first weekend in santiago

i've only been here for little over a week, but it feels so much longer. so far, the trip has been great and i'm beginning to learn the city by walking or using the metro and the micros (local buses). my host family is great and my chilean mom is very talkative. i hang out with the kids everyday since they don't have school and talk with friends of the family during evening walks in the nearby park. the apartment is close to downtown so it is located very conveniently and i can walk just about everywhere.

its summer here so the weather is nice if not HOT. i found out the hole in the ozone layer is right above chile, so people here are extra careful about going out in the sun. i started classes last week and i can say that its definitely going to be a challenge getting through classes all in spanish. many students are native speaking, but hopefully i'll be fine and my fluidity will improve by the end of the trip. oh and the spanish spoken here is CRAZY. it is called castellano and its so fast. chileans combine their words and cut off the ends. to make it worse, there are tons of chilenismos (words only used in chile).

since it was the first weekend here in chile, of course i went out with friends to see the nightlife. everything is pushed back here by several hours in comparison with the US. on a typical day, the sun goes down around 9 so families eat dinner around 9 or 10 and the youth go out around 12 only to return about 5 or 6! my mom was wondering why i came home so early when i got back at 3:30 this weekend =) on friday night, i hung out with the other students who are here on the trip with me in a section of the city called sucia lined with restaurantes, bars, and clubs. on friday, we took a trip to cerro de santa lucia where santiago was founded and later became an observatory. on saturday, it was the long expected Love Parade. usually, this festival is hosted in europe, but this year it came to santiago. its a HUGE event of electronic music and 300,000 people were expected to come out. tons of flatbed trucks paraded around downtown while people danced in the streets in between being hosed down by the firefighters!