¡Desde Santiago!

¡Hola a todos! It's been a few weeks (and a continent ago) since I've last posted, so it's high time I fill y'all in on what's been going on down here:

I've been with my program since I arrived in Santiago last week. It's a small group with 13 girls and 4 guys, from all over the US, and all really cool. (As a side note, the skewed gender distribution seems to be par for study abroad programs here- in a university orientation meeting today with 100 other foreign students, I counted only about 20 guys.) For the first few days of our time here, we had a "cultural orientation," which entailed us being locked in a hotel in a non-descript part of town and attending meetings about personal safety, Chilean slang, and public transportation (more on that later). Culturally oriented after three days, we moved in with our families, and we've been commuting to our academic orientation hasta entonces.

My family chilena is "buena onda" (very cool): my dad's an accountant who works from home, my mom works for a progressive think tank, and I have two brothers, 22 and 19 years old. The older works for a real estate agency, and due to the crazy hours that Chileans work (usually 9 or 10 to 7 or 8) is out of the house a lot. My younger brother has a fauxhawk, 5 ear piercings, and is entering his first year in the university as, what else, an engineering student. So far, our bonding has been limited to me watching him play soccer on el Playestation and the both of us trying to fix the house's computer, but I'm hoping that once I can understand more than 30% of what he says we'll bond over other things, like perhaps piercings and extreme hair styles.

Getting used to the language here has been a big challenge. It's not that I can't speak the language, but Chilean spanish is VERY difficult to understand, because of how fast they speak, the halves of the words that they drop, and the thousands of "chilenismos" (Chilean slang) that pepper their speech. Driving in the car with my brother and his friends, I haven't been able to tell when they're talking to me or to each other, which has lead to some awkward silences, or worse, awkward interruptions. It's something that I can get used to, but for now it's been a very fish-out-of-water expreience.

Santiago so far has been wonderful. It has a very manageable feel- one the one hand it's very large and sprawling (like most Latin American cities), but at the same time it feels accessible and homey. Two reasons for this: first, Chileans are about the friendliest, most helpful people I've ever been around. They have no hesitation about answering a gringo's gramatically incorrect question, and even if you randomly ask someone passing by on the street, they'll stop and politely answer youre question, bad accent and all. They'll even help out when you don't ask for it- my friend and I got disoriented while trying to find the exit to a subway platform, and from the walkway above the tracks a guy shouted down at us how to get out. Coming from New York, this seemed way to nice, but I'll take whatever help I can get.

The other reason for the city feeling accessible is the public transportation system- but don't ask any Chilean about that. Some background: two weeks ago, Santiago completely overhauled (read: replaced) their bus routes and timing. Instead of the old system of unregulated "micros" that ran everywhere and stopped anywhere, and where the driver was paid based on the number of fares he recieved (=very inefficient), the new system, Transantiago, has fixed bus routes and schedule, and a contactless Metrocard-like way to pay (onomatepoetically called Bip!). To the rest of the world, this is a normal way for a public transport system to run, but here it's caused mass confusion. About 50% of the conversations that I can eavesdrop on are about Transantiago and how hard it is to use it/get used to it. Granted, there are problems- outside of the subway stations (which only over a small part of the city), there are almost no places to refill the Bip card, and buses run so infrequently after midnight that it's easier to walk than wait. But compared to before, there are fews redundant routes and buses, less pollution, and for us a much easier system to learn.

Time to run to lunch, so I'll sign off. Que toda pasen bien, y ciao.