Week 1 Recap

So, I've been in Chile about a week so I suppose it's time to actually update this thing! Here's some of what happened in the past week (Hint: a lot).

Jacob drove me to JFK super early Tuesday morning and after some minor kerfluffles before boarding (apparently TACA actually cares how heavy your carry-on is, so Jacob took home a few things I planned on bringing), I got on the plane and got ready for my FOUR layovers. Yes, four. Because I decided to go with the cheapest flight possible, regardless of how miserable I would be 24 hours into this ordeal. I ended up in:

San Jose, Costa Rica!

Which, guys, is seriously gorgeous.

OMG pretty!

Also gorgeous is Quito, Ecuador, my next stop:

Quito!

Not that you can tell from my crappy photo I took on the plane while we were taxiing. Quito is a bunch of brightly colored houses in a valley between green mountains and looked amazing when we were landing. I would have been cool with just ending up here, but I stayed on the plane until the next stop in Guayaquil, Ecuador:

Guayaquil!

I was not impressed with the view from the Guayaquil airport. The next stop was Lima, Peru, and by the time we got there it was dark and I was NOT in the mood for pictures or being awake, so no pictures. Same for Santiago de Chile, since I got there at 3:30am and had to wait until 6am for the buses to the central bus terminal to start up. So I paid the $140 reciprocity fee for Americans to get into Chile (I know, right?), exchanged some money and finished up The Hunger Games (totally awesome). Then at 6am, I found the right bus and headed over to the bus terminal where I bought another bus ticket and spent another hour waiting for the bus to take me eight hours south to Temuco. Now I'm sure Santiago's a lovely city, but I only saw the airport, bus terminal, and a lot of graffiti, so I didn't get the best impression.

I slept pretty much the entire eight hours, interrupted only by me suddenly waking up in a strange city with no idea what time it was or where I was, and promptly falling back asleep. So I was pretty out of it by the time we actually got to Temuco and had to start having full conversations in Spanish with the members of the organization who picked me up and brought me to the house I'd be living at. 

Guys, Spanish is tough. Especially after a full 36 hours of traveling.

But I picked out my room (on the second floor of a cute little house), took a walk with the girl who met me at the bus station to the supermarket (conveniently just a few blocks away right next to a bus stop) and made what I think might have been polite conversation before falling asleep.

I'm definitely a big fan of where I'm living, mostly because my landlady is an adorable, sweet woman who speaks slowly for my benefit and explains everything to me in really simple terms. On Friday, she took me to the center of Temuco (we live toward the outskirts of the city) and showed me the market, the cathedral and the mall (which is pretty legit, since it has a bowling alley and churros). She only speaks Spanish so I don't always make complete sense to her, but I think she wants to look after me since I'm all alone on a new continent.

View from my window

I've also started work at the foundation, which has been a little exhausting since they also only speak Spanish and I'm finding it hard to keep up sometimes. The foundation is a bit out of town, so I have to take the Micro (the bus system) down the road a ways to the middle of nowhere. One of the guys met up with me at the bus stop the first day (Thursday) and generally showed me how to get to the foundation, so on Friday I was like, "Oh cool, I can do this all by myself!" Here's the thing: there's like a bajillion buses that pass my stop on the way to the foundation and I need to flag down the correct one as they come flying down the street. So, I flagged down the one I thought looked like the one I took the day before and asked "La Fundación?" and the driver said "Sí." And I thought "Cool." And then after driving me a ways, he dropped me off at a gymnasium. And I was like "Umm, la Fundación?" and he was like "Oh, no me entiendes" and I was like "NO, TÚ NO ME ENTIENDES" and I took a bus back to where I started and figured out which bus to take. So, that's how I learned which bus to take.

That's the main stuff that happened, but this is already pretty long, so I'll end it there. My main point is that I miss everyone a ton already and I'll update soon!