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.