Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Orientation!

I'm just finishing up my 4th day in Santiago and my last day of orientation.  My flights went really well, but traveling for 24 hours straight really wore me out!  About 10 students from my program ended up on my same flight from Dallas/Fort Worth to Santiago.  One of the first things I did when I got off the plane was get some coffee...but it definitely wasn't the kind I was used to!  I had associated South America with good coffee...but I was mistaken.  Good coffee has to be imported to Chile and it's really expensive...so Nescafe is EVERYWHERE.  Even decent restaurants, etc. serve instant coffee, and you have to specify that you want "CAFE cafe" if you want to get the real thing.  Most people here drink tea, so I've been drinking a lot of that instead.

One of the other first things I noticed was the COLD!  It was super cold and foggy.  It's weird to experience summer one day, and to experience winter only 24 hours later!  It won't get nearly as cold as Baltimore, thankfully!

I spent Sunday with my host family.  Their names are Myriam and Esteban--they have an eight year old named Andres a 3 year old named Vincente.  They live right in the middle of Providencia, which is a pretty nice part of the city.  My room actually has a balcony where I can look out and see a lot of the city! 

I could only understand about half of what my family said to me the first day, but it's getting a little easier each day.  Chilean accents are really difficult to understand, but everyone keeps saying that if you can understand Chilean Spanish, you can understand any Spanish. 

During our first day of orientation, we went over a lot of the basics of Chile and our program, and we got to meet the whole group for the first time.  There's about 35 of us! 

On the second day, we had more orientation classes and a group of us went to La Moneda, which is the office of the President, Sebastián Piñera.  There were a lot of police (carabineros) there, which was intimidating, but I soon discovered that they're really friendly! They also are really fond of the stray dogs that roam around Santiago (I hope I don't try to smuggle one back home). 

Oh yeah, I also got lost on the second day.  I was taking the metro home for the first time and I got on the right line, but just went in the wrong direction.  It was pretty easy to get back on track, though, and now I think I've officially conquered the Santiago metro system!  It's pretty simple, actually...a lot easier than New York or D.C.

On the last day of orientation, got to visit Cerro Santa Lucia, which was really neat.  We got to walk up these small, winding stairways all the way to the top, where we got a really good view of the city (except for the fog/smog).
At the bottom of Cerro Santa Lucia


The view from only about 1/3 of the way up!

Tomorrow is our first official day of classes.  I'm taking the clinical observation seminar portion at La Pontificia Universidad Católica and the medical Spanish portion at the IES center.  The actual observation will start in about a week or so, and that will be at the Clínica Universidad Católica, which is, if I understood correctly, a private teaching hospital.  I'm excited!

I'll post some pictures of my homestay and the IES center and more soon!

Tengo que hacer mi tarea!

3 comments:

  1. This sounds so awesome, Kiks! Love the pictures! Can't wait to see and hear more!

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  2. Great to hear about your stay so far Nana

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  3. WOW great to see your home away from home. nice room and balcony. Food sounds very interesting. Enjoy Nana

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