El comienzo...

So I arrived in Santiago de Chile last Wednesday, which would make this already my fifth day in Chile. ¡No se puede creer! I'm all moved in to my new home for the next five and a half months with my familia chilena and everything seems to be moving so fast.

But to back up a bit, I arrived here after only three days back in the States with my familia estadounidense. Everything has been such a whirlwind of travel and change and Spanish and I'm still not quite used to the idea that I'm no longer in Central America, not to mention the U.S. To be honest, I really miss Guatemala and I've been told on several occasions that I have a Central American accent in Spanish.

But I know that very very soon that will be replaced with a castellano chileno. I've already picked up a ton of local slang and it's been surprisingly easy to incorporate it into my daily vocabulary. I'm also having a great time speaking in Spanish with my family. By the end of this trip I'm determined to have improved my fluency by leaps and bounds. I'm already dreaming and thinking in Spanish, making it quite difficult to compose this blog without a bit of Spanglish. I apologize in advance for any confusion and feel free to make use of my best friend, wordreference.com, if you need translation.

So anyway, I met up with the 43 other students in my program and after some basic introductions to Chile and a night out at a salsateca, we moved in with our host families. Mine consists of two parents (the father, Miguel, is a retired banker, the mother, Marta, a stay-at-home-mom as is customary in the machista culture here), two brothers (Jose Miguel, a 26-year-old lawyer-to-be, and Juan Pablo, a 19-year-old student) and a sister (Carmen Gloria, a 23-year-old education student). All the kids live at home since most people in Chile live at home until marriage. They live in Las Condes, an upper-middle class part of town, in a one-story house. It's small but comfortable. The only downside is that very few people in Chile have central heating so the calefont (radiator-type heater) is the most popular location in the house. It's definitely winter here.

I spent the weekend just kind of getting used to the house, eating with the family and reading a ton and exploring the metro and the neighborhood. Some things I'll have to get accustomed to: my 45-minute commute to school every day, eating some variety of bread with almost every meal, dinner at 9:30 PM and just in general living with a family again. It's been two years since I've lived in an actual house with rules and customs and parents.

One thing I won't need any time to get used to: la once. It's the Chilean version of tea time and it's basically tea or coffee with bread and tons of spreads and cheese and cookies or some other sweet. As many of you know, I could live on a diet of bread, cheese, chocolate and wine. (The wine in Chile, by the way, really is as incredible as they say....and you can find it for $2 a bottle in the supermarket!). So la once is a new favorite of mine...

Walking through Santiago is a surprising experience since the city is far more spaced out and far more homogeneous than I expected. The people of Chile are very European in look and style (imagine all black outfits and all black hair and all grim stares straight ahead). It's quite a change from Guatemala City where everything is color and warmth and "Buenas tardes," but Santiago is not all that different from the streets of New York. They even call Las Condes "Sanhattan."

There are cafes (and sadly Starbuckses) on every corner and an abundance of banks and pharmacies for some unknown reason. The buildings are definitely skyscraper height but they are further apart so there is a lot of awkward unused space in between. In my neighborhood there are three little parks and playgrounds within a few blocks of each other. It will be quite interesting to view this experience in Santiago through the lens of my Urban Studies background, and I'm always thinking in terms of the use of public space and private space and people and design. We have yet to sign up for classes, but I'm definitely interested in examining the city further, so I'll be looking for that in my studies.

I'm also planning on taking a Salsa class. I'll keep you updated...