was boring, I’m not going to talk about it. But that afternoon we toured through more of Valpo and affirmed my belief that’s it’s the coolest place ever. At the end of the tour some friends and I stayed in the city to get a few drinks. We managed to find our way to the roof of this hotel that overlooked all of the two cities. We hung out there and watched the moonrise. It was an indescribably cool moment. So that pretty much brings us to now. More things happened but nothing that interesting and I’m tired of blogging. I apologize again if you notice any grammar/spelling errors as well as generally poor writing. Also I hope this post wasn’t to long/short (I don’t really know how much detail you are expecting) and if you have any feedback please let me know.

map of chile

24.2.13 First Post

All right, so I’m on day four and I’m just now starting this blog so I apologize. Anyways, for the first three or so days we were in Santiago just going through an orientation period. We went on a number of visits to your pretty standard points of interest. We saw the Chilean White House (which I believe is in fact called the “White House”) along with a vineyard, Pablo Nurado’s Santiago house, and a couple of vistas where you could see a lot of the city. Santiago is a bit of a strange place, it seems like it was once much like every other city, except that then it grew. And then it kept growing until it just spun out of control and became this massive city that doesn’t seem to exhibit any kind of urban planning and just kind of spills into the valleys between what I assume are the foothills of the Andes. It’s a very odd place. I kind of like it. I don’t think I would want to spend a ton of time there, but I kind of like it. So that’s where I was until this afternoon when we drove down to Viña del Mar (it’s about an hour and a half or so west of Santiago). This was when I finally met my host family. My family has a mother, father and three sons, all of whom are sort of around my age, as well as an indeterminate number of daughters who never seem to be around. They all seem like nice people. There’s also another exchange student living with us, which is nice to have. I’ve only been in Viña for half a day but it seems pretty cool so far. Its super pretty and seems like it’ll be fun. Oh and this language barrier is going to be interesting. My Spanish isn’t that bad, it’s just sort of bad. However, it is getting a little easier already and given enough time I feel like I’ll get pretty good. For the moment though trying to understand Spanish is like trying to read a book in a dream. I can kind of get the point but its mostly just out of reach (Does anyone else have that problem in dreams or am I just going someplace weird right now?). All right, so that was days 1-4, I’ll try to update this slightly more frequently in the future but we’ll just see what happens. Oh and please excuse any spelling/grammar errors, I just really don’t care enough to correct them all.