I'm here!

After a full day of travel, I'm finally here in Santiago. I left for the airport at 5 in the morning on Wednesday...now at 2pm today I'm still awake =( I am torn between staying up to get my internal clock adjusted or taking a mini-siesta so I am coherent at the welcome dinner tonight.

Thankfully, my flights were uneventful yesterday but the overnight one was too bumpy to sleep.
Pretty much everyone who arrived on my flight was the same way but that didn't keep us from going out to explore the city as soon as we got here. Since we were so sleepy, we figured we had better not go too far from the hotel, but we made it to the Casa de Cambio (money exchange shop) and some unknown cafe for lunch.

A bit of amusing news - I have been dubbed "the Spanish speaker" by the rest of the group. Apparently no one else out of the 30 students in this program speaks anything remotely close to passable Spanish. A few can understand fairly well, but so far I am the only one who's been able to converse with the natives. On the plus side I am making lots of friends because everyone needs me to translate things or tell their shuttle driver where we are going. On the minus side though, I don't actually speak Spanish very well at all. I am sure I will get better though, since it looks as though I will be getting plenty of practice. People speak English here more readily than I thought they would, but not enough to rely on it. So far they actually haven't been speaking English to me anyway, unless someone else in my group talks to them first. I blend in pretty well down here in terms of appearance, so I think a lot of people just assume I am Chilean. Maybe it's because it's winter but there are a lot of light-skinned and dark-haired people here. I figured I would stick out like a sore thumb, but I guess not. Or maybe the Asians in my group just stick out more.

One interesting linguistic thing I've noticed so far is the difference between Chilean Spanish and Mexican Spanish. In general I am able to understand Chilean speakers better, and I think they use more of the terms I actually learned in school instead of strange border slang. However, lunch threw me off a bit because almost none of the meats are called the same thing in Mexican and Chilean Spanish. For example, "chicken" has always been "pollo" to me, but here they call it "ave." Roast beef is usually "carne asada," but today I saw "barros" and "churrasco." It was kind of embarassing because everyone was asking me what the menu items were at lunch and I had never seen most of the words before. Even so, it is fun to be able to practice my Spanish. I am much more comfortable speaking it here than I ever was in Mexico.

That's about it for first impressions of the city. It has been overcast all day, and cold. I find the cold refreshing at the moment but I'll probably be missing the sun within a few days. The hotel we are living at is really nice and the bellboy said that the travelstudy group comes here every year, so I guess they are used to the silly Americans taking over the top floor every summer. Hopefully tomorrow I can get some pictures taken, I just didn't want to be standing around being obviously touristy today since I am so tired and not as alert as I would like to be. The stores and restaurants like tourists a lot, but I don't get that same impression from the people walking around so I don't want to advertise it until I can be more on my guard.

Anyway, I have wireless internet in my hotel room, so I am hoping I'll be able to update pretty frequently with pictures and such.